Those Rohingyas who had come to listen to Badu, accompanied Karim to the field. The next morning, Rahim’s recitation of the sacred scripture was interrupted by a clamor outside his hut. He told Karim to find out what was going on. At the western part of their village, next to the path which went to the Aung Syke bazaar, a number of destitute Rohingya families had erected temporary hovels made of polythene. They were passing their days, barely protecting themselves from the elements, roughly half a mile from Rahim’s residence. The land where the Rohingyas built their shacks was the property of three Rohingya families. Every villager knew this. Hence, the families which had taken shelter over there thought there wouldn’t be any kind of trouble. But that morning, twenty to thirty Bamar youths told those families to dismantle their shacks and leave the area. The Bamar youths claimed, the neighboring Buddhist villagers had complained to them. According to them the destitute Rohingya families were causing pollution in the area. The Buddhist youths reacted violently when the Rohingya families refused to scrap their shacks. A scuffle broke out between the two groups as the youths demolished with sticks, a number of shacks. Consequently, the Rohingya families got together to resist the Buddhist youths. At this point, the youths had been surrounded, and out of desperation, they began issuing threats that they would bring in the Tatmadaw. Though Tatmadaw didn’t show up, but from a nearby police station, ten policemen arrived at the scene. As the policemen tried to relieve the besieged youths, it only aggravated the already tense situation. The policemen were not interested to find out why the Buddhist youths had been besieged by the angry Rohingyas. They kept asking why the Rohingya families refused to listen to the demands of the Buddhist youths. Karim appeared at the scene during a heated argument between the Rohingyas and the policemen. Karim said to the policeman who was in charge, “These Rohingya families haven’t erected their hovels on government land. They have erected their shacks with permission from the land owners. Why did these Buddhist youths tell the Rohingya families to dismantle their shacks? Is it any of their business?”
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This policeman had the appearance of a Japanese sumo wrestler. He raised his chubby hand and with a high-pitched tone said to Karim, “Our government does not accept that you have any right over this land. You have to do as the locals over here tell you to do. If you make too much noise you just might see the repetition of what happened in the northern village.”
Karim simply couldn’t think of what to say to these tyrants. An old man standing behind Karim bitterly asked, “You people are destroying our homes, where will we find shelter?”
“You’ll have to return where you came from?”
Karim suppressed his outrage as he said, “We are in our own land, it is you who are the trespassers. If the government does not recognize us as citizens, it has no right to tell us where to go, what to eat or what to do.”
One of the Buddhist youths reacted sharply to this statement. Furiously he said to the police officer, “Arrest this terrorist. Being an intruder, how dare he defy the government’s jurisdiction over this land!” Upon saying this he attempted to move towards Karim with a raised fist, but the police officer stopped him, and said, “Enough, go home now. Let me handle this.”
After the Buddhist youths had reluctantly left the spot, the police officer said to the Rohingya villagers, “You have been given a week to vacate this place. I won’t take it nicely, if I find these shacks after a week.” Having said what he had to say, the obese police officer left behind hundreds of helpless Rohingyas, wondering what future had in store for them. Pointing his finger at the sky above his head, the old man sitting along the unpaved road cried out, “O Lord! Do You not see what they’ve been doing to us? Where are You? Where are your servants who’ll stand up for us?”
Far away, from the horizon, the heavy noise of thunder rattled everyone’s eardrums and alerted the helpless mass about an impending storm. A few seconds later, a gust of cool wind conveyed to them that it had been raining somewhere. Scattered rain drops couldn’t make any impression upon the homeless Rohingyas. Out of anger, frustration and a deep sense of humiliation, tears swelled out of Karim’s eyes. At ginger pace, he was heading somewhere, but he was not sure where. The homes where his ancestors had lived for centuries, they could no longer call them their homes. They were outsiders.