Beg's Stories: A Subaltern’s Account of the 1971 War in East Pakistan and Thereafter by Salman Beg instant download

Beg's Stories: A Subaltern’s Account of the 1971 War in East Pakistan and Thereafter by Salman Beg instant download

While I was encouraged by many, to narrate my experiences of 1971, stay in India and return home it was my son-in-law Ali Abbas Aizad who convinced me to share these in written form. This happened when my wife and I were visiting him, my eldest daughter and their children in Abu Dhabi in October 2021.
-
Let me say that I had no idea, when I was writing the first story, that a total of ten stories would come about, and could naturally be divided into two parts. The first part groups five stories covering the war in East Pakistan which lasted from 10 November to 20 December 1971. The second part is spread over 22 months and titled Guest of Indira Gandhi, as the bulk of the time was spent in various Indian camps spread over Gaya, Delhi, Agra, Delhi and Roorkee, and ends with my homecoming. I thought long and hard about how to end the stories. As I read again what my father had written in October 1974, I decided to use an extract from his publication, which makes for the perfect conclusion.
-
In a sense, my story is but one of the thousands of stories of this tragic period, of young men thrust into war, and where loss, pain and anguish were suffered by their families on both sides of the war. I was still in my eighteenth year when I left home, and not yet 21 when I returned twenty-three months later in October 1973