Note: Last week's picture of three-year-old Aylan's dead body at the beach shook the whole world with shock and grief. (I am purposefully not posting that picture). It started a massive exchange of emails between friends. I am posting stories of 2 of my friends who suffered the plight of refugees in the 1971 Pak/India war. I am not writing personal notes, as stories are enough to describe the lifelong psychological miseries of war.
(1)
The image of a Syrian child reminded me of myself. I was five years old when, one night, my father woke me up at 3 in the morning to walk out of our house quietly. We walked for 30 minutes and boarded a bus from Jessore to Khulna to Chittagong, a port in eastern Bangladesh. I was shipped from one hand to another hand to finally board 'safinae arab' (ship from Pakistan). It took 16 days in the Indian Ocean to eventually reach Karachi. I am alive and kicking, but hundreds of thousands perished in 1971. Images of Civil war, blood, army boots, rifles, crying women, screaming children, and dead bodies are as vivid as they were on that day. My childhood is connected to the image of EPR (East Pakistan Rifles) invading our house to search as they suspect we are hiding Bengalis!! (and we did :)) - I was told I spiked a fever that day. All night of March 25, 1971 - there was no electricity. We hear sounds of gunfire in candlelight (My experience of shama har rang main jalti hai). The following day, the 'talao' (lake) in front of our house was full of dead bodies and blood. We had two flags in our home - of Pakistan and of Mukti Bahini - depending on who is in charge of the area. It was interesting - we protected Bengalis, and Bengalis saved us, giving us safe passage (at least earlier in the chaos).
I was born in Karachi. My father made the mistake of sending us to school in East Pakistan as Christian schools were very good for education. I guess he was not competent to read politics. It is unfortunate how West Pakistan was kept in pure darkness. Our relatives in Karachi didn't believe our plight, though they were helpful. Later in the war, there was no distinction between friends and enemies at one point. Mukti Bahini kidnaped my father, and he was almost killed. They only let him go because he spoke Bengali fluently and Urdu in Bombay style. It took three years before my father made it to Karachi.
That image of a Syrian boy brought back thousands of lost pictures, like getting handed from one person to another, as we switched small boats (called launch those days) - finally, it was a big ship. People take pride in war, but human miseries on both sides always take huge tolls and usually go undocumented in history. When a human suffers - ideology, language, culture, and religion lose meaning. --- Jab aurat bazar main jism bechne nikalti hai to poori insaniyat be-maani ho jaati hai (Manto)
(2)
For the first time in 44 years, I am penning something over that traumatic lifetime tragedy. I went through almost identical after the 1971 fall of Dhaka. My father had a solid pro-army reputation and owned a wholesale cloth business. Ironically, Pakistan Cloth House first got burnt in New Market Dhaka with a Pak flag over there. I had vivid images of many horrible events followed by that tragedy. That particular night of December 16, I can recall, we were hiding in the house of our nani's sister, who was married to a Bengali lawyer, the only interracial marriage in our family. Mukti Bahini boys broke in upon hearing some of us Urdu speaking and hiding there. Just that one particular vivid image still brings shivers to my spine. Abbu was on the bed with a blanket up to their head. Ammi opened the door and spoke to those guys in Bengali. One of the boys shouted. There was a wristwatch of abbu shining out of blanket. He fired a bullet, and I started crying. Ammi said something to them again, taking me in her arms, and they left. We survived that night and took shelter in a dargah, not to trouble our hosts. Then it's a long story. We traveled by air to Calcutta from Dhaka, then by road to Patna till we reached the Nepal-Bihar border town, and stayed in Kathmandu for seven months till repatriated by Pak govt and reached Karachi on January 3, 1974, by Afghan airline planes. The last thing I still remember is the large Qandhari apples served by the air hostess!
My father hated the Bengali language, never tried to learn it, and ridiculed my mother because she had mastered it! Luckily, that expertise saved us from our house to the airport, where my other siblings were forcefully kept quiet not to utter any Urdu word. Abbu decided to leave all the property and arranged our exit. Plane taking off from Dhaka airport still gives me heartache, and landing in Karachi airport after nine months via Calcutta, Patna, and Kathmandu is still nostalgic whenever I board or land airplanes. The feeling of being free to speak Urdu when we touched Pakistan airspace is priceless; that's why abbu always insisted that whatever he lost to come to Pakistan meant nothing. He used to say: "Bengali daulat cheen saktain hain, qismat aur aqal nhi." He started here from scratch again. And الحمدللہ علی کل حال.
I never could come out of those images. Though very vivid, the pictures kept on taking shapes with continuous tales heard from grandparents, parents, and older cousins...dead bodies on streets...jiye bangla shouts...arsons...agents (some fake, some actual) taking money to get people across borders...changing residencies...lost childhood. I don't remember playing with toys and growing up by passing those years. I was 8 when we finally reached Pakistan.
When humans suffer in wars, zaban, aqeeda aur watan ki two kori ki auqat nahi rehti aur jaan bachane ke liye log aag ka darya paar ker ke mehfooz jagah dhoondte hain. In any war, the worst sufferers are women and children. Just spot any war in any country and follow the plight of their women and children in the following years. This pic has already made an unprecedented impact, just like in 1972 when a naked Vietnamese girl was made after the US napalm bombing and that dying kid in Darfur who was pictured moments before being eaten by vultures.
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