As the country celebrates the birth centenary of Abbasuddin Ahmed , I am reminded of my journey in search of my roots. It was a journey very similar to that undertaken by Alex Hailey in search of his roots, which ended with the discovery of Kunta Kinte, his ancestor. In this journey to Cooch Behar, one of the erstwhile princely states of India, Abbasuddin was my Kunta Kinte. He was the one who reigned like a king in the unassuming village of Balarampur, he was the one who left his small village for Cooch Behar and then Calcutta, he was the one who enthralled the elite audience with his unadulterated folk songs and founded the tradition of music in the Muslim homes with Nazrul Islam’s Islamic songs. For me, he was the pioneer and we have followed suit.
I can recall my grandmother Lutfunnessa Abbas, fondly called Aleya by her husband (the name is borrowed from the character in the Nawab Serajuddaulah play), describing to me the scenic beauty of Cooch Behar. She herself hailed from Domar of Rangpur district. She was only 12/13 years old when she was married to Abbasuddin and it was inevitable that she would have fond recollections of those parts where she spent the lion’s share of her life. She spoke of her in-laws’ house in the village Balarampur, where Abbasuddin’s father Moulvi Jafar Ali Ahmed lived. Right after their marriage at around 1931, Abbasuddin left for Calcutta while his young wife was left behind with the extended family. She was a hearty and playful adolescent, falling down from the olive trees, much to the chagrin of the elders in whose opinion she was not behaving like a mature adult and who were quick to rebuke her. She found a soulmate in her brother-in-law Abdul Karim, another extraordinarily talented poet and littérateur. Aleya was forever longing and pining for her husband and Abdul Karim had the wit and the pen to compose bhawaiya songs that eased the pangs of separation that Aleya was feeling. 
One of those songs is still a very famous one. 
O more kala re kala
Opare chokilam bari 
Opare chokilam bari
Kala roilam kala shari shari re
Kala, kalar bagichay ghirilo shonar mayare
My journey to Cooch Behar in February, 1999 was a journey to see for myself the place where this song was written. For many years, Cooch Behar was a restricted area in India, where visa was almost impossible for foreigners to get. From liberation to 1999, the aspiration to visit my native roots lay dormant for a variety of reasons. In my childhood dreams I have visited Cooch Behar many times, and I have seen our ancestral estate in Balarampur which my father describes as stretches of land that seem infinite till the land meets the horizon. All belonged to Abbasuddin’s father, yet I never had the opportunity to physically visit the area.
I have often been afraid of being disappointed with Cooch Behar, because from my childhood days I had built up wishful castles (sic) with daintily decorated palaces, Maharajas and Maharanis going around on their horses and palanquins, men and women sitting by the side of Torsha river and singing songs of separation and mysticism. Flowers growing in abundance, the cow-carts traversing long distances, the cart puller singing his bhawaiya with a broken voice, and Abbasuddin’s friends Panketu and Thertheru were all present in my imagination. I also wondered whether my grandmother and father had exaggerated the beauty of their native village. After all, any person is bound to be biased with regard to his place of origin. During this span of time, I myself had the opportunity to travel far and wide and another foreign travel to some new country had turned into a mundane affair for me. I was sure that I would be disappointed with Cooch Behar and actually tried to prevent myself from shattering my childhood dreams. Then came this offer to visit Cooch Behar where the road in front of my grandfather’s erstwhile house was going to be named ‘Abbasuddin Shoroni’ and my father was to inaugurate this occasion. Along with this there was the 10th Bhawaiya festival that was to be held in Cooch Behar just three days prior to the inauguration of the road. I had to avail myself of this opportunity, whether or not I met with disappointment. I had to visit the place in Balarampur where Aleya had wandered with her playmates, where my father was born. I had to see the verandah of the house in Cooch Behar where her three children had grown up and learned the songs from their father, where the famous Jenkins school (in which father and son had both studied) was situated. There was also the additional attraction of meeting cousins who had stayed back.
My aunt Ferdousi Rahman (affectionately called Moina) and I set out for Bagdogra airport from Calcutta. At Bagdogra an Indian ambassador car was waiting with some people to welcome us on behalf of the organisers of the Bhawaiya festival. I could immediately recognise familiar scenes from my grandfather’s songs as the car wended its way through the roads of North Bengal. We were put up in a rest house in Jalpaiguri whose hilly beauty matched the exact descriptions given by my father, who always called himself the `man from the hilly areas, the man from the foot of the Himalayas’. It was almost 8 p.m. at night when we reached the Torsha river which marks the entrance to Cooch Behar. The car mounted a wooden ferry and I was a little indignant at its crudity and fragility. But I noticed a glow of transformation in Moina who is usually more lily-livered than I. She told me, `This is where I belong, this is our Torsha river’. She chanted 
Torsha Nodir dhare dhare lo
Shokhi Lo Monshai Nodir Dhare
and I thought, ‘Wow, what has happened to my aunt who is even afraid to shop alone in Dhaka?!’ She had found a new spirit in herself at this time of the night in a wooden ferry that threatened to sink every minute.
What I had not realised was the strong pull of her origins which had transformed Ferdousi Rahman into that little girl in her frock when she came to the girls’ school with her elder cousins, when she sat in her father’s lap and sang delightful and melodious songs, when she staged a drama (along with her siblings and cousins) in the inner courtyards of their house in Palash Bari Road. She took me around to all these places, telling bits and pieces of stories from her childhood, taking videos for my other cousins, narrating each and every detail. I also saw the house that my grandmother had built all by herself (in Cooch Behar town) with the money saved from her husband’s meagre income as a singer. Abbasuddin’s father had disinherited him for becoming a singer and all those vast acres of land were of no use to the young woman Aleya who raised her 3 children in her banished abode in Cooch Behar.
The next three days of the Bhawaiya festival opened up new vistas for me. Every night unfolded with new revelations wrapped in layers of love and adoration. Almost the entire town of Cooch Behar was present in the Bhawaiya festival. I was a new attraction and as I sang into the microphone in front of an estimated audience of nearly 40,000, I myself underwent an incredible transformation. Just as the introduction proclaimed that I was the granddaughter of Abbasuddin, so did the flow of the love of the audience and the blending of these two evoke the best from me in terms of music. Fellow singers looked wonderingly at me as I went backstage after my performance.

‘Wow, we have never heard you singing like this,’ they said. Neither had I, because this was a rare occasion when the people of my grandfather’s birthplace were looking at me with a special expectation. It is then that I spotted the real beauty of this place — it was neither the shimmering water in the river, nor the overwhelming height of the hills that enthralled me. The culture-minded people contributed extensively to the beauty of Cooch Behar. It was amazing to see men, women and children flocking together, sitting and standing in this open air concert, waiting to hear one more song, clapping their hands to welcome me, for I was Abbasuddin’s direct descendant. How could I miss spotting this beauty for so many years? The cradle mountains of Australia, the tumultuous blue water in Cape Town, the confluence of the Mississipi and Lake Michigan in USA, faded away in pale colours next to the glee and adoration, encouragement and applause of these’ ‘Bahe’ people from Cooch Behar. I felt like their very own granddaughter! I felt at home — these are the origins, this is the root, I said to myself.
In the next few days, my parents and my two daughters, along with my younger sister and her family, joined us in Cooch Behar. We took part in the inauguration of the new road and now it was time to visit Balarampur village. This distance was traversed by car and I could picture my grandfather’s entire family making this journey from Balarampur to Cooch Behar and back in a bullock-cart. I remembered my grandmother’s story: when Abbasuddin heard a folk song from one of the indigenous singers he rushed off, leaving his family in the cart, only to return after 3 days!
The Balarampur village home was even more beautiful than I had imagined. My father took us to see the yard where the aforesaid song was written and to my utter delight he showed us even the Sadhur Dola (name of the grounds next to the house), which is mentioned in the song. He recited the song and every bit matched the description like a pair of gloves. It was as if the place had remained fixed in time! It was an amazing revelation to see for myself all these places that I have dreamed of and also have heard about for the last 40 something years. The stretches of green land, the beauty of the hilly village, the purity of the people’s mind and the language that they spoke — all seemed familiar. I felt that I had grown up with them. Distant cousins like Thertheru and Panketu were also present. They touched us to feel if we were real and we touched the good earth to see if it was too. It was unbelievable that the house and its surroundings had remained the same as in the song. I could visualise for myself the verdant trees like Bel, Champa, growing on all sides, the banana trees demarcating a village home from others, the betel nut palms towering over it all and offering misty shade. It was just like a playroom left intact for 40 years. The only thing that I missed was not seeing Abbasuddin himself, but of course he is with us in his songs that will last till the end of the human race.