A new wave of refugees came to the city in September 1974. Coming to the city was probably the worst thing they could do. In the villages they could collect herbs, catch a bird in the fields, steal eggs from turtles, and uproot a banana tree to extract its white skeleton. There were hundreds of thousands of canals and ponds full of fish. These opportunities were not available in the cities. Still they came.
What pushed them to set out for Dhaka in that critical moment of our national history, I asked myself once again, if it wasn’t a conspiracy of Pakistani collaborators, as Moina Mia had said? I came up with several answers. First, they were not landowners. These people were rootless, so it was easy for them to decide to set out for a new place. They had nothing to lose. Second, they were not going anywhere. They were just wandering the way they had wandered year after year, generation after generation, before the liberation as well as after it. And in the course of that wandering they found themselves in Dhaka, which happened to be the capital of the country. Third, they were scared of seeing more death. Death came every day. They looked for the most densely populated area in the country. They thought they would be able to hide themselves amidst Dhaka’s crowds, and death would not find them. Fourth, they did not want to just die meaninglessly; they did not want to be shadows of lives without enjoying the promises of the new country. They had lived year after year in slavery, burdened by discrimination and shame. Now they were free. If they could survive a few more days, they might be able to live with honour. By going from place to place they wanted to buy time.
I revised my answers, again and again, until I believed I knew exactly why the refugees chose to come to Dhaka. If it were other refugees at any other time, I would not have used the same arguments. I was sure those refugees got on the road to Dhaka one morning compelled by a higher cause.
They wanted to get as close as they could to Sheikh Mujib. That was it, I thought; definitely. That was why they were here. He was their man. They wanted to draw his attention to their sufferings. What better way was there to do that than coming to the capital, being his neighbour, burying the dead at his doorstep, bowing down before him and saying with unshakeable promise that even after thousands of deaths they would not lose confidence in him? He was not going to go see them in their villages. They had waited and waited and seen death after death; he did not come. He did not come even though he had promised in his speeches to look after them. So they came to him.
I saluted them. They were strong people. They had made it this far through the famine. Soon they would be at his house; they would be his uninvited guests and speak their minds, calling for his attention.
If I lived in a village and the famine had hit, I asked myself, would I have the courage to come to Dhaka as they did? Would I dare cross those drought-stricken miles and raise a tent next to a burial ground under the open sky, knowing that one day after my death from acute starvation I would be buried by strangers in a strange place, or left at a street corner to be eaten by dogs and vultures? Would I be able to think clearly about such a long and critical journey? Would I do something else entirely, like killing people who stood in my way, who hid food in their backyards and did not sell their wares because they wanted a price hike? Good that I was alone, no children or elderly relatives with me; good that I had no parents to look after. If I had, I would have left them behind. I would have snatched their food to feed myself. Every life has a duty to live, you know; every life is precious but at this moment my life is more precious than yours—that was what I would have argued. It would have been reprehensible.
I felt exhausted. Whenever I asked myself these questions, I felt exhausted. I struggled for a breath of air. I struggled to look normal, to appear to Nur Hussain like I was perfectly fine, I was fit to accompany him to Moina Mia’s gathering, though I knew in my mind I was falling into an endless abyss.
In 1974 alone over one and a half million people died in Sheikh Mujib’s liberated Bangladesh. How big was that number? Five times the number of Bangladeshis killed by Pakistani forces during the entire period of the liberation war in 1971. No natural disaster had claimed so many lives since the beginning of our national calendar. No ruthless tribal landlord or maharaja in our history had been the cause of so many deaths in the subcontinent. No religious clash, territorial disagreement, or deadly disease subjected our people to helplessly witness the untimely decline of such an astronomical number of lives.