The place that I reside is about 40 kilometers from Kolkata and another 20 kilometers from Bangladesh. This place had been a deep forest during British Raj and still continued to be post Independence. It was only in the 60s that the forests had been cleared for residential purposes. Even before my parents or I was born, and my grand-parents had not met each other, India and Bangladesh shared a relation that India and Nepal shares today. An Indian resident had easy access to the resources of Bangladesh and vice-versa. Trains services ran from Sealdah in West Bengal to Khulna in Bangladesh. It was before Independence and Bangladesh was a part of India.
My father’s parents had been traders. They had sweetmeat shops and lots of Property. Let me describe some of the facts that have become history. Today 100 Paisa make up one Rupee. This is the naya-paisa that is used today. But in those days one Rupee was comprised of sixteen Annas. And four Paisa made up one Anna. So for example if you had a hundred Rupees with you, then you could change that money for sixteen hundred Annas or six thousand four hundred Paisa. You could get coins of one paisa, one Anna, two Anna, four Anna, eight Anna and one Rupee. In the British Raj you could also come across half Anna(=two paisa) or quarter Anna(=one paisa).
At that time things were pretty cheap and you could easily compare one Rupee with today’s five hundred Rupees. When I was a three year old boy I heard stories about how my grandfather bought bagful of grocery, fish, egg and meat for the entire family for the entire week without spending more than a Rupee. At those time refrigerator was not used in houses but food always remained fresh.I had not been there to witness these myself ,but I strongly believe so because there were also other seniors who backed up the same. Around the late 50s era, the old Anna-Paisa system got replaced by the modern coinage that we use today.
When I was a kid I had seen the naya-paisa in various forms and sizes. Today we see only 25 paisa and 50 paisa, 1 rupee, and 5 rupee coins. But I have seen 1paisa,2 paisa,3 paisa,5 paisa and 10 paisa coins also. It has not been more than 10 years before I last saw the 10 paisa coin exchanging hands. Very soon 25 paisa coin will also be gone.
In my grandfather’s time, our family was big and joint. We were not the nuclear family that is prevalent today. At those times the interspacing between two homes were quit big and a house kept an open corridor the size of a small house of today. So a neighbor can be found to be quite far away from your house. Houses were usually thatched and one storied. Each house had room for more than 10 people. These features can be found even today but the difference is that today ten people do not live in the same house as it did happen long ago. The roads were built by clearing the grass that surrounded the fields. There was no electricity and people usually went to sleep after dark. Candles and oil lamps helped in the dark sometime. But that sometime meant an attack by a bandit or a thief who usually kept themselves busy at night time. How the lamps helped was, by letting to view who the thief was.
There were a lot of stories about how thieves made underground tunnels to enter houses and how easily people got sacred of unknown strangers called “ghosts”. Some of these were true. There was one story of “DIANE” ,who is a witch of Bengal found to have taken several lives by some sorcery. As a child I was typically scared of this story. One of the stories told by my grandmother had a thief as the protagonist and I was thoroughly mesmerized by this story.
After India got independence, there was a Hindu Muslim divide and Bangladesh that we know today, became a part of Pakistan known as East-Pakistan. So West Bengal witnessed a who-goes-where situation. The situation got intensified in 1964 when disparity between the Hindus and the Muslims took a huge toll of life. None the less, our family members hid somewhere and escaped. Some still were in East-Pakistan and some in India. My father was a small boy of eleven years when he had moved to India.
to be continued.................(read chapter 2 Independence of Bangladesh)
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