I asked my Dadu about the war

Like I said in my last post I was going to try write about this at some point if I ever worked out how to say it without completely collapsing. I still don't think that's working, but going to write this out now before I totally lose my courage.

I was having a video call with my Dadu last week and ended up asking him directly, for the first time ever, about 1971. He's 78 now and clearly doesn't love discussing it (my dad had told me as much in advance), but he answered me anyway, in a hushed way that I'd never heard him speak in before.

He was a very young boy living in Dhaka at the time when the crackdown began. He explained that he was stuck in a relative's house out in the suburbs for a few weeks with not much real information beyond whispers and then... Sounds at night, that he didn't want to describe.

He lost a cousin that year, someone who he remembered simply as, ' a good boy, quite, wanted to be a teacher,' and then paused on the call.

I held my breath and stayed silent, feeling it was the wrong time for me to try and fill empty space.

The most interesting thing for me though was at the end when he said, in Bengali, that he doesn't talk about it a lot 'because nobody here wants to hear it anymore and it changes nothing.' I've been thinking about that particular sentence all week. It's not really accusatory, more like there's an acceptance to it, a resigned peace in letting this one defining, most traumatic year of his life become an almost completely untold story.

I did ask him afterward if he minded me putting a bit of this down on here (even if poorly) and he seemed really receptive, saying he was in fact glad that someone in the family was taking the initiative to ask questions rather than allow it all to be left unsaid and unspoken. That wasn't exactly the reaction I expected; I'd thought I was perhaps trespassing on very private ground, and in reality the silence wasn't serving an protective purpose; it was just the path of least resistance.

I don't have a clever concluding message for this. Just wishing I had asked him these questions ten years ago, when he might have been able to recall things with a little more clarity, although as I know I might not have understood his answers. Going to continue asking, slowly, whatever he's prepared to tell.