“Each survivor owes it to those who do not survive to account for them.”

***

For forty years I wanted to write of the one bloody spring day when the land of my birth was no more mine. That soft, misty February morning dawned forty-five days after the sixteenth of December 1971, when East Pakistan, the land my parents had chosen as their home following the great partition of the Indian subcontinent, had become Bangladesh. And all those who had come to this land from India or had, like me, been born to parents who had made the trek to this land in 1947, were no longer of it.

Living in Karachi since August 1972, I willed my mind to only remember the golden land’s offerings of the scent of mango blossoms, of the delicate shefali, of the perfectly formed gardenias, the sweet happiness of childhood, the trembling ecstasy of first love, the smell of the earth when the first slanting monsoon raindrops fell on the waiting plains. But the odor of that spring day! The damned odor! The odor of the brown-red stain on white flowers growing among green grass, the odor of crushed marigold petals, of the damp moss covered walls, the smell of burnt globs of rice and lentil, and the rank smell of rotting hyacinth – all indistinguishable from what was gentle and what was not – always took over my soul and made me not want to remember.
Continue reading A Voice from Pakistan: Of Martyrs and Marigolds →

By Syed Arif Hussaini – pakistanlink.org

Nafisa Hoodbhoy’s book “Aboard the Democracy Train – A Journey through Pakistan’s Last Decade of Democracy” is a gripping account of the two-terms each of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif during 1988 to 1999. Both ascended the Prime Minister’s office through elections and both were sacked by the President of the time on charges of corruption.

Nafisa serving as the only female reporter with the premier English daily of Pakistan, Dawn, for sixteen eventful years, 1984-2000, had the advantage of covering for her paper all major developments of that period and taking mental notes to be incorporated in a book after the turmoil settled down and admitted of an objective evaluation of the events that continue to cast their shadow even to this day. Objectivity of a news reporter, particularly of a staid and sober paper like Dawn, has remained her forte even after a decade of departure from the paper.
Continue reading Aboard the Democracy Train Reviewed in Pakistan Link newspaper →

By Aquila Ismail

Forty odd years have gone by since those dark days that I spent in the Murapara internment camp in newly created Bangladesh, with my mother and sister, not knowing where my father and brothers were. It still hurts. It still makes me nauseous. How is it that something so beyond one’s control can take over, destroy, and mar life forever? I was never given a chance to say, ‘I was born here, this is my land, do not take it away from me.’
Continue reading Some thoughts on the writing of Of Martyrs and Marigolds →