The Walls My Father Built in Comilla

A survivor’s silence, a son’s search for meaning.

It began with a silence that never really ended.
My father was the lone survivor of a massacre in Comilla, then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Two hundred people died that day — colleagues, friends, students, and among them my young maternal uncle, Amin. After that, he stopped seeing people. He never again entered a hospital or clinic. Even the simplest act of trust — a handshake, a visit — became too much.

A Teacher Turned to Stone

He had been a teacher and hostel superintendent — a man of chalk dust, lesson plans, and steady rules. His students said he spoke softly but expected discipline. The night of the killings, the world he built through lessons and dormitory roll calls collapsed.

In the years after, he still ironed his clothes, still rose early, still sipped tea. But his world had shrunk. The classroom laughter was gone, replaced by long evenings spent in half-dark rooms.

It was not anger that kept him apart. It was something colder — a fear that life could vanish again in a single hour.

The Journey After the Ruin

Months later, he crossed over to what remained of Pakistan through the Red Cross evacuation program. He carried no luggage, only a few papers proving he had once been a teacher. He was sent first to Sakesar, a quiet hill station where he began teaching again. The air there was thin, clean, and lonely — perhaps exactly what he wanted.

In the 1980s, he finally moved to Karachi, a city that swallowed sorrow in its noise. He kept teaching, quietly, dutifully. Yet even there, far from Comilla, he stayed inside the walls he had built long ago. He never went to doctors, never joined family gatherings for long.

Tillich’s Mirror

Years later, I came across Paul Tillich’s description of neurosis as “a progressive narrowing of experience.” He called it a kind of existential claustrophobia, the invisible walls we build around ourselves to survive unbearable pain.

That was my father.
Each year, another brick went up: fewer visits, fewer letters, fewer stories about the past. He was not mad. He was simply trying to live in a smaller, safer world. But safety has a price. You lose the sound of other voices. You lose surprise.

Memory’s Unfinished Lesson

Sometimes I imagine him walking through the old hostel corridors, long after the war, listening for footsteps that would never come. There is something sacred, almost defiant, about how he carried that silence. And yet, it is also terribly sad.

Tillich warned that the attempt to escape anxiety only deepens it. My father never read Tillich, but he lived that truth. He built his refuge out of fear, and inside it, found no peace.

Maybe healing, if it ever comes, begins with breaking one small brick — letting in air, sound, another human voice.

I have tried to do that here, by telling his story.