A River Called Surma, a Place Named Sunamganj: Mapping the Consciousness of a Land, Dreaming of My Mother’s Village in Sylhet -Neela Bhattacharya Saxena

In the meandering, muddy river floats a song of unspeakable longing.  Words of the song that cannot be deciphered bounce with the waves.  Shimmering like fish scales, these words pass away into nothingness, into the deep cavern of collective memory. There is urgency in those words, to be recollected and heard by generations that know them not. So she scoops them up in the net of her strong palms and lines them up on the river bank to give them shape, to create meaning out of the bedlam of memory.  

She then tells the stories to her eager quiet little first born. This daughter, in between her play with her sister dreams of that river, hearing its incessant moaning like Whitman’s boy who hears the song of the bereaved bird in “Paumanok” and sings “the word stronger and more delicious than any.” Words, words, words and their unheard sound fascinate her and an intensity of music along with the drum beats of a lived past play on her skin. But the girl is no poet; infected by that longing she grows up with a vague sense of incompletion. 

The daughter, now a mother herself, who teaches very near Whitman’s beach in Long Island, pleads with her mother to write down her memories because she is too busy with stuff, but her mom just likes to tell the tales.  Except, when in the right mood, she writes in superb poetic Bengali some of her precious tales from her memory’s inexhaustible store - of people, of celebrations, of intrigues, of loves, of sorrow, and above all- of a broken song.  To humor her daughter, she has drawn an exquisite map of her home.

I am stunned at my mother’s cartographic skills.  The map, replete with the four corners of north- south- east- west is so vivid with mango, kadam, supari, and many other trees that I can almost touch the house nestled in the middle of a vast expanse.  This map is the most poignant reminder of a traumatic and yet joyful personal history that gets lost in our everydayness. My mother, Shyamala Bhattacharya, was born in a country whose national boundaries have been off limits to her family since 1947. Hounded by partition, forced to leave the land of her birth, she cannot stop talking about a place called Sunamganj, of a village named Mallikpur near a river called Surma. 

This April, far away sounds of the storm called Kalbaishakhi that brings incessant rain to the watery land of an undivided Bengal deafens my quietude.  I sit in mesmerizing but desert like Sedona at my friend’s home immersing myself in an imagined stretch of land whose waters flow in my veins. I am trying to give English expression to Kazi Nazrul Islam’s songs of Kali.  Now the national poet of Bangladesh, Islam speaks in a language that cannot be understood in the din of any nationalist rhetoric.  Like Rabindranath Tagore who sat in his boat on the Padma River and sang the song of a borderless humanity, Nazrul, the rebel poet, sang in the same voice, of Kali and Allah.

I can smell the fishy shores of a river I have never seen; I hear the sound of voices that speak a familiar and yet strange language somewhere far away.  I can see the caverns in the forest fill with water turning into “haors” (a sort of wetland lake) whose ends cannot be seen. I see Salim Chacha, a Muslim milkman, pour his unsold milk on the “chita” site called Shibtilla where my grandfather was cremated.  Salim Chacha used to deliver milk to my mother’s family. A cousin of my mother had built a temple in that site; you can see it on my mother’s map with a little temple sign! My grandfather was a Brahmin jamindar, an illustrious Chowdhury with land but no money. He was only a pretend Chowdhury though as he was adopted by the family at age 16! If you wonder why Salim Chacha, a Muslim man would do such a thing? Perhaps he heard the unheard sound of the eternal river and did not care for external names and forms of religions. 

My mother also told me the story of Kutu Mian who sang ballads in their courtyard with pictures drawn on sticks. Tales of the earthquake of “Chairbangla” (Bengali year 4?) were a part of fakir Kutu’s song offerings. She speaks of a rebel poet Mukunda Das whom the British could not catch. And she retells the unknown tale of “fakir bidroha” (rebellion of the Muslim fakirs).  At one of my aunt’s wedding, saris were all khadi (Gandhi’s handspun cloth) and the mother of my grandfather’s first wife gave revolutionary speeches at Sylhet center. Recently a cousin brought a couple of tattered books rescued from an old trunk. One is called Radhanath Charit, life story of this great grandmother’s husband, a local leader in the revolutionary struggle against the British. 

Another tattered book that my cousin Shankha showed is called Stabratnamala that includes “Tripursundaristotram” and “Tarashatanamstotram” testifying to my family’s Shakta Tantric antecedents. I saw in the pages of that book in blue ink what could possibly be my grandfather’s signature – Satish Chandra Chowdhury. He died young in 1934 when my mother was only nine years old.  He looms large in my imagination as I traverse time and enter into this imagined space that my mother has etched into my consciousness.  One of the tattered books was printed in Sunamganj Press that was started by my eldest mama (maternal uncle), Shaktidhar Chowdhury, Shankha’s father.  

A famous Muslim poet Hachan (Hasan) Raja was my grandfather’s friend and apparently had given a ‘mohar’ (gold coin) to him at the birth of my grandfather’s first, but short lived son by his first wife. My own grandmother, Shubashini Debi, widowed at 29, raised her 6 children in tumultuous times.  She would stay up all night cutting supari (acasia) and chewing paan before a court appearance when she had to fight neighboring jamindars who were trying to swindle her of her land. She won all of the cases attending them in covered palkis.  But she had to leave everything and come nearly destitute with her family in 1948 as a refugee to “India,” just a few miles from Sunamganj which became a part of East Pakistan. 

 

Hasan Raja

But sometime in the depth of the night a presence disturbs me, a ghostly shape; I startle at the recognition: my maternal great grandmother.  My mother only vaguely remembers her visits to her home in Habiganj.  My mother’s cousins would speak in hushed tones about “Thakur” doing “sadhana” inside the mosquito net in the “digambari” or sky clad form! So no one was allowed to go near her room. Her name was Shibsundari, beauty of Shiva or does it mean, made beautiful by Shiva’s love, his spouse Parvati. There is a story about her guru, a famous sanyasi, coming to her home and asking for food, ignoring the feast arranged for him by the villagers at another place. 

I also imagine the form of Trailokya Bhattacharya, the family priest, who officiated at the Mahavidya pujas at my mother’s uncle’s home. He would make clay Shiva lingas every day and mother recalls seeing them strewn near the altar. When his right hand was paralyzed, he continued the ritual using his left hand! This uncle was known to light Akashbati (sky light), a lantern hoisted on a bamboo stick to illuminate the area.  As a relatively well-off but childless man, one of the real brothers of my grandfather, he lived very near my mother’s home. My mother’s memory of the murti of Chinnamasta being made at his home inspired me to publish an essay about this Tantric goddess.  Her stories furnished the materials for my very first published essay “Border in the Courtyard: Partitioned India and my Mother’s ‘home’” that I wrote in 1997 to celebrate India’s 50th Independence Day. For people like my mother, it was the day of partition. 

I can’t even begin to retell my mother’s accounts of many celebrations, women’s bratas or rituals, her boat trips across the watery ‘haors’ and her childhood days of carefree fun.  One story gives me a vivid image of her slightly crazy girlhood.  Apparently she and her older sister had ended up eating something with marijuana in it at a neighbor’s home. Ma laughs wildly as she remembers she and her sister almost falling into the pond as they wobbled back home and tried hiding their drugged state from their mother! She also once downed some whiskey sneaking into her maternal uncle’s study who was a doctor at a tea plantation. Some Granny tales to tell the coming generations. 

 

Haor

As I travel around the world, I often find people from Sylhet but one of the most poignant meetings was in Nicosia in Cyprus. I had unexpectedly found myself in an exhibition that showcased paintings of my now dear friend Lazaro Soteri.  She was wearing Indian clothes and the walls were full of Shiva/Shakti paintings! But as I walked into the hall, I heard the extremely familiar sound of Bhatiali songs that Bengal’s boatmen sing.  My mother often spoke of being lulled into sleep by their distant music.  I saw a circle of Desi musicians soulfully singing away. When I told these Bangladeshi singers of my Sylheti heritage, they showed serious disappointment at the fact that I had traveled all over Europe but had not yet been to Sylhet.

In the days of virtual reality and interconnected web of technological existence, I have discovered many images of Sunamganj, Surma River and Sylhet in general. Referring to Bangladesh’s war of independence, Wikipedia says that Sunamganj was liberated on 6 December 1971. What is liberation? Fortunately I discovered a whole series of beautiful photos put out by someone named Emon Chowdhury.  In one of them I see a girl with an umbrella in a school uniform walking on a beautiful village path. Somehow I see in her my mother who was the only girl from her village to walk to a distant school. 

 

Surma River

Googling can be an agonizing activity. I found no trace of the small village called Mallikpur in Sunamganj district. My mother’s map may be the only concrete image left of a place that is lost to time. Also, looking at these images I feel a strange tightness in my belly. When I speak to my mother about my wish to visit Bangladesh, she often reluctantly expresses a mixture of loss, anger, and no desire to see the land again. I hear in her voice the howling pain of a subcontinent divided.  Whenever I visit Tripura, my father’s ancestral home, where my mother gave birth to me many years ago on April 25th, I can almost hear the sound of the river Surma, just across from the town.  Maternal embrace gives us being, life and the primal sensation of touch helping us orient ourselves to life’s fleeting ephemerality. As I write I can almost touch those floating words on the river Surma that long to find expression.