Non-Fiction
Dacca 1970: Cyclone and Naxalite Lookers
T
owards the end of the year, as the Delhi winter set in, news came of a cyclone that had struck East Pakistan and killed a number of people. The number was first surmised to be 100,000, but rose with each successive estimate. Shapiro telexed me from New York, asking me to fly out and do him a story. It was one of the greatest natural disasters of the century… I flew from Delhi, leaving Leela behind, to Dacca, the East Pakistan capital...When we landed at Dacca, at nightfall, there were clouds overhead, and a faint rain fell. Going through immigration, I encountered a plump official, who said, ‘You are one of the journalists from Delhi?’ I assented, and presented my passport. ‘Hah,’ he said, ‘you are Breetish? Velcum to our beautiful country. I vas thinking you vere Indian. Indians we do not like. Indians are terreeble fellows—vot you say—like sheet.’ I wondered what Mrs. Gandhi or Mr. Pant would have said at this point. A taxi took me to the Intercontinental Hotel, where I was booked. The driver spoke a kind of English. He did not seem much concerned about the cyclone and its effects. ‘Too many poor people on coast,’ he said. ‘What matter they die? You tell me, sir.’ But he seemed very concerned that there were also poor people in Dacca, of which, he emphasized as we neared the hotel, he was one. ‘All fault of West Pakistanis, sir,’ he said. ‘West Pakistanis very bloody people. They care about me? No, they not care.’ The Intercontinental floated, like a huge upended liner in whose portholes lights shone, above the darkened slums of the city. The lobby was full of other correspondents acquiring accreditation cards and government handouts at a desk that had been specially set up…I had no credentials, apart from Shapiro’s telex and a rather imprecise letter from the New York Times bureau in Delhi. When I applied for my press card with these, the government man turned me away, saying, ‘This data is insufficient, mister.’ But a young man who was assisting him followed me as I walked off. ‘Sir,’ he said, and called me by my name, ‘you are the poet, isn’t it? I have seen your photo on your books. Please, sir, why you are here? You want to write poetries about cyclone?’
Dom Moraes
At this time I was very easily irritated by people who called me a poet. It reminded me of something I wanted to forget, like a botched but important love affair. However, there was a look about the young man which struck me. Perhaps I had inherited a quality from David Archer: I could see and feel a poet without reading his work. I asked if he wrote poetry. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I am writing in Bengali, of course. And all my friends are poets. They will be too pleased to meet you. To think it is taking a cyclone to bring you to us!’ We fixed an appointment for the next day. He said, ‘How I can serve you?’ I asked about my press card. ‘I will fix,’ he said. ‘I will fix. The government man there is also too much appreciating artists. When I tell him you are artist, he will give.’ Within two minutes I had my card, without which I could not have gone anywhere near the disaster area… Next day the young poet showed up exactly on time, and took me, in a bicycle-rickshaw, through the bazaar to a flat above a sweet-meat shop. The occupant, I was told, was a senior Bengali poet, and he was the mentor of a group of younger men, of whom my new friend was one. The young poets were all university students; the older one was a professor. Though my particular poet had described him as unimaginably ancient, Asif could not have been more than thirty-five. The front-room was filled with unshaven young men, with very Naxalite looks about them, but with manuscripts, rather than AK-47s under their arms. Everyone welcomed me effusively. Asif’s wife brought sweets and tea. I was later told that it had been a singular honour to me that she had appeared in male company at all… I read [my poems], and then, with the younger men all squatting round, Asif and I—we occupied the only two chairs in the room— entered into a political discussion. They were all young and very enthusiastic, and they desperately needed to be understood… the cyclone? ‘Ah, the cyclone, the cyclone,’ Asif said. ‘That is only one more entry in a long list. How have the West Pakistanis helped us? All the other nations offer assistance, even India, but the West Pakistanis sit still. They hoped perhaps for a bigger cyclone, which would wipe us all out.’ Everyone present laughed bitterly. n
Excerpted from A Variety of Absences: The Collected Memoirs of Dom Moraes. 2003.
Non-Fiction
Dacca March 25, 1971: Forewarned?
Nurul Islam
T
he night of the 25th March 1971 turned out to be the night of reckoning. There was great suspense and rumours were rife about some sort of military action by Pakistan. I had lost contact with the team involved in negotiations with Pakistan and there were rumours that negotiations with General Yahya had broken down. Curious to find out any sign of an unusual nature I went out for a drive towards the centre of the city but decided to return. It looked like the lull before a storm. That night there was a very boisterous and largely attended party at the house of my neighbour, a First Secretary in the US Consulate. Around midnight, there was a rumble of tanks and artillery moving along the road towards the New Market and accompanying fire. All this was visible from the rooftop of my nearby house in the Dhanmondi residential area. At the crack of dawn, anxious to know what had happened during the night, I tried my telephones. Finding them disconnected, I walked over to the house of my neighbour, the US First Secretary. His phones were also disconnected. When asked about the occasion for such a big assembly of so many US families in his house, he responded that it was a birthday party for one of his friends and because of the midnight commotions they had stayed overnight. I wondered what so many children of all ages, including infants, were doing at the birthday party of his middle-aged friend. It seemed as if the Americans were forewarned by the Pakistanis about the military crackdown so that they could assemble in the designated houses that would not be in the line of fire and would be safe and out of harm’s way. Next day, a student of mine who was an activist in the National Awami Party (Muzaffar) came to convince me that I was very naive to stay in my house and that I should go underground. In the course of the night, the army had killed numerous civilians, including women and children, Awami League activists and students, in order to quash the struggle for autonomy. My close association with and assistance to Sheikh Mujib during all these years, including active help in the civil disobedience movement, were well-known to the army. They were sure to come looking for me. I heeded the advice given and went underground that day and sure enough, the army came next day, ransacked my house and took away my domestic help for questioning. While hiding from the army, I stayed for a day in Ford Foundation’s guesthouse in the company of one of the American advisers to PIDE [Pakistan Institute of Development Economics] in Dhaka. n
DHAKA TRIBUNE SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 2013
ARTS & LETTERS
Excerpted from Making of a Nation Bangladesh: An Economist’s Tale. 2006.
15