ABSTRACT
Death is the final journey, one that all people will eventually make. For first generation British Sylhetis, many of whom have spent a lifetime moving between places, endlessly evaluating their past, their present and their futures in terms of a shifting and fantasized ‘other’ land, it often marks the last physical movement of their bodies. Dying and death cast the problem of desh-bidesh into different perspective: ambivalence seems to fall away; desk becomes the place where one truly belongs, the locus of spirituality and the self. These perspectives are invariably gendered. For the majority of widows, their sense of being split between places is made even more acute when their husbands are buried back in Sylhet. In contrast, for men who are dying, or planning to be buried in desh, issue is, perhaps, finally resolved. Many widows described their husbands’ deaths to the author in extraordinary detail, reliving and reconstructing the trauma and pain of the event through their narratives.
