‘Oho, Joseph, since when have you become such an expert on camera angles and that too in a place we hardly know?’ I snapped at him in mild irritation. The reason for this was that the voice had interrupted a pretty shot of the silhouetted boats with some ducks waddling in front of them. I later did get the photo, without the ducks—they didn’t wait for me to recover from my surprise at the next part of the conversation.

The dark, wizened man smiled, revealing teeth stained by decades of chewing paan. ‘I was talking, sir, not him, I’m from here, sir.’ The sir was pronounced saar.

By this time, I was quite stunned. ‘But you speak Assamese, good Assamese, how do you speak it so well, you are from here, aren’t you?’

‘Ah, saar, I am from here but I’ve lived for thirty-five years in Assam, I know it well and I learned Assamese quickly.’

The name?

‘Keramat, Keramat Bhai.’

I was filled with a strange exultation. It was only well after the conversation was over that morning with Keramat and three others (who had visited or lived in Assam for a number of years), that I recognized the feeling that was building up. It was of elation, of unbridled triumph. Triumph against the politicians and bureaucrats, the academics and pseudo-intellectuals in India and Bangladesh who tried either to prove or disprove the border crossings between these countries, based on statistics, or polemics, or propoganda, or theory especially, the shallow ideology of the left.

Here I was, a non-graduate, dabbling in things like demography and international relations, not to speak of international journalism, untrained in the social sciences and the decent skills of social analysis. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage. Such skills are necessary. But they can be learned, even informally. But, more important, I felt, was the fact that I was coming to the field with an uncluttered mind, ready for fresh thought and initiatives, unmindful of set and pet theories and bombast. I carried no ideological baggage or prejudice.

To my untutored mind, that single, simple incident proved beyond any doubt that Bangladeshis came to Assam; they worked, lived, voted, ate and fished there. ‘It’s all come together for me in this little village by the Brahmaputra,’ I noted in my daily journal that evening.