Imagine the land border between India and Bangladesh. What do you think it is like? A fence that runs for miles? A craggy, clearly demarcated line like the one seen on maps?

To most of us, crossing the border requires much ceremony. Plans need to be made in advance.

Communities living along the border will tell you otherwise. To many of them, the border is an invisible line anyone can step over without a visa.

At the Chapainawabganj-Malda border, one finds Bangladeshi nationals tilling Indian land, and vice-versa. They cross over each day to work on these lands -- but perhaps "cross over" is too presumptuous a term. They simply walk over to these lands, the border of no consequence.

At the border of Namochakpara, a bone-thin septuagenarian named Habibur Rahman swung his hoe into the earth, cracking the surface. He is an Indian. Beside him worked two sharecroppers, Mamun and his brother, who are both Bangladeshis. The soil they till, is Indian land, belonging to a village called Milik Sultanpur. The border here runs diagonally through a strip of fields, separating Bangladesh and India.


"India starts from here," said Habibur, pointing to a small pyramid-shaped boundary marker nestled beneath a grove of banana trees. To reach his field one has to walk past it, into Indian territory.

"My house is in Milik Sultanpur. This land is my ancestral property. I got two sharecroppers from Namochakpara because the land is closer to Bangladesh than to my village in India," he said. While Mamun and his brother had been working with Habibur for only two years, he has always chosen Bangladeshi workers because they were just geographically closer.