London, 1971

I was about six years old when my family got on a plane bound for London from Lagos, Nigeria. I remember the elation that I felt at Lagos airport, the quick turn of my stomach as the roar of the BOAC airplane turned into a crescendo and it rose into the clouds. After sparring mildly with my brother for the control of the armrest buttons and gadgets, I spotted a teacher from the Nigerian school that I attended. She asked me if I was going for a holiday to London. I heard the faint rustle of my mother's sari, and before I could answer, she blurted out, quite tensely: "Yes, yes, we are only going for a holiday." My teacher seemed satisfied at this answer, and turned away to attend to her own children's tug-of-war.
My mother's behavior surprised me. She was ordinarily the calmest of mothers. She had prepared an elaborate birthday party for me a few months ago where I had received very many presents. As I thought of them in an acquisitive six-year old fashion, I turned to her, with her neat appearance and anxious eyes, and asked: "Mummy, when are we going back home?" Turning to me, she said quietly: "We are not going back, not ever. Your Bappa is leaving the Pakistan High Commission. We are at war with Pakistan."
I looked frantically around for my father. He was sitting far away at the back of the plane, in the smoking zone, with his characteristic Benson & Hedges pack in his hand, his long legs protruding into the aisle. He caught me looking at him, and he smiled with the same anxiety reflected in his eyes. As the BOAC plane tore through the grey clouds, I felt that we were hurtling towards an unknown, uncertain destination.
My father had been a diplomat with the Pakistan High Commission in Nigeria in1970. It was his first posting. As the first son going abroad, families on both his and my mother's side had made much of it. My dada, tall and commanding, had been in charge of departure arrangements and I remember his booming voice ordering my younger chachas on frantic errands. No one dared to say "no" to my dada. There were many invitations at the houses of relatives and we were finally seen off from the old Dacca airport with my younger uncles yelling through the steel shuttered gates: "Khuda hafeez!"
I remember the youthful excitement of my father when we arrived in Nigeria and he drove us on the winding highways, while my mother recuperated at home with my new-born baby sister. He was the only Bengali officer from the East wing and as the war started, the rhetoric around him and our family changed from the flowery to the abusive in the small High Commission circles. I recall a dinner party that we attended, and a West Pakistani officer glancing at my father, saying "Bangali bandar" to another aide and laughing. My father turned red in the face, clenching his hands, while my young 24-year-old mother looked on apprehensively.
Years later, when I asked him about what drove him to defect, he said simply: "It was a choice between freedom and eternal slavery to those dictators. If I had not defected, they would have shipped all of us to prison camps in Pakistan." When an officer from the Indian High Commission offered to help with passports and airline tickets, he, with my mother's support, decided to take their only chance at survival. The Overseas Office of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh at Prembridge Gardens, London, headed by Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury, encouraged him to join them.
Our early days in London passed in a blur. I recall the slight shiver of cold as I stepped off the plane and Mr. Mohiuddin Ahmed (who had left his post at the Pakistan High Commission in London) and his wife greeting us with smiles and warm clothes. My father gave an interview in a London newspaper soon after in which he said: "I will not peddle Yahya's lies".
We stayed with Mr. Sultan Sharif and his lovely Irish wife Nora for a couple of days, after which we shared a terraced house in Balham with another Bengali family. We also became good friends with Mr. and Mrs. Martin and their children Shoma, Tina and Pavel who lived close by. We often strolled up and down the street in front of our house, or pop into the local fish 'n chips for a bite. I was fascinated by the pictures of David Cassidy on Shoma Apu's wall .We were enrolled into the school nearest our house and became used to Christmas plays and British school lunches with custard for dessert. I recall British children calling out at us: "Paki! Paki" and all of us Bengali boys and girls yelling back at the top of our voices: "We are not Pakis, we are Bengalis!" But of course, they didn't understand and laughed and walked away. Schoolyards and classrooms were rough places in those days.
Life became tougher. Day after day, the television screen that we gathered to watch was filled with the images of rotting dead bodies and fat crows in Dacca. Joan Baez and George Harrison gave concerts for Bangladesh. Our fathers met at the Prembridge Gardens Office and planned on how to gather international support for Bangladesh. They had meetings with British MPs and gave press conferences to let the foreign press know about the atrocities of the Pakistani army. We, the children, overheard our parents talk about the bloody massacres of entire neighbourhoods, the orchestrated mass rape of Bengali women in an effort to rid them of their "Hindu Bengali" gene, the slaughter camps where entire families disappeared and even of the kindness of the occasional Pakistani officer. An army officer appeared on grandfather's doorsteps in Dacca when my father defected. When my dada told him that he had no knowledge of the whereabouts of his son, this officer looked intently at my grandfather, nodded his head, signalled to his troops who had been standing with bayoneted guns outside and left. The aftermath of this interrogation could have easily been very different.
Our fathers ran out of funds. We watched our mothers put away their colourful saris, and don the grey clothes of the London factory worker. Our mothers were a generation of women raised in conservative households who had never imagined having to step out of the house to support a family. Now they were doing it to support their husbands and their country. The day my mother went out to work, she put a latch key around my neck. "Look after your brother" she said. My baby sister cried and cried on the first day at the babysitters. My mother worked in an assembly line at a television factory called Decca and became one of the best workers on the row. The dedication that she showed in being a supportive wife and a caring mother also shone through her work at the factory.
One night, I woke up to the sounds of some voices. My parents were whispering to one another and my father was dressed to go out. He whispered to her: "He is coming - Mujib is coming tonight". It was all over the Guardian the following day and the Bengali community in London heaved a collective sigh of relief. The man in the black koti represented something that I did not understand as a child; I only knew that my parents were smiling again.
People in Bangladesh remember the day that their country became independent in many different ways. Some remember buying balloons and letting off patkas. Others remember packing their belongings in the villages that they had fled to and preparing to come back to Dacca. I remember it as the euphoric day that my mother was able to discard her grey London factory clothes and wear her vibrant saris once again.

Sayeeda Jaigirdar lives in Toronto. Her novel-in-progress is The Song of the Jamdanee Sari.