The brief journey began from my Niketan residence by an Uber to the airport which was nice on a weekend. The shock was of course having to pay Taka 200 for small frothy coffee. That's about three times more than I would ever pay for one in Canada. It's Dhaka of free, loose and not always clean money. But soon we were away to Rajshahi, not sure now which airline.

A plane to Rajshahi, an outrageous ask from an auto which was settled at some mythical half way point and we were on our way to the village in Poba thana, our destination. A scarce half an hour later, we are inside the bowels of Bangladesh where 1971 occurred.

As planned before the video shooting was already on and villagers who had fought in the war were narrating what they did. I wait nearby and listen to the stories. Painful, heroic, or cruel is immaterial. It's about a time in history and we want to capture that. Perhaps, through that process I am trying to capture the 1971 in all of us. There are plastic chairs to sit on and men with weather beaten faces discuss war, peace, politics, betrayal and death, then and now.

The man from Dhaka

I am the man from Dhaka, the citizen from above who has come down to record what they did years back. That particular year haunts them in a way no outsider can understand. A war in a village or villages changes them and the residents. Nothing can or did remain the same. It was a time when people did what they thought was the thing to do. But as we know from that and many other villages, the world in a village was fundamentally altered forever.

If betrayal is the key to understand the politics of 1971, survival is the other one. Both came together, often at the same time and changed the villages, making enemies and friends for a lifetime. If in a moment when the space between life and death was so thin that even a thread couldn't pass, no matter what one chose, the pact unto death was made. Perhaps in Poba, life and death became the same.

Pearu's war

The characters - the dramatis personae - in a play called the Liberation War in Poba has many characters but few are as interesting as Pearu Sarder. He is the outsider in some sense, the killer in the peasant's dress. In 1971, several of his family members were killed and he joined the war more to take revenge as much to liberate the villages. In that year he was a kamla, an agricultural wage labourer. In 2018, he almost missed the shooting because he had gone away to work as a kamla/harvester some villages away. History has changed but life has not for some.

There are some strange telling but what runs through such narratives is one of hate and vengeance. There is no politeness about how these people describe the war encounters. They are not embarrassed by the passage of time. They speak with the same venom that their body must have translated into violent action that year. Hearing them, one almost feels that for them the war is always alive.

We have been listening to Pearu and his comrades for some time. The narratives have a familiarity but also a reflection of what rural minds were and perhaps are. The world they live in has its own value structures and urban sociology and idioms are missing in them. In all of them, society, tradition, faith and primeval instincts come together to play a role.

Executioner's words

Pearu's role was that of an executioner. He killed those who were sentenced to death by the freedom fighters. He would kill them by slashing their throats in a "classic "executioner style. And he would make sure they would not get a chance to pray or say the last words of a Muslim, the kalema. He wanted to be sure that when they faced God he would not be recognized as one. He wouldn't let them pray or beg mercy from Allah. "Suppose Allah forgave them. I wanted to finish them before they could utter any holy words."

"And I never said a word before butchering them because they were not humans nor animals. Why should I say so? They were worse than animals. They handed over daughters and sisters to the Pak army. What kind of animals are they? No mercy, no mercy..."

Autumnal moments

Its early November and there is a softening of light all around. The mellow smell of autumn is all around and sitting in a backyard of a village home of the village elder, there is an element of peace and quiet. 1971 is far away and the discussion is all on the next coming elections.

Alliances, intrigues, money in play are all discussed and we sit through that chatter. There is some distance from it all but also some recognition that this conversation would have been so different in another time or land.

The camera is wrapped up and the tiny crew of three plus a couple of friends crowd the good-bye gathering. The extra warmth of a rural people for urban bhadroloks is obvious and it is also obvious that we are guests but not of them. And that is what it is. 1971 brought everyone together through the catalyst of violence and struggle.

We start walking towards the main road where we hope to catch an auto and reach the city. There are several stoppages and each time we cross one, the scene changes. The distance between Poba and Rajshahi city is also real and between Dhaka even more so. But perhaps 1971 shows that the proximity is also greater than we think. By accepting both and learning about them, we learn about 1971.