homes to defend the holy Koran and many Hindus fled.” There has been much killing the camel-corps major grants. “The crocodiles have gotten fat, “says the frogman, glancing out at the Ganges.
But all is returning to normal, they say. and the Bengali people aren't afraid of the army. A ferry is landing, and a group of Bengali laborers, recruited by the army to reopen a jute mill, edges past the majors in single file. Each of them bows his head in a subservient salute as he passed the officers.
Not all army officers are as sympathetic as these majors. Western residents of one town tell of an army captain approaching a young Hindu girl and telling her to feel the barrel of his gun. “You feel it is still warms,” he said. “From killing Hindus,1 he added, laughing but not joking.
An old Bihari who served as a bearer in the British Indian army many years ago is now a waiter at a roadside hostel on the outskirts of a town more than half destroyed. He supports the army and thus isn't afraid to talk. He explains that for several April days, after the Awami League people fled but before the army arrived, things were bad for the Biharis. Mobs of Bengalis ran through the streets shouting (and he lapses into his old Indian-army English). “Kill the Bihari buggers, burn the Bihari buggers.” Some Biharis were killed, he says, but most weren't. Then the army arrived. The army kills many Bengali buggers.” he says. “And the Hindu buggers. they run away to India. It is very bad days. Sahib."
A Hindu, one of the richest and most respected men in his community before the fighting, was a philanthropist who had built schools, hospitals and irrigation systems for the predominantly Moslem peasants in his area. He considered himself fully Pakistani. Although a Bengali, he hadn't backed the Awami League but rather had supported the more conservative and even anti-Hindu Moslem League.
The hunter becomes the hunted
For nearly a month after the civil war began but before the army arrived in his area (and thus during the period Biharis were in danger from Bengalis), the Hindu sheltered two Biharis in his home. When mobs came looking for them, he protected them. But. with the arrival of the army, roles reversed, and Bengalis - particularly Hindu Bengali- became the hunted.
Hindu villages were burned by the army, and mobs were encouraged to plunder Hindu homes. Under army orders the local Hindu temple was smashed to the ground by men wielding sledgehammers'.
The Hindu and his family fled to the village hut of a friend, where they have been hiding for more than two months. His first daylight emergence from this hiding place was for a rendezvous with two reporters. He walked across the rice paddies in the late afternoon, dressed as a peasant and shielding his face with a black umbrella.
He hadn't fled to India like so many other Hindus because he hoped the army would move on and life might somehow return to what it had been before. But the army remains, Hindus are still being searched out and shot, and now it is too risky to try to reach the border from this area.
