Darkness, caught in loud silence

Strange things sometimes get the better of us in this country. Think of all the fears, all the apprehensions, all the doubts and suspicions that swirl around you at the time when the annual national budget is about to be announced. And once the finance minister has made his presentation, everyone seems to be getting caught in a frenzy of response and reaction. You can be sure the political opposition will decry the entire exercise as a plot against the poor; and, in the next breath, you can be certain that the ruling circles will suggest that the budget proves the nation has never had it so good. But if you wish to have an objective idea of post-budget conditions, ask the simple citizens of this country. More likely than not, you will find them in a spot.
And that happens when a government decrees that it will henceforth collect taxes on income from savings certificates. That is a neat way of doing business. It is a clean way of informing middle class men and women, those who look forward to a peaceful, pleasant sunset in their lives before mortality seizes hold of them, that part of the interest they have accumulated on their savings certificates will belong to the state. Now, what do you make of that? You are an honest citizen. You have not taken a corrupt step in your whole life. You have suffered for your scruples and your integrity. Those savings certificates are for you somewhat of a hold on the future. Why must the government then come in and claim a chunk of that money for itself?
Ah, but governments have a way of doing things you and I might not always understand. Not all governments, though. Around the world there are innumerable governments doing their job with nothing of the intrusive about them. You do not see presidents, prime ministers and ministers every livelong day on television or in the newspapers. That is the way things ought to be. Here, in our particular social clime, we do things a little differently. Here the education minister formally presents the results of school and college-leaving examinations to the prime minister, who then in cheerful grandeur releases them to an expectant country. And, before you know it, it is a whole nation that explodes in happy hysteria. Children in school fall into excited exuberance. Their teachers speak breathlessly to the media about their institutions. And newspapers dramatically go into the business of producing long comments on the significance of the results. It is a phenomenon that can only happen here. Doesn't that make you feel uplifted?
And then comes overwhelming tragedy. The manner in which individuals are getting their heads smashed under the wheels of buses driven by untrained men tells you something about the corruption that is now eating away at our souls. No one will tell you how these drivers came by their licences. Ask the police why they keep looking away from all the dilapidated vehicles that endlessly make a mess of the roads. They will not answer. Ask them why, moments into a bad accident, the driver of the offending bus manages to flee. No one will educate you on the issue. It is a queer experience observing the way policemen operate here. They seize vehicles (they call it requisition) without at all feeling embarrassed about it. They detain cars and motorcycles on the road and then commandeer the keys from the drivers of the vehicles. Under what law do they engage in such questionable acts? And why must they subtly, insidiously inform those drivers that there are indeed ways of getting out of the whole mess, through mandatory generosity on the part of the drivers?
It is a country where Kalpana Chakma can go missing for years and no voice will tell us where she has vanished or who has done what to her. It is a nation that will not know why a customs official died in the early 1980s soon after he detected some smuggled items at the airport. It is a land where men who went around killing their fellow Bengalis in the name of Pakistan in 1971 go about doing business as usual. Powerful men in both the ruling party and the opposition happily come together in trying to run Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation buses out of town so that they can have their own buses open new boxes of treasure for them. In this land without leadership, land grabbers find the courage to berate a minister and to demand that they be given land not theirs.
In this season of global soccer, the strange mutates into the bizarre. You gather your children around you, you have your spouse all smiling beside you --- all because a game in South Africa will come alive in the next few seconds. The anthems begin to be sung, the deafening roars of the crowd send electric thrill into you. Life, you tell yourself, is beautiful.
And then there is darkness, caught in loud silence. A power outage has smashed your happiness into a thousand little pieces.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: [email protected]