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Faces � An Expatriate�s Letter from Dhaka.
Published on February 13, 2007 Dear Friends, Perhaps all of us in this list remember the Netrokona suicide bombing in December 2005. Such news disappears from the media and our memory too soon. A man on a bicycle had carried a bomb to a crowd, killing and wounding many. Perhaps none of us knew directly any of the victims. Only abstractly, we knew that the people affected were real, that somewhere there was a mother, a father, a brother, a sister.
No, it is not that we must have a direct relationship with the victims to care about a crime. Indeed, what sort of world would it be if we care about injustice and oppression only when we are affected personally? And yet, we know too that such considerations need a connection to people to become real and true. Our concern and our condolences must be a hand in support, an embrace, words heard by the aggrieved; and to understand the news, to be with people, we need to see faces behind the reports. Thus - a visit in January that I speak of below, if there are some who find it of interest.
Netrokona, the town I went to, is in the north east region of Bangladesh. You can go there by car in about three and half hours from the capital. The road is a strip of grey on a green landscape of cultivated fields spread all the way to the horizon. In winter mornings a thick fog comes to hide all that is a stones throw away. An overloaded truck, a packed bus, a lone rickshaw � materialize out of absolutely nothing. In the summer the rainfall in this region is among the heaviest in Bangladesh. All these can make the journey a little difficult even in the best of times.
Once you are there, after the road trip, it is peaceful and very quiet, as if on a remote island. The town is about 50 thousand people. Small bungalow homes lie in rows by the narrow streets. A short walk in any direction gives way to the open fields of the countryside. It is very peaceful and life has a certain simplicity. It is a gentler sort of life. Strangers trust each other, the language is softer and, there is much hospitality and kindness.
It is not a backwater by any means. This area was a site of much activity during the resistance against British rule in India. The Tebagha movement happened here. A major three day All India Peasant Conference was held here in 1945. Today many progressive groups like Bangladesh Nari Progoti Songstha and Udichi are active here. Perhaps as much as 30% of the population is non-muslim. With this diversity and history of progressive culture it is not a mystery that this town became the target of religious extremists.
In my visit I met many people, victims of that infamous attack, families. Today I want to speak of Shudipta Rani Paul. �Shelly� as she was known to her friends, lived with her parents in a one room bungalow. On this morning that I was there, the sun streamed in from a window though the branches of a tree and the floor shone bright. It is a small home but pretty, clean, colorful, spare. The family belongings gathered in one room underline the simplicity of their life: two beds, a bookshelf, a glass almirah in which are framed a few pictures of Shudipta.
Shudipta was a beautiful vivacious young woman. In the pictures you see her youthful, amongst friends, with family, in plays performed on stage, in a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Kerala. She had had many friends. No doubt her friends were gladdened by someone who rose above the plainness of her surroundings in such enthusiasm for the arts, for her activism with the women of the town, for her singing and indeed - for life. Plays were her passion and Udichi was a good organization for her. Udichi is one of the oldest cultural organizations in the country, mass based in its music, drama, dance, fine arts and literature. The majority of its performances are street plays. One - Itihas Katha Kao (�Speak, History!�) has been performed over 1,050 times.
On this morning, Shudipta�s mother entered the room. Grief was fresh on her face.
She was sobbing. �The boy did not want to be left there. He cried and cried begging me to not leave him there.�
This boy she was crying for is Shudipta�s younger brother. He is there in a picture, perhaps late teens, handsome, a smile on his face. He had been suffering from mental illness. In the non-existent mental health system in Bangladesh, the only option after a point is to leave him in the one �mental asylum� in the country that is little more than a prison. So infamous is this institution that it is not known by its own name but by the name of the town it is situated in, at another end of the country, and that name is used in insults. So that is what had happened, after Shudipta�s death, just before this bright morning of my visit.
Shudipta�s father is a slim, pepper haired man of perhaps little more than sixty. A retired schoolteacher, frailer than his age, he recently developed serious health problems. But on this day he could only speak of his daughter: she was the only earning member of the family and she it was who had cared for the entire family. All her small earnings from the women�s NGO that she worked in went to support the family - mother, father, brother. She used to love her work, her plays. She was born in this one roomed house we were in today, and here it was that she had grown up.
The room didn�t have many things, but it had sunshine. Once this sunshine had warmth, children�s laughter, happiness. Here a little baby girl was born, spoke her first words, played with her dolls, did her school work, grew up and cared for sick parents. And here, in this room, is one of the oldest stories of humankind, a story repeated endlessly through the ages and never the lesser, a story that has been told by others in far better ways than I can, this tragedy unlike any for a mother and a father: the child dies.
Now - a thousand memories in each corner of their home, overlapping one other as the layers of a ruined city, each one evoking that which is no longer, each calling a name that is no longer even a name. Now � the emptiness of it! And yet, fate does not leave them alone. This home, where they had lived so long, where their children were born, so heavy with memories, tragic and familiar, this too may not be theirs anymore. The landlord on whose land they rented this room, he is selling the land, and the future for Shudipta�s parents is uncertain.
This morning, in the Udichi bungalow nearby, the same one which was the target of the bombs and where Shudipta suffered her fatal wounds � for she had not died instantly, but lingered on with her broken body for almost a day � people gathered to mark the 30 day passage of the atrocity. The room was full of men and women. It was a subdued atmosphere, sorrowful. People wept quietly. There was not much talk of bringing the perpetrators to justice. Perhaps people despair of it. The killer destroyed himself. Alive are the real perpetrators of the crime, anonymous and arrogant, the tentacles of their power assiduously cultivated over decades today mixed in with the life blood of the country, in the schools, in the police barracks, in the fashionable homes of the power brokers of the elite.
But powerful though they may be, these evil ones do not have the hearts of the people of the land. Ordinary people, those who do not seek to be bribed by power or money, they see today�s fascists for what they are. People remember, too, those other atrocities that were perpetrated by the same criminals at the very birth of Bangladesh. They can win if they consider murder a victory, but they can not convince us, can not win us over, for to do that they would have to have tolerance, reason and humanity on their side, which is precisely what they lack. So long there are people who oppose them and extend sympathy and help to our traumatized communities, those enemies of the people have not won, for each of their crime shout aloud their sub humanity.
For Shudipta
and all the other martyred activists of Udichi, may we pay homage with a
few lines from Neruda?
Sister, you do not sleep, no, you do not sleep.
Pure is your gentle name, pure is your fragile life. Of bee, shadow, fire, snow, silence, foam, of steel, line, pollen was built your tough, your slender structure.
They are your people, sister: those who today speak your name, we who from everywhere, from the water and the land, with your name leave unspoken and speak other names.
Because fire does not die.
In Solidarity,
Nurul Kabir Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia Cambridge, MA USA
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