On a rainy night last month, down an alleyway in the Jackson Heights section of Queens, in a restaurant basement, sat about two dozen retirees. There was a one-time federal tax agent, a retired car salesman, a former pharmacy cashier and several taxi drivers who had shut off their meters for good.
One of these men, Golam Khan, a 72-year-old ex-cabby, was in charge. He put his arm around other grey-haired men and whispered instructions. He cleared the front row of seats for a few distinguished guests.
After some introductory speeches, Khan stood before the crowd at a lectern on a raised stage. He cast his mind to their faraway homeland, Bangladesh, and the time more than 50 years ago when they participated in the victorious but bloody war that led to the nation’s independence.
“We are fortunate people who fought in the War of Liberation,” he said. “In a nation’s life, freedom fighters come but once.”
The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War might seem like an obscure bit of history, but it looms as an immense trauma for many New Yorkers — people like the men in that basement. The war provided their most honoured accomplishments and their most terrifying memories.
Estimates of how many Bengalis were killed in 1971 range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. A leading American scholar of the conflict, the Princeton international affairs professor Gary Bass, calls it “a forgotten genocide”.
Finding men and women who lived through the war is not difficult in New York. From 2000 to 2015, Bangladeshis were the city’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Revolutionaries of the 1970s today work humble jobs on the streets and sidewalks where New Yorkers spend their days.
Fakhrul Alam, a 69-year-old owner of newsstands in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, says that in 1971 he guarded what he calls a “famous tree” that from time immemorial both Hindus and Muslims had believed to possess magic healing powers — until he woke up one morning to find the whole tree somehow stolen, uprooted: a casualty of the war.
Jewel Mohammad Jamal, 69, a Midtown traffic policeman, says that during his time as a young soldier, he once saw hundreds of dead bodies floating in the Salda river, near Bangladesh’s eastern border with India. If he describes this moment in conversation, he said, he fears that nightmares will haunt his sleep.
That might seem like a reason to repress memories. Yet in interviews, dozens of Bangladeshi veterans grew expansive when given the chance to recount heroic and tragic episodes from the distant world of their youth.
“Nobody asked me,” said Shawkat Akbar, a 68-year-old retired seller of Fords and Toyotas, “but if somebody did ask me, I would explain very well our liberation war”.
Akbar is part of the organisation that held last month’s event and that Khan founded and runs, Bangladesh Liberation War Veterans 1971 USA Inc. The group of about 60 veterans provides a forum for gossip, ennobles its working-class members with titles (Khan has appointed eight of them vice-presidents) and stages events where poems are recited, war stories are recounted, old slogans are raised, manly tears are shed and an exalted status lost with immigration to the US is recovered, briefly.
The occasion last month was honouring Ruhul Amin, a veteran who died in April and who, like Khan, was a retired taxi driver in his 70s.
“After five years, after 10 years, freedom fighters will not have the ability to arrange these events,” Khan said in his speech. His voice broke, and his eyes grew red and watery. “We will not be around anymore.”
Khan discussed the meaning of this prospect in an interview a few days later.
“When the people came from Bangladesh, they have become crazy to make money,” he said. “They have forgotten their culture, they have forgotten their nationality.” But now, he continued, they have settled down. “We’re all retired people.”
This is the moment when a first-generation of immigrants finally has time to reminisce.
Tazin Khan, 30, a cybersecurity specialist and one of Khan’s daughters, asked to join one of our interviews. “I hope you don’t mind if I ask questions,” she said. “I am trying to learn this history, too.”
Before 1971, Bangladesh was a region of Pakistan, which encompassed two halves separated by about 1,000 miles, with India in between. West Pakistan, populated largely by Punjabis who spoke Urdu, was militarily, politically and economically dominant, while East Pakistan consisted of Bengalis who felt marginalised.
East Pakistan was a poor, agrarian society with a popular, pipe-smoking, bespectacled and frequently imprisoned leader in Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who fought for greater autonomy for Bengalis.
Even in casual conversation, Khan refers to him by his full name, preceded by his sobriquet, “Father of the Nation, Friend of Bengal”.
Khan and Rahman came from landowning families in the same rural district. As a teenager, Khan recalls, he found his way to a meeting at his idol’s home. He stood up and announced that he would like to recite a poem by the Bengali writer Kazi Nazrul Islam.
Khan still remembers the poem.
“The mosque, church, and Buddhist temple and Hindu temple — all crush it, break down it,” he declaimed in his living room. “Start a slogan by the name of Human Being — A Victory for the Human Being.”
Rahman won Pakistan’s 1970 general election, but was denied the prime ministership by the West’s military authorities, who feared that he would bring about the East’s secession. Bengali protest became the pretext for Rahman’s arrest and a military crackdown on March 25, 1971.
Khan requested his parents’ blessing to join a Bengali guerrilla uprising.
“Fight for your country,” Khan recalled his father telling him. “I have another two sons.”
The decision represented a grave risk.
The Pakistani army used its firepower to brutal ends, Professor Bass said in a phone interview: “You’re seeing massive numbers of civilians being killed in a systematic campaign. That easily qualifies as crimes against humanity.”
Khan describes his experience of the war as an Odyssean saga.
He traversed his nation by foot, he says, to be armed and trained in India before returning to his homeland. His platoon scattered after it was ambushed. He shot a Pakistani captain at close range. Twice he watched a fellow soldier die right next to him. Twice he killed someone he did not intend to in the middle of a firefight. He was tricked by a group of Maoist insurgents, who gave his troop free food and then tried to steal their guns. He allied with another Bengali military unit, defected from it and allied with yet a third group. He narrowly escaped a deadly mortar blast.
With the war still raging, he returned home. It was nighttime. He stood outside. “Ma?” Khan called.
Soon he was inside, his family surrounding him. His father told him they had received a letter stating that he had died during the ambush. Khan’s family had already held his funeral.
The war ended in December 1971 with Pakistan’s defeat. Rahman became the leader of independent Bangladesh, but he suspended democracy in 1974 and was assassinated in 1975. Bangladeshi politics lost the secular progressivism of Khan’s poem and split into bitter divisions.
Khan became a rebel again, only to find himself imprisoned and tortured. After being released, he earned a master’s degree in Bengali literature and started a prosperous furniture business. Years passed, and Khan became a well-connected businessman with the reputation of a war hero.
In the early 1990s, the political winds in Bangladesh changed and he faced the threat of another detention. He gave up everything and moved to the US in 1993. Now he was a poor immigrant from an obscure land.
He asked himself: “Am I not meant to do something better than drive a taxi?”
He did the job in two stints, in the 1990s and again in the 2010s, in addition to working as a cashier at McDonald’s and managing a grocery store.
His three children attended college in the US and now have corporate or creative professions in New York City. In 2017, thanks to their financial support, Khan was able to retire. He lives with Rizia Khan, his wife since 1982, in New Hyde Park on Long Island.
Of all the occasions when Khan has spoken in America about his past, one stands out.
In September 2021, he found himself at an improbable scene: a packed hip-hop show at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom. At one point, the concert organisers summoned him backstage.
Shortly thereafter, the headliner, a Bangladeshi American rapper named Anik Khan, paused between songs. He announced a special guest: someone who had grown up in a village, recited poetry in front of thousands, started a successful business, enjoyed the services of a personal driver — and then left it all behind to become a driver for other people while living in a one-bedroom apartment with six people in Queens.
“If it’s OK,” Anik said, “I’d love to bring out my father to do one of his poems.”
To the sound of a blaring klaxon and shrieks from the crowd, Khan emerged. Anik was sporting cornrows and an unbuttoned short-sleeve shirt; his father wore pointed slippers, a white kurta and a green shawl with golden trim. Turning towards the hip-hop fans, Golam folded his hands in the traditional South Asian sign of respect.
He did not, however, recite his poem.
“I was a freedom fighter in the War of Liberation,” he said.
Many in the crowd could not have known what war, exactly, he was referring to, but they cheered in response.
Khan continued: “In 1971 …”
Anik reappeared. He whispered something into his father’s ear and made a straight-ahead gesture with his arm before backing away.
Khan continued his explanation.
“This poetry was very much encouragement the War of Liberation,” he went on. “I was very young that time.”
Anik returned. He leaned over his father’s shoulder, the microphone picking up his words. “I have to do a show, Baba,” Anik pleaded. “Can you do your poem? Right now. No more talking.”
For two minutes, gesticulating to the crowd and to his heart, Khan recited Bengali verse.
Finally, he finished. The DJ shouted, “Make some noise for Golam!”
He might not have made himself understood, but in that moment, Khan found glory in America.
New York Times News Service
