nd it is here that we found a mentally disabled man, straddling the border. He spends his days sitting under the shade of Indian trees, and then crosses over to Bismillah hotel in Bangladesh for scraps of food. He neither tells anyone his name, nor whether he is Bangladeshi or Indian. All that anybody can say about him is that one day two years ago, he turned up here.

The resemblance to the protagonist of Sadaat Hossain Manto's famous short story Toba Tek Singh is uncanny. The story, set in the Partition-era, revolves around the exchange of inmates of India and Pakistan's insane asylums. The Hindu and Sikh inmates were being sent to India, and the Muslims to Pakistan. The story follows one Sikh inmate who cared only about whether his homeland, a village called Toba Tek Singh, was in India or in Pakistan. In defiance, he fell dead on no-man's-land, and the story ends thus: "There, behind barbed wire, was Hindustan. Here, behind the same kind of barbed wire, was Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh."

And just like that, this man, with no name, no citizenship and possibly no cognisance of concepts like nation-states, lives right on the Bangladesh-India border. All he understands -- and needs to understand -- is that Bangladesh gives him food, and India gives him shelter. So, he survives.