“Sur draws us into the terrifying world of the new border but tempers and humanises her clinical description of the physical infrastructure of fence and tower with a range of ethnographic vignettes that tell a story of transborder kinships, conviviality and unforeseen friendships.”

“A group of young girls, hypnotized by brilliant hair ribbons and bells in a stall, ignored the stray dogs that sniffed their feet and licked their hands. It was the clothes stalls that attracted the largest numbers of buyers. ‘There are no clothing stores in the Rajabari area,’ one resident said as she picked out woolen cardigans for her household. Not every item came with fixed price. Produce from the Naga villages were weighed, checked, and given an exchange value. As goods were translated into monetary values, tensions ran high.”

"The securitized discourse and policy around borders focuses on assigning people to definite bounded territories, with outsiders as security threats. The notable exceptions are the wealthy and powerful, and some functional personnel of global capitalism, whose privilege sometimes bypasses these limitations. This is supposedly demonstrated through various documents of identity, territorial presence, voting rights, work rights, public resource rights, and so forth. The ideal—for it is often bent, compromised, or defied—is that each person has a known, documented identity that gives rights to a specific geographic space.”

“Jabbar’s narrative underscores many dilemmas that a disappearance produces, where documents act as propellers, not of justice as much as an undying hope. I fear that meddling with the narrative would constrain the paths Jabbar traverses, which are important for readers to assimilate on their own. The narrative as reproduced verbatim here is a haunting that allows for entering the depths of mourning, melancholia, agency, memory making, and resistance.”