On the evening of 12th June 1986, Tulsi arrived at Goalanda. He came along with his father Banha,his mother and his two elder sisters. He was just 12 years of age then, and hence, did not have the faintest idea as to where the entire family was moving to. He only knew that they were going to a faraway place and that it would take them a number of days to reach their destination. For four days and four nights they had been travelling by train and yet, the end was nowhere in sight.
In the four coaches of the train travelled about six hundred people; men, women and children. Tulsi failed to comprehend how so many of them could ever enter into only four coaches of the train and finally arrive at Goalanda. Getting off at Goalanda Station, he had a peculiar feeling, as though it was for the first time in four days that he could breathe again. About two hundred of them travelled with him in the same coach. Along the route at various small and big stations, the Sardars, with the indiscriminate use of their batons, yelling and abusing, pushed hundreds of people into the already jammed coaches. Once inside; sitting, standing, squatting, sprawling on the floor, standing with their backs against the walls, with babies and children clinging on to their shoulders, they travelled, shuddering at the thought of what further calamities and misfortunes lay ahead in store for them.
At the end of the very first day itself, the air inside the coach was filled with a vile stench which gradually became pungent and finally unbearable. The single toilet of the coach which even otherwise could hardly serve any meaningful purpose for so many people was not spared and was crammed with people. Their clothes were dirty enough, but now with the filth gathering constantly they became stiff like dried cowdung. Tulsi could take no more of the acrid smell, he felt squeamish and vomited. Since there was no way he could either move or reach any of the windows, he let it out all around him. And, almost immediately a spurt of curses and abuses were hurled at him followed instantly by two tight slaps across his face from his father Banha. Miraculously, as if because of the impact of the slaps, his vomiting stopped. As days passed, he became used to it.
It was late evening when about seven hundred people; men, women, young and old, babies and children got off the train at Goalanda Station. Here they would make their transit camp in the coolie depot. They had no idea how long they would have to stay here. It could be three days or a week or two, or even a month. It was the terminus of the railhead. From here they would resume their journey by steamer or ferry-boat whichever could be made available.
Goalanda is situated on one bank, and on the other, a little further ahead, stands Chandpur. In between flow the mighty rivers Padma and Meghna. In the month of June, during the monsoon, the rivers were in high spate and with the swirling waves and rising tides became like a vast limitless ocean. Big fishing boats crowded the bank and some of them were scattered in the shallow waters and on the wet damp broken land of Goalanda Station. Inside the depot, hundreds of people lay down listless, famished, tired and exhausted. As the surging and swelling waves of the river became calm and sober in the evening, even so, the people in the depot sat calm, quiet and still.
These people were brought to work as coolies in tea estates and the Depot was arranged for them to stay until a boat could be brought along to carry them by the river route. Then, would start another torturous journey, another trial, another slate of agony.
The teeming crowd was pushed inside the depot before sun set. Tulsi was shocked with dismay, as if he had completely lost his senses. In the gathering darkness he could see only a huge grotesque mass and no individual forms with different hands, feet and stomachs, no big bones no limbs. Yes, it was only a single mass, limbless, non-moving, perhaps petrified. Perhaps individuals with distinct identity belonged to another world, in his, none did exist.
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