Bangladesh is a country I visited at different times. I went there as a child with my parents and sisters and recall the sheer joy of travelling through the rural areas which were dotted with ponds, each of a different colour. Green during the day when its deep, cool waters, reflected the trees around it. Blue and silver at dawn when it mirrored the sky above. Golden when the sun went down in the horizon. It was delightful to jump into these lakes, swim or simply splash around. The countryside was also streaked with rivers of varying sizes. There were gurgling streams which we waded through on foot. There were wide, wild rivers, which we crossed on boats. The surrounding scenery seemed surreal. There were orchards of mangoes and jackfruits on the banks. The fruits dazzled like gigantic gems in the sun. It was fairytale like. Floating down those rivers on our cozy boats was no less enchanting than the simulated rivulet in Disneyland which I visited many times with my family as a child. I still recall the song, “This is a small world after all.”

It is. Bangladeshi ponds and rivers are no different than Indian ones. British drew an artificial border through it. The Radcliffe Line. The utterly ugly, invisible, imaginary partition which divided us. Otherwise we are the same people with the same land, same landscape.

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In childhood, it did not occur to me that we are different. I had as much fun, floating my paper boat in a village puddle during Monsoon in Bangladesh as I did in a rustic town in India, where a relative lived.

The differences, political, personal grew glaring when I visited and lived in Bangladesh’s capital city Dhaka for a while when my husband got a job there. I was told that as journalist I could not work.

Yet, even then, a decade or two earlier, it was still friendly. There was mutual love between the Bangladeshi Bengalis and the Bengalis of India’s West Bengal. We shared the same language, with a few differences in dialects. We shared the same culture. We shared Rabindranath Tagore as the creator of our respective national anthems.

Today’s turn of events is disturbing. Religious fanatics have taken over. They are fanning flames of hatred. They have forgotten the fight from which stemmed the very idea of Bangladesh. The idea that Bengali is our common language, our common culture, our common identity.

The freedom fighters of Bangladesh, when it was East Pakistan, gave up their lives to extricate the land and the language of the Bengalis from the tyrannical and oppressive rulers of West Pakistan. Today these martyrs’ images are being attacked, their statues are being defaced. Their names are being sullied. Their reputation is being tarnished.

Since violence broke out in Bangladesh in August, I visited the border at Bongaon. It was telling that a wall image of Mujibur Rahman, thus far considered a founding father of Bangladesh, had been whitewashed. Elsewhere images of his visage had been blackened.

I also went to Taki, through which runs the riverine border between India and Bangladesh. I took a boat ride on the Ichhamati River, on one bank of which lies Bangladesh and on the other, India. There is an imaginary line that runs through the river. It is the border. Boats on the Indian side does not cross over to the other side. Boats from the Bangladeshi side do not cross over into this side.

Our boatman told us the tales of the camaraderie that existed between people of the two sides. “Our love for each other is really visible during the Festival of Durga Puja,” he said cheerfully. “See that enclosure there?” He asked, pointing towards a canopied area on the Bangladeshi side. “That is where the Durga pratimas (clay idols) would be gathered before the immersion procession started.” His face fell when he narrated the next bit. “This year there was no immersion from their side. They did not celebrate. They have completely stopped Durga Puja.” Our boatman said it was a time of year he and other boatmen as well as all the locals cherished. It was a time to meet mid-stream and smile together, laugh together. Our boatman took us to the mid-point. “We do not have permission to go further.”

I looked down at the deep. There was no line. There was no difference. A leaf floated in the river. It was dawn and the water was clear, blue and silver. It was a golden, fallen leaf. I did not know whether it was from a Bangladeshi tree or an Indian one. One side of it fell on the Bangladeshi side and the other on the Indian side.