Coming Back Home in 23 Years (True Story)

 

A small village in Bogura, a northern city in Bangladesh. It resembled any other villages in a South Asian country with lots of trees, many colored crop fields, small rivers, marshlands, class discriminations, poverty and dependence on nature: sometimes for rain and some other times for unrainy outfields. 

And her name was Amena. It was in the 40s of the last century under the British rule in the Indian subcontinent. She was unlike any other naturally learned girl without proper academic education in a remote village with hardly any schooling facility. And as a common fate, she was to meet the destiny of the early marriage with which all the girls, in the time and context she belonged to, were born in.

Years passed. She got married off to a carpenter living in the adjacent village. From a poor family to another poverty-riddled one to carry the burden of running a family in meager income of her husband, the only earning member in a joint family consisting of 6 members. And soon there were four more to join them, when family planning things were unimaginable dreams like making a voyage to the Moon.

Years passed. She kept on carrying the burden of running a poverty-stricken family with four growing kids and her husband and the wages her husband could manage to earn. And then her husband passed away, leaving her in a living hell full of unfed or half-fed mouths. No choice left except working as house–maids and even that job too was scarcer in the time and place she belonged to. Spinach and other green vegetables grown on the marshlands were the main source of their meals. But managing rice or flour as the main dish had always been a problem. Luckily enough there were plenty of fishes in the rivers and other water bodies, but they had to depend on the dry season for the water to be vaporized in the low lying lands and it was the time of the year when they could add protein to their menus.

Winters, one after another, passed by with new struggles with the growing kids, now a little older. No more schooling left for the sons and the oldest one left with shouldering the partial responsibility of maintaining the family expense. Enduring the struggles destiny tied her to, she went a bit mentally imbalanced with a light amnesia.

Her second son, in a desperate attempt to change the destiny managed to make a move to Malaysia, a country which her mother never heard of. Only thing she knew was that it was a foreign country. He was very fond of this son. 

Partly because of the mental illness, negligence from her eldest son and partly because of the suppressed anger against her fate she left home unnoticed. And a new life began to unfold in newer course with the newer people. And she was already at her later 40s by the time.

She boarded on a train compartment with many other jobless people, where the ticket checkers hardly pay any visit. And it took her from her village district to Jessore, and then to Sitakund, Chattogram, another city in Bangladesh, about 500 kilometers away off her village. And she got down in search of abroad which she think her second son would be living in.

A mysterious allegorical journey like that of The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan began in the real sense, once she met a group of worshippers on a pilgrimage to a temple above the Sitakund Hill, the Bangladeshi part of the 50-kilometer long Chandranath Hills.

She was from a village full of green crop fields, narrow roads in-between, small rivers flowing across and marshlands which usually remain dried during the winter and summer seasons. And now an entirely new world was opening up before her eyes with a series of hills and forest lines. She trekked through the hilly tracks with the group on foot to enter India without any passport or visa.

Her journey continued through months of pilgrimage on foot, from one temple to another one, from one city to another one and her search for her son, who never left her mind even in her amnesia, was being continued too. She was just letting herself entirely lost in the flow like a straw in the current of a river cruising on to meet the ocean. And eventually she met the Himalayas which was where her long travel on foot, covering nearly an unbelievable distance of 1000 kilometers came to an end.

A new life panned out for her, who was all alone in a foreign country,  and for whom the idea of the world map is limited to two parts; one being her own country centering on her village and the other is a foreign country. So, it appeared to her that her son would be anywhere around the foreign soil she landed in. And which is why she settled down in a city in Nepal, a popular tourist destination with people from all over the world with so many colors and shades.

She used to do odd jobs in the restaurants at the tourist hub of the beautiful country at the foothills of the Majestic Himalayas. Apart from her jobs in the hotels and restaurants and sometimes as the domestic helps, she kept looking for her second son in a foreign country without knowing the foreign languages that she could verbally communicate to with people other than the language of a mother braving the destiny.

She was lost in a new world she was completely unaware of. But she was finally managed to live on her own. She could at least work to earn her livelihood. She was living a life not as a refugee to the society of her own or to her own family.

Winters kept passing by followed by the springs. And she kept living alone in the foreign country completely unknown to her with regards to the living styles, customs, behaviors, weather, colors, visuals and languages. But there was freedom and probably which was why she never thought of coming back home to be living with the uncertainty in the availability of the next meal.

She was the Nora of Ibsen. Both of them just moved on to the point of no return in search of new meanings to life with new hopes to continue living on: one in the real life and the other one in a play not less real than the real world. And from a middle aged woman, Amena turned old enough to be a senior citizen in the passage of long 23 years.

Again she turned to be a helpless woman with the burden of old age, but not undefeated. Standing at 80 with no more strength left to work in a restaurant she ended up being on the street again and then to an asylum. And in the long run she was finally discovered by someone who identified her to be a Bangladeshi and let the consulate know about her condition.

And finally Bangladeshi embassy in Nepal, with the help of social media and a local investigating agency, found the home she left 23 years ago.

All her children are alive with their respective families, leaving behind the curse of poverty and the nightmarish memories of the past. Even her second son, in search of whom Amena kept walking on to reach the foreign country, returned home a long ago to live a stable life running a small business. But, it was beyond their imagination that their mother was still alive. After searching every possible place she could be in, they thought her to be dead a long time ago.

With the help of the government, Amena came back home after twenty three long years in the aura of a dreamy atmosphere; in an outburst of emotions filled in with tears of love and affection.     

But, did she really come back Home or just make a wonderful family reunion?