A shopkeeper, a thin Bengali with wire rimmed spectacles, glances out from his shop at two strangers walking down the deserted street. They enter the shop and inquire about “the troubles” in this town. The shopkeeper is visibly trembling “There is nothing I can say", he, replies Then he glances again at the flattened buildings lining the main streets and whispers, “Look around you.” As the visitors leave, he adds, voice cracking, “I am ashamed I cannot...."
Further down the street a youth approaches. “The army destroyed our city. Many Bengalis are being arrested. They are being shot every night and thrown into the river. We no longer eat the fish from the river,” he whispers.
The youth guides the strangers to the local hospital to talk to a surgeon.” The surgeon is a Bengali but is employed by the government, which means he is particularly vulnerable. He is asked about killing in the city. “Killing? What killing? Killing by whom?” He is asked about general problems. “Problems? What problems? There are no problems."
Belaboring the obvious
The visitors take their leave. Outside the hospital the youth whispers: “You have talked to the doctor, but I think he has concealed the truth. He is afraid.” It is explaining the obvious.
A professor and his student arc talking about the prospects of students returning to classes in early August, when the university is supposed to reopen. They are pessimistic. Some students are hiding in their homes, others have fled to outlying villages or to India. Some have joined the Mukti Bahini. The campus has been turned into a military camp, and troops are quartered in the dormitories, using books to fuel their cooking fires. “Would you come back?” the professor asks.
The student, a girl, has a room in a house that overlooks an army interrogation center. “All day the students, young boys, are brought in and beatern.” she says. Three soldiers walk on them with boots. All night we hear the screams. I cannot sleep. We cannot stand to see and hear these things."
“Our army had a good reputation.” the professor says. “We had a great army. But look what it has done. How can an army be great when it fights in an immoral cause?”
Two army majors are standing at a ferry landing on the cast bank of the Ganges River. One is a frogman, the other one served in the camel corps. Both seem to be civilized and charming men. They explain that they are fighting a patriotic war to defend the integrity of their country against Indian agents, miscreants and misguided individuals. “We saw atrocities that made our blood boil. Had you seen them, even you would have wanted to kill,” lie says of a town where some Biharis were butchered by Bengalis. (The town was later leveled by the army and a far greater number of Bengalis were killed).
The majors are asked why so many Bengalis have fled, particularly Hindus. The answer is imaginative. They say that in April, before the army restored order. Hindus told Moslems that the “holy Koran is just an old look. So the Moslems came out of their
