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Bipun babu and his Bangladesh
by Afsan Chowdhury
SOME names always return, decrepit and used but ever ready to tell the same stories to my old ears and to anyone else who might want to hear. In that war year called 1971, when every life was weaving tales, some tall and some black dripping with rain or blood, some just sat and drank the cheap liquor that Dhaka still sold to citizens in amber bottles marked with drug dose labels. Bipin babu was one of them.
He lived, a late middle-aged Hindu in Dilu Road, where our extended family had homes. My uncles had a sign painting business and Bipin babu along with several other Hindu painters worked in it, some lived nearby too. He was a chronic alcoholic and in those wonderfully tolerant days, nobody cared and as long as he could work, he was fine. In fact, when he had one of his stupors, he slept it out and nobody minded. He had no interest in what we call politics, not even when Sheikh Mujib won. He had only two passions, Mohammedan Sporting Club of Dhaka and his booze.
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WHEN the war was sweeping through Dhaka on the night of the 25th, a particular target for attack were the slums of Dhaka. Spread all over the city, huddled masses of rage and despair, there is a particular fear and disgust in Pakistani voices as they have talked of these slums in 1971. They say that, in most processions, the angriest eyes belonged largely to the unfed poor of Dhaka. These were those who dared to imagine politics beyond Dhaka’s middle-class radicalism, the made-for-success liberal nationalism and the rest of the waiting classes expecting victory and comfort. These people whom even some of the sturdy generals of Pakistan feared saw many enemies and their throats rang loudest because it’s that hunger that fed their rage, that made them want blood if need be, for a reckoning they thought had come.
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EVEN as I have spent digging the history of 1971 for over three decades and feel that I know the contours of that history fairly well, it’s the invisibilisation of the urban slum-dwellers from history that surprises me. No heroic myths have grown around them, no tales of their suffering rendered as they were mowed down by Pakistani bullets, no honour designated for the poor and the fallen as they faced the wrath of the enemy and paid for their rage, so well-caught in Pakistani eyes.
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I ONCE did a survey of some of the main points of Pakistani attack on Dhaka and that in many ways describe the image of the enemy to them. The central attack was on Dhaka University, largely deserted and left with few students with most at Jagannath Hall. The university was the breeder of revolts. They attacked Rajarbagh and Pilkhana, both points of armed resistance to Pakistan. They went for the university teachers, the intellectuals who had concretised the nationalist movement for all to see and gather around. They went for several other places too including for some individuals like Lt Com Moazzem Hossain, the man who masterminded the Agartala conspiracy case of 1969 and was tried but forced to be released by Pakistan in the face of public agitation. He was killed by a special group meant just for him. Pakistanis have a long memory and the military even more so.
Yet, what remain largely unreported are the attacks on the slums of Dhaka.
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DHAKA’S urban poor, in the forgotten language of yesteryears’ class politics – the lumpen proletariats of Dhaka – not only paid the highest price in blood but also were paid the lowest wages in terms of memory. Just nobody remembers who they were in 1971, where they disappeared from history and why. Perhaps the cause lies in our own attentions.
That we pay to when we construct history and why for our conveniences.
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THE Pal para slum on which the Sonargaon Hotel largely sits was a slum populated mostly by Hindus from the working class. On the night of the 25th, the army stopped their trucks and sprayed the shanties with bullets like decorations of rage that came deep from their hate and fear. Perhaps it was the perfect expression of rage of a state that was anti-poor and also anti-Hindu. From the roof of our house we saw the scene. It was one of the many that made us so strangely dumb next morning.
I have returned again and again to record the words of the Jagannath Hall slum of 4th class employees, the organised residences of the lowest class who hoard the memory of that night as they were led out and shot and they carried their dead and dying home to the hovels and listen to final words. That is unless they themselves were already dead.
I remember the Hindus because like their impoverished Muslim brothers, the burdened history of Bangladesh has offered no space for either remembering them or remembering their memories. The next day after March 25, the people fanned out from the many slums of Dhaka to go home and to the villages to become part of another narrative, of the villages in 1971. We remember the villages largely with the memories that were carried back by the visiting middle and upper class, escaping Dhaka to rural sanctuaries for safety.
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AFTER March 25, several residents of Pal para came to stay with us including our childhood pal Moron Chandra Das, his wife and child, members of the sweeper caste. Others did too. Some left Dhaka for safety from amongst the painters group. Bipin babu stayed on. His family moved away with other relatives but he didn’t. I think it was his anxiety about finding alcohol on the run that made him a citizen of that terrible moment in that city we call Dhaka still.
He would loiter the whole day in the neighbourhood and felt safe as everyone knew him and nobody in that para considered handing over anyone to Pakistanis a patriotic task. Nobody, not even Mr Ahmed and his family, the retired gentleman from Urdu-speaking India, who had settled in Dhaka and was raising seven daughters. After victory was won, these innocent people’s house was looted and the looters later returned for other booty but mercifully for all, the family had taken shelter in neighbour’s homes and reached safety. Much later they left for Pakistan, leaving their home and house behind which has been occupied by so many since then.
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BIPIN babu had one really close brush with Pakistan in 1971. Everyone kept an eye on him so that he would not get lost and be found by the soldiers but he did wander off, drunk and singing, right there to the main Eskaton Avenue. As he was crossing the road he was stopped. His full name was Bipin Bihari Pal and he blurted that out and lord knows what happened but they let him go after planting a mighty kick on his backside. Perhaps they could not be bothered as the war wasn’t going well for them or maybe they thought he was a ‘Bihari’ or maybe at that point they just didn’t care.
Struggling with pain the next day, he told everyone that what saved him was his expertise of foreign languages. He had said ‘public friend’ when stopped and this was in English while holding a conversation with them in Urdu.
He survived the nine months, still hugging his bottles, his work or whatever and not really worried about much else.
Once in a while he would sing.
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WHEN I saw him in 1972, he was quite disturbed. His family had decided to move to India after experiencing what everyone had gone through. He refused to go. He said he had lived in Dhaka all his life and would be a stranger in Kolkata. His wife would not give up and finally his whole family put so much pressure that he agreed. By that time, he had become a grandfather and I suppose that mellowed him and pulled him to his family.
He said goodbye to all and left. After six months or so, he returned back. He complained the whole day about everything India but mostly about food. They had very little rice, fish or anything that he liked. He said his family had alu bhaji-chapati for breakfast which he considered blasphemous. He had always had rice for the all important first meal and of course for the rest of them. Kolkata was not worth it.
Yet very soon, the socioeconomics of the new times began to exert its will on him. He found that work was drying up, fish and rice had become so dear that for a person like him, machh-bhat was a luxury and as his plate became smaller his bangla mod doses increased. While drunk, he would abuse the desh, the land that had stolen his fish, his rice and even laid a hand on his liquor.
One day after almost a year of struggle, he disappeared again.
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ALMOST two years after that, as the BAKSAL days were in full force, I spied him sitting in the dark near the walls of our garage on the narrow lane. Normally, he would have a great chat with me but this time, he just saw me and went back to his bottle. I didn’t know what to say to him, didn’t know why he was here again.
‘So bhaiya, how is your Bangladesh?’ The voice was dark with memories and despair. ‘So you all went to fight this war and make this country? How is Bangladesh doing?’
I didn’t say anything because I had nothing to say. He sat there ignoring me and went back to his bottle which he was emptying rapidly. I had things on my mind too. Within a few days he had disappeared again. He had disappeared to be a stranger in a distant land, which he doesn’t call home and gone away from a land in which he has become a stranger and cannot call it his home again.
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FOR the poor of Dhaka, migration is never to another state or distance; it is always to a new reality. Most don’t have to move to another land to be cast out of history for roads don’t open to them to reach any lands promised. They are forever the citizens of shadows, neither complete in life nor in memory and least of all in the map of people who make up Bangladesh.
Once in a while, I wonder if Bipin babu’s alcoholic body has made it so far but chances are poor. I wonder if he went into exile or he exiled Bangladesh from him.
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