Normandy, can you read me?

As the wistful homesick Falgun breeze reached Dhaka, it took me back to childhood.
When I was young, I wanted to make a list of all the wars fought on earth. I don't exactly know why. The idea isn't clear anymore, maybe it was clear at that time, but one loses things.

It even started in one Falgun.
I was in class eight I think.
The beginning of the class year brought with it new anxieties and new hope.
I'd just come out of a life-threatening accident. And I guess the residue left in my body had something to do with that, but again I'm not sure. Even if my accident had anything to do with my sudden urge to list all the wars, it was embedded in the deep of the subconscious.
Anyway, I did make a list. I'm sure not of all the wars, but there were plenty.

Name
Place
Number of Deaths
The Possible Reasons
The Outcome
The Aftermath

And I really wanted to talk to someone about the heartbreaking things I was uncovering. I felt like a wartime journalist and wanted to let others know what had happened.

I think that was the doom of me, that I wanted to have friends with whom I could have intelligent arguments. I tolerated a ridiculous amount of unkindness because of that. I overlooked things in people just because I could talk about films and books and a whole lot of unfounded dreams with them.

Kindness.
Those wars that I listed almost threatened to make that a fairy-tale, something one tells the children to make them go to sleep, delaying a little bit the process of knowing the real world.

Sentimental ritualization of wars in Western films never really got me, not even as a kid, which makes me think that I got the taste of the world far too early. I should've been naive enough in school, to fall for the righteous American generals who gave loud speeches and saved people at the end that justified all the other things.

Other things that history decided to drop until people like Chinua Achebe started to say, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Our own wars, in the meantime, barely give people a boost now. I guess for us, the people that have been ruled over by the white lords for such a long time, and the self-hatred has been nurtured with such meticulousness, that our wars for us aren't posh enough, our common people who had to take arms aren't beautiful enough, our freedom fighters aren't polished enough, our sense of self isn't worthy enough.

When Churchill was becoming the voice of the just and righteous Europe, and after when he was dubbed the hero of the time, it was easy enough for the people who'll tell the stories of war to the next generations to omit us from the equation.The famine of Bengal that was completely the making of the Kingdom, of Churchill, was never mentioned.

Who doesn't want their heroes to be pristine?
And we were the stain.

William Vandivert | Credit: The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images © Time Life Pictures

And so even now when I see movies being made, speeches being given by people of that part of the world, I think of us, I think of the people who despite having lands full of crops died of hunger.

The existence of the famine was simply denied, and how do you prove your deaths when your lives weren't recognized in the first place.We the people who according to Churchill were “breeding like rabbits.” Churchill who asked poignant questions like how come Gandhi was still alive if the famine was that bad.

2.1–3 million people were murdered by the wartime colonial policy. We fought for the British and served them our rice, we saw our brown skins hanging from our bones and we saw our bodies piling up on our ever-green land.

© Times of India 

But there has to be a common ground, at least I think so, a ground where the soldiers who were just kids with arms on the Battle of Normandy, and the brown soldiers with their British uniforms on these shores know each other.
Not each other's names but each other's faces. They know the looks.

When I think that nobody left Normandy, I think of our soldiers who would never unsee the skeletal bodies they left behind to fight a war, not of their own. They went to the foreign lands and saw the rice being served their fathers planted.   

Nobody left Normandy. The dead were dead, and the living were not the ones who marched past at the beginning, they were not the ones who obeyed orders at the beginning, the people who came back were not the ones who left the homes.

And we didn't leave. We the brown rabbits.
We are still standing there. Lost. Collectively lost, collectively traumatized, collectively numb, and we collectively want to be without stains.
Pristine like Churchill.

But wistful homesick Falgun breeze catches on.
And I have to find that ground.
A ground where all the people who had to go through a war, forced upon or otherwise, who had no choice, who had to defend their existence, acknowledged or not, I have to believe they read each other.

So Normandy, can you read me?