Birds of Paradise
Three captivating short stories on the Bangladesh Freedom Struggle that vividly capture the disruption and outbreak of violence during the period.
This is part of Jamhoor’s special issue Borders & Border-making in South Asia.
Muktijuddho (Liberation War). Illustration: Roopbaan
Illustration: Wendy Nanan
Ibrahim Sayed stepped up to the dusty spot before the three black cricket stumps and wiped droplets of sweat from his forehead. It was a humid and unusually sunny day in March and the Cadet College Boys Cricket Team was playing against the prestigious Aga Khan School. It was the fourth hour of the five-hour match, the score was tied and his bright green polyester top clung uncomfortably to his skinny rib cage.
Over the dry, browning grass field, a peculiar audience had gathered, unencumbered by the heat. Some were mothers dressed in stiffly starched saris sitting in spotless white chairs. The housewives sipped bitter imported lemonade through imported plastic straws while discussing worldly matters like Ricky’s wedding announcement to Fatty Monika and Dolly’s upcoming tea party that afternoon. Polite laughter fluttered for an ephemeral moment before being replaced by another oppressive heatwave.
Next to the well-fed wives were the unmentionables, the chai-wallahs and rickshaw drivers who were as numerous in the city as fleas on mangy dogs. The men scratched their once-white wife beaters freely and joked through paan-stained teeth. These were Ibrahim’s family. They cheered him on when he was studying candle-lit night after candle-lit night, bringing him snacks when he was hungry, and dispensing smacks when he was about to give up. Now their faces glowed with joy, proud of their little wunderkind. Their laughter floated lazily through the air like self-satisfied toads basking in midday heat at the village pond.
With damp batting gloves, Ibrahim clutched the light brown wooden bat. He anxiously scraped his white sneakers against the dusty ground and felt the piercing blue eyes of the wicketkeeper monitoring his every move, crouching low with his dark gray keeping gloves outstretched like a ravenous predator. It was the same wicketkeeper who had taunted him on the first day of class, yelling, “Hey, chai wallah’s son! Where’s my food?” When Ibrahim received top marks, he heard their peals of laughter following him.
With too much time and too few friends, Ibrahim had started to take walks on weekends, wandering the College’s grounds until he learned every nook and cranny. He came to know when the chokas would come to rest alongside the lake in the southeast corner of the campus, where the sunset would meld with the grebes’ dark orange wings and red eyes. During monsoon seasons, he took shelter with the small gibbons under the magnanimous leaves of the banana trees that dotted the eastern borders of the campus. During hot summer seasons, he would leave out bowls of water for the grateful, thirsty dholes, watching the foxes dart furtively toward the bowls with their bushy black-tipped tails trailing low from the protective shadows of the forest.
Besides these walks, Ibrahim liked weekly cricket games. It was the only time when he felt the genuine admiration of his classmates, the only time when he could be sure that he had earned the praise they lavished on at the end of every game. During the free time that the boys had every evening from four to five, he would be out on the field, running plays with imaginary teammates. He knew everything about the cricket field—that the field dipped in the middle, that the pitcher’s run was slanted ever so slightly toward the top, that you had to run ever so fast to avoid the pitfalls on the pitch.
Usually, when he had his trustworthy cricket bat tucked under his hands, he felt calm. Today, though, the once familiar cricket field felt foreign. Everywhere Ibrahim looked, it was a sea of white faces in uniform white masks and white chest barriers to protect them from some still-unknown danger. He lifted the bat into position, ready to strike, and watched the bowler’s arm come up and his feet stampede into pitch.
Unexpectedly, the sentinel dhotori came running down, the first time anyone had seen the man leave the belfry in the middle of the tallest building on the well-groomed campus. Behind his back, everyone called him Atlas because he sternly watched over all of them with his straight back and thick handlebar moustache, his starched uniform. Yet, today Atlas, who once seemed so strong and powerful, only squeaked like a reedy flute.
“They’ve started shooting! They’re here! The Pakistanis are here!”
The crack of Ibrahim’s wooden bat hitting the bright red ball echoed through the hushed field like the snap of a dry bone in the mouth of a hungry wolf. It thudded onto the grass, a drop of vermillion in a sea of green. They had lost the game, though they didn’t know then that it was only the beginning.
Illustration: Karen Haydock
Inside the dusty, hot kitchen, Hasina quietly strangled the baby quail and started to defeather it. Next, naked and massaged with masala, the quail fried in a vat of bubbling oil on the open fire in her small kitchen area. Hasina’s masala recipe was passed down to her from her mother who had learned it from her mother and so on back to the Mughals. During her quiet moments, Hasina liked to look at her face in the passing river and pretend she resembled the Mughal Queen, Jodha, known for her charisma and storytelling prowess.
Oil splattered the surrounding tan walls and the heat from the fire made Hasina sweat through her thin cotton blouse and sari. Her hair hung in a braid trailing down mid-hip, tied with a practical black cotton ribbon. She spent most of her day in this claustrophobic room, endlessly chopping, stirring, measuring and flipping. At the end of the day, she would take the blackened pots from the kerosine stove and scrub, scrub, scrub with steel wool until it shone bright silver like the ring she hoped to get someday from a sweetheart.
In the small doorstep, a smug kak scratched the hard ground, its beady black eyes staring into Hasina’s own. Hasina tried not to make a noise as the bird came closer and closer to her. When she was younger, her Amma said that she had made the ugliest crying noises like the kak’s. Her father had found it so deplorable, her Amma reproached, that he had left the family—leaving her with an ungrateful daughter and good-for-nothing sons. When her Amma finally passed, Hasina had learned to take care of the household, to cook and clean and the hundred other things a woman must manage.
She had even learned to ignore whatever current foolish ideas her brothers obsessed over. Her brothers, self-declared revolutionaries in flowing white thobes, strode in, hungry and tired from another day of fighting the enemy. Unemployed and undereducated, they were seduced by the idea of the motherland, a beautiful nation to accompany them to important, manly affairs dressed in dazzling attire. Hasina did not care whether the country was independent. She was much more preoccupied with the alarming rate at which her brothers’ new comrades would consume their food with little to offer in return.
Hasina scurried with tiffin boxes of rice, meat, and curried vegetables to where they were sitting cross-legged on a plaid patterned cloth over the beaten ground. Crushing the birds’ small bones between their teeth, the brothers callously calculated the daily number of deaths. For them, it was like keeping score at the cricket game, each death another strike.
“No man,” long-haired, righteous Mitul declared, “should have to be a slave to anyone else.” Standing in the shadows, Hasina brought out more food in quiet servitude.
Today, the quiet mannered, well-spoken Satish had joined her brothers. Unlike the others with their shaved heads and well-toned muscles, Satish wore glasses and carried a purse like a woman. He liked to spend his days talking to the villagers, nodding his head and writing down their words on his spiral notebooks. He called this project an “oral history,” though the villagers didn’t believe anyone would be interested in hearing their measly tales. Old Uncle Faruk liked to tease Satish, telling him, “Today it is October 17th, 1965! I passed a small movement, three stools, they looked like rotund Eid ladoos! Why don’t you write that in your book, it’s important history!”
Once, Satish had even asked Hasina for her history. They were standing by the pond, Hasina washing her brother's clothes and Satish watching her from behind the curtain of banana leaves. As he waited expectantly for her answer, Hasina couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye, focusing instead on the snow-white lilies floating mellifluously through the water. And though she had wanted to respond, she just started running back, back to the safety of her little kitchen.
Sometimes she thought back to that moment and wished she had spoken. But then he would have heard her voice, the way it s-s-s-so-sounded so strange. The w-w-words ca-cam-came out with a mind of their own. She remembers trying to tell her b-b-bro-brothers about the way the other children teased her, shoving her around while they spit lychee seeds in her face, hard black pits leaving pockmarks. Her brothers told her that if she couldn’t speak normally, then maybe she shouldn’t speak at all. So how could she have responded to Satish when her voice didn’t even r-r-r-respond to her?
Besides, unlike Hasina whose parents had worked meagre government jobs at the local train station, Satish’s parents were in politics. That meant that he lived in the nicer side of town where there were footpaths and magical taps that delivered water straight to their sinks, and even a machine that was able to keep their food cold through the most humid days. Well, so Hasina had heard during one of her Amma’s extended gossip sessions.
As for Satish, he liked to come to the shabby household, to see himself among the proletariat. He liked to eat Hasina's quail, so lovingly prepared, the meat supple and young. He liked the way she served food, eyes lowered to the ground, taking one hesitant step after another, carefully taking stock from a corner of the small courtyard. Sometimes, he caught her eye and she would stare back like a pecha in the middle of the night with its yellow pupils, yellow twin moons surrounded by black rings.
Hasina liked to hear Satish’s voice, its preponderant ability to pontificate on a single point for hours at end. Illiterate herself, she could hardly follow the maze of these monologues. She liked the way he spoke Bangla, a soft, cool breeze on a warm summer night. Some of the vowels rose and dipped like the ridges of the tin roof while others were hard like large raindrops pounding the ground, signaling the start of the monsoon season. Together, they made a harmony she wanted to listen to forever.
Today, Hasina wore her most beautiful sari, a black silk affair with a mosaic of gold flakes dotting the side. She pinned a white garland around her coiled updo. Today was important. It was the day she was going to finally get the courage to speak, to b-b-be-bend her voice to her will, to unleash rainstorms inside. She had practiced every night for the past year, and could finally curve her tongue enough so that it would reach the roof of her mouth and the bottom quick enough to say “I love you.” Today, she would be beautiful and courageous.
When she entered the courtyard, everyone was so still; so still that Hasina had thought for a moment that her plan had worked. She scanned the room, eager to find Satish when she noticed the three soldiers and their black guns. All of a sudden, like sudden thunder in the middle of summer, there were shouts and screams and Hasina lost control not only of her voice but also her body. When the soldiers came for her, Hasina was so pecha-like that the soldiers thought she had simply frozen from fright and left her alone.
When she was finally able to move, when the soldiers had left, Hasina tried to find Satish. She left their house to find naked limbs sprawled around the village, the hands and legs indistinguishable from the building rubble and personal detritus. The smell of rotting flesh, of leftover gunsmoke from rifles permeated the air, making her vomit over the remains of a little boy. The bones and teeth sticking out made her feet bleed, leaving a fresh cardinal trail on the already dried ground. Her task was helpless, the faces of her neighbors mutilated beyond identification. Random spots of blood splattered on the walls of every house like the oil spots that had once dotted the walls of Hasina’s kitchen.
Overhead, the sun beat down relentlessly, which made the smell of rotting bodies from the nearby house more odious. Hasina hadn’t known that the dead could be so repugnant. She crouched low next to a kak. In a matter of minutes, the smug kak flew away. Too late, Hasina heard the soldiers’ footsteps and gasped as a cold hand touched her feverish forehead. She turned to see a face almost as young as her brother’s, brows furrowed in concentration. After a long, quiet moment, he passed his canteen. When she went to move her lips, he pressed his finger against them.
“There’s no one here!” he cried to the waiting troop in Urdu, slowly getting back up.
Still frozen, Hasina listened to the troop go farther and farther away. Through her cracked lips, she whispered a silent prayer for the soldiers. For the next few months, she survived by eating only fruits and small insects and drinking stream water from the dented canteen. Maybe she had seen Satish but didn’t recognize him. Maybe he had changed his name, the same way her country changed its name. When the country had grown up and started to forget about the war, she still carried the canteen for good luck.
“Banglar maera meyera shokolei mukti juddha.” “Mothers and daughters of Bengal are all freedom fighters.”. Credits: 1971 War Poster by Nitun Kundu
Hidden in the shrubs, Arman could hear the calls of the tuntuni bird as it sewed its nest together from scraps of paper and twigs. Across the street, five soldiers patrolled the streets. When the soldiers first started, they had come one by one like solitary Bengali tigers stalking their victim. Now they walked unabashed in groups of five or six like vultures waiting to strike on their next prey. Soon, he was worried, they would populate the city like cockroaches hiding in every nook and cranny. His father had told him that he should always hide whenever he saw these monsters lurking, so Arman crouched lower in the bush.
Slowly growing more and more afraid, Arman started to talk to the birds, telling them about his dreams of becoming a radio host, his fears of never gaining a voice deep enough. He told them that he liked to run in the streets when it was monsoon season and the water swelled up to his knees. He told them that Mina next door made him feel strangely protective, that he was happy whenever she was around and angry when she cried. He told them that he was afraid of the big men who took away his father, who took Mina's father in the middle of the night.
Most of all, he told them about his mother, the secret superhero. She was better than the Superman all his friends talked about, stronger than the Hulk, smarter than Professor X. The first time he found out about her powers, he told them, he had not realized how powerful she was. It was midnight yet he was awakened by the sound of static down the hall. Sleepily, he walked across the dark, cross-tiled floor to discover his mother working hard, writing in a book with “স্বাধীনতা” on the cover in bright red writing and a raised fist. Though he couldn’t read yet, she had taken his fingers and traced the contour of the letters, telling him it meant shadhinata, “freedom.”
Over the next few nights, she told him a lot about shadhinata in urgent whispers, most of which he didn’t quite understand. There were bad men, wolves with rifles and machetes who did not want people like his mother to speak. These bad men did bad things like hurt innocent people. They were, Arman privately thought, a lot like the bullies in school. Together, he and his mother would practice speaking Bangla, always in whispers, always in the dark. Every night, she told him “Above anything, you are a Bengali. You must never forget where you come from, what you are.”
In school, though, Arman had to speak Urdu, and had to change his mouth to fit these harsh words. To Arman, the sounds were dull, flat blunts that hit his skin like the rounded balls the other boys would pelt him with during playground time. It was the scratchy uniform he had to don every morning, rubbing his skin until it was scarlet. It was the slaps he would get from his teachers for being stupid and slow. It felt like his skin slowly heated up from being under the gaze of an interrogation lamp in the principal's office. Remembering the nights with his mother, though, gave him strength. Now, when he was being beaten by bullies, he kept repeating the word, shadhinata. He, too, was a superhero.
Sometimes strange men and women would come into the house, in loose white cotton clothing, carrying large black weapons. There was something purposeful about them, something that made him think that he was a part of some greater game. It gave him a zap of energy, like jumping into an ice-cold pool during the winter. When the visitors came, he would sleep with his mother. He would fall asleep with his arms wrapped around her as she whispered Bangla lullabies to him, the words wrapping around him like a warm blanket that had just finished drying outside on the clothesline.
With a shudder, Arman realized that there was a small snake in front of him. Staring at the dull-colored venomous devil in front of him, he began to panic. Breathing in and out, he tried to reassure himself. He tried to keep quiet, to hold his breath though his heart seemed to pump louder and louder, trying to mimic the way his ayah would sweep his bedroom in the morning, the soft swish-swish waking him up for school. He couldn’t hold it for much longer.
Arman screamed. He saw the soldiers immediately stiffen and turn in his direction. There was no way he could escape now. They came closer and closer, trapping him in every direction. In his white t-shirt, tan khakis and off-white sneakers, Arman ran toward the soldier’s gleaming machete, screaming “Shadhinata!” like the hero his mother always told him he was.
Nuha Fariha is a first generation queer Bangladeshi American. She will be starting her Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University in Fall 2021. Her work can be found on Stone of Madness Press, Tealight Press, Jamhoor and Magma. Currently she lives in Philadelphia with her partner and their 5 month old infant. You can find her on Instagram @nuhawrites.