As a first-generation American, I’ve always carried with me an intense fascination for my past. This is the story of my most notorious ancestor, and my unease at the rest who have been forgotten.

During mealtimes as a child, along with the handfuls of rice she would put into my mouth, my mother would spoon-feed me her family’s history, all of which could be traced back to one man.

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Monir’s ship steered off course in the midst of a cyclone. He was one of few survivors, with the number of people onboard and alive dwindling as time passed. By God’s grace, the ship docked at the Sandwip Ship Ghat.

He sailed the Meghna River into the Bay of Bengal, though from where we do not know. Perhaps from Assam, or Paschimbanga, with the original body being either the Brahmaputra or the Ganga. But, there’s also reason to believe that he could’ve been from Odisha or Bihar, or Kashmir and Punjab. (Why is there reason to believe such? …Because we must trust the words we’ve circulated for so long. If we do not give weight to our own theories, no matter how distant from the realm of reality they may be, then who will? It simply would not do to disrespect our elders and say No, that doesn’t seem quite right.)

Monir was tall, fair-skinned, and had hazel eyes. This is how we know he was not what people would now consider Bangladeshi. Additionally, his tongue was unlike ours—even amongst ethnic Bengalis, the linguistic quirks of dialects make them nearly mutually intelligible—for it was more elegant, more kind. His voice carried such rich smoothness that he made even the Sandwipya dialect he would come to speak sound kind, when it otherwise sounds brutal. 

His differences, his superiority, made him a man worthy of veneration. Even when he eventually fell from otherworldly heights to the levels of commoners due to years of association and thus familiarization. He became a man of the island, but in the small community of Harispur, Sandwip, where he had stuck his claim and built a house for himself, his wife, and their eventual children, he was still seen as more.

In taking a native bride, Monir created a new line; one with ties to both the world at large and its spirit of adventure, and a small island of fishermen, shipworkers, and farmers in the Bay of Bengal.

For over a century, his descendants stayed on the island, a token of their gratitude to him and all he did. But they still weaved together fictions of his heroic journey across treacherous waters, as though he was the family Odysseus. 

For over a century they stayed. But they’ve clearly since left.

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With time, once-familiar lands can become not just foreign, but foreigners. The opposite is also true, a cyclical pattern of migration where identities are transformed by location and locations are transformed by identity. As generations pass, roots are continuously pulled out of the ground and replanted elsewhere. When we leave, we leave behind families and memories and names. We leave behind entire histories, though we desperately try to take as much of them with us as we can hold in our small pockets and limited luggage.

We leave behind burial grounds, if there were ever any at all. Too many of us were haphazardly put into the soil, with no accompanying gravemarkers to identify us by.

There is a pond in front of our ancestral home of seven generations, one removed from my own. It is where we would get our drinking water, where our children would swim and play, where we would fish, where we would garden. This pond defines our family identity just as much as the four mud buildings with tin roofs on our complex—as in, still, even decades after we’ve all scattered.

Monur’go Bari. That’s what they call us, our family. That house in Harishpur, with the pond? With the dirt road and the tiny creek? That’s Monu’s house.

We’re Monu for Monir, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather. The man who came from everywhere and nowhere in the early 19th century, who married an island girl descended from Arakanese pirates and, in settling down with her, created a local dynasty.

On the other side of the pond is a makeshift cemetery, the resting place of generations of women in my family, including Monir’s wife.

When we leave home, we leave an imprint elsewhere. We forget those who have stayed, who were there in the first place, almost as though we never knew them at all. 

We remember the name of a man no one alive remembers, but we forget those who have nurtured our heritage. We forget the person to whom we owe it all—Monir couldn’t have created our family without the culture—her culture—he adopted and made his own.

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“What about his wife?” I asked my mother the day she revealed to me the name of our myth of an ancestor.

“What about her?”

“What was her name?”

“Oh, that does not matter. She was only his wife.”

“And the woman who created our family. The one who birthed us. Is she not important?”

Process

This personal essay started with a free-write about family that then took off in multiple directions about loss, migration, culture, and feminism. I kept doing free-writes that built off one another before deciding what I wanted to write, not what I wanted to say with my writing. And I wanted to write about my ancestors, the people I come from whom I haven’t had the pleasure of knowing personally, who exist only through oral tradition.

Ultimately, my mentor helped me with structural issues and it ended up being a piece on whose stories are told, and whose get overwritten. Who matters? The people who leave, who take with them stories to tell. They create the canon of their families, not those who are left behind.