MY BOOK : LIFE OF A REFUGEE BOY OF 11

My Book 

Writing a book about the Bangladesh liberation war and my days of those tumultuous period had been bugging me for a very long time.  The liberation war was perhaps the most memorable episode of my life. It has changed the course of my life once for all. The days of the war were the hardest of days of my life. I have been battling with the lingering residual legacy of the war since those days till today. Have kept it quiet, never expressed the inner cacodemons and the internal psychological impact that the war had given me. I still be grappling with many of the impediments of 1971. It’s difficult to express how I felt then and how still feel about now. Our societies and families are at times not to so passionate to listen and give some assurance. They busy with their own issues of life. I guess. The days, weeks, months of the time since we became destitute and were shown to be a refugee family still in my memory like broad day light. Every single day I can still after all these 49 years I can go back and recapitulate, as if all of those scenes are sequentially filmed in my minds celluloid. All I need to do it rewind the reel. This is how i remember those precarious days.

  Memories of the fear of death , the belly crunching hunger, the love and affection of stranger and unknown families, the mistreatment of the close relatives, the scared eyes, the physical exertion and above all was the depression caused due to the exodus is not  something I can eradicate from  my mind. Rough sleeping and long excruciatingly long nights and getting thumping noise in my ears and dreaming about the enemy soldiers walking straight towards us and firing from a point blank range to annihilate the whole family. The nagging pain of losing our father and how will the family run without him and what will happen to us all — these were the ever ending saga of my internal feeling at the time; these were really painful and to get on with life with literally managing a family 5 including me was fearsome an act as a 10 - 11 years old boy.  Mental redundancy of no education for over 2 months, lack of physical sport activities was making brining frustration and time of the day and nights were not ending. Finally there were no amenities at all whatsoever, no radio, no music, no Sunday matinee of radio drama, which was impacting in our rural lifestyle enormously. 

The life of a tween or a preteen who has just fallen from the grace, found himself homeless and destitute along with his family out of the blue is a part of the hardest downfall to swallow.Moving from one village to another for numerous days going around 7 villages in 13 days is another experience to cope with. Never lived in a remote village in the middle of a country side where the language and accent are completely different. The nights were dark. Only source of light in the thatched huts was either a paraffin fuelled hurricane lantern or a naked flame wick lamps.The food was unpalatable to eat although the hosts were very generous generally. But the wide gap of culture, linguistic difference, the difference in commonality and perspective of life made it more harder to gel in with the same age group people and the older folks were very difficult to adjust with. Yet there were loads of affinity from many and at the same time there were huge numbers of villagers who were sceptical about our presence in their space. This is where we felt much safer than that the town that we fled. 

Slowly the invading enemy started to attack the villages astride main roads adjoining the major cities. Suddenly marching at night with a huge column of troops during the hours of darkness. The panic in the eyes villagers were  unfathomable and the fear of death amongst the women was horrendous. In the first village where we took shelter was 2.5 miles away from the main metalled road that connected main north eastern district of the country with the capital city and the port city. During the siege of East Pakistan this road becomes MSR (main supply routes) of the occupying Pakistani army. There were numbers of army patrol attacked the village that we were living at the time. The entire population as soon as they saw the headlights of military convoys were running amok all around in panic to take shelter hiding on the bank of the canal, nullah, bamboo grove, in the water logged paddy or jute fields. At time after the enemy soldiers left the village during the debriefing many a time fingers were pointed at the town folks who like us took shelter in their villages and that made us very uneasy to live in the same village any more. 

Started shifting from one village to the other and other and other. Many of the villagers we later moved further  south west deep into the country and monsoon started to kick by then made the occupying army’s movement to start to get more restricted. Nevertheless, our plight of my family as a destitute and as a guest of mercy on some relative or unknown family was not something that we could cope with any more. It is probably a hard job for a mother with 5 kids to do nothing all day and be at the mercy of the host family for food, snacks, breakfast. It became untenable for us to continue  to stay with  our hosts. The host was enormously generous although their neighbours did not always have the best of hospitality. However, I don’t blame them,  everyone was going through the hardest time of their lives. There were no supply of food  and groceries from the towns, there were huge shortage of rice, the peasants were scared to go to their arable lands for crops, no fertilisers to buy, there were no cash in the hands of the peasants because they could not sale their produces to the towns. Those were the most precarious time in the history Bangladesh. 

We came to know that, hundreds of ex servicemen, serving service men, youth, students, farmers, unemployed and industrial workers were joining the newly formed Mukti Bahini (Freedom Fighter). Also there were a few families running away from the massacre and atrocity from the capital city were passing by those villages where we were staying en route to India. Our family was fragmented in to 4 pieces; elder sister in the capital city studying and living in college boarding, one brother in school hostels, father’s place of pasting was further north east corner of the country and we are stuck in these villages some 15 - 20 miles away from the sub divisional town of Brahmin Baria. We had no spare clothes, no money, no bedding to sleep, no particular room to live, floating in the midst of fear, agony, death, anger and mercy. Our elder brother who was then only 17 years old one day suggested that, how about we cross the border to pour into the shores of India; like all these additional caravans fleeing the genocide, the annihilation to India to save their lives. The rumours were abuzz that the Pakistan army was abducting women from the villages and keeping them captive in their bunkers, camps, barracks and garrisons. That happened around us where we were living together in the time. My sister was right on the time 15 years old. 

The sudden dramatic change in our life style was the hardest thing to cope and little did I know worse than that waited on us. The sleepless night, the fear of advancing army column with their rifles aimed at us and the running amok in the hours of darkness to hide in the bush, undergrowth, nullah, dipping into the cold, muddy pond or running miles away to the nearest mangrove to save our souls were fast becoming a common chore. And once the military men gone, we come back to the house where we were staying with wet, dirty cloth in the middle of the night to pass the night without a wink of sleep in the eyes. It was imperative to bring some closure to the present status. But the fear, long distance walking, the rain, the norwester in the month of April, above all the route to India was through the main MSR ; the heavily patrolled main metalled road connecting the nearest military garrison in Cumilla with Brahmin Baria to Sylhet also at the same time it was the only high rising feature to observe the railway line from camilla to Brahmin Baria and keep an eye on the Indian borders by taking branch single track brick laid semi metalled truck-able roads. The road crossing from the west towards the east towards India was heavily guarded by mobile patrol and few fortified posts notoriously reminiscing the infamous Check Point Charlie.

Despite all the kerfuffles,  agonies, fear and impoverishment those few days village life gave me an awful load of sense of belonging at that tender age. Learned how the village life is, cultures, colloquial language, how to plough the land with bull plough, hand cutting paddy crop, harvesting with bull, hand milking cows, rowing boats, boating by oar and fishing with net fishing and fishing with rods both manual and wheel rods and angling, this was a huge learning curve. This eviction from the insular life to this taught us all the ropes of life and how the people in the villages live. The only entertain for those village folks were to gather together at night in the home courtyard and sing folklore and recite poetry, or a drama or jatra (ballad-opera) or sing or reading  puthi ( historical rhythmic poetry - booklet-text). This period of penury was the prelude to an extremely perilous life ahead. The journey of life in a war torn country can get very diabolical and our families miseries knew no bounds to say the least. Mother was extremely disturbed because two of our siblings are away from us and the head of the family the first bread earner is also away and even if he come back to our address he would not find us there, as we fled the town on the face of a extreme danger on that very fateful day ………where it all started!

(to be continued)