Tag: Bihari families in Bangladesh

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.

The Last Flight: My Mother’s Journey Through a Country That Had Stopped Loving Us”

The year was 1974. The borders were closed, the war was long over, and the sky was about to shut too.

By then, East Pakistan had become Bangladesh. The slogans had faded, but the resentment lingered. For people like us—Urdu-speaking, marked by history—we were suddenly aliens in the only home we had ever known.

My father worked for the Red Cross and chose to stay behind in Chittagong. His reasons were quiet, maybe painful—maybe he felt duty-bound to help, or maybe he simply didn’t want to abandon the soil where his life had taken root.

But one thing he knew: his children had to get out.

The last Red Cross humanitarian flight was leaving from Dhaka. After that, no one knew what would happen. No more evacuations. No more airlifts. Just silence.

So my mother did what history rarely remembers: she gathered three children and walked us across the edge of a falling world.

From Chittagong to Dhaka, she made the journey alone.
No escort. No certainty. No man beside her. Just three young children and a bag of essentials packed like lifelines.

The country was tense. Angry. Raw. Even train stations were dangerous places for those who didn’t speak Bengali or belonged to the wrong community. A look, an accent, a name—any of it could turn fatal.

And yet, my mother moved like a shadow through all of it. Calm. Focused. Terrified, I know now—but never showing it.

She held us close on the train. She covered my baby sister in cloth, hushed my brother when he asked too many questions. I was old enough to feel the fear but too young to understand the full weight of it.

Dhaka was a waiting room of last chances.

When we finally reached the Red Cross camp, we saw families like ours—tired, stranded, scared. Some had missed earlier flights. Some didn’t know if they were even on the list.

But we were. Somehow, we were.

They called our names. They checked our papers. They told my mother it was time.

She looked back only once.

She was leaving behind her husband, her home, everything that had once been her life. But she didn’t let her voice crack. She didn’t let her grip loosen on our hands. She walked us up to that Red Cross plane like she was walking through fire—with dignity, with purpose, and with no guarantee of what waited on the other side.

There were no headlines. No medals. Just a mother who saved her children.

We took off. My brother looked out the window, searching for our father. My baby sister slept in my mother’s lap. I watched her face the entire flight.

She didn’t blink.
Didn’t sigh.
Didn’t cry.

She just stared ahead, as if flying between two countries meant holding your breath for hours.

I tell this story not because war made us heroes. But because love did.

The world remembers soldiers and treaties.

But I remember a woman on a train, holding three passports in one hand and her baby in the other.

She didn’t speak at the rallies. She wasn’t quoted in the papers. But she did what history rarely credits: she got us out.

And that was everything.