Ghosts of the Displaced

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/ghosts-of-the-displaced.html

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MY grandmother lived in three countries without ever moving. The Bengali village where she was born, married, had five children and became a widow saw its political boundaries change from British India to Pakistan to Bangladesh between 1947 and 1971. My grandmother was a storyteller, and when I was growing up in that village, her imagination recreated for me altered allegiances and divided houses.

When I decided to move to Jerusalem with my family in 2005, I was curious about what it would be like to live in a divided city. The partition of Palestine and that of Bengal and Punjab took place within a year of each other and bore similar hallmarks of the hasty withdrawal of the old colonial order.

In Jerusalem, our first house was part of a grand Arab duplex on a street called Emek Refaim, “the valley of ghosts.” It had tall arched windows and ceilings so high that whenever I found myself alone, I had the feeling of being in a church. Later, I would read about the history of this part of West Jerusalem and learn that the house had indeed been owned by a Christian Palestinian family, who were dispossessed following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that was set off by the creation of Israel.

My grandmother liked talking about haunted houses. In Bangladesh, homes that were once owned by wealthy Hindus who fled to India after the 1947 partition had altars now eerily devoid of gods. She said that she was often awakened by the sound of a conch shell, blown by unseen worshipers of the absent deities.

Across the border, in the Indian state of West Bengal, you can visit the once lavish dwellings, now mostly in ruins, of Muslim landowners and tax collectors — known as “zamindars” in British India — who notoriously led a life of debauchery and decadence. Post-partition, they were stripped of their roles and wealth, and many went to the newly created Pakistan. Books and plays have been written about phantom musicians and dancers who still come out on certain moonlit nights to perform for their zamindar. The dancers bow to their patron, the connoisseur of Indian court music, who pays them generously before they all disappear into the fog of history.

In Jerusalem, when I saw shadows dance on the Hebron tiles of our courtyard, I thought of those displaced ghosts, and my home’s former owners.

I was not the only one who wondered about this absentee generation. My closest Israeli friend lived with her Palestinian flat mate in the former Arab village of Ein Karem, a newly gentrified haven for artists and writers on the outskirts of Jerusalem. One day when I visited her, she ushered me out into the garden to show me a crooked fig tree.

“Look at this tree, I’ve never seen any figs on its branches. We think the tree is cursed because it misses the original owners of this house.”

I suggested that perhaps it produced only male flowers. But my friend told me she knew this wasn’t true. What she said next took me back to my grandmother’s stories.

“There were visitors. A mother and her daughter. The mother was modestly dressed. So was the daughter, in long galabias, without the head scarves.”

I stared at her.

“They were at home, you see, no need to cover your hair.”

My secular, left-wing friend, an activist and lawyer, was talking about otherworldly visitors.

“I was having a shower on the day when they first appeared. First I heard the mother. ‘Why are you having a shower outside?’ she asked. I didn’t understand. I was in my en suite bathroom. Then I realized that that part of the building didn’t exist when they lived here. It was an extension built by the Jewish landlord post-1948. ‘Come, come inside, you’ll catch a cold,’ she said. I obeyed her dutifully. The mother smiled. She had a very young face. She handed me a towel. ‘Would you like some tea, hot mint tea? Let’s go and get some leaves from the garden. Come, I’ll show you.’ I slipped into my dressing gown and followed her.

“She was looking frantically for the mint, on the outer edge of the garden, next to the barren fig tree. ‘The mint used to grow here, under the fig tree. The figs were delicious. The tree used to yield so much that even after feeding the whole neighborhood, we could dry enough fruit to last us the winter months.’ I told the mother that I had some dried mint tea bags in the house. We went inside and stood in the kitchen. She looked around and said, ‘Where’s the kettle? We left it on. We didn’t have time to turn the gas off.’ ”

MY friend explained that she remembered the details so vividly because she’d recorded the conversations. Now I was worried about my friend’s sanity.

“You’ve recorded your conversations with a pair of ghost refugees?”

“They were actually monologues. I kept feeling their presence, and found myself talking to them quite often. So I decided to record my part of the conversation with the silent visitors, the original residents of my house.”

The apparitions, she explained, were born of guilt: “Since I could not personally compensate them, I could at least offer my personal apology by inviting their ghosts into my — well, their — house to drink tea with me.”

Sadly, my friend went on to point out, some Israelis insist on calling the descendants of the Palestinians who fled in 1948 “phantom refugees.” But they are real. There are 1.5 million Palestinian refugees living in camps around the Arab world and in the West Bank, who haven’t moved on, who won’t move on, and they pray every day to return to their families’ abandoned properties. “The right of return,” my friend said, “is the most crucial topic in any peace talk, more important than even the status of Jerusalem. We must do something first about the descendants of those people who had to leave with their kettles on the stove. Otherwise they’ll be breathing down Israel’s neck forever. They’ll be coming back to turn the stove off!”

Throughout my life, I felt the pain of division so desperately that I refused to call the country of my birth by its real political name. Whenever people asked me where I came from, I would answer, “Bengal.” Later, when I lived abroad, every time I went “home” I made sure I flew to Kolkata in Indian West Bengal, and traveled across the border overland to the Bangladeshi town where my parents lived. This way I could visit undivided “Bengal,” unified by my journey and my imagination. Such personal steps are the only way to circumvent impossible political boundaries.

But in the Israeli-Palestinian context, an intricate system of legal and military controls makes it extremely difficult for even third-generation descendants of Palestinian refugees to visit their ancestral home in Israel. With an April deadline approaching to reach a framework for a peace deal, both sides must realize that unless the right of return is addressed — at least with financial compensation, if the physical reality seems impossible — there’s no chance for peace and reconciliation.

In Bangladesh and West Bengal, I saw a different process of reconciliation. There, the refugees and landowners swapped places and allegiances, and eventually, most seemed to have learned to live with one another’s narrative.

In my dusty Bengali town every evening, the sound of the conch shell from an old Hindu temple drifted down our alley, announcing the hour of the invocation of the gods. My grandmother would tell me to come out to the garden, heavy with the fragrance of the gondhoraj flower, and say: “Can you smell the strong scent? It’s responding to the call of the temple gods.” Exactly at that moment the Muslim prayer call, the beautiful azan from the nearby white-domed mosque, would also fill the air.