Mahmud Rahman
Bari Koi?—Where is Home?
Before I flew out of San Francisco—headed for Dhaka, Bangladesh—I ran into a friend who was excited to hear that I was “going home.” I asked her, “What should I bring back for you?”
“A piece of earth,” she said. I’d have to figure that out.
This was shaping up to be a weighty trip, and somewhere inside me tumbled the question, what would I bring back for myself? It was my first trip home since my father died four years earlier—I had not gone back then. And just a few weeks ago, I’d lost my sister.
“Going home”—where was home anymore?
I’ve lived in the United States my entire adult life, making temporary homes in multiple cities, but there remains something in my spirit that still considers Bangladesh as home. That’s where I had lived the first seventeen years of my life, in one spot of land, though the little tin and wood cottage would be replaced by a more solid brick and cement building just as I left my toddler years behind. When I made this trip at the end of 2001, that brick building still existed and was where I’d stayed, with my brother. I had grown up there with mother, father, siblings. My parents were dead, only my brother lived there with his wife, their adult children away.
I had planned this visit months earlier. By the time I was about to leave, my younger sister Jenny, suffering from cancer for three years, had just died. We buried her in Norman, Oklahoma, where she had gone for hospice care. I attended the funeral, mourning her in the company of most of my siblings, the ones who, like me, had settled as immigrants in the United States. When I boarded the plane, the grief was still raw inside me.
I was slightly anxious about returning to the family home on Mymensingh Road where she and I grew up as children, just over a year apart. But the city I arrived in, decades past those times, was a drastically different place. Everything between the two of us—playtime as children, difficulties between us as adults, the struggle to close the gap in the three years before she passed—all felt distant. I was astounded how a leap in geography could recede a painful event into history.
After I arrived, there wasn’t much time to spend in the house remembering our childhood days. When I first made plans to visit, Sani, my brother in Dhaka, had said he wanted to take me to visit our father’s village home. I’d never been there; he had been there once when he was five years old. Nearly half a century ago.
I welcomed the chance to be away from the family house. On this new journey, I would have no memories or ghosts shadowing me.
This trip to the village was more of an event than it seemed at first glance. When you grow up in this part of the world, a common question people ask when they meet you is Bari koi? Where is your home?
When I still lived here, I always answered, the city of Dhaka. This was where I was born, came of age. The city of my attachments, my loves, my trials, all my memories. Dhaka alone had shaped me.
That response was never acceptable. People expected you to reach further back. Who you were, where “home” could only be, was your father’s village. Your bones and cells somehow carried your father’s rural roots.
This was understandable in a mostly agrarian society where many city folk were first generation urbanites, with living roots in the village. As a child, when I became aware that my brother had visited the village, I too wanted to go there. It sounded romantic. Years later, I would realize our father never went back after that trip. Once both his parents were dead, he didn’t return. His younger brother still lived there with his family, and there were sisters close by—but he never seemed to feel close enough to want to visit. With his village roots so threadbare, how could that place have any meaning for me?
There was another reason why I refused to identify home as my father’s village: my mother’s roots lay elsewhere. Why didn’t her roots count? Unlike my father, she had been born and grown up as a fully urban child; so had her mother. Her father’s village roots were weak. Yet, during the 1971 war that liberated Bangladesh, when I and some of my extended family hid out in the villages for a short while, it was to her father’s ancestral village that we went. During the war, villages became temporary homes for many fleeing the Pakistani military crackdown in the cities. Rural ties could be lifesaving.
Despite my reservations about “bari koi,” I was excited when my brother offered to take me to our father’s village. I looked forward to a trip through the countryside and had some curiosity about the landscape in which my father was born. Would there be any new clues into who he was?
The day after I arrived, Sani thrust into my hand a notebook he’d mentioned last year. After our father died, Sani had discovered the notebook in his room. A few years before his death, my father had hired a young man to record entries about his life.
For most of my life I didn’t have much interest in his life. I only remembered him as an abusive father. Other than seeing him during my occasional visits home, I didn’t keep in contact with him. But in my middle age, I began to see traces of him in me. And that horrified me. As I became a writer, I grew curious about what had made him the man he was. I came to Dhaka in 1995 when he was ailing, and death was coming close.
I did get some stories, some clues, though not as much as I’d wanted. Would there be something new in this notebook? Would there be a glimmer of what was missing in the accounts he shared with me?
I opened the notebook; it was hardbound, the cover a floral pattern. I could see my father instructing the scribe to buy a sturdy notebook. Sani promised to give me a photocopy, so for now I only gave the book a quick scan. I was disappointed my father’s words were written down in “Shadhu Bangla,” a very formal form of the language. This was so far removed from how he spoke, I could not hear him at all.
Much of what was recorded here I recalled from our conversations. I was astounded by the detail. How did he possibly remember the street addresses where he’d lived during his time in Calcutta during the 1920s and 30s? Or the names of people who appear to have been mere acquaintances? The man dictating these details was in his nineties.
Even in death, he continued to disappoint. There was in the recounting of factual detail the same man I encountered in 1995. His stories related events, names, and dates, with only the barest trace of emotion. This had troubled me, and I had tried to probe, asking him about the reasons behind some of the choices he’d made. I hadn’t been able to elicit much.
Then, two entries made me sit up.
For a long time, I saw my father as cruelty personified. When our mother tried to stand up for herself, refusing submission, he often chased her through the house with his rifle. He reminded my mother’s other children, those she’d had with her deceased first husband, that they were not equal members of the household. I remember the beatings I got from him for nothing more than being an active, curious child. One time I saw him thrash a suspected thief. The man had wandered into our compound; I can’t remember what he was suspected of doing, but my father went at him with a long bamboo pole and swung it at him, hitting him on his back and legs. Tears streamed down the man’s face, and he begged for mercy until my father finally stopped.
After my father died, I reflected on the full arc of his life with us and conceded that cruelty was not the sum total of who he had been. Still, I always wondered what in his life reinforced this streak of harshness. I suspected it had to do with his work in the Calcutta Police where he had been a Sub Inspector between 1928 and 1942. Here was confirmation in black and white.
Chronicling his police life, he wrote that he was transferred to the Boro Bazar precinct right before the outbreak of a round of the non-cooperation movement with British colonial rule. Young women had launched a campaign to stop the sale of British textiles, and “boys” had also jumped into the struggle. The demonstrators set fire to British cloth.
“We would block them, and after arresting them, the girls were sent to Lal Bazar. They were kept in the Lal Bazar central lockup . . . We didn’t arrest the boys. We beat them with a cane and sent them scurrying off. Some we detained until dusk. The girls were also let go from the lockup after dusk.”
He was one of those doing the caning. “Caning could only be done by Sub Inspectors, not Assistant Sub Inspectors or other staff.” He was zealous about this task. “One time a man present at the station objected to the beatings, and I gave him a beating too. The next day he filed a case with the Additional Chief Magistrate’s Court.” After a hearing, the case was dismissed.
He didn’t express any opinion about the freedom movement. He simply related what he did. But the episode was clearly important to him. This account of beating the protesters was one of the few anecdotes repeated a second time, and there was one line making it crystal clear that he appreciated being recognized for this service to the British. He noted that before the case against him was dismissed, his superior, Deputy Commissioner L.D. Gordon, made it known to everyone that “even if Lutfur Rahman is found guilty, he will be kept on in his job.”
When I had spoken to my father, I asked what he did in his police job. He just said, “Paperwork.” Was he ashamed to tell me details? Perhaps. It is easier to be direct with a stranger. He eventually left the police in 1942. I had inquired why. He simply replied, “It didn’t feel good anymore.” I did get a hint of scandal. One of his colleagues had questioned how he could afford the lifestyle he had, given his meager salary. My father owned a motorcycle and a car, bought used, and even built a motorboat. His rejoinder was that as a person without children, he had more disposable income.
Perhaps. The journal didn’t offer anything new. I remember 1942 for another reason. It was the year Gandhi and the Indian National Congress launched the Quit India movement, and thousands of freedom fighters were thrown in jail. My father would have known of the crackdown, but if he participated in it, there was no mention of it. He said that he took leave around that time and kept extending it. Could it be that he was tired of putting down his own people?
That is probably wishful thinking. Both Sani and I became rebels against the Pakistani state, though we managed to avoid any beatings from the policemen who would be in the shoes our father had once worn. It would be comforting to find something noble—or at least not distasteful—in our father’s history. But I’ve long known that family was not where our political leanings were nurtured. As the movement grew against the ruling power in Pakistan, there wasn’t much political discussion around the home. I don’t recall our father saying anything about the politics then, though he probably sympathized with the opposition since the daily newspaper that came into the house was the non-government English daily that leaned towards the opposition. Still, Sani and I were radicalized outside the home, in school, and in the streets. I was comforted that no matter what else I may have absorbed from our father, it was not some legacy of collaboration with oppressive power.
That evening at dinner, Sani was surprised to hear what I found in the journal. It didn’t seem he had read the full account. This discovery would hang over me like a shadow as we headed for the village. Would I find anything there to destabilize my new understanding about our father?
All I knew were its postal coordinates: Village: Keshranga; Sub Division: Chandpur; District: Comilla. With administrative changes since the 1980s, the village was now at: Sub District: Shahrasti; District: Chandpur. The name of the village means Red Hair. I’d always wondered how that came to be.
Mid-afternoon we piled into a maroon-colored Toyota Starlet. Ronju, who worked for Sani, took the wheel. I was excited to get on the road. This was the first time in thirty years that I journeyed outside Dhaka.
Sani and I had taken the same road when we fled to India during the war.
We had taken buses and auto-rickshaws up to Chandina, followed by a rickshaw ride to the Sylhet-Comilla road, then walked the rest of the way to cross over to Tripura state in India.
As we left the city, the scenery became vaguely familiar, but I could not latch onto a single landmark. The road was raised above low-lying agricultural fields. This was the major roadway to the southeast of Bangladesh, an undivided two-lane road lined by trees on both sides. The road was shared mostly by buses, trucks, and cars, but traffic would thicken with auto-rickshaws and pedal rickshaws in the small towns we passed every few kilometers.
It was winter and we drove past mustard fields, splashes of yellow flowers exploding out of the green countryside. That view threw me back thirty years, again the year of the war, but a different journey: my first “return home,” after the war had just ended. I had come home with friends on a small pickup along a different route, and when we saw the mustard fields I burst into tears at that vision of beauty amidst the just concluded horror. Until then, I had not known when I’d be returning from exile. This time my eyes were dry, and they drank in the rest of the landscape: new factories, more brick buildings in the small towns, and yes, more people. The population had doubled.
We passed convoys of military trucks and jeeps, and Sani said the army was holding winter exercises. The vehicles were new, the symbols unfamiliar. But I didn’t feel fear as I had once done when sighting such vehicles—this was not the occupation army we were escaping from.
As the sun went down, we drove through Chandina. Sani was paying close attention, and at one point, he said, “There, that’s the side road we’d taken in 1971.” He remembered it had been adjacent to a high school building and he recognized the school. For me, nothing was familiar. I settled back into my seat, weighing the cost of too many decades out of the country. Sani had remained behind, and his memories were deeply rooted here. For the same reason, he was more observant with what he noticed here with his eyes.
It was dark when we entered Comilla, a major district town. We would spend the night near the center of town, in a house that belonged to the descendants of a French adventurer from the mid-19th century. Sani knew the family. We were welcomed into the living room, still bright with a Christmas tree, ornaments, lights, and streamers. A disco ball hung from the ceiling.
We drank whiskey and vodka, we tried to ward off the mosquitoes buzzing around us, and through our conversations, with the help of century old directories and passports, I learned more about the family. Back in the early 19th century, a Frenchman came to southern Bengal by way of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. He acquired a large landed estate in and around Comilla. During British rule, a variety of other European fortune-seekers, missionaries, and wanderers came to Bengal. They included Greeks, Armenians, and evidently, some French as well. Many left and returned to Europe; some dissolved into the local population.
After dinner—they had prepared shorputi fish, cooked two ways, chicken korma, cauliflower bhaji, mutton, and rice—we went to bed. When they led us to the guest room, I was astounded by the bed, bigger than any I’d ever seen. A four-poster bed made of Burmese teak, varnished black. The mother of the household proudly informed us the bed had once belonged to “Lord Clive.” I didn’t quite know how to take this. I was already disturbed having learned of the details of how my father had helped uphold British rule. Now we were going to sleep in a bed that had belonged to the first colonial overlord of Bengal, Robert Clive of the East India Company. The skeptic in me wondered how many other families might claim to own beds that belonged to Clive. There could be quite a market for such beds among those attached to colonial nostalgia.
After breakfast, we set off for Keshranga. We’d been told to look for a relative who’d be a guide once we arrived at the high school in Waruk Bazar. I read the signs on stores and businesses in each town we drove through. It didn’t take long to reach. A street vendor pointed the way to the school, and as soon as we entered the compound, Sani recognized Shofik, our cousin who’d be our guide.
We all piled into the car and drove back in the direction we had come from. At the next town, we veered off the main road. For about four or five kilometers, we crossed a number of small towns. The biggest was Shahrasti, the Sub District headquarters. Shofik enlightened us with snippets about the places we were driving through. Shahrasti had been settled by Rasti Shah, a Muslim preacher who came here centuries ago. His tomb became a shrine visited by pilgrims who came from near and far. We passed through Mehar Kalibari and Thakur Bazar, which seemed to be largely Hindu settlements. I noticed groups of Hindu women walking by, recognizing which community they belonged to from the vermillion in the part of their hair, a sign carried by married Hindu women.
Crossing the Dakatia River, we took an unpaved road that finally led us to Keshranga. On foot, Shofik led us to the compound where our grandparents lived. We stood in front of a brick house where the plaster had fallen away from the bottom half of the walls, the brickwork gaping out. The windows were partly shuttered, the front door missing. A sign at the top of the doorway had words in Bengali that were partially eroded. I could see the house name, “Rehan Manzil,” and the year in which it was built, “1934.” The story went that our father, after working in Calcutta for some years, had sent money to help build this house.
The house lay abandoned; no one had lived here for at least a decade. My father’s younger brother lived here, but he and his wife were long dead, and the two sons moved away. We walked inside. The structure was still intact, and we saw wooden benches in one of the three rooms. Shofik said the local government held some meetings there. On the right side of the house, we found a cement staircase to the roof. We walked up the steps. The roof was encircled by a waist-high railing giving us a good view of the surroundings.
We took some photos and walked back downstairs. Sani said he remembered the house as well as the outhouse he had to use when he came here. We had one more stop. When our father died, he told Sani to make sure his parents’ graves were cared for. Shofik now led us there. We walked past the ruins of a small Hindu Shiva temple, a mere hundred meters from the house. A piece of the brick wall remained upright. Sani remembered the temple too; he said there had been “jungle” around it. The Shiva lingam was gone, but a piece of black stone, where offerings were made, was still partly buried in the earth.
Our father’s journal mentioned that his grandfather’s surname had been Pal. Even his father kept that surname for part of his life. He’d started off as Rehanuddin Ahmed Pal, then dropped the Pal and added Sherestadar, based on his occupation title as a clerk of the court. Pal is a Hindu surname. My father’s grandmother’s name had been Modhumala.
We walked past a mosque. Small boys assembled there for Friday prayers. Shofik led us to the back. Here was a small graveyard bordered by a bamboo fence. Our grandparents and some other relatives were buried here. Dried coconut fronds draped the surface of the graves. Following a custom followed by many Muslims, there were no markers, no specific grave belonged to a single individual. Many had been buried over others in this graveyard.
I had wanted to see this village to get a picture of the kind of place our father was born. It probably didn’t look much different then, though it would have been more wooded back then. Over the years people had cut down many trees for fuel.
From his journal, I learned that he hadn’t really spent a lot of his childhood in this village. He started primary school here but there were no higher schools close by. He went elsewhere, attending schools in three different places, staying with relatives. I imagined that time away, in less remote places, convinced him that he would not return here. When he was eighteen, his father wanted him to end his studies, get married, and follow in his footsteps as a clerk in the courthouse. He rebelled by stealing some money from the family and running away. He headed for the two biggest cities in the region, Rangoon and Calcutta. After he came back, he came to terms with the family. He ended up in Calcutta to attend college and after finishing, started working in the police there.
With our visit to Keshranga coming to an end, what was I taking back from this journey to a bari, a home that had never been mine?
What stood out about this locality was the nearness of temple and mosque, the physical closeness of Hindus and Muslims. I didn’t know if people from the two communities lived that close now. We had just passed through towns with a distinct presence of Hindus.
I recalled that over a century earlier, my grandfather still carried a Hindu surname. I would not be able to decipher the story of conversion by his father, but one thing I could tell was that when our father was a child here, he lived close to people of both communities. Relations between Hindus and Muslims in this land have not always been friendly. We had driven by the Dakatia River to get to this village. I didn’t know it then but some years later, I would read in a magazine that the Dakatia River had been the escape route for many Hindus fleeing massacre during the Noakhali pogroms of 1946, the violence that had brought Gandhi here to calm tensions on the eve of the end of British rule.
I remembered and took comfort that in our home, no matter what other prejudices existed in our father and mother, I could not recall a single incident of anti-Hindu resentment or bigotry, common enough among the Bengali Muslim middle class of the 1950s. The slur malaun I never heard from our parents’ lips. Communal bigotry was not a legacy I had to confront.
What did I make of the house Rehan Manzil? The only story I had was that our father helped build it for his parents and siblings. No other details. Who came up with the design, how did the bricks and iron beams come here, how many people worked on it, how long did it take? Had he come to see it as it was being built? Was it built all at once, or in sections? His journal, detailed though it was about other aspects of life, said nothing about this house.
All I was left with was the transactional element: for his job serving the colonial police he was able to save some earnings to improve his family’s home in the village. This story—a migrant sending savings home to build a brick structure in the village—was a story that has been repeated over and over again. The rural landscape of Bangladesh has been transformed by remittance money from migrants laboring in far flung places. My father did what migrant sons often do.
I was certain that he had not had this home constructed with the intention of ever living here. He had comfortably made the city his home, and when he moved back to East Bengal in the early 1940s, he settled in Dhaka, the city which would become the capital of East Pakistan and later Bangladesh.
My memory returned to my last visit to Dhaka when he was still alive, just six years earlier. As I was about to depart, he said, “Why don’t you come home? I won’t be alive the next time you come to visit.”
I had replied, “You say that every time—and I see you again the next time I come.” But I knew that given his health, I doubted I would ever see him again.
I felt the need to add some additional words, even though I knew they might hurt. “It’s not possible. I’ve made a home in the United States. It was the same with you. You left your village and never returned either.”
I caught the slightest nod of agreement—touché, you’ve got me there.
As we left Keshranga, our cousin insisted we stop for lunch with his family in Waruk Bazar. His mother, our father’s youngest sister, was eager to meet us. When we arrived at their door, she greeted us with affection and generosity. They had prepared a sumptuous meal—rice polao, chicken, tomato cucumber salad. We learned a bit about their lives—they told us about their difficulties with getting drinking water since the nearby tubewells were drawing arsenic-tainted water—and we met a whole constellation of cousins and their children.
My aunt was eighty years old and spoke in a dialect I couldn’t fully make out. But she made a point of gifting us with a list of the names of all our father’s siblings. In total, two brothers and eight sisters. There had been an older brother who died as a child. I remember meeting the younger brother and a few of the sisters. Now she was the only survivor.
I had learned at some point that our father had not visited this sister in forty years. That had stunned me. She would have been the baby of the family, and back in the 1930s he must have met her on his visits home.
In my wanderings I’ve met different kinds of migrants. Those who pine for their distant homelands and left-behind family. Those with mixed and complex feelings. Others who say, I’m glad I got the fuck away. And I know that this range of emotions has little to do with big notions of patriotism and love of homeland but sometimes just a mix of how people remember how they were treated, how they felt growing up in certain places, whether they were satisfied with their immediate worlds or they pined for something way different.
I could place my father in that spectrum of emotions. And I also knew that I myself had sometimes occupied some of the same spots as he within that rainbow.
During the last hours of the drive back to Dhaka, my insides were tumbling over. Eating those ras malai sweets at a stop we made in Comilla had not been a good idea at all. I managed to hold it in until we reached home, and then the bathroom became my refuge. I tried to resolve the distress with oral saline, the usual treatment here, but it was not enough. The doctor I remembered from my teenage years, still practicing nearby, came to visit and told me, this is the price you pay for migration: your body no longer has immunity to local bugs. After the lecture, he prescribed antibiotics.
I recovered in the room where I was staying—what used to be our mother’s bedroom. And though I didn’t know it then, this visit would be the last one to this house. My brother had made plans with a developer to tear down this house and the surrounding structures and replace them with a high-rise commercial and residential building, similar to many that had sprung up in this neighborhood.
My father had settled here in the early 1940s as he was quitting his police job in Calcutta. He first built a tin-roofed wooden cottage, and he replaced that with a brick house, built out in stages. This was the house of most of my childhood memories, where I was lying in sick now.
In my bed, I had time to closely examine the room. It was undoubtedly a dying house. The walls were eroding from salinity and the plaster from the ceiling had dropped in patches. My brother, his wife, their children or others who sometimes lived here like a niece of hers right now, were just marking time.
The next time I “return home” to Dhaka, I would stay with them in an apartment elsewhere, the new construction in this spot would be “in development.” I would no longer have even the ruins of a house to visit, like the one in Keshranga. City property is too valuable to let lie dormant. Nothing on this corner of Mymensingh Road would be recognizable anymore. Whatever remained of the fam- ily homestead would only exist in sepia tones, in old photos or in our memories. Somewhat connected to the notion of “bari” being in the village is the concept of bhita, a spot of physical landscape one could always yearn for as home. This wasn’t just true of Bangladesh; all over the globe there is sometimes the idea of a family having a solid home place, where one might be able to “return” to. But home as something durable is a matter of great privilege, something not given to the vast majority of humankind. In this delta territory, even those with some degree of privilege have seen their homes taken away by shifting rivers. I have visited distant relatives who have taken me to a riverbank and pointed to the middle of the water, there, that’s where our home used to be.
For most people, life was like what I’d had over the years: shelter in a series of homes. In my case, many rented flats and houses, in many different cities. Some to myself alone. Some with family. Some with roommates. The homes of the past, of childhood, only live on in our memories.
On this visit home at the end of 2001, I had come to gain distance from fresh grief—which I did—but I was thrust face to face with my father’s legacies. Illness provided a distraction from both.
I recovered from my stomach bug, and thankfully I still found some time to meet old friends, make new ones, and even begin to consider the possibility of coming here to stay a while. I had begun to toy with the idea of taking some years off from employed work to spend on my writing.
Three years later I’d make a scouting trip. And the year after, I would dismantle my apartment in Oakland, put my books in storage, and return to Dhaka for a stay of nearly three years. I came to write and translate. I rented a flat in a different part of the city, my brother and his family provided gracious support, and I made new connections and friends. I immersed myself in the thickness of life here. The Dhaka from the past remained inside me, but the Dhaka as a home I would take into the rest of my life would be the city I fell in love with during those years.
Today, fifteen more years have passed since that extended stay. My brother Sani’s also dead. I haven’t been home in ten years, a gap that feels way too long. A trip is long overdue. The next time I go, I may well come across a Bangladeshi who might ask me, bari koi? How will I answer?
I have no single hometown. Bari will include Dhaka—and a necklace of other places. My concept of home will forever remain one based on love in motion. I left Dhaka at seventeen, first as a refugee, later as an emigrant. Partly by choice, partly by circumstance, partly by what I pine for, I have made a wandering life.
I sometimes wonder why. Was it that initial uprooting into exile or had I been restless even before? And once uprooted, why was it easier to keep moving, beyond initial destinations decided by circumstance? Moving later in life, in my forties, fifties, sixties was harder, requiring more planning and resources, and yet I’ve kept repeating that movement. What is this restlessness that persists, even though I do choose to settle in places for relatively long pauses.
I have visited friends who’ve been settled, sometimes in their original hometowns, and I have even envied them the results of their rootedness, their closer-knit communities, but I don’t seem inclined to make the same choice.
I have lived in more than two dozen apartments and houses, and I can remember the contours of most of them. But more than structure or furnishings, I remember more the people who lived there or passed through. If I happen to revisit some of these places again—as I sometimes do—I have certain places I see as pilgrimage. They are not the addresses where I once lived. They are more likely to be a park, a library, a bookstore, a city neighborhood, or a nearby body of water, a lake, a pond, a stream, a river, or the ocean.
A year ago, I just moved again, this time with a partner and stepchild, my family over the last decade. We’re making a new home in an entirely new city. When I wrote lovingly about Philadelphia to an old friend, she said, it sounds like you’ve found home. This could be the last stop—for now I’m happy to add this link to the necklace.
By the time I wrapped up my return to San Francisco in January 2002, I remembered what my friend had asked for. I’d had several opportunities to bag up some soil from the places I visited. But I was never sentimental enough to scoop up some dirt into a bag. I took a final wander through the city musing on what I should take for my friend. At a souvenir shop I found a pair of earrings made of baked clay. Shaped into small birds. And that was the “piece of earth” I brought back for her.
Earth from my original homeland, shaped into the form of a wandering creature.