21/4/2014

Ghosts of the Displaced - NYTimes.com

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SUNDAYREVIEW

OPINION

Ghosts of the Displaced

By LIPIKA PELHAM

MARCH 22, 2014

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.

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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 homes
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, Ive 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 wasnt true. What she said next took me
back to my grandmothers 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
didnt understand. I was in my en suite bathroom. Then I realized that
that part of the building didnt exist when they lived here. It was an

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extension built by the Jewish landlord post-1948. Come, come inside,

youll 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? Lets go and get some leaves from the garden.
Come, Ill 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, Wheres the kettle? We left it on. We
didnt have time to turn the gas off.
MY friend explained that she remembered the details so vividly
because shed recorded the conversations. Now I was worried about my
friends sanity.
Youve 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
havent moved on, who wont 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

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the stove. Otherwise theyll be breathing down Israels neck forever.

Theyll 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 thirdgeneration 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 theres 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 anothers 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? Its 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.
Lipika Pelham isthe author of The Unlikely Settler: A Memoir.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 23, 2014, on page SR8 of the New York
edition with the headline: Ghosts of the Displaced.

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