When she saw me walking into her home in Assam’s Barpeta district, Amina Begum attempted valiantly to get up from the bed.
Her body shook as the 68-year-old tried – and failed – to raise herself.
When I had visited Begum in June last year, she was not this infirm. She was walking, her eyes alert, her memory vivid.
But a year later, she is a shadow of that self. She cannot walk without support, or sit up straight. She is mostly confined to her bed. Her face is vacant, but it is her sorrowful eyes that speak of hopelessness and fear.
“Everything has changed in one year,” her husband, Ajmal Khan said. Both their names have been changed to protect their identity.
Exactly a year ago, Begum was secretly “pushed back” into Bangladesh by Indian authorities at gun point in the dead of the night amid a renewed crackdown on undocumented migrants. At least 300 Assam residents have been expelled from Indian territory in this fashion.
After a month, Begum managed to cross the border with the help of residents of the borderlands of India and Bangladesh and came back home to her village.
Since her return, Khan said, Begum has been wasting away. She falters while recalling incidents from her past, and loses the train of her thought while speaking. She has withdrawn from regular life and does not speak much, her daughter-in-law told me.
“But she remembers how she was dumped across the barbed wire, the days at the detention centre,” Khan said. “She is afraid that the police will pick her up and throw her in Bangladesh again.”
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.