Titled wrongly as if it were a novel, Ali Ahmad Khan’s autobiography is a mini-history of Pakistan with emphasis on the (hitherto) eastern wing. Largely prosaic, it has the flair of fiction, the author himself being the central character, haunted, chased and persecuted, knowingly or unknowingly, by the preternatural forces unleashed by the events that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh.

It is a tale of fear and hunger, hide-and-seek, bravery and cowardice, nobility and bestiality, and of all those passions that come to the fore when human beings interact in an emotion-charged phenomenon which they cannot comprehend and over which they have no control.

How do you react to the sight of blood all around you? Unless you are a uniformed soldier, a terrorist without a conscience or a hired, professional killer you are unlikely to escape post-traumatic stress disorder if you live what Khan lived through in the weeks and months preceding and following East Pakistan’s secession in 1971.

One man’s recollection of the horrific journey from East to West Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of the 1971 debacle

As page after page records for posterity, the author saw more than his share of scenes of others getting killed. He saw bodies floating on water, and more chillingly, vultures feasting on bodies as the water subsided and the dead lay on a dried-up lake bed.

Maybe he could pick up the pieces of his life and carry on, but how do you come to terms with life when your father and three brothers are murdered? They left home never to be seen again.

Khan only heard unconfirmed accounts of what happened to them and tried unsuccessfully to construct a realistic story of how they must have passed their last moments. His comments on their deaths go into the realm of philosophy. As he puts it, the murder of his father and three brothers appeared to him his penance for the collective sins of Bengalis and non-Bengalis.

He was a West Pakistani in a sea of Bengalis, but his pen maintains impartiality and blames both Bengalis and non-Bengalis, civilian and military, for acts of brutality, torture and mass murders committed in a frenzy that indeed was a horrendous re-enactment of the Partition upheaval. On March 25, 1971, Khan got to see war when the Pakistan Army began its crackdown in Dhaka with the city shaken by the unending thuds of artillery fire. Then began civil war in the real sense of the term.

The East Pakistan Rifles rebelled, killing fellow non-Bengali soldiers, followed by a massacre of West Pakistani civilians. The latter had themselves collaborated — or if you wish, cooperated — with the army in eliminating ‘traitors’ and suspects. The author then records a phenomenon by no means unknown to Islamic history — both the killers and the targeted shouted “Allaho Akbar!”

“As the curfew was relaxed a few days after the army action, I drove past a scene I had never seen in my life before. A wake of vultures seemed waiting to devour the three bodies floating in a rain-fed ditch. From the tattered uniforms it appeared the bodies were those of workers of the government bus service. ... I have no doubt those kites and vultures must have become as healthy and robust as those which had feasted themselves on human bodies during the Bengal famine of 1943.” — Translated excerpt from the book

The post-surrender part of the book revolves around Khan’s struggle for survival, the camaraderie that springs up among the persecuted, the terror-stricken days and nights in mucky shelters provided by kind-hearted strangers, the schemes for escape from Bangladesh, procuring travel documents, the nerve-wracking border crossing, and the Indian part of the route to Nepal with probing by an Indian passenger until he asked him the ultimate question: “Are you Pakistani?”

When Khan landed in Karachi via Bangkok he was penniless, but alive and mentally sound. That was an achievement. What should have been a source of strength for him throughout his life was the risk he took to save from certain death a man whom a West Pakistani crowd was determined to lynch.

Though the reader does get the overall picture of united Pakistan, the focus of the book is on East Pakistan: the stirrings of Bengali ethnic consciousness; the Muslim League’s electoral defeats; the long-term repercussions of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s martial law; the 1970 elections; the protracted negotiations between Gen Yahya Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; and finally the army crackdown on March 25. The author thinks the failure to call the assembly session was the main reason for the gory outcome of what was basically a political issue. While the crucial negotiations were about the Awami League’s six points, the author doesn’t tell the readers what those six points were.

The book, of course, completes its autobiographical antecedents by giving the reader details of the writer’s personal life, including incriminating facts, mandatory family background, post-Partition life in Karachi, his activism as a student, interaction with politicians, and finally his venture into journalism, the latter taking him to the BBC.

Khan wasn’t the only one who lived through the horror that led to Bangladesh’s creation. There were millions of other South Asians who suffered the agony of two Partitions: first, what H.V. Hodson calls The Great Divide, and second, the 1971 tragedy — a mix of political gaucherie, ethnic madness, mass exodus, civil war and blatant foreign intrusion. A guilty verdict is too early for history, for we are too close to the events and too emotionally involved to come to an objective assessment of what caused the bloodbath. Nevertheless, the efficacy of the book lies in the author’s eyewitness account of the East Pakistan trauma, for long after we are gone the book will help future scholars determine the truth behind the mass of legends and half-truths that make historiography such a challenge.

The reviewer is Dawn’s Readers’ Editor.

Jeevan Aik Kahani
(MEMOIR)
By Ali Ahmad Khan
Aaj ki Kitabain/City Press Bookshop
Publisher’s contact: ajmalkamal@gmail.com
ISBN: 978-9696480082
220pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 20th, 2016