I am one of the privileged many (or the unprivileged, depending on how you choose to see it) who wasn’t there as our country found itself submerged in war and bloodshed, as its mother tongue started to fade from the tongues of its citizens.
And I have inherited this knowledge as I have inherited this nation and its memories, stolen from my parents and grandparents, my aunts and uncles, from distant relatives who have reached the ends of their lives. I have imagined the birth of a nation through their stories, the inflections in their voices, and the way their eyes sometimes gloss over when they remember.
But that’s all it can be for someone who was born so late, and that is why, perhaps, I am one of the unprivileged many who cannot ever know what it’s like to be free, for we have never really known what it was like to have our tongues ripped out, our fathers and mothers taken away never to be seen again, to have huddled with lights turned off as bullets and planes went off in the sky.
And, as a result, we find ourselves unappreciative of the country we find ourselves in. My attachment to this country of ours is weak and I, too, dream of one day escaping the myriad people and vehicles which seem to be suffocating me from all sides. I, too, curse the bureaucracy, the corruption, the unbearability of it all, because I cannot, like an ungrateful child, try as I might, remember with poignant clarity what it was like to be anything but this.
I dream of cooler weather and cleaner streets, of “educated” masses, and polite people who stand in queues, of buses which aren’t crammed to the brim, unclogged arteries, free healthcare and free highways, beautiful skylines and a conscientious populace, better technology with which to communicate and live.
When I watch some of my peers curse what the Pakistanis did to our forefathers and foremothers, I cannot help but be unsympathetic. I cannot quite see where the passion comes from as they hoist the national flag on their windows and railings, wrap it around them as they cheer perhaps the cricket team on, or pretend to see the blood as the songs come on Ekushey February or December 16.
What do they know of what it was like, I ask myself. What do they know of how the people suffered and how they hit back? Do they know anything of how people cowered in the dark, not knowing if they would survive from one day to the next? Can they even imagine the terror of an unexpected knock at the door that might lead to an “intellectual” of the family being taken away?
I think not. But I can understand how the narrative has been brewed, and how it has persisted throughout the generations. I understand how, then, this generation, with memories and imaginations like mine, though with a less cynical outlook, have honed and perfected them, and have inherited the pain. And they too feel it as if they were there, their hearts bleeding to keep a dying language alive, and the jubilation at finally, after so long, succeeding.
And though this doesn’t happen often, sometimes, when listening to the people who lived through it -- a dying breed no doubt -- to their stories of love, loss, and independence, for a very temporary moment in time, I, too, feel as if I am there, feeling as they once felt, and I, too, in a way, feel free.
