My junior year of high school was spent in a hostel far from the land I called home. I walked into the common room, bright-eyed and nervous. A few classmates leaned over. "Do you need a passport to come to this part of India?" one asked. I was unsure if it was a joke. It was not.
Years later, traveling through small towns, I heard it again. People referred to me as "Chinese," sometimes curious, sometimes in a low whisper I did not fully understand.
Running after a bus that did not stop, I managed to catch the fare collector's attention. A passenger muttered, "People like you come here and spoil things for the rest." More recently, a retired officer from a reputed institution told me, "This is India," his tone more threat than pride.
These moments, among many others, stayed with me not because of their volume, but because they revealed something about distance within the same country, shaped as much by perception as by place.
I am Assamese, born where the Brahmaputra winds past river islands, paddy fields, and tea estates, through villages rooted in centuries of life. I grew up in markets where herbs and river fish mingled with dust. Our traditions are lived quietly, not explained in words.
Much of India rarely sees this world closely. Our languages, crafts, and rhythms of life are familiar to us, while elsewhere they are often met with surprise or misreading. Identity feels both fragile and resilient at the same time.
I have spent decades observing the tangible and intangible threads of Assam, and more recently putting them into words. Bamboo scaffolds shape homes and bridges. The namghar gathers community while spirituality and daily life merge. Tea estates carry daily rituals, and borgeets float above river islands. These details, carrying memory, culture, and endurance, shaped my writing about Assam.
Like everything else, the markets are still here, though their rhythms have shifted. Festivals return each year, though the patterns of participation are not always the same. In the last few decades, the rhythms of life here have shifted, shaped by currents invisible to most, and they continue to leave their quiet mark even today. The river continues its course, unchanged in appearance, while life along its banks moves differently than before. These changes do not arrive in a single moment. They accumulate in ordinary time, in how people speak, meet, and share public space.
Language carries memory. Assamese goes beyond being a medium of words; it is a vessel that holds emotion, connection, and history. Speaking it traces centuries of lineage and anchors me in a community that stretches beyond my lifetime.
These small acts become a kind of inheritance, offered to the wider world. Every word spoken, every meal shared, every festival quietly celebrated forms a bridge between identity and perception, between Assam and elsewhere in India. Belonging requires participation. It requires sustaining what matters and letting history record our presence with dignity.
When I began putting these details into words, it was not to define them, but to keep them in view. There is a difference between what is lived and what is remembered, and that distance is not always visible from within.
What is written has a way of remaining. It holds a place for what might otherwise pass without record, for what is practiced today and may, in time, be carried differently.
The hills and rivers endure. Bamboo still stands. Namghars still gather. Languages are still spoken. Festivals return with the seasons. For now, these remain part of everyday life. In time, some of it will live differently, in memory, in fragments, or in pages such as these.
And that, perhaps, is how it endures.