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Coming Home to Kaliabor
The days of my illness were important days of my life. During that time I seemed to suddenly grow older and develop a new quality — that of being deeply concerned about all people. It was as though the skin had been torn off my heart, making it unbearably sensitive to every injury, my own or another’s.
Maxim Gorky, Childhood
April 26, 2008
Rabin Saikia sold beetel nuts to pay for college and eventually got a job with the Food Corporation of India in 1972, earning Rs.273 a month as a clerk. After years of working 12-hour days, he was promoted to senior clerk in 1984, and started buying land with the money he saved from his salary of Rs.3,500. That property, mostly plantation, is worth unimaginably more now, a goldmine he sits on in retirement.
He lives in Nagaon now, many hours into the heartland of Assam, with its single main street crowded with up to five lanes of cars, all with their headlights on full-beam, horns blaring not once, not even continuously, but repetitively. It is quieter in an ancestral home in Kaliabor, though, where the only movement is the flap of curtains.