Migrants on the margins

From climate change to survival and resilience, a story of a family in Kolkata weaves together many aspects of migration

The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh to India

by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

Published by 

Penguin Vintage

264 pages ₹699

 

Amid the political posturing on “Bangladeshi infiltration”, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia’s latest work of narrative non-fiction, The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh to India, frames the forced migration of the people from the Sunderbans in Bangladesh to Kolkata within the paradigm of climate change and crises.

 

Bengali-speaking Muslims from border districts are often stigmatised as infiltrating Bangladeshis. Overlooked in all this are the experiences of refugees who are “fleeing floods, storms, hunger, persecution — seeking food, shelter, work, dignity”. When the author moved to Kolkata from Hyderabad in 2011, she found her house help hiding his identity to protect himself against such threats. She writes, “Islamophobia was something I read about — abstract, distant, occasionally surfacing as class prejudice — but never as something visceral. Kolkata was different. It was a city still haunted by the memory of Partition.”

 

In The Undocumented, Ms Kundalia traces the life of a migrant family — Safrat and her two children: Nur and Nabeel — fleeing the catastrophic impact of climate change. The family finds a passage to Kolkata after the Cyclone Aila destroys their livelihood in Bedkashi, Sunderbans, in 2009. The narrative has four parts — The Departure, The Waiting, The Becoming, and The Remembering. It upturns every stone associated with migration, lucidly describing the horrors that engulf the forests during and after a cyclone, and also the fear and caution with which most of the migrants conduct themselves on a daily basis in Kolkata. In the end, it leaves readers pondering over the book’s epigraph, taken from “Home” by the British poet Warsan Shire: “No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark.”

 

The author is careful not to generalise Safrat’s life as everyone’s. The experiences of migrants are as diverse as their numbers but Ms Kundalia’s prose thrives on her ability to tell Safrat and Nur’s experiences from their perspective with a degree of empathy that’s often missing in news and academic frameworks.

 

Safrat works as Sapna, a domestic help in New Town, and dreams of sending her son Nabeel (14) to school, and to marry her daughter Nur (15) to a good man. She dotes on Nabeel while prohibiting Nur from working despite their dire circumstances in the slum. Ms Kundalia introduces readers to the many unseen systems that work seamlessly to manage these slums — from landlords to multiple middlemen who rent blankets to sleep on streets, brokers who loan money, find agents to forge paperwork and find work for the migrants. This network also comes in handy during political rallies that thrive on the presence of these workers, promising them water and electricity, providing neither in the end. There’s also an invisible network of guides that helps transport people across borders, many disappear with money, but some keep their word without accepting any pay.

 

These revelations of unseen networks occur as the readers sit with the discomfort of Safrat’s treatment of her children. Nur is capable but denied access to outside world. She carries her odhna/hijab when she goes out. She is responsible for household chores while Nabeel starts smoking and spends more time doing “nashi” (being destructive). This patriarchal practice is central to the family’s dynamic where Nur sneaks out to find moments of freedom, and Nabeel eventually becomes an empty shell of the boy he used to be. Safrat recalls “haram” multiple times while Nur recalls the changing atmosphere in

 

Bedkashi, a village where once both Hindus and Muslims prayed to Bonbibi for protection against tigers but had quickly given in to Islamic conservatism.

 

Ms Kundalia infuses the narrative with endearing moments shared between siblings, and the mother’s desperation for her son’s education as the only way out of this wretched situation. The author, here too, adds nuance between the aspiration and reality through the community.

 

The author writes, “The straight ladder — school, job, promotion — never reaches the margins, so they build their own crooked one. It’s a way up — a careful, clumsy attempt to carve a place for themselves in a world built to shut them out.” Such attempts, whether it is Safrat’s work, Nur’s stubbornness to teach or to find employment, or Nabeel’s association with syndicate leaders, often lead to more misery.

 

The Undocumented skillfully weaves together many aspects of migration: Climate change, life in prison with no nation to accept them, trafficking, new identities, survival and resilience undone by absent paperwork. Its strength lies in showcasing this movement as a series of events instrumented by both nature and political borders, and not as “isolated accidents”. In today’s context, this deeply moving but nuanced story of forced migration is an urgent and necessary read.

 

The reviewer is an independent writer from Sambalpur, Odisha @geekyliterati