Reading about Rupali Bailung, the 41-year-old woman from Assam who had disappeared, and was recently found in Bangladesh, four years after being taken dead by her family members, I was reminded of my pishi (paternal aunt).I don’t remember exactly when the incident took place. It was in the 1980s. I was probably in the 5th or 6th grade. After I returned home from school, I had a phone call from Baba, who worked in the audit department at the Northeast Frontier Railway headquarters, “A pishi you have never met before is coming to stay with us tonight. Your Ma is bringing her along. Touch her feet, and be respectful.”I was stunned. I was learning of the existence of an aunt and about her visit, all at once. How come Baba never mentioned having a sister before? I had only met his elder brother at Barashat, in South 24 Parganas. The old man, a refugee from Mymensingh in erstwhile East Bengal, like my father, ran a weekly newspaper in Bengali, called Shahor Theke Dure (Away from the City). It carried local news on the problem of ‘jabor-dakhol,’ or forcible occupation.Waiting with intense curiosity, I finally caught sight of Ma with the strange lady. It was a hot afternoon. Both women were thirsty and I poured for them a glass of water each. We were in the living room. I learnt Pishi was a widow, from her white sari and the absence of a vermillion mark on her forehead. She was quite old. Her hair had greyed. With a soft pair of eyes, she called me to her, stroked my head gently, and asked Ma about me. I was silent. I desperately wanted to ask either of them, why Baba had never mentioned her.Also read | Poor Nations Bear the Brunt of Refugee Crisis, West Must Help: UNI was quite bold at asking questions to elders. But that day I held my tongue. Maybe the presence of this strange woman I had never met or heard of before kept me puzzled enough to keep silent. Baba arrived later in the evening. They had conversations till dinner. I either wasn’t privy to it, or I just don’t remember.I only remember two distinct things. After dinner, she had taken out a bottle of brandy. My parents were scandalised. “The doctor prescribed it for my throat,” she said matter-of-factly. “But it is alcohol!” Baba said, sounding unconvinced. I was subtly kept away from her. I could not speak to her. I sleepily saw her leave early morning, the next day. Baba went along, to drop her to the railway station.After he returned, Baba told Ma, “I handed her the money and told her, never come again.” I was stunned to hear that. “Why?” I intervened. Baba said hesitantly, “She is mad.” Mad? I was shocked, “But I liked the way she spoke to me, and caressed my face. I liked her smile.” Gently, but firmly, Baba said, “She is not a bad person. But she is not like us. I am afraid we can’t have her.” Pishi was sent back forever, to where she lived in North Bengal. Refugee families don’t always treat their own well. Pishi was born with a stigma. I did not see her again.Rupali, a 41-year-old woman, lived in the cooperative village in Sissiborgaon area of Assam’s Dhemaji district that borders Arunachal Pradesh. In May 2015, she had gone to attend a Bihu function nearby, when she disappeared. An Assamese news channel recently posted pictures and videos of the woman, taking material posted by a Facebook user from Bangladesh. The woman’s family members recognised her on television. Rupali was found near Jagannath Ashram in Moulvibazar district, which is part of Sylhet Division.When a reporter asked her what was she doing in Bangladesh, the frail, grey-haired woman, in a pink sari tied around the waist like a petticoat, and a printed top, replied confidently in Assamese,“I am not a citizen of Bangladesh. I did not go to Bangladesh. Why do you talk like a fool? This is India. I belong to India. The district is probably Lakhimpur (a neighbouring district of Dhemaji).”Rupali roams around freely, having tea and munching biscuits offered by people in the neighbourhood. She does not know she is not in Lakhimpur, but in Moulvibazar. She does not know she has breached the law by crossing the border. Did she cross the border by herself? Or did someone lead her to the other side? The rationalists will tell you, she does not know she is in another country, because her mind is not in a rational state of order. Madness is the absence of reason.Also read | Book Review: How Migration Shaped Our Nation StatesBut what does “reason” mean here? It means the knowledge of Partition, the knowledge of nations, and the law of the dividing line that separates nations. Knowledge means what (you think) you know about history, and of its laws. Objectively speaking, it takes a certain kind of privilege – of life’s conditions and conditioning – to receive and accept the knowledge that has a fatal bearing on the imagination.The faculty of reason demands a privileged mental reception that may err, if the conditions of life may not be conducive to such luxuries. Only when such moments occur, at the point of erring, you find life raising a question that disturbs reason. To raise questions is the task of thinking against the reason of history, and the history of reason. Thinking is prone to side with madness.Rupali Bailung. Image: Video screengrabRupali lives in Moulvibazar without realising it is not her hometown. It does not make her a fool. It tells us people in Moulvibazar have not made her feel out of place or threatened in any manner. She must be feeling at home in Moulvibazar. The fact that she is unaware of the absence of her family may not be a lapse of memory, but the secret of her relationship with the family.Rupali’s life in Moulvibazar reveals it is possible that life across the border, outside the web of legality, can be no less mad or no less sane than life in one’s own nation. Bailung even gets angry if asked too many questions. She is averse to questions by apparently sane minds trying to probe her insanity. Sane minds feel entitled to ask questions to people they think are mad. It’s a game that the sane play with the insane to feel secure in their sanity.If Rupali gets angry – or mad – at questioners, it is perhaps to show her irritation at their ignorance on her condition. The sane think they know the limitations of the mad, whereas the mad may be more aware of the limitations of sanity. Rupali has crossed the borders of nationalist reason by accident. Madness allowed her to cross it. Borders are mad. They mark – prove – the limitations to the bizarre politics of reason.Whether Rupali crossed over to Bangladesh by herself or someone else tricked her into it, she has created an interesting political puzzle in the times of NRC (the National Register of Citizens). The NRC has created the nightmarish possibility of four million people in Assam turning stateless. People are being turned into mere population by the cruel and exclusionary logic of citizenship laws.There is panic among minorities who are set to lose their possessions and rights. They are brining state officials to spare them. There is fear, chaos and a state-sponsored madness that is having its mirror-effect on those affected by it.In contrast, Rupali is a refugee by accident. For the poor and the mad alone, there is no difference between countries, where you are offered food and the freedom to move around. Rupali mocks at the laws of nations and their borders.Jugal Bailung, Rupali’s elder brother, told reporters, “Although she was mentally unstable, yet she would always return home whenever she ventured out. That day, when she didn’t return, we searched for her at various places and later, filed a missing report with the police. After a few days, the villagers spotted the decomposed body of a woman near a river and we all thought it was that of hers. We brought it home and performed the last rites.”Rupali’s life turned out to be crazier than the rational conclusions drawn by her family of her disappearance. Jugal said her sister showed symptoms of mental illness after she appeared for her 12th grade exams. There is a curious relationship hidden here between class, demands of pedagogy and the appearance of mental issues. Something did not work for Rupali any longer, or it reached its limits. Some cord was broken.The claim that Rupali is “mentally unstable” reminded again of my pishi. Baba had said of her, “She is a ‘shutika pagol’” (‘pagol’ is mad). The word “shutika” is a term among many others that are ascribed in Bengal to illnesses that occur at childbirth, due to anaemia and the presence of an intestinal worm. But the medical problem is attributed to the influence of “evil spirits”. The patient is diagnosed of a mental condition, from her physiological condition.Also read | How Refugees in Ghana and Liberia Started a School for Their OwnMadness is determined through a cultural imagination whose source is not scientific or rational. We learn how madness was detected in early medical practice. Also, notice how once the stigma of madness is assigned to a person, it becomes part of not just belief, but also knowledge. Reason enters through the back door.Rupali’s story has brought into attention the intrinsic relationship between madness and the refugee condition. An accidental refugee, designated “mentally unstable”, Rupali raises questions on how to read the life of refugees in relation to the laws of citizenship and national boundaries.The issues are reminiscent of Manto’s famous story of ‘Toba Tek Singh’, where the governments of India and Pakistan after three years of Partition, take the mad decision of exchanging lunatics. In a Lahore madhouse, in response to the question by an inmate, “What is Pakistan?” a lunatic Maulvi replied, “It’s a place in India where they make razors.” It is a strange and violent stereotype. Partition sealed the stereotypes between the two communities. Stereotypes became knowledge. Knowledge became rational grounds for enmity. Those who claimed sanity left the lunatics behind. The mad figure of Rupali dissolves those claims.In his famous work, Madness And Civilization (1965), Michel Foucault writes, that “madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved. It conceals beneath error the secret enterprise of truth.”What is the “real problem”? The question demands a long and complicated answer, but I will hazard a short one for lack of space: The problem is that of rational political systems and regimes of knowledge that lack empathy. Beneath madness, lie the injustices of sanity.Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, published by Speaking Tiger Books (August 2018).