Ilias call home

For a few hours last Thursday, many people who heard the news that someone had called from Ilias Ali's phone were enthralled and excited. He was alive! bdnews24.com had informed that a phone call had been made from Ilias Ali's cell to someone in Sylhet. It reached national media in seconds and for a few minutes pushed aside all other news. In the newsroom, there was a lot of buzz but also an obvious concern about the political implications of his return. Suddenly after being considered dead by many for days, Ilias Ali seemed to have come alive. He was for a few brief moments resurrected and people talked about him in the present not the past tense. But a few hours later the news was declared as false and Ilias Ali was no longer with us again.

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For those of us who are of a certain age, 'disappearances' is not a stranger. It began in 1971 when Pakistan would swoop and take away people and many were rarely seen again. Disappearance of intellectuals and others on December 14 is another reminder of how horrific this experience of disappearance can be. Fathers of friends were gone and many bodies couldn't even be recovered from the killing fields of Mirpur and other places. I know how painful this never really knowing is, how this lack of closure affected my friend late Mishuk Munier, whose father Prof. Munier Chowdhury was disappeared. But does one really die if there is no news of the death? Of course everyone knows someone is not coming back but the mind doesn't accept it and the heart doesn't know how to. It's a fate that is closest to living with the dead, never being able to bury or say goodbye.

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I lived in the Mohammedpur for long, a place where the Biharis lived in the camp and led a life that kind of overwhelms the generally held notions of humanity. Since we consider them our enemy we tolerate every abuse against them though over time this wall of hostility has crumbled a bit. Here, disappearance of family members in the days after 1971 was common and I suppose few took notice of the Bihari mothers and wives who mourn for men who never returned.

I remember Zohrat /Zughra who roamed the lanes and by-lanes of Mohammedpur often drifting beyond the camp area to look for her husband who had disappeared. She would knock on doors and give vivid descriptions of the missing man and ask if anyone had seen him. She would usually be replied in the language reserved for beggars but I think after a while she must have gotten used to it. Unfazed, she would move on to the next house and repeat her questions. She had no sense that it was not Khulna from where her husband had disappeared and of course it didn't matter to her because what mattered was the disappearance not how or where.

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During the Mujib era, the practice exploded in scale as disappearing became not only a matter of vengeance but economics as well. Rich people were picked up and held for ransom and the new powerful learnt this trade almost immediately as rivalries and feuds were settled but bodies remained unfound. In one case, a man was kidnapped by his own cousin and even though the family had paid the money no one returned.
Political disappearances and many conducted by the state agents went on with impunity. The Rakkhi Bahini did it with arrogance and swagger but so did others including the newly powerful student and youth groups. Parents were terrified when they would hear that a son had joined politics because so many kinds of disappearances could happen to the politically inclined.

A friend of mine who belonged to an extreme left party was taken in and his family gave up hope after searching for long. No lawyers, no political contacts could help his family locate him. Finally in desperation they invited their pir baba to Dhaka who using the murid network found and got him released. But a week later he went missing again and it was heard that this time it was his own party that had done it deciding he was a traitor, He was never heard of again. I remember the mother would always give me bananas to eat when I would visit them later on, the son's favourite snacks.

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It has happened with every political phase and with RAB as an established fact of life, bigger than God, there has been many more in the last decade. Most of them are mysterious cases as is the one of Ilias Ali. His wife has said that the cause of his disappearance is 'political' but it really doesn't matter anymore because he is not really a person now but a symptom, an indicator of what the state has turned out to be. The political person has served his purpose and right now it's the human Ilias Ali that is left behind. How much he matters to his party is not important but to the family, the politician ended long ago and it's only the father, husband who remains. What matters is that he should come home. The family wants the man, the person, the human being back. Will that happen?

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Partisan politics is a huge monster which insists that political causes must be fed with the food it deserves including human bodies. We have no stomach for that anymore but in Bangladesh what we want doesn't matter. In a swish, a person becomes an image on flickering TV screen, a man becomes a name and no more and it's only in the family, that the entire human being is restored and becomes a person and a human being. In the end that's what matters.

No matter what, no matter how, no matter when Ilias Ali must return home.

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Afsan Chowdhury is the executive editor of bdnews24.com.