It's Diwali that she missed the most, says Chang Yuet Ho. She was around 12, Chang estimates, when she last saw her friends lighting hundreds of earthern lamps and bursting crackers.

Fifty-one years later, last month, Chang found herself back in the midst of the festival preparations. She went home to Hong Kong just before Diwali day, but not without meeting at least some of the people she had lost touch with all those years ago.

Chang was among the estimated 1,500 people of Chinese origin  brought to Assam by British planters as tea was discovered here in the first half of the 19th century  who were arrested in the wake of the Chinese aggression of 1962, and packed off to different prisons. Many of them, including Chang, were later deported to China.

Some of the Chinese families managed to stay behind as the deportation process was called off mid-way after the war came to an end. Others who were not deported made their way back after two years or more in prisons. Chang and six others who now live in Hong Kong returned to their birthplace, Makum township in Upper Assam, about 7 km from the commercial hub of Tinsukia, for the first time in 51 years last month. Of the six, five were women.

Makum incidentally got its name from Makam, meaning a golden horse in Cantonese. The Chinese settlers though know it by its Mandarin name, Machin.

"I remember going to the Chinese school located by the main road. I remember so many of my classmates, as also Liu Mei Fang, a teacher who came from Kolkata," said Chang, a retired factory worker.

That school, attended by most of the children of Chinese descent, is now a Hindi high school. Everything has changed, Chang noted, the railway track was bigger and more shops had sprung up.

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