What my family remembers about Ispahani Public School, 1971, and the silence my father carried afterward.

My father did not tell me much about Comilla.

I learned about it through fragments. A name mentioned at home. A relative who never came back. A school where my father had once taught and supervised boys in a hostel. Then there was his silence.

The place was Ispahani Public School in Comilla Cantonment, in what was then East Pakistan.

For years, I understood what happened there mainly through my family’s account. My father, we were told, survived terrible violence in 1971. Among those who died was my young maternal uncle, Amin. Our family remembered a much larger number of people being killed around that period, including people connected with the world in which my father worked.

I once wrote the figure as 200 and described my father as the lone survivor.

I need to be more careful now.

I have searched for documentary evidence that independently confirms those precise details. I have not found it. They belong to my family’s memory of 1971, and I think readers deserve to know where family testimony ends and the surviving documentary record begins.

Before 1971: The School My Father Knew

The surviving institutional history lets me see more of the school my father knew before war reduced it to a place in family memory.

The history preserved by the Glorious Cumilla Ispahanians alumni association says the institution began in September 1962 as Cantonment Public School, an English-medium school created at the initiative of Brigadier Ghulam Mohammad, then station commander. It did not begin with an impressive campus. The school initially operated from another high-school building. A barrack in the Engineers’ Line became the boys’ hostel, while military quarters were adapted as accommodation for teachers.

That detail brings the institution closer to my family’s story. My father was not working in an abstract educational establishment. He belonged to a small residential school community in which teachers, students, classrooms and hostel life occupied the same institutional world.

The school became Mainamati Public School in 1965. The alumni history says Brigadier A. O. Mitha subsequently brought M. M. Ispahani into the project. Financial support from the Ispahani interests helped the school expand, and the institution was renamed Ispahani Public School. On 28 September 1966, Major General Fazal Muqueem Khan laid the foundation stone of its new building.

These are administrative details, but for me they perform another function. They restore ordinary life to a story that I first knew only through catastrophe. Before 1971 there were school timetables, hostel beds, examinations and teachers going to work. My father belonged to that everyday world.

The School Was Real. So Was Its Rupture

Ispahani Public School was not an incidental name from an old family story.

The institution’s alumni association traces its beginning to September 1962, when it opened as an English-medium school called Cantonment Public School. It later became Mainamati Public School. After support from the Ispahani business family, it took the name Ispahani Public School in the 1960s.

The school had a hostel. That detail matters to me because my father worked there as a teacher and hostel superintendent.

The institutional record also confirms that 1971 shattered the school.

According to the history published by the Glorious Cumilla Ispahanians alumni association, the school closed during the war. Buildings and equipment were damaged or lost. The association records that eleven teachers were killed during the conflict.

It names them: Abul Kashem, Azizul Haq, Abdul Jabbar, Tazul Islam, Sharfauddin Ahmed, Mosla Uddin, Amir Hosain, Abdul Malak, Mafiz Uddin Bhuiyan, Khairul Bashar and Abul Mannan.

Those names matter.

They also tell me something uncomfortable about memory. The documentary record that survives does not necessarily contain every story remembered inside the families who lived through those months.

The school history does not document the specific episode my family remembers involving my father. Nor have I found an independent source establishing the figure of about 200 deaths that survived in our family account.

I will not turn memory into documentation simply because the memory belongs to my family.

But I will not erase the memory because I cannot find it on a website either.

Comilla Had More Than One Story in 1971

Writing about Comilla requires another kind of care.

The violence of 1971 cannot be reduced to what happened to my father.

The Pakistan Army carried out large-scale violence against Bengali civilians during the war. Comilla Cantonment itself became the site of killings of Bengali military personnel. Historical research collected by Sciences Po’s Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network records the killing of Bengali officers and hundreds of Bengali servicemen at Comilla Cantonment on 27 and 28 March.

Any Pakistani writing about 1971 has to face that record.

There is another record too.

Non-Bengali civilians, many of them Urdu-speaking people commonly described as Biharis, were also attacked during the breakdown of authority and the communal violence surrounding the war. The same Sciences Po chronology documents attacks on non-Bengalis during March and April 1971 and further revenge killings after the conflict.

One history does not cancel the other.

I am not interested in using my father’s suffering to reduce the suffering of Bengalis. Nor should acknowledging crimes committed against Bengalis require me to pretend that Bihari families experienced nothing.

My family lived inside that complicated history.

The Man Who Came Out of Comilla

Documents can tell me when a school opened and when it reopened.

They cannot tell me why my father became the man I remember.

Before 1971, he had been a teacher. He supervised a hostel. His working life depended on routine: classes, students and the small responsibilities that make up an ordinary school day.

After Comilla, something changed.

He withdrew from people.

I remember his reluctance to enter hospitals and clinics. Family gatherings did not hold him for long. He could maintain the ordinary disciplines of daily life, yet he kept much of the world at a distance.

As a child, I did not have language for any of this.

I only knew my father.

Children notice habits long before they understand causes. A man refuses to go somewhere. He avoids certain conversations. The adults know not to press him. Years pass, and what once seemed like personality begins to look different.

Only much later did I connect those habits with Comilla.

I cannot clinically explain what my father experienced, and I should not try. I can describe what I saw.

His world became smaller.

Leaving East Pakistan

Eventually my parents’ lives became part of the much larger movement of people produced by the destruction of Pakistan in 1971.

My mother’s story deserves its own telling. She had children to protect while the country around her was disappearing. Her eventual journey out of Bangladesh is a story I have written separately in The Last Flight: My Mother’s Journey Through a Country That Had Stopped Loving Us.

My father’s route was different.

He eventually came to what remained of Pakistan and resumed teaching. For a period he taught at Sakesar. Later he lived in Karachi.

A map makes such a journey look deceptively simple.

Comilla. Sakesar. Karachi.

A few names connected by lines.

Human beings do not move that neatly.

My father could leave Comilla. Comilla did not necessarily leave him.

Nine Students and a School Starting Again

The most arresting number I found in the institutional history is not a death toll.

It is nine.

The alumni account says Ispahani restarted on 12 February 1972 with one resident student and eight local students. The school had lost property and equipment, its finances were badly depleted, and eleven teachers were recorded as killed. Yet classes began again.

I keep returning to those nine students. Institutions often describe recovery through buildings, budgets and examination results. A school, however, really starts again when children return to classrooms. In February 1972, there were barely enough of them to fill a small room.

My father was no longer part of that rebuilding. His life had moved toward Pakistan. The institution and the teacher who once worked there were beginning separate histories.

Fifty Years Later

Then I found a newspaper report that moved the story forward by four decades.

In September 2012, The Daily Star reported on Ispahani Public School and College’s golden jubilee at Comilla Cantonment. Bangladesh’s education minister Nurul Islam Nahid inaugurated the programme. Mirza Salman Ispahani, the local divisional commander and the institution’s principal were among those who spoke. Students and guest performers took part in a cultural programme.

The newspaper described a school celebrating fifty years.

I read that report differently from an alumnus returning for a reunion. I wondered what my father would have remembered had he stood there.

The institution had acquired another half-century of students, teachers, examinations and ceremonies. Bangladesh had changed. Comilla itself is now officially written as Cumilla in English. A school that had almost ceased functioning in the aftermath of war had survived long enough to celebrate continuity.

My father’s calendar was different.

The school could count anniversaries. Families count absences.

That does not make the jubilee false or the family memory more true. They are simply two ways in which time survives a rupture. An institution rebuilds itself through new generations. A family can continue carrying an old event even after the buildings have been repaired and the classrooms filled again.

What the Ispahani Record Changed for Me

Finding the history of Ispahani Public School did not give me the confirmation I originally hoped to find.

In one sense, it did something more useful.

It forced me to separate what I know from what I inherited.

I now know from the school’s historical record that the institution my father knew existed in the form my family remembered. It had been an English-medium school. It had hostel accommodation. The war closed it. Eleven teachers appear in the alumni association’s memorial to those killed in 1971. The institution eventually reopened in February 1972 in a country called Bangladesh.

I also know what the record does not tell me.

It does not establish that 200 people died in the incident remembered by my family. It does not identify my father as the sole survivor of such an event.

Perhaps another archive contains that evidence. Perhaps an old student remembers him. There may be former teachers or families in Bangladesh and Pakistan carrying pieces of the same story under different names.

Or perhaps some parts of 1971 disappeared with the people who witnessed them.

That possibility troubles me more than a neat answer would.

The Walls My Father Carried

When I first wrote about my father, I tried to understand his withdrawal through philosophy. I quoted Paul Tillich and searched for a concept that could explain the walls a human being builds after catastrophe.

I no longer think I need that explanation.

I saw the walls.

That is enough.

My father taught children before a country broke apart. Our family remembers him surviving violence that killed people close to him, including Amin. He later rebuilt an outwardly ordinary life in Pakistan.

But ordinary life can conceal a great deal.

There must be thousands of families in Bangladesh and Pakistan with stories like ours. Bengali families remember people taken by soldiers. Bihari families remember relatives who disappeared in communal violence. Hindu families carry another set of memories. Some stories entered official histories. Others remained at dinner tables and inside old houses.

For the wider historical setting of Urdu-speaking families in East Pakistan, I have written separately about why the Biharis were not outsiders to East Pakistan.

Mine remained mostly inside my father.

I am writing it down now with a distinction I should have made more clearly before.

History requires evidence.

Family memory requires honesty.

Sometimes the two meet. Sometimes they do not.

More than half a century after 1971, I am still looking for the place where my father’s story meets the record.