There Are No More Places to Migrate To

This essay, written as narrative nonfiction, is the portion of an oral history interview with Kalyani Ray Chowdhury, who was born in 1929 in Chittagong (present-day Bangladesh), on what she recalls of her homeland in East Bengal. A few months prior to India's 1947 Partition into India and Pakistan by the British, Ray Chowdhury's family had been vacationing in the city of Patna. They were unable to travel back home to Mymensingh due to rising communal and political turmoil. When the Partition line was finally declared, they found themselves living life as refugees in Calcutta in West Bengal, while their home remained abandoned across the newly formed border in East Bengal. During the course of the interview, Ray Chowdhury also makes note of the nuanced distinctions in the culture and language of people from both sides of the Bengal border, and how conscious efforts had to be made on the part of her family to feel any sense of integration to their newly adopted home.