Walk a little further to the Muslim mohalla in Satrasal and five Abduls, one Fatema, one Moslema and a Khalilur gathered around our little party. One of the Abduls, Abdul Barek Ansari, called himself a Diwani—one of those men with power over life and death, over land and landlessness in the chars. This very man, Ansari traced his ancestry to Dinajpur in West Bengal and claimed to be a direct descendant of the man who built the first mosque in Satrasal. On top of that he said he was a member of the Asom Gana Parishad, which has on its agenda the detection and deportation of Bangladeshis from the state, although it has done little for this cause.

‘Initially, everybody said that the border fencing would have evil repercussions on the Muslims of this area. Now we feel that we have only benefited. If such immigration had continued, it would have spoilt our relations with the Hindus.’

The next Abdul piped up, this time a Jalil and a forty-five-year-old school teacher. And he was the most vehement of the lot: ‘Only fools can believe that the border fencing can check illegal immigration. They were fools to put these up. The fencing can, at best, stop our cattle and goats from crossing over, not people. If people can cross the seven seas, what is a little wire fencing to them?’

His mind strayed to family planning, which he furiously opposed saying that this was all the will of the ‘Uparwalla’.

‘People say there are too many people in Bangladesh, there is no family planning there. But this is the rule of the ‘Uparwalla’. It is a sin to stop this. If there are too many people there, it is not surprising that they will have to go somewhere else. People will leave that place for here, anywhere else. What is there to be so upset about?’

Jalil had put his finger on what scholars have sought to prove with statistics and embellish with analysis and ‘considered’ views: that Bangladesh just has too many people for the land that they inhabit.

There were others to be met. Romen Das’s home is next to the fence in Satrasal. A former policeman who was awarded the President’s Medal for Bravery in 1978 (he single handedly captured a gang of dacoits), he was in an expansive mood and talked with the team as two other Das’s, Bharat and Sushil, both aged about forty, joined the conversation about migration.