"Sorry, my throat is not good," he said, taking a puff as he sat cross-legged in the home of his lifelong friend, Amir Ali, a violinist in his mid-seventies.

 

As young men, back in Myanmar, they had played together in a wedding band, touring their native Rakhine state on the western border performing on moonlit nights beside the rice fields.

 

"We were hired every day, sometimes we couldn't go home for 20 days," said Amir Ali, a bone-thin man with hollowed cheeks and a faraway look.

 

Now their venue is a bamboo shelter in a Bangladeshi camp on the edge of a trash-filled swamp, their audience a curious crowd of fellow refugees. But for the first time in decades they are free to play music.

 

In recent years Myanmar imposed debilitating restrictions on the Rohingya, a Muslim minority demonised as immigrants from Bangladesh. They were prevented from travelling, gathering in groups, and expressing their ethnicity. Getting permission to perform was nearly impossible, refugees said.

 

"Back in Myanmar, we couldn't gather more than 10 people, so how could we sing?" said Amir Ali, idly strumming the violin and cradling his baby nephew.

 

It had been a long time since the band's last wedding when, in August 2017, soldiers arrived in their quiet village in northern Rakhine State and burned it to the ground. The sweeping crackdown, which the United Nations has said was executed with genocidal intent, drove 730,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh.

 

Now home to close to a million people, including those who fled previous waves of violence, the camps comprise the world's largest refugee settlement.

 

There, Rohingya society is re-forming. While life in the camp is bleak and monotonous, refugees say Bangladesh offers relative freedom compared with the apartheid-like conditions they endured in northern Rakhine.

 

 

 

"PLAY AN OLD SONG!"

 

On a recent morning, several hundred Rohingya, including the wedding band, crowded into the office of a local community organization for a 'Rohingya Traditional Affairs Day'.

 

Someone rigged up a large speaker normally used for the call to prayer to amplify a harmonium, an accordion-like instrument, and an ensemble of musicians including Amir Ali the violinist, now deafeningly loud, struck up with a high-tempo jam.

 

"This is a traditional affairs event!" one of the organizers cried out, gesturing at the players to stop. "Play an old song," he said.

 

Known as hawla, the old songs are slow and normally played at weddings, love stories that revolve around the towns of northern Rakhine, traditions like flying kites, and the rhythms of rice farming.

 

They involve frustrated love affairs and travel by boat and motorcycle between the villages. Unlike newer songs, they are not about recent suffering, but rather a peaceful time before.

 

Amir Ali and Gudar Mia grew up in the same village, Hlaing Thi, in Maungdaw township, close to the Bangladeshi border. Amir Ali, from a wealthier family, learned to play violin from a relative who owned one.

 

He forged an imitation instrument out of bamboo before later buying one in Bangladesh. "The whole day he was playing the violin," recalled Gudar Mia, who lived across the river and memorized old songs from his relatives as a child.