curating a past
The author talks about growing up in Dhaka where traditions were being rebuilt for a new state.
He talks about his policeman father who was on duty during the fateful days of February 1952 and met him with honour. He also got a poem from one of the places he raided at that time. He immediately understood the political and literary value of the poem and refused to hand it over. Instead he fled home, copied it by hand and, once assured of its safety, returned to his office and handed over the poem as part of the confiscated items.
When policemen become such desperate lovers of poetry, what chance can an artificial state survive? It also says something bigger. That the great middle class, who were the big supporters of the language movement, the educated middle class, had already lost their loyalty.
it is no accident that on the night of the 25thth 1971, The resistance to the Razarbagh Police Line became so significant that even Pakistan’s salaried law enforcers had long ago become volunteer warriors of the Bangladesh Liberation War.
