The Bewas Village

Shohagpur is so remote that even local people didn’t know where the village was. We frequently asked for directions to reach the cluster of amazing greenery, placid and quiet yet with a past full of deaths and struggle. Farida Akhtar of UBINIG had lent us two guides, which was a great help. Shohagpur-Kakornkandi lies deep inside Jamalpur district, resting against the hills where indigenous tribes of Garos once lived and now have been dispossessed and forced to become low landers. India lies just next door separated by the hills. The guides said that they had come by another route hence the confusion of location.

We had run into a post-flood gash on the terrible, unkempt road. Floodwaters had cleaved and wounded the travel way road leaving it unhealed. We had to alight to let the rented car negotiate the absence of any ‘road’ on a road. Two village kids stood and watched. We asked for directions again.

“You mean the Bewas’ village ? “

----------------------

Our guide was recognized by the villagers: seeing us ancient wooden chairs were pulled out from ramshackle homes and placed under shades. Soon conservation began. As it always is and in that village even more insistently, memories of death and hunger tumble out all too easily. Sitting in the courtyard of a widow we listened.

On the 10th of Srabon the army had come and attacked the village without any warning. No rounding up, no questioning, no identification, just shooting to kill. It came swiftly, suddenly as if the angels of death had no time for the niceties of murder. The villagers had walked out of their dilapidated homes at dawn and the efficient soldiers of Pakistan quickly finished them off.

As I heard them and almost forced myself to stare at their faces as they talked, I wondered how could they find this almost hidden village in the high monsoon of 1971 when nearly 30 years later I had found it so difficult to locate?.

Even more puzzling was the why? Why this village ?

Today it had become a village without old men. All men who would have been aged today had been killed on that single bloody morning. Children had grown up without fathers in Shohagpur to become labourers who worked in other people’s field. They had lost their possessions to law, custom and ultimately force. They owned no land.

“Life took our men away, our land away, our peace away. We only have out bodies left.”

--------------------

I used the testimonies and the interviews for an episode of a BBC series on “women and 71” and was in fact pleasantly struck by the public response which was quite high. And when offers to video it came from others I became a little concerned. It seemed there was a ‘market’ for such horrors. Economic market, political market, other kinds of market and I for once felt possessive of other people’s memories. I was afraid they would be manipulated.

There were many questions about that place and they had been left unanswered. I had seen them framed against the past but the palpable hunger and ruinous lives of today were as much a result of our own deeds. We continued to destroy what the Pak army had mangled on a rainy morning many monsoons ago.

I wanted to record the life, past and present and not just the war months. That is by itself such a simple limited narrative but their life lasted longer than the war and after 1971 we devastated whatever was left.. Brutality was only half the tale, betrayal told the rest.

So I cobbled together a team of pre-employment youths, full of imagined 1971 and yet innocent and willing enough to learn, got some funds from the Grameen Trust and returned to that and other villages. There were other women as well whom we had heard and wanted to record their voices before time stilled them.

--------------------

I came out and saw the army. They wanted to go inside. I put my hands up like this and said there was no one inside. They flung me away into the yard and dragged my husband and son outside. They shot them both right there, there.

They killed every male in the village, every male. When the army was gone, there was not a single man left to bury the dead. We had to drag the bodies ourselves and bury them. Without a bath, without a shroud put them into one single hole I had dug myself. Not a grave but a hole. No janaza, no kafon, no washing of he dead but only the earth to cover their blood and the body. Nothing else.

I have lived next to their graves all my life. I shall never leave here. They lie buried together. I shall not leave this place even if I starve. This is where my place is. This is where I am.

------------------------

If the burial of the dead was an incomplete, botched up make shift affair, there was nothing disorganized about their starving. Alekjan Begum stands near a mound housing some of her dead and suddenly weeps about the memories of starving. She describes foods of the foodless of rural Bengal. Roots, plants, berries, wild vegetables…things I don’t want to learn. They scare me.

For days, we ate them, for days we had no rice.. Days after days of banana shoot gruels..ate them.. ate them… ate …

Just as there is something deeply violating about burying the dead improperly without baths, prayers and shrouds there is something equally violent about eating roots, plants, banana gruel to fend off starvation. Food which field animals have.

It doesn’t just touch the body, it rapes the soul.

--------
Kader daktar the local quack was the healer of Shohagpur. Like some others of that village they would prey on the refugees passing through to India. A lot of the loot was stored in one of the huts of that village. One night somebody broke into that hut and helped himself to some of the stuff.

An enraged Kader went to the army post miles away and told them that Shohagpur was a Muktibahini training camp. Nestled against the border it made eminent sense to the Pak army. They mounted a classic early morning raid. They killed only the men, the Muktis. No women were touched. Kader had managed to transform harmless farmers and kamlas into warriors and killers through his own greed. No mercy was shown to people who were killed on the charge of being partisans. It was war.

Years later, they still insist they were not fighters. Many of them ran away to India that night but didn’t like the refugee camps. Soon, they returned to their broken homes, their unkept graves, their hunger.

Kader had two associates – Sona Miyan and Moyna Mian- and though they moved away to other areas – Haluaghat – they have been consumed by the anonymity of such endless processions of facilitators of mass murder.

-----------------------

If one notices anything in particular, it’s the lack of anger or rage. Thirty years of endless hunger and half-fed bellies have taught them some plain truths. And hopelessness. And resignation. And the flame of revenge was blown away by the winds of despair.

Hunger is more certain than a full belly, a kuli’s work more possible at Nalitabari Bazar than some relief programme to improve their lives. When we gave them some money out of our shooting budget, they were stunned. Nobody had ever given them anything barring some government rations many years ago. Then they began to fight amongst themselves. They didn't want a tube well or something like that. They just wanted to eat as much as they wanted. Just once in the last 30 years.

--------

Some people had said that they would like to go and look for Kader daktar or try him or whatever. Maybe bump him off. At least I know what had happened. At least I should have done something.

But then whom should I kill for keeping hunger alive and well in that village where Shohagpur was consumed by the life of Bewas, Bewarish and Bangladesh ?.

Am I not Kader daktar myself ?