পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৪৭১

439 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড Bombing at night is a deadly thing, and unnecessary here. These bombs were aimed at the airport runway, but the Indians had been attacking it for five days by daylight. Only at midday today did a jet pilot finally put a bomb right on it. But up to then we had all agreed with an Australian correspondent here who muttered on the first day: The Indians couldn't bit a bull in the bum with a banjo.' That was when we saw the Indian jets careening out of the sky, shot down one by one, seven or nine of them, probably more. The big Sukhoi- 7 Russian bombers are the most spectacular in their fall, slow and graceful, like a sad ballet. That seems a month agO. After the bombing we emerge into the streets and I look at my fellow covertakers. We make a grotesque miscellany. Dapper clerks in white shirts and trousers and black shoes and with glistening hair; clouds of impassive, lean rickshaw men careering in packs through the dogs and crows picking at offal in the roads; strange groups of tattered people, dark-skinned, wild eyes in bony faces, crouching under a huge banyan tree-the ultimate poor. What do they make of the sirens, the earth-shaking noise of bombs? The old man striding nowhere through the city, his dirty white locks flying, with a bundle and a long stick, like a mad prophet possessed by the belief that he would see his strangest prophecy come true if he can only get there, somewhere, in time. Friday Morning: The sirens drowned out the muazzin's early call to prayer. And now we hear the guns. The front can't be far away. The propeller-driven Indian aircraft drop huge bombs. The tall steel structure of the Intercontinental Hotel quivers like a sapling. Again the mercy flights scheduled for the umpteenth time by the UN and today by the RAF in Singapore, have been cancelled. The women and children are stranded. Who, we ask here with increasing indignation, is preventing these innocents from leaving-the Indian Government? The Pakistanis have no reason to do so. One thing international opinion could do is to urge the Indians to stop night bombing, at which they are as inept as most other air forces. Another is to try to have Dacca declared an open city, I believe the Pakistanis would agree to this under certain conditions designed solely to prevent massacres and a civilian uprising and shoot-out in these teeming streets where two rickshaws abreast can cause a traffic block. There has been a calmness in the city, despite the raids. Banks and shops go on as before. People shelter under doorways and walls when the Indian jets go over or the shrapnel from the Pakistani anti-aircraft guns falls. Slit trenches are everywhere: the hotel lawns have been cut into neatly and in straight lines like a sliced cake. Is there to be a heroic last stand, a miniature...for East Pakistan? Impossible to say. We listen to the BBC and learn that the Indian Army has armored personnel carriers and can throw a bridge across the waterways hereabouts with air speed. But the armies are probably about on the line of the real rivers, the Ganges on the west and its biggest tributary to the east. These are huge stretches of water, as big as lakes. It is not easy to