Remembering East Pakistan; Part 1 – Woh Humsafar Tha Magar ….

Kabhi yeh haal ke dono mein yak-dili thi bohot
Kabhi yeh marhala jaisey ke ashnai na thi
From Nasir Turabi's ode to the painful East-West Pakistan breakup in 1971

I was to visit Bangladesh for the first time. It was part of the geography I managed work-wise, and because economic indicators for the country were bullish and growth was imminent, I was tasked to increase our presence and business there. The visit, and dozens thereafter, became a cherished life experience for me.

Razi’s departure had rendered me a liberated, albeit hesitant, “civilian” (oh, the price one pays for freedom….but that’s a subject for another blog entry). Now there was no constraint of security for me as an extended “military personnel” (why a single individual is referred to as “personnel” in fauji-talk is beyond me, even if it is less dehumanizing than “human resource”), so I could travel to countries which earlier constituted sensitive, if not forbidden, destinations. Amujani was excited and reminded me repeatedly to visit the house in Dhaka cantonment that she had lived in. Abbi was nostalgic; “Look up my buddy AG Mahmud, you remember Auntie Hasina right?” and “Check up on Khandkar Sb, what a great officer he was”, and finally “I wish Bashar old chap were still alive, he would be so happy to see you… what a tragedy”. This last referred to AVM Khademul Bashar who, in 1965, was Abbi’s squadron mate and our neighbor in Mauripur, and whose daughter Shampa was my bestie. Uncle Bashar died in an air crash later as Chief of Staff of Bangladesh Air Force. Abbi had many Bangladeshi friends from their shared PAF tenure, and he and Ammi remembered them fondly. “I’m travelling for work”, I reminded my excitable household, “It’s not a holiday”.

For all the buzz at home about my first trip to erstwhile East Pakistan, a land my elders had loved, only Ammi remembered; “You’re landing on December 16th, beta. It’s Victory Day in their country. Ehtiat karna.” With this statement of fact, punctuated with an understated note of caution, Ammi conveyed all that remained unspoken; betrayal in love, wounds of war, anger and regret, and intense sadness over separation. It was buried, but it festered. All became quiet. I felt like the child of a contentious divorce preparing to visit the other parent.

It was indeed Victory Day and Bangladesh TV vociferously informed me of it as I settled into my hotel room. Resounding declarations of loyalty to the country with delightful renditions of Tagore’s uplifting Amar Sonar Bangla reminded me of state television back home; BTV, after all, was a child of PTV hence amusingly similar. The message, however, was starkly contradictory. For the first time in my life I heard the words “murderous Pakistan Army, “Our enemy Pakistan”, and (God forbid) “Death to Pakistan”. Horrified, I watched grainy footage of aggressors hunting down and killing scores of unarmed men, women and children. Since 1971, my fellow countrymen and I had been fed a nauseating diet of “Idhar hum, Udhar tum” by the establishment, portraying Mukti Bahini as the aggressor and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the betrayer. I had never fully bought into it, but I had also not ventured in search of an alternate. Discovering it while a guest of the brethren we had butchered was sobering.

The doorbell rang and I exited my reverie. The guest relations officer was returning my passport after having registered it for security with Police; standard procedure during Sheikh Hasina’s rule, graciously waived during Khaleda Zia’s. As he handed it over with a smile and another word of welcome, he seemed unruffled by its ominous origin. “He’s too young to remember” protested my paranoia, “he doesn’t know you’re related and you killed his parents!”. That night I hid under the covers, dreading the unavoidable experience of facing modern day Bangladesh as the nth generation of Pakistani military.

The next day, and the subsequent week, were a revelation. My hosts, business partners of my company, took to my strategies for growth like ducks to water. No one from our industry had acknowledged their country’s potential in the field as I had, and they were not about to miss this opportunity to participate, collaborate and contribute. Their revenue base was tiny and, all told, it would remain smaller than their neighbors’, but their mint-shiny enthusiasm was contagious and I was enchanted. For five days, we used every hour between breakfast and dinner to brainstorm ideas, meet customers, devise strategies and agree on execution models. In the end, as I prepared to depart, we had a business plan, they had an invitation to visit Pakistan, and I had a fresh perspective on a complex, love-hate relationship.

From vendors on the street to hotel clerks, from senior executives at customer organizations to young IT enthusiasts, I experienced no hostility, and this surprised me immensely. There was, however, much curiosity. Everyone was surprised that I was Pakistani and not Indian, and everyone attempted to converse with me in Urdu. The neatly dressed young man who chauffeured me asked, shyly “Madam, hum suna Islamabad bohot sundar?”. The COO of a bank extended our 40 minute visit to 2 hours asking about ex-colleagues at UBL where he had trained and worked under Agha Hasan Abedi, “the god of banking” as he called him. (It turned out I actually knew a couple of them!). A business tycoon who wished to invest in a startup scribbled a paper-napkin-map of Islamabad’s F-6/2 sector precisely identifying two plots which he had abandoned when he fled to Bangladesh. “You had two?” I asked, incredulous, “each 2,000 sq yds? Wow!”. “Arre baba, koi nahin leta tha…sab apna abai shehr mein invest karta tha. It cost me peanuts…best investment I ever made, until….” And he drifted off. Of course, it was not possible to glide through a week without a single whack on the wrist. “My dad was a freedom fighter”, said a young man during a Q&A session not meant for the topic. “He told me that jute exports paid for Islamabad”. The young man’s casual accusation left me grasping for a response, finding none. “Unko Islamabad se patsan ki khushboo aati thi”, his Urdu diction was perfect, his smile disarming. Oh boy! I stuttered and stumbled, and changed the subject. Local colleagues tried to help me recover and, over lunch, we ambled into a candid conversation about a discomforting subject. That it ended on a mutually appreciative note is credit to their magnanimity and, possibly, my sense of humor. A friend who fancied himself a political activist told me his story. He was enrolled at Dow Medical College, Karachi in 1971 and remained in the thick of political strife between Awami League and PPP until his dramatic departure for Bangladesh, his academic ambitions shattered. His account of atrocities committed even before war was officially declared brought tears to my eyes. My account of the shahadat of Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas at the hands of the PAF betrayer Flt.Lt. Matiur Rahman surprised him. “Betrayer, ghaddar?” he exclaimed, “but he was a patriot. He received the highest military award of Bangladesh”. “Hmm” I responded, “maybe he and the Nishan e Haider awardee of Pakistan can talk it out in heaven; they seem to be together again!”. Heroes and villains…one man’s is often not the other’s.

In the end, I discovered that, despite the injustice done to them, Bangladeshis are not bitter about 1971 like we are. It is rather like 1947; the Indo-Pak partition does not occupy my thoughts the way it does my Indian friends’ with whom conversations often end with “Kya yaar, saath hote to acha hota!”. It is my belief that the one who leaves moves on while the one who is left agonizes and pines, as we do for East Pakistan.

More soon…….

Image Credit: thousandwonders.net