Life in the camps was at once better and worse than life in Myanmar. Unlike in their village, they could sleep through the night without worrying about being killed. But they were forbidden to leave the camps and needed permission to travel to proper hospitals outside its boundaries. Forces far outside their community controlled their fate. Myanmar and Bangladesh are negotiating for repatriation. Many Rohingya say they will refuse to go without official ethnic recognition, but they have no elected leaders or representatives at the table. ARSA, meanwhile, has made its presence known in the camps, and executions of those who speak out against them continue. The United Nations refugee agency is trying to arbitrate. But who knows how suddenly this place too would again cast the Rohingya off.

Bangladesh does not allow Rohingya to enroll in government schools. UNICEF had set up “child-friendly spaces” — but children went there to play and draw pictures, not to learn. Aid agencies also set up some “learning centers” without a set curriculum. Futhu scoffed at the uselessness. Private tutoring schools cropped up, like the kind Futhu attended as a refugee, but they covered only basic math and language instruction, not history or science or anything else children would need to pass exams. Classes were held for just an hour a day. Another generation living in a grave. They were still teaching to the Burmese education system, hopeful as ever that their situation would change and they would return to their land.

Day to day, Futhu survived, and you could even say he prospered. He volunteered for the World Food Program and received promotions to become the manager of an aid-distribution site. But he stopped teaching, and he stopped keeping his diaries. Sometimes he wrote down the dates and times of a few events on his cellphone — an International Committee of the Red Cross delegation visit or the birth of a baby — but his nightly chronicles had ceased. He told me that it was because the camps were crowded and humid, that there was no peace in which he could put together his thoughts, but I wondered if there wasn’t something else, if this life was not really the one he wanted to document.

In all the hours we spent talking, Futhu only ever asked me one question: What did I think would happen to the Rohingya? I told him I didn’t know. I asked what he thought about returning to Dunse Para. One day he told me he wanted nothing more than to return with his rights; another day he decided he would rather perish in the sea.

I’d read that the Burmese government was building a model village on Dunse Para’s lands, which now were nothing more than unkept fields with burned stumps. When I mentioned this to Futhu, he told me he had heard the same but did not want to believe it. It seemed too much — to cast them off their earth and then just take it? The events of Oct. 9 and Aug. 25 played regularly in his mind. When he dreamed, he saw only his father, who died several months earlier, buried in the camp graveyard, far from the land he sprang from. “Everyone will die one day,” he told me. “I will also have to die. I convinced my mind of that. But about the hardship we went through, I failed to convince myself to forget about them.”

On my last night in the camps, at around 8 p.m., well past the dusk curfew, Futhu was kneeling in the bamboo hut as the darkness stretched its arms through the cracks in the thatch, his face silhouetted against a single solar-powered light bulb. Something happened in him then — I still don’t know what — but Futhu, who had always been so optimistic and purposeful, suddenly crumbled. The hut had filled with relatives and neighbors, and in front of his family and villagers, he started weighing his life.

“Is this a life anybody can look forward to? Why live such a life full of hardship?” he asked. “My kids, my father. ... My father died, my grandfather died. Nothing has changed. Now it’s my turn. I have kids. This is the time, I have to try to support my kids. I don’t even want to have kids anymore. Thinking about it is useless. We are just trying to survive here, and also I don’t know what will happen to my future. My head gets messed up if I think about it. All the things I used to do. That time I was very much into this campaign for education, but right now I don’t want to think about it. My heart is in so much turmoil.”