#bidesh vs bilat

My family were always very adamant about getting the best education possible. It was a conviction that went for generations, not just limited to Shafiqs or even jadukara: it permeated across Bengal, crossing through the Subcontinent, spreading through most of Asia. Education was the key to everything - livelihood, freedom, power, success. And for my family, only the best would do.

They did wish they could send me to the Cadet College where they met, but after the Liberation War there were just not enough resources left to bring it back to even just pure functionality, let alone its former glory. My parents left Bidesh, left Bangladesh, to find better futures - especially for me, their only child.

So I am well aware that I sound like a petulant, ungrateful child when I say that being in Hogwarts was very rough and difficult for me.

I arrived in Hogwarts a year or two after the Second Wizarding War, where Lord Voldemort was defeated in the Great Hall, causing the school to take a short hiatus to rebuild. I was both a little too young, and a little too transient, to really know much about the Bilati war. My parents had moved to England not too long before I was born and had mostly kept to Muggle society, since you were more likely to find other Bengalis there - even a few jadukara. They left to avoid the worst of the war - trying to get involved in another one would be folly.

When I arrived at Hogwarts - via an acceptance letter that my parents were both highly surprised and very elated to receive, since they were well aware of Hogwarts’ prestige but didn’t think immigrants were eligible - a lot of students had bonded over their shared experience of the war. Many had lost family or friends to it; a few had been in the frontline. I thought I might have something to contribute too - my family just went through a war themselves, my entire culture was at risk, I too am a war survivor. (Sort of. Maybe.)

But that didn’t seem like enough. Their war was sequestered away from the Muggle world; if you weren’t a wizard, you wouldn’t understand. My war made no magical distinction, but upheld a rich cultural heritage that underpinned our magical ability - a heritage alien to their world.

I didn’t quite know what to make of the Hogwarts letter. My family had talked about it, had talked to me about jadu and some of their experiences, but they mostly wanted me to adjust to regular British life. Sometimes I heard them grumble about how they weren’t as free to practice jadu as much as they wanted to because of the Statute, how they figured that their knowledge was probably banned in Bilat anyway (they did ban flying carpets, after all), how if there was no Operation Searchlight, no war, no suppression we could have had a very luxurious bountiful life of being a jadukaranoble.

Perhaps they felt that me being at Hogwarts meant that I could get the time and space for magic that they missed. I wouldn’t be bound by statutes or restrictions. I could really dive into my birthright. I could revive the name of Shafiq, return what had been forcibly taken from us by bands of colonizers.

All that ambition and desire for greatness was likely what got me sorted in Slytherin. There were a few others in my house that had descended from families of much renown, families who also treasured prestige and power. Like me, they were sent to Hogwarts with big expectations - to rebuild names that had been torn apart by battle.

But we were only eleven, twelve, thirteen. Not even puberty yet for some people. What would we know about power and prestige? We just wanted to play.

My house seemed to have a harder time at Hogwarts than most others. People talked about unearned bad reputations, about everyone else assuming that we must have been on Voldemort’s side, about how we can’t trust the other houses just yet, just because you don’t know how they’d regard you. The only ones you could trust were your fellow Slytherins: we took care of our own.

Except I’m not sure that quite happened for me. I wasn’t ostracised or bullied, oh no. I did manage to make some friends, and a lot of the classes were…not easy necessarily, but not agonizingly hard either. (History of Magic and Muggle Studies were the main ones that gave me headaches, only because they were both so restricted in subject matter and some of their facts were dubious. Not every magical culture uses a wand, for Gods’ sake.)

But I think when you’re entering a world that is already so abstract to you in multiple ways, when you’re somehow supposed to be part of the secret In-Crowd yet you feel like you’re only qualified enough to be the Outsider, when you’re having to navigate multiple new cultures at once…that gets tiring after a while.

I couldn’t trade war stories: I wasn’t there, no one I knew was there, we were all fighting a different war. I couldn’t talk about learning magic from a kindly elder as a child: the only elders I had were my parents and the odd uncle or two, but the very limited amount of magic they exposed me to wasn’t even the same sort my classmates learnt. I couldn’t talk about what my family did over the holidays - we had a completely different set of holidays to work with, and the extent of my participation with Christmas was to visit some friends of my family’s for dinner.

I generally got along better with the Muggle-borns; they too were grappling with culture shock, not quite knowing if they’re allowed to claim themselves as witches or wizards, not when the effects of the Muggle-Born Registries were still fresh. There were a few Muggle-borns that had arrived later to Hogwarts than usual because the War-time Ministry did not allow the school owls to let them know they were eligible to study, and they had to play catch-up a lot, possibly for the entirety of their school years. Always a little bit behind, never quite getting it, objectively skilled and competent but still struggling culturally.

And even then it was a little tricky, because they were British, always had been. Technically so was I: British culture was the best culture I knew, more than Bengali culture or any other culture my parents would have known. But it’s such a different experience of Britishness when you had kids stab you with ‘paki’, when people keep asking you to repeat yourself because 'your accent got in the way’, when no one quite believes you when you say you were born at the hospital down the road and instead insist that you were born in the Ganges River.

To Hogwarts’ credit, I didn’t get as much of the racist backlash here. But I still had to deal with the clueless questions, the people thinking my last name is Patil, the attempts to fix my accent in Charms class.

Maybe I’m just oversensitive. I don’t know. The whole school was recovering from major trauma. They don’t have time to deal with one student’s identity issues - not when the school had an identity crisis of its own. Especially Slytherin House: who were they, without the blood supremacist stigma, without the easy stereotyping of alliance? How do you maintain your own core being when everyone and everything else parses you by your supposed history? Who can you trust to be just youaround?

I don’t know if I am destined for greatness, power, prestige. I’m not sure the rest of my house, or my school, quite knew that either.

[[source:kawaii palace on flickr - her friend theladyvon makes the robes in the picture for AUD$60 plus s&h.
this piece was long delayed because I could not obtain any Slytherin art with someone vaguely resembling Ayesha in it. and my comp’s too old to really do graphics editing. sorry!]]