She exists, now as Bangladeshi

I thought she was long dead.

The last time I saw her, she was bloated like a corpse. It was not because of the advanced pregnancy. But her body was full of fluid. Her eyes had turned yellow from jaundice. And she could hardly breathe. Her obese body weighed down with heavy pregnancy made it difficult for her to move.

“Did you see a doc?” I was concerned.

“Once. Long time back.”

“Why not now?”

She kept quiet for some time and then said, “It is difficult. I live in the enclave. I have to fake my name and address. And doctors know I am faking my identity. They refuse to see me. And it is far away too, difficult to go.”

So Kalpana took it on her fate to fight it through. I thought it was a lost fight.

She had fought many things on her own before. Officially she was an Indian citizen living in an Indian enclave of Cooch Behar, Dashiarchhara.  But she had to find a job and jobs are rare here.

So one day she decided to go over to India, her official homeland, with her husband, father and other villagers.

They walked up to the barbed wire fence one afternoon. Thirty of them. And waited in the brush along the border for darkness to fall and for the agents to help them cross over.

Soon after daylight faded, the agents appeared shadowy figures in the dark. Each of them paid Tk 3000 to the agents for the border crossing. It sounds weird but that's what happened. She had to pay to go to her own country.

Then the agents propped a bamboo ladder against the fence and one by one they crossed over.

She did not stop there but pushed all the way to Delhi where she started working in a brick kiln until she got pregnant and came back.

“But you badly need to see a doctor,” I had insisted.

“I will be okay,” she had said after an awkward silence. I doubted it.

Yesterday, as I walked down the road in the enclave, I remembered her helpless face. Is she dead? Could she pull through as she had said?

I asked the villagers if they knew her. There was more than one Kalpana. And several were pregnant. Which one was I talking about?

They took me to several houses. And finally to the Kalpana's I was looking for.

She stepped out the house and smiled. A beautiful child in her arm.  Yes, she had fought it out. Her five-month-old son reached out as I took their photograph.

Kalpana is happy that from tonight the enclave will no longer exist. Bangladesh will be her home.

“We can go to hospitals now,” she said. “We will find jobs. We will not have to go to India in search of work.”

Her husband did not come back from Delhi. He does not call or keep in touch. He has just disappeared.

But Kalpana will fight through without him. She is a fighter.