Surviving the slaughter of innocents

Debdas Chakraborti, '1971 as I saw it', oil on canvas

EVERY year April 3, the most dreaded day in my life, sends a chilling shiver of panic down my spine. It is a poignant and sordid narrative of how on this day in 1971 my life, like that of many others, was shattered to pieces foreve. We were caught unaware by the gruesome and grisly terror of death and destruction unleashed by the occupation Pakistan army on the unsuspecting civilian population in an outskirt neighbourhood of Dhaka city across the Buriganga river. Ever since then, this incident has been known as the Jinjira massacre. It is a lurid account of brazen ethnic cleansing, a ruthless execution of racial hatred and extermination campaign of Bangalis. 

December 1970 was the happiest moment in my life in particular, and for the Bangalis in general. I had just returned to my work in Islamabad after nine months of training in West Germany and there was a happy reunion with my wife and children. Bangalis had won a landside victory in the national election held in December, winning 67 seats out of 69 seats earmarked for East Pakistan in the constituent National Assembly. There were great expectations that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would soon be sworn as Prime Minister. The end of exploitation and tyranny, deprivation and discrimination of Bengalis was within sight.

But soon the joy evaporated and was turned into despair. President General Yahya, in collusion with the military clique and conspiratorial Zulfikar Bhutto, the PPP leader in West Pakistan in a nationwide broadcast on March1 postponed the March 3 constituent assembly session. 

These were the writings on the wall. I told my wife that we could not waste another minute. I applied for 10 days casual leave, giving the excuse of my ailing father.  

On the appointed day of my departure, as I was preparing to leave my house, I saw my wife watering the vegetable garden at the backyard and the flowers in the garden. She gave a long lingering look to take in the scene of her little home that she had built with care and fondness over the years. A look of sadness and melancholy in her face was unmistakable. 

As we boarded the plane, we saw some rough looking men occupying almost the entire plane. These were definitely soldiers in civilian clothes. I told my father about this as soon as I got home. He said he would duly arrange to inform Bangabandhu. Meanwhile Yahya and Bhutto kept Bangabandhu and other Awami League leaders engaged in dialogue negotiating the terms of the six-point demands with no result. It was clear that the dialogue was a mere cover to gain time for an army crackdown. The Pakistani treachery and betrayal on the dark night of March 25 is now known to all.

People were leaving the city in panic. Soon our neighbourhood in Elephant road looked deserted. Rumours were rife about an impending house to house search, and detention by the army. Our village home in Kasba, bordering India was a mud house not fit to stay in. My father decided to take shelter in the house of his Khan Bahadur friend in Faridpur where my father was a superintendent of police in 1949. 

On March 31, the entire family including my parents, my elder brother Professor Momen and his wife and two children, my younger brothers Hasnat and Abdur Rashid, my three sisters, my wife, our two sons and I left our Elephant Road house. 

As we were crossing the Buriganga, my mother, who had high blood pressure, suddenly became very ill. We decided to stay put in Jinzira until my mother recovered. We took shelter, sharing a wide veranda with other refugees, in a two-storied building.  We spent three nights in Jinjira. On April 3, at dawn, we were awakened by three loud bursts of mortal shells in our vicinity. Everybody ran helter-skelter in panic. I took my older son in my arms and my wife held our younger son in one arm and her bag in the other and started running towards the south as the shell fire was coming from the north. No sooner had we covered some distance towards the south, we heard shooting from the south. We then started running towards the east but soon found people running from that direction as well. We were trapped. My wife was lagging behind and fell down on the ground under the weight of our son and the bag she was carrying. I pleaded with her repeatedly to let go of the bag and finally though reluctantly, she threw it away. When we arrived at a mosque for shelter, we saw that it was filled to the brim. There was a graveyard behind the mosque and we found people hiding in the graves. There were a few vacant graves covered with creepers and leafs. We cleared the grave of grass and leaves and hid there. After about half an hour, the sound of gun shots stopped. People rose from the graves and gathered in front of the mosque. It was surreal. We too followed them. An elderly person asked us to follow him to his house nearby when he saw that my wife Shelly's sari was wet with clay. His wife gave my wife a sari to wear and he gave me a spare lungi to wear. He then sent for a boat to take us to Dhaka. 

Early next morning the entire family returned home miraculously unharmed. Abba narrated how he ran some distance alone and took shelter in an abandoned hut. The army aimed their guns at him twice. He uttered, 'La ilaha illah.' They spared him. After the army left Jinjira at noon, Abba went out in search for us. The village was littered with dead bodies. In the evening, he went to the house where we had taken shelter. There he met our entire family. Momin bhai explained how he and others took shelter in a mosque nearby as mother could not run. When the army entered the mosque in search of young people, Momin bhai, Hasnat and Rashid sat behind the row of women standing at the rear. The army picked a few young people and left.  

In May, Hasnat went to join his duties in Patuakhali at the prodding of chief secretary Shafiul Azam. Rashid disappeared to join the ranks of the freedom fighters. My older brother Dr. Momin left his job in Hammersmith Hospital in London and joined the field hospital of Melaghar under Major Khaled Mosharraf. I kept moving from Elephant road to Dhanmondi, to Shahjahanpur to Laxmibazar and back to Elephant Road to evade arrest. 

An estimated 3,000 men, women and children were killed in the Jinjira massacre.

It is true that all of us barely escaped with our lives in Jinjira. But my life was not the same again. My wife gradually became silent, distant and withdrawn. Doctors treating her at home and abroad said she suffered the irreversible loss of her memory, stunned by the trauma of the assault in Jinjira. I sometimes think that she might have thrown away fragments of herself when she parted with her bag, containing her little world of precious possessions like her wedding sari, wedding photo album, and other personal knickknacks. She led a miserable existence of self imposed loneliness and isolation for the rest of her life until she died a few years ago. Shelley, my wife, indeed paid a heavy price for freedom. She is one of the many unknown heroes of the liberation war. As for me, I have been carrying the scar ever since and etching out a meaningless existence without purpose, colour and pulsation of life. 

The writer is a contributor to The Daily Star and a former diplomat.