India is building a fence along its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh. Jyoti Thottam in Time:
Photo: Prashant Panjiar
The village of Panidhar is a cluster of 18 mud, brick and bamboo houses in a poor, wet corner of eastern India. Its problems will sound familiar to anyone who has traveled through the country’s thick rural darkness. Panidhar’s 195 residents live on rice and fish from the surrounding paddy fields and ponds; lucky children get vegetables and lentils, too, but few go to school. The brick factory across the Ichamati River sends boats to fetch a few of the young men; the rest have left for cities many miles away.
An accident of geography turns these ordinary lives into one of India’s most surreal dramas. The border between India and Bangladesh, drawn in haste just before India’s independence in 1947, snakes through Panidhar. It runs right in front of the modest, thatched-roof home of Fazlur Rehman, 50, the village’s unofficial headman. His younger brother lives next door – in another country. “His child, my child are the same,” Rehman says. But in Panidhar, the children violate international law every time they run around the small patch of mango and betel-nut trees. A few hundred meters away, Indian and Bangladeshi border guards patrol on each side.
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