From the Ganga to the Tay by Bashabi Fraser sampler

Preface
‘I am forever restless,
My depths holding the secret of my progress’
(translated from Rabindranath Tagore’s song, ‘Oh River’)
the story of this poem begins not beside the Ganga or the Tay,
but along another river, the Karnaphuli, which leaps from the hills
above Rangamati, a beautiful town in Chittagong district. The port of
Chittagong has grown on either side of Karnaphuli’s banks, just
before it flows into the Bay of Bengal. It is this river that was the
highway my paternal grandfather used to travel to and from his
ancestral village and Chittagong. In this riverine terrain, the arteries
of transport were rivers which form a network that connected a
fertile land where the British Empire ruled from, in Bengal, till
1911–12, after which the imperial capital moved to Delhi.
However, this story is not about Empire but about an association that
grew out of a colonial encounter. My great grandfather worked for a
Scots sahib who grew very fond of his bright eyed, gentle, studious
son, who was my grandfather, my Dadu, and supervised his studies.
By a stroke of ill luck, my great grandfather died when my
grandfather was about 12. It was then that the Scottish civil servant
took on the full responsibility of Dadu’s education and helped him to
find a job. When the Scotsman and his wife suggested Dadu come
with them when they were returning ‘home’, Dadu was touched, but
he could not leave his widowed mother and felt he had a lot of
responsibility still towards his siblings. But the link with Scotland was
made and I was to hear this story of the kindly Scotsman and his wife
from my Dadu later.
Decades later, when my parents were researchers at the London
School of Economics in the ’60s, they met Arthur Geddes, the
geographer son of the Scots architect and town planner, Patrick
Geddes. In London, they also met Julian Dakin the linguist and
historian, who became a life-long friend and travelled to work in
Kolkata (Calcutta) after my parents returned. When Julian left India,
he came to teach at Edinburgh University. He died in 1972 but the
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