It is the morning after Yahya Khan informs the country and the world that the negotiations in Dhaka have failed, that he means to have Bangabandhu pay a price for his ‘crime’, that the Awami League, which won the mandate to form Pakistan’s first elected government at the election three months earlier, has been proscribed. I go to school; I am in little mood to speak to anyone. In my heart I know I am no more a Pakistani but a Bengali under assault by a vicious army.
It is a sad day in April, made sadder by the feeling that our family does not any more belong with the neighbours with whom we have shared joy and sorrow for years. A neighbour, a Punjabi woman, picks up a fight with my mother. Sheikh Mujib, she screams, will be hanged. My mother, never one to shy away from an argument, has a ready retort. She tells the neighbour that if that happens not a single Pakistani soldier will come back alive from Bangladesh. I note that Mother speaks of Bangladesh, not East Pakistan.
In the afternoon, my father comes from work with Grandfather’s letter in his hand. In sombre manner, he says Grandfather writes that my cousin, much older than me and of nearly the same age as my father, has gone missing. We later learn that in the middle of the month, the month being April, my cousin, Colonel Ziaur Rahman of the army medical corps and at that point principal of Sylhet Medical College, has been kidnapped by the army. His remains have never been found.
It is a July afternoon as my parents, my siblings and I prepare to board the Bolan Mail at Quetta railway station. Our destination? We are headed for Karachi, from where we will fly to our occupied Bangladesh. My father’s transfer orders, from his head office to the regional office in Dhaka, issued days after the election and then rescinded, have been restored through persuading his superior officers that my grandfather, all alone in our village outside Dhaka, needed to be looked after.
My classmates have come to bid me farewell. One of them tells me he prays that East Pakistan will remain part of Pakistan. I let him know that the next time I visit Quetta, or any part of Pakistan, it will be as a free citizen of a free Bangladesh. My friends and I know we might never meet again. The Bolan Mail, linked to our family journeys for years, slowly makes its way out of Quetta.
Twenty-five years later, I keep my promise. I am in Quetta on a week’s visit. My teachers, a brother-and-sister team who taught me in school, remind me of the old promise that I had also made to them before leaving Quetta. I am proud to be walking along the old streets of that well-known town as a citizen of Bangladesh. I love the green passport I carry.
At Karachi airport, I am restless. The PIA aircraft that will take our family to Dhaka seemingly will take a long time before it takes off. I walk out of the terminal and come back in, to be accosted by security who conduct a search of me, especially the pockets of the blazer I am wearing. I go out a second time and come back. Another security check. Those men are not happy with me. They do not check the inner pocket of my blazer, where a pencil sketch I had made of Bangabandhu happens to be. What if they fish the sketch out? The sketch will travel to Dhaka with me.
It is a rainy evening when we land in Dhaka on a day in July. We have been travelling with the enemy on that aircraft. All those men, in suits and conveying the impression of smartness, with some of them making conversation with me and my father, reveal themselves to be army officers once we land at Tejgaon airport. Their fellow officers stationed in Dhaka and in uniform, salute them.
We look for our Shahidullah Mama, for he is supposed to be there to receive our family. We look everywhere for him. He is nowhere. But then we spot him outside the main gates of the airport. In driving rain, beside his office jeep, he waits. He explains that Pakistan’s soldiers would not let him in. As we climb into the jeep, it is a desolate city, bereft of people, that strikes us. The rain does not stop.
On that muggy July evening, we arrive from the airport at the Kathal Bagan home of our aunt, my mother’s cousin. A single bulb lights up the bedroom, where my uncle waits. Where is everyone else? He tells us, almost in a whisper, that our aunt and our cousins have been sent off to the village as a precaution against the predatory instincts of Pakistan’s soldiers and their local collaborators. I notice the stack of newspapers in the room, copies of the Pakistan Observer my uncle has preserved since the December election. ‘They are for you to read,’ my uncle tells me. I am touched.
On this first evening in Dhaka, I ask our Bari Mama, brother-in-law of my aunt, to help me locate Shwadhin Bangla Betar on the transistor we have brought with us from Quetta. He takes me to an adjacent room, makes me lie down on a bed, pulls a quilt over me (it is unbearably hot and I am perspiring heavily) and then turns the knob on the transistor. I hear Bojro Kontho, the voice of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. I am thrilled. Bari Mama warns me never to increase the volume whenever I tune in to Shwadhin Bangla Betar. And always to listen to it under a quilt.
On a day in August, my father and I leave for our village. At Demra, where we will cross the river to reach Tarabo on the other bank by boat across the Sitalakhya, a Punjabi army captain is in charge of a check post. He is questioning everyone there. When our turn comes, he looks at me and breaks into a smile. ‘Kaise ho, bundu?’ He speaks in Urdu, as you might have guessed already. His ‘bundu’ is meant to be ‘bondhu’. I can speak, read and write Urdu, but I tell him in English, ‘I am sorry I don’t know Urdu.’ His smile vanishes, but he lets us pass.
A platoon of soldiers rushes into our village, guns at the ready, looking for Hindus to kill. As they fan out in all directions, they scream and bark orders, asking everyone to stay put in their huts. They approach our ancestral hut, confident that they will have a good kill. It is maghrib prayer time. They see my grandfather, aged a hundred-and-nine years, engrossed in prayer. Once Grandfather has finished his ritual, they salaam him, confess that they had been told the village was populated by Hindus. Grandfather says not a word. The soldiers leave the village.
As the monsoon rains pour late into the night in Panchrukhi, a place not many miles away from our village, my cousin and his comrades in the Mukti Bahini plant explosives under the bridge in order to prevent the movements of the army in the area. Within minutes, a terrible explosion, heard for miles around, reduces the bridge to rubble. My cousin and his friends loudly exclaim ‘Joi Bangla’ before slipping away into the remains of the night.
I take a walk along Green Road, feeling rather listless. It is a desolate city. A truck carrying Pakistani soldiers passes by me and then stops a few yards away. The soldiers stare at me, obviously suspicious that I am a rebel, an enemy of the state, which of course I am. ‘Oe larhka’, one of them says to me in a clearly indignant voice, ‘idhar aao.’ Somehow the blood begins to boil in me. I shout back, in Urdu, ‘kya hae?’ For a few moments, the soldiers keep staring at me and then move off. Has my Urdu, expressed in anger, saved me? I wonder.
It is December. Leaflets calling on Niazi and his soldiers to surrender are dropped from Indian aircraft coasting across the skies over Dhaka. One of the leaflets floats down to the courtyard of our home in Malibagh. I read it, in my halting Bangla, and realise that the message is from General SHFJ Manekshaw, the chief of the Indian army. I know that liberation is close.
December 16. A few minutes after 4pm. I hear Joi Bangla in the neighbourhood and on the streets in many voices. I tune in to Dhaka Radio and hear a recitation of the poem ‘aaj srishti shukher ullashe.’ And then, wafting along on the radio waves, comes the tranquillity-inspiring song, ‘hajar bochhor pore /abar eshechhi phire/ Bangla’r buuke acchi dnarhiye.’ It is Abdul Jabbar who sings.
It is wonderful to be alive. It is a moment of pride knowing that Bangladesh has come into being, that the oppressors have bitten the dust. I am proud to be a Bengali.