Then, becoming conscious that he had committed a horrible mistake, he laughed aloud, muttered something about respecting one’s elders. When I asked him when he had come to Hajo, he shuffled his feet and mumbled about having been here for a few days and that he would soon be moving on. Shaken by the turn of the conversation, he slipped away. I wish I had grabbed him by his shirt or at least reported his presence to the police in Hajo. One can find many excuses for not doing what one should have done—in this case, the fact we needed to return to Guwahati at the end of a long and tiring day’s shoot.

These vignettes hold up a higher, greater truth. They inform us of the scale of the human flood entering Assam and its neighbourhood.

Now back again to the char dwellers near Dhubri and those who keep losing land to the river, who are constantly see-sawing between two nations in their own inner world. Who or what are they? How many of them are there? Can their conditions be improved? Are they Indians or Bangladeshis?

If there is any place on earth where there are environmental refugees, then surely they are to be found here—in the children of the chars.

We shall show, in the next chapters, that Bangladeshis do come, in large numbers to India. Some of them stay and settle. Others use it as a transit, en route to Pakistan or to the Middle East and South-East Asia. There are also those who work as seasonal labourers and return home having made some profit.

The Puzzle of Identification

But once you catch a ‘Bangladeshi,’ how do you establish his or her identity?

This is one the toughest hurdles that laws, the courts, the police system and diplomats have not been able to overcome in decades. Trying to locate or ferret out even the facts can be an extremely tedious and frustrating business. One of the places where information about the complaints against foreign nationals and material about cases against them can be found is at the courts of the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunal (IMDT).

Anindita Dasgupta, all of five feet tall and sporting a neat bob cut, marched into the Registrar’s office in Guwahati, and later, in other courts elsewhere in Assam, to demand information. She met a portly, cheerful man at Guwahati who happily admitted that their records were ‘very badly maintained. That is how we function.’