The LIfe Goes On

Fifty-six years after my grandfather's family was forced to leave East Pakistan, I returned to Ponabalia — now in Bangladesh — searching for our ancestral home. I came as a tourist on 7th December 2017, carrying an Indian passport, retracing a journey my grandfather never chose to make.

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My grandfather was a citizen, born under British rule, in a land that was his own. Religious conflict and the violence of Partition changed that — uprooting him and his family to Calcutta, against his will, against the life he had known. For the rest of his life, the only identity available to him was "Bengali refugee," or Hindu udbastu — the displaced. This was not his story alone. It belongs to millions — Hindus and Muslims alike — who crossed a border that cut through their homes, their fields, their sense of belonging, in both directions.

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What I was really searching for in Ponabalia was not just a house, but the memory of what we once were — a jouthyo poribar, a joint family, rooted and whole. After the migration, that unity fractured. Members of the family scattered across India, pulled away from the axis that once held us together. Some still have a connection. Most have drifted into a quiet, unspoken distance — not estranged, forgotten by time.

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Importantly, I did not find the house. Perhaps it no longer stands; perhaps memory had reshaped its location more kindly than the land itself.