What revisiting my grandparents’ land in Bangladesh taught me about belonging

There is a particular sunset moment that I replay often in my mind. The heavens are a violet pink, an incomplete oil painting across which the sun burnishes and then falters down. I have climbed a hill, using my hands to steady myself, and there are shrubs of green sprouting between the uneven rocks. I can see cows in the nearby rice fields, a patchwork quilt of green, and I feel an immense sense of pride. I’m small, perhaps nine years old, and this is the first time I can recall seeing my grandfather’s tillah, his pockets of earth.

Sunset over the Surma River in Sylhet

Adib Chowdhury

I visit this hill every time I am in Sylhet. It is my homecoming. My grandparents Dhadha and Dhadhi lived here. Their eldest, my father, left in his early 20s, but the ripe coconut trees and paan sellers still remember him. I couldn’t name a road in Sylhet, or a region beyond those of my ancestors, but I can read and write Bangla, which is not so common for those in the diaspora. I’m aware of how deep my roots go, of the women who looked like me whose stories are buried here. Like many whose families migrated to the West decades ago, we carry shadows of their history. It’s in the lao bottle gourd grown in my mother-in-law’s garden in Portsmouth, the way we fragrance our meat with shatkora and our obsession with sharing tropical fruit.

Boats on the Dholai River in Bholaganj, Sylhet District;

K M Asad