Illegal Bengali

People who speak that Indian language face deportation from Gurgaon and other parts of the country

Bunny and I are living under the Damoclean sword of summary deportation. No, we’re not facing the prospect of deportation from Trump’s America, where thousands of so-called illegal migrants are being rounded up wholesale and chucked out of the country. 

We fear being deported out of Gurgaon where we’ve been living for more years than we, or Gurgaon, might care to remember. The powers-that-be in what bills itself as the Millennium City have launched a drive to identify and deport Bangladeshi migrants who’ve snuck into India, and then into Gurgaon, to find employment as domestic help and in other menial jobs. 

The problem is that the powers-that-be lack the linguistic ability to distinguish between a Bangladeshi and a citizen from the Indian state of Bengal. For Gurgaon’s officialdom, anyone speaking Bengali is a suspect Bangladeshi who should be ejected forthwith.

That the Bengali a Bangladeshi speaks is easily distinguished from the Bengali spoken by an Indian Bengali by the way the letter ‘s’ is pronounced – Bangladeshis use the hard ‘s’ as in kiss; Indian Bengalis use the soft ‘s’ as in dish – is a piece of elocutionary trivia of which the local authorities remain blissfully ignorant. 

Having lived most of our lives in what was Calcutta, Bunny and I speak fluent if ungrammatical Bengali and occasionally converse with each other in that language to keep our lingual hand in, to mix metaphors. If some snoopy eavesdropper were to overhear us, would we be reported for immediate expulsion as illegal migrants? 

Indeed, we are migrants who as economic refugees left Calcutta, which after years of Marxist rule had become not just a backwater, but a stagnant pond, to seek gainful employment in National Capital Region, and had done it without seeking official sanction. 

Does that make us instantly deportable illegal migrants? If so, where should we be deported to? Bangladesh won’t have us. So would our only deportable destination be Mamata’s welcoming Republic of Bengal, ultimate refuge for the illegal Bengali? 

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