“It was soon after I met the fakir, when I was thirteen years old, that everything began to go wrong. First, my best Hindu friend took poison and killed herself: she was in love with a Muslim boy, and her family would not let her marry him. Then the Hindus began to be angry with us because of politics. There were many stories of Hindus being mistreated over the border in East Pakistan, and some of the Hindu politicians began to say that we should pay the price for this, and that the Hindus should kill all the Muslims in Bihar in revenge. We didn’t know anything about what was happening in East Pakistan, but they said that we were Muslims, so we must take the blame. There was a song they used to sing:
I will cut down the Muslims, and I’ll make a bridge,
Then I will cross the Rupsha River
And I will bathe in the blood of the Muslims.
Things steadily got worse. There were isolated murders: Hindus killed a Muslim, then the Muslims killed a Hindu. But our village was majority Muslim so we were never that worried, and we were sheltering the family of my father’s Hindu friend, rather than living in fear ourselves. We felt in no real danger.
“Then one day, there was a big attack on the village. A large party of gundas came to Sonepur one Friday, when all the men were in the mosque during midday prayers. They had daggers and long staves and they surrounded the mosque and dared the men to come out, shouting insults, calling them all circumcised cowards. Eventually, when they set fire to the roof of the mosque, our men rushed out, but they were unarmed and completely surrounded, and they were all killed. That was how I lost my stepfather, my paternal uncle—the one who took our land—and my cousin.
“As chance would have it, none of us children were in the mosque that day—we were all out playing in the bamboo. When we saw people running and the smoke rising from the mosque, we ran into the jungle. Our mother eventually found us hiding there. She was with her brother, my uncle, who had also been out in the fields, and so had managed to escape. He dug us a small pit in the jungle, in the middle of a banana plantation, and covered it with palm thatch. We hid there for fifteen days, creeping back to our house at night on a couple of occasions to get food.
“Eventually, the family decided that we would cross to East Pakistan, and seek shelter with some cousins of my mother who lived just over the border, until things blew over. I was very excited at the prospect of the journey, and was looking forward to meeting some new cousins. After the fear of living in the pit, it was a relief just to head off. I didn’t think for a minute it would be permanent.
“We left late one evening, and walked for several days through the jungle towards the border, carrying whatever goods we had managed to salvage from the village. My uncle had bribed one of the border guards, and we stayed the evening with him just before the crossing. The guard’s family was kind to us, and gave us dal and rice. Then just before dawn, he rowed us across the river, and left us on the river bank next to a field on the far side. He pointed us in the right direction and told us to run. I remember running across the field. I was very scared as he had said we might get shot; but he had said don’t cry, just run, run, run, so that was what we did.
“The following evening, we finally reached my cousin’s village. The village was much larger than the one we came from, and our cousins were very good to us, and made us feel welcome. They built us a new house in the middle of a garden, and we had all the fruits and trees we could wish: mangoes, coconuts, bamboos, betel nuts, grapes, pomegranates. They even put me in a school—the only one I ever went to. My cousins were powerful people locally, and we feared no crime.
“In fact for the first year, the only fear we had was of the floods. The fields of the village were very rich, but every monsoon they would become inundated and the river would burst its banks so that we had to take shelter on makeshift platforms up in the trees. In the branches we would be safe—but the river swept away everything, including all our belongings. The houses we had made were kucha, made of bamboo and mud and palm thatch, and they could not withstand the floods. Everything was spoiled by the water. So we had to start again, and this time we built an embankment around the village. But the following year, during the rains, the same thing happened again.
“That year was 1971; a very bad year indeed. The West Pakistanis were fighting with the East Pakistanis, and the Biharis sided with the West Pakistanis against the Bengalis. We knew nothing about this, and the violence did not come to our village. But we heard that many people had been killed in towns nearby, and that both sides were murdering each other in every way they could. We also heard that Biharis were being kidnapped by Bengali militias and made to work as slave labour. Others were kidnapped, then beheaded. Many of our people took refuge in camps, but then died for lack of food. Things were so bad that we stopped eating fish from the river because there were so many bodies rotting in the water. Everyone was frightened, and no one knew what to do, or even what it was really about. We could just about understand why Hindus might want to kill Muslims, but why would Muslims want to kill Muslims? It seemed as if the whole world was soaked in blood.