On 16 December 1971, I stayed home all day. The morning and the early part of the afternoon were spent waiting for news about the imminent surrender of the Pakistanis, who by then had grown weak and tired and unable to carry on. And there lay the danger. It is always a tired beast that makes that final lunge before it dies. It is a lunge that leaves, just when you thought everything was turning out to be fine in the end, a lot of blood and debris scattered all around. Over the previous few days, General Niazi had given every reason for Bengalis and the outside world to think that his forces were ready for a fight to the finish. That obviously meant they intended to hang on to Dhaka and slug it out with the Mukti Bahini and the Indian army. In turn, that would have meant more bloodletting, especially in terms of dead Bengali civilians. It was such a fear that had led, between 13 and 15 December, to an exodus of people from the city and towards the rural regions. The frenzy with which people moved out of the city —- and there were many who could not, for all escape routes had become blocked by then —- was a reminder of the earlier maddening rush of men, women and children out of the city in March, only hours after Tikka Khan had gone into implementing his plans of genocide.
   As we prepared for either a long war of attrition between the Pakistanis and our liberators or an unconditional surrender by Niazi, we had no way of knowing that a number of leading Bengali intellectuals had already been picked up by the murder squads of the Jamaat-e-Islami, eventually to be killed and dumped across the brickfields of Rayerbazar. It would not be till the day after liberation that the full import of what had been done to our intellectuals would dawn on us. There was a reason why no one knew that such a macabre last-minute operation by the Pakistanis and their collaborators was going on, obviously to paralyse the new state of Bangladesh at birth. In the final few days before the end of the war, the Pakistani authorities had clamped a curfew all over the city. At night, the curfew was reinforced by the imposition of a blackout. The advantages from such moves were clearly there for the Pakistan army. As the moment of doom approached, it resorted to increasingly bizarre and murderous measures to defend itself. That threat by Niazi to hold out was chilling. And he did not hide his feelings when he appeared before the foreign media already gathered in Dhaka to witness what they were sure was the birth of Bangladesh to tell them that he had not run away, that indeed his enemies would have to take the city over his dead body. Everyone, of course, knew that Niazi’s men were in dire straits. But, again, men forced into a corner fight back with ferocity that is close to being animalistic. That was the fear in people who had remained in the city.
   In the few days prior to the surrender of the Pakistan army, leaflets had been dropped all over Dhaka by the Indians asking Niazi and his men to give up, promising them that if they did so they would be treated according to the terms of the Geneva Conventions. The leaflets were cheerfully picked up by Bengalis as they dropped on to the roofs of their homes or their courtyards. It was easy to see how badly mauled the Pakistani soldiers had been. Indian aircraft flew with ease over the sky, which was a sign that the Pakistan air force had been completely knocked out on the ground. For those of us who stayed and watched developments, with a mixture of fear and hope, the times were momentous in scope. By the evening of 15 December, there were hardly any Pakistani patrols to be seen anywhere. Shwadhin Bangla Betar, All India Radio and the BBC had by then produced detailed accounts of how towns and cities in Bangladesh had already fallen to the joint Indo-Bangladesh command and how rapidly the liberators were proceeding to Dhaka. It was my good fortune to come by a radio conversation between two Pakistani army officers, as I searched for some foreign station for news on Bangladesh, on how their forces were faring. Their dialogue was in Urdu. One asked about a colleague, to which the reply was that he had become a ‘shaheed’ or martyr. Then more questions from the first officer followed, all about other friends in the military. The reply was the same —- every one of them had been ‘martyred’. Then the conversation went dead. For me, it was revealing and I made a point of letting my father know what I had bumped into. He and I then tried to see, through turning the radio knob, if we could listen in to more of those conversations. Nothing happened and we moved on to the BBC Bengali Service. That was less than twenty four hours away from the birth of Bangladesh.]
   In those last few days of Pakistan in our lives, citizens lived on tightly controlled rations. Nearly every household survived on potatoes that had been bought before the curfew had been clamped. In the narrow streets of such middle class areas as Malibagh, the small shops that the soldiers could not spot easily as they went around in their jeeps and trucks, shopkeepers made brisk sales, in clandestine fashion, of some necessary food items such as biscuits, sugar and, of course, potatoes. At that point, there was the apprehension in everyone of how much worse life could turn out to be if the Pakistani soldiers opted for hand-to-hand combat with the Indians and the Bengali guerrillas in the streets and alleys of Dhaka. What if the battle raged on for six months or more? How many more Bengalis would die and how would we deal with the spectre of swollen corpses on the streets? I think it would be fair to say that in mid-December 1971, not many of us truly thought that we would survive the final fury of Pakistan’s soldiers. Indeed, despite all the news of Bengali battlefield triumphs pouring in upon the airwaves, we quite did not foresee the possibility of Dhaka falling any time soon. But despite such foreboding on our part, we were absolutely thrilled seeing the Pakistani military structure fall into disarray. The puppet civilian administration of A.M. Malik had already caved in and Rao Farman Ali was pressing the United Nations, through its representative in Dhaka, for a ceasefire that would allow Pakistani forces to be evacuated to West Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Intercontinental Hotel (today’s Sheraton) had already been converted into a neutral zone under UN auspices where Governor Malik and all the members of his collaborationist cabinet had taken shelter with their families. As the countdown to final victory began, there was no news of big-time collaborators like Khan Abdus Sabur. Only a few days earlier, he had been reported in the newspapers as suggesting that if Bangladesh took birth, it would do so as an illegitimate child of India. Other collaborators —- Nurul Amin, Golam Azam, Mahmud Ali and Raja Tridiv Roy —- were away in Rawalpindi, having travelled there in November to be part of a process by Yahya Khan towards transferring power to a pliable group of politicians. Amin had already been named prime minister in a toothless administration, with Bhutto, already fulminating and screaming away at the United Nations, as deputy prime minister and foreign minister. As the debate in the UN Security Council wore on and as the Soviet Union cast one veto after another against any resolution advocating a ceasefire that would perpetuate Pakistan in Dhaka, we cheered. No Bengali wanted a situation anything less than a total military defeat for the Pakistanis.
   In the light of a fading afternoon on 16 December, we heard, at first tentatively and then in decisive clarity, slogans of Joi Bangla in the neighbourhood. My friend Billal, who managed a small grocery nearby, came panting to tell us excitedly that the Pakistan army had surrendered. Suddenly, everybody I knew began running about excitedly, almost in a state of delirium. Everyone was hugging everyone else, with many unable to hold back their tears. We were all, suddenly and dramatically, citizens of Pakistan no more. East Pakistan had finally, thankfully died and we were now the free citizens of a free Bangladesh. Some of my neighbours, all sturdy young men and wracked by the terrible memories of the past nine months, went off to look for razakars to catch and punish.
   I went for my radio. Dhaka radio, which had been dishing out all forms of Pakistani nonsense in the final days of the war, was now liberated, like the rest of us. A happy male voice was reciting srishti shukher ullashe. The song Joi Bangla Banglar Joi was played over and over. And then flowed the voice of Abdul Jabbar. Hajar bochhor pore abar eshechhi phire / Banglar booke aachhi danrhiye, he sang. A little while later, it was the BBC World Service I tuned in to. The emergence of Bangladesh was the lead headline. On All India Radio, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was telling parliament, to rapturous applause from all lawmakers, that Dhaka was now the free capital of a free country.
   As afternoon made way to evening, we tempered our triumphalism with remembrance of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. No one knew if he was alive in Pakistan. The last anyone had heard of him was when the military junta put him on trial in Mianwali before a special military tribunal in August. For all one knew late on 16 December 1971, the father of the nation could already have been put to death by his enemies. We prayed for him, as the night deepened. No one went to sleep, for the world was talking about Bangladesh.