Alam’s Own House:- Dibyendu Palit’s exquisite short story “Alam’s Own House” reminds the reader

of the horror of the Bengal national Movement and its aftermath with partition of Pakistan and
Dhaka in 1971. The author expresses the excruciating pain of migration and the consequent
rootlessness through the protagonist named Alam. The backdrop of the story is this historic partition
that tends his family with other community members to leave Calcutta by exchanging their house
and property with Anantashekhar Sanyal and migrate to Dhaka due to their excessive fear as
Muslims of becoming minority in the native city among Hindus. Of course, the desperation of this
exchange is primarily of Ananta Shekhar. However, Alam stays with Anantashekhar’s family in
Calcutta to finish his studies. This stay brings him closer to the host’s daughter Raka. Eventually Alam
has to leave for Dhaka after his father’s death. But his intimacy with his Raka retains through regular
exchange of letters. The romantic episode of the time leaves such an indelible impression on his
mind that gradually she becomes the root of his desire for home and the nest of his nostalgia. It
becomes explicit in his feeling thus, “if his physique could be analysed, instead of his body, arms,
legs and head, he could see the door windows, stairs and attics!”

Luckily, the grand occasion of taking part in a conference on friendship between divided
nations after three years gives him an opportunity to visit his home town. A complementary
occasion is definitely his visit to the birthplace and also to meet Raka which was always enlivened in
the recess of his heart through memory and nostalgia. Even the absence of places and things like
Park Circus, Maniktala, Narkeldanga, the woodpecker tree at the gate of his house, Gandhi’s portrait
in the old living room and the oil painting of the Battle of Plassey have their manifestation through
his nostalgic mind. But his dream of meeting Raka is shattered by her absence at home, or rather her
self- exile. A letter from her clarified a ‘resistance’ that induced her to fly to Delhi without meeting
him. To quote her, “Your intentions are noble. You want to take me up where you are. I am eternally
grateful to you to you for that. But, Alam, I lake the mental strength required of me. There’s a kind
of resistance , a kind of hesitation—something, somewhere. I cannot explain what it is. And I don’t
have the strength to break that wall.” Disheartened Alam realizes that his house has become an
alternative place where he lives in the bedroom of an impersonal guest. He feels ruined with this
fragmented love life. Then only he can understand the essence of Raka’s writing once that, “Some
lands are meant for certain roots only.” It is an irony that he regarded his attendance in the seminar
incomplete without the home coming once. But this very visit brought to light the hard truth that
nostalgic longings are quite too weak to bind people once separated by time, place and religion.

Nevertheless, these cross currents help the protagonist to build a strong conviction that
memories of both shared culture and home are very brittle to unite people. Because, the paradigms
under partition culture prove that one’s habitats are not love and allied memories but religion, caste,
creed and geographical demarcation. Now he and Raka are inhabitants of different nation- states
and the seminar that he is coming to attend insists on these differences rather than being an
antidote to the unity among nations. Anantashekhar’s apprehension is proved true, “But can oil and
water ever gel together?” Alam’s conviction of being all oil or all water soon mingles in the dust.
Hence, c take part in a conference on friendship between divided nations rossing this territory
means a “transformed experience” of an expatriate in him. He now remains only a product of
rootless cosmopolitanism.

Dibyendu Palit seems to reflect here on his deep perceptions on various border issues through
the touching experiences of the narrator protagonist. In one hand he challenges the legitimacy of
man-made boundaries demarcating ethnic or religious distinctions, and insists on the other hand
that in spite of these painful migrations to new locations under compulsion, a part of one’s root still
persists in the old native land and its memories torment him/her the whole life.
I shall Return to this Bengal:- The modernist movement in literature of Bengal definitely gains
impetus with Jibanananda Das, the legendary creator of “Banalata Sen”. His poems are marked by an
aroma of romanticism through his deep love for nature and high patriotic zeal. The lyric I shall
Return to this Bengal, one of the 1957 collections of his poems named Beautiful Bengal, is replete
with the poet’s nostalgic longing for his homeland. The backdrop is definitely the historic partition of
Bengal and his confinement as a refugee there in Calcutta. But this compulsion to be separated from
his birthplace Barishal, a village of Bengal due to the turmoil and horror of Independence Movement
of Bangladesh aches his heart and its nostalgia haunt him like a nightmare. The bounty of nature in
the undivided entity of Bengal with flora and fauna is a constant attraction for the poet. The
homesick poet sees no ray of hope of going back during his life time since the demarcation does not
allow him there. The more he realizes this gulf, the more he becomes impatient to be there. So, he
takes recourse to the hope beyond this life that in the guise of airy or aquatic or terrestrial creature
he will transcend the barriers of demarcation and will enjoy the bliss of rootedness.

In the very brief framework of the poem with its lucid language, the resonance of nature’s
bounty and deep patriotism of the poet are genuinely felt. It also expresses the poet’s triumph in the
life beyond to be the significant part of his motherland. His poetic sensibility imparts the poem its
sensuous appeal with visible objects, their shape, colour and odour. The images here are ordinary
but significant. It is only he that imparts beauty and significance even to lowly and unattractive
creatures and plants like Indian Maina, owl, crow, sparrow, duck and grass etc. in the eyes of the
readers. Buddhadeva Bose rightly says of him, “A nature worshipper, but by no means a a Platonist
or pantheist; he is rather a pagan who loves the things of nature seriously not as tokens or symbols,
nor as patterns of perfection, but simply because they are what they are.” With his exceptional
poetic sensibility, deep love for nature and patriotic zeal, he is much acclaimed a poet after
Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam.

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Basti by Intizar Husain:- Basti by Intizar Husain the legendary Urdu literary
genius from Pakistan, occupies the place of pride as an NYRB (New York
Review Books) classic. It is a kaleidoscopic representation of the novelist’s
psychological and emotional approaches to the pluralistic community culture
of a people as well as the impact of historic partition on it. Replete with pain
and trauma of migrants, the novel is a fine discourse on the cracked reality of
the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and then the partition of Bengal and Pakistan
in 1971. The narrative from the prism of memory of a migrant about an
ordinary people’s displacement from India, re-settlement as the title of the
novel implies in deemed homeland Pakistan but their lives of consequent
chaos through another war, constitutes the plot of the novel. The publication
of the novel in 1979 was first a formidable challenge for Husain. But Frances
W. Pritchett’s translation and Asif Farrukhi’s introduction to it in 2007
revolutionized it by international readership.
 The novelist here showcases the inevitable transformation through
physical and psychological violence of a settlement through the protagonist
and narrator Zakir, a nostalgic professor of History. He himself was an
immigrant with other Muslims from India to his new homeland Pakistan across
the border. As a child in the beginning of the novel Zakir is introduced in an
earthly paradise of flora and fauna. In the cities like Rupnagar-the home of the
protagonist, Meerut-the seat if his college life, Vyaspur-where his family moves
to and Delhi-the choice of his childhood beloved Sabirah, the protagonist
spends his happy days which later flashes before him through memory. In this
context it can be said that the name of the hero is symbolic since it means ‘he
who remembers’. Life for him in these days is a mythic and even mystic vision
of harmony between young and old, man and women, Muslim and Hindu. He
was then so closed to Hindu culture that his mother said, “Son…why were you
born in our house? You should have been in Hindu’s house. Your father is
always invoking the name of God and the Prophet-he doesn’t realise his son
has taken to Hindu stories.” But it does not last long. Even the happiness he
felt by touching the soil of Pakistan with his family in 1947 and its aftermath
the novelist depicts thus, “The whole day walked on a fresh sky, suffused with
happiness… That day seemed very pure to him… after that, the days grew
soiled and dirty. How quickly the purity of our days was lost, how quickly the
coolness fled from our nights.” The sense of relief faces an onslaught through
the ravages in the name of Bengal national Movement. Through the traumatic
fall of Dhaka he envisages the new modern world with transformation as a seat
of intolerant angry mobs with slogans in their mouth and fire in hands burning
the city of Pakistan, presumably Lahore. The remnant of these convulsions for
him is a treacherous city of Kufa. The tensed situation can easily be understood
when as a lonely wanderer with prayers in mosque he is warned, ‘Don’t speak,
for fear you might be recognized.”
It is the post-partition reality that all his convictions and efforts are
proved futile due to burn and slaughter among brothers. He plunges into
regret and uncertainty. A great void through the realization of futility of
partition leaves Zakir disillusioned and lonely. Neither any country nor any
language and religion can experience its diverse consequences. That is why the
novelist in the end of the novel echoes this utter and irrespective loss by
quoting Lord Buddha and the holy Quran. Buddha says, “Monks, just imagine a
house that is burning on all four sides. Inside it some children are stumbling
around, trembling with fear. Oh monks, men and women are children,
stumbling around in a fiercely blazing house.” The holy Quran also prophecies
the same, “I swear by Time, man is surely in loss.” Thus, the genius in Husain
offers his complicated historical perspective in conformity with both secular
and sacred traditions of South Asia.
However, it is pertinent that the introspection of the protagonist about
their failure leads to true self-reckoning and even hope too. Sitting furtively in
the café with his friends he says, “The thing is this, Irfan, that defeat. But,
today, in this country, everybody is accusing the other and will still be
tomorrow; today everyone is trying to prove his innocence, and will still be
tomorrow. Somebody must bear the trust. I thought I might just as well.”
Though the dreams and aspirations of these people in the new nation are
proved futile, yet they carry their cities in the guise of trust on their shoulders
to this new land. Thus, the novel can be called a touching account of exile, loss
and longing.
It is worth mentionable that, the novelist adroitly handles this spiritual,
national and universal crisis in the novel more through memory than
hegemonic official history and memories become an integral part of the
narrative to make sense of the protagonist’s experience of home and
homelessness.
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