The poise, the grace, the detached analysis of the political trajectory of the country and the unique matter-of-factness with which he discusses his own experience of life come to a deeply emotional closure when journalist Ali Ahmed Khan writes the short epilogue of his memoirs Jeevan Aik Kahani [Life: A Tale]. Let me attempt a somewhat liberal translation of the book’s ending lines from Urdu: “I don’t know how a person is impacted in general if he is repeatedly settled and ruined during the course of his life. But for me, this has meant the past continuously eclipsing my present and the fear of an uncertain future permanently seizing my mind. I always feel scared that my home will be plundered once again. When I see children in my family growing up, I dread they are not massacred once again.”

Khan’s memoirs capture his early and middle life, but there is a definite focus on exploring the social, cultural, political and attitudinal reasons that led to the creation of Bangladesh. He relates his family history of living across the subcontinent before 1947, followed by multiple migrations as a consequence of, first, the partition of British India and, then, the dismemberment of Pakistan. He then effortlessly interlaces his personal and professional life with political and social upheavals around him to tell the blood-soaked tale of the separation of East and West Pakistan.

The misfortune of common individuals and ordinary families is highlighted, but a certain objectivity remains at play in the background of this narrative. However, even with this objectivity, the haunting description of insanity, death and destruction in the book causes huge distress — he once saw vultures crowding around a large puddle, waiting for it to dry so that the corpses floating on the surface could be still and accessible. Since there was no one to ever pick up the many corpses, Khan also became a witness to that same puddle drying up and the vultures and ravens feasting on the human corpses. Here, Khan also recalls the drawings that were sketched during the 1943 Bengal famine in which vultures are shown waiting for people to die.

The greatest irony in these memoirs is that even after being subjected to colossal personal tragedies, Khan remains supportive of the rights movement of East Pakistan that later turned into the liberation movement of Bangladesh. He is vociferously against the disenfranchisement of East Pakistanis by the West Pakistan-dominated state and the shabby treatment meted out to ordinary Bengalis from day one by the Muslim immigrants from areas that remained a part of India — who had settled in East Pakistan during and soon after 1947 — and the Punjabi elites from West Pakistan. Khan is a keen observer of how politics have taken shape since the inception of the country and the prejudices and injustices with which East Pakistan and Bengalis were treated by the power centres in West Pakistan. He disapproves of the callousness of the 1971 army operation in East Pakistan and the death and destruction it inflicted on Bengalis.

Khan writes that he was somehow mentally prepared when news reached him that he had lost his father and two brothers in Dinajpur and another brother in Kushtia. This was perhaps because of a cold, logical understanding that he had developed as a journalist espousing progressive ideas, which helped him submit to the fact that historic forces were now taking their toll and causing a major turnaround of events. But a personal tragedy of the magnitude that he faced would unsettle anyone. He was unsettled on his way to meet his mother and thought that facing his mother and consoling her would be the real challenge. When he met his mother, who had moved in with her daughter and son-in-law after the gruesome murders, she first told Khan that her wish was to hold a gun and shoot down three Bengalis. Then quickly regaining her composure, she said, “But never do that son. Because then their mothers will go through the same agony that I am going through right now.”

I wish we would learn the same lesson.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 15th, 2018