Short Story: The Razakar’s Daughter by Niaz Zaman

Niaz Zaman shares a poignant story that focuses on the Liberation War of 1971 which ended in December that year.

Both their fathers were in politics – and, as often happens, in parties with very different, one might even say, opposing agendas. His father, though he only wore khaddar, was always dressed in a freshly washed and ironed outfit every day and, though he believed in socialism, was very particular about the fish and meats that were served for lunch and dinner. Her father, though he belonged to the party historically founded by Muslim landowners, owned just a small plot of ancestral property and had, unlike many of the politicians of the time, studied at the University of Dacca rather than at Islamia College in Calcutta. 

In September 1970, Bashir had just finished his engineering exams. He had sufficiently impressed the American Visiting Professor to get a recommendation that enabled him to get into the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where Fazlur Rahman Khan, the Bengali who had designed the Sears Tower, had also studied.