Kill You, Sure (9)

              Kill You, Sure (9)

                                        Nidhu Bhusan Das

                    

                       

                 George Kennedy and Salma Aga celebrate their 50^th Marriage Anniversary next December.Bithi and her parents will be there to arrange for a grand party. Salma’s brother Rafique with his family will fly from Pakistan to attend the party. George’s brother Paul and sister Sharon will come with their families. It’ll be a wonderful get together.Bithi looks forward to attending the great event. The Kennedys’re strong and stout. They’re affable and always keep contact with relatives. The Agas and other Kennedys often visit them whenever they’re across the Atlantic. Bithi knows it, and they love her so much. She’s so much attached to her grandparents. She rarely remains out of their touch. She feels lonely away from the grandparents. To her, they’re one of the best examples of family life, the other being her parents. It appears her parents’re the replication of the grandparents. They’re beautiful and lively even when they’re in their seventies.

                Rafique’s wife Priyanka’s the daughter of Paul and his Indian wife Rekha Dubey. Their only daughter Preeti Aga studies in Boston and lives with George and Salma.Preeti and Bithi have wonderful relation – they love each other so much. They talk everyday by phone, e-mail and on the Google Hangout. They’re planning to make the anniversary celebration a memorable event.

             Bithi leaves Dhaka tomorrow for Chittagong Hill Tracts for a week to begin the study of the tribes there.Anis’s arranged her tour. Reba accompanies her. She’s interested in the Mongoloid people living the pristine glory of Rangamati and Bandorbon areas as she likes the folk tradition of Ireland. Her grandma Sharon Kennedy’s a professor of Anthropology at Dublin University and she’s her inspiration. She heard about the tribes of Chittagong Hill Tracts from the grandma who’s told her she could study the people.”Mom, it’s going to be an exciting experience. I believe we’ll enjoy the beauty of the landscape and the people living there,” Bithi tells her mother at supper. The train’s at 7 a.m. from Kamalapur station. They’ll reach Chittagong by the evening and put up in Agrabad Hotel for the night.

                In Rangamati they’re in the forest bungalow. They’ve decided on the location of enquiry and accordingly visit khagrachhori the next day, go from door to door, relate with the people and win their confidence and goodwill, the necessary prerequisite for proper field study. On the way back to the bungalow, Bithi receives a call from Prof Zafar Iqbal to be informed that renowned scientist and humanist A P J Abdul Kalam’s passed away at the hill station Shillong.”A great man’s gone, gone for ever,” he said in a choked voice.

“It’s a great loss, a humanist worth the name’s gone,” she says as tears blur her sight.

 “Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work,” Kalam’d say, he remembers.

“You have the dream before your dreams can come true,” the great man would tell, recalls Bithi calling up his message for the young generation to have courage to think differently, to invent, and to travel the unexplored path, to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed.

“When he says’ Man needs his difficulties because they are necessary to enjoy success’, he’s a great philosopher and wit,” says Zafar.

“May we not have a condolence meeting to pay homage and remember this great man?” Bithi suggests.

“We must. He’s beyond geography, beyond time,” says the professor.

“May it be day after tomorrow at TSC?” Bithi suggests.

“Or at Bangla Academy as an alternative,” the professor says.

“Okay, am coming back tomorrow.”

“Could you visit some places and people there?”

“Yes, Rangamati and outskirts. The people’re so loving and lovable in their simplicity. They’re as innocent as Adam and Eve in paradise before their fall says mom and apprehends they may lose their pristine glory in the wake of the demographic change wrought against their interest,” Bithi informs.

“It could be a fertile research area for you,” assures the professor.

“Fertile not only for her research but also for politics of settling outsiders in the territory for compulsive mainstreaming of the indigenous people which has proved to be counterproductive elsewhere in the world,” thinks Bithi.

              The Chittagong Hill Tracts was an independent state free from outside control. The Mugals tried but couldn’t bring the CHT into its full suzerainty. They remained content with a kind of trade relation. The British annexed the Tracts in 1860, more than a century after the battle of Plasssey.During the early periods of its rule, the British refrained from interfering with the internal affairs of the Tracts and it wasn’t made a regular part of Bengal. Its administrative system, land rights, and closure to outside settlers all set it apart from the rest of Bengal. This status was reconfirmed in the 1930s when the region was declared an excluded area under the Government of India Act. Later the British enacted a legal instrument the Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation of 1900, also known as CHT Manual, for the general administration of the area. Through this Regulation the British allowed the Jumma people to enjoy a limited measure of autonomy and banned permanent settlement of the outsiders.

                The Pakistani government viewed the Jumma people with suspicion and took measures to do away with the legal safeguards granted by the British. Outsiders were encouraged to settle in the CHT. The Kaptai dam, built over Karnaphuli River without consulting the indigenous people, submerged 54 thousand acres of first class arable land and displaced 100,000 Jumma people from their homestead.

             After the emergence of Bangladesh the Tracts has turned into a militarized zone since mid-1970s; protective provisions of the CHT Regulation have been done away with; settlement of outsiders has been encouraged and sponsored. The indigenous people haven’t been able to accept the policy of their marginalization, Bithi’s told by her grand aunt.

             On her first visit she’s come to like Ritesh Chakma, a second year student of Rangamati College who accompanied her to different houses, and called her didi. He’s genial, simple, updated and forward looking like Preeti, she thinks.( continued on 27 August 2015)