Seventy One : In Death's Proximity

During his first career, while teaching at Khulna Daulatpur College, Professor Nazmul Haque tells phase by phase about the horrors of people, life, death, dreams, struggle and war - which he saw and experienced very closely. The professor began the memoir, “I did not know that when you float in water, the bodies of men float upside and the bodies of women float down. This is the difference between them in the water after death".
Beginning of the period After the Dhaka crackdown on March 25, 1971, the horror reached Khulna city. Out on the street, he saw the bodies of the three sons of a Shakespeare Milton-read lawyer, lying on the street, right in front of the house. People are fleeing the city in droves, day or night. The Pakistani army had kept the city in terror by installing machine guns on the top-storied buildings. One by one, the harsh reality of brutal torture, oppression, rape, and destruction by Pakistani forces across urban and rural Bengal. Railway lines, slums, human habitations, local markets, and bazaars are burnt to ashes. The darkness of the night sky is filled with the red glow of the fire.

The story of Khaled Rashid, another professor comes in the flow of the events of the liberation war. Expelled from ordinary society for his revolutionary idealism. Then, while facing the Pak invading forces, he disappeared forever on a day in the quarter of April. Shanti Das, a college student who was forced to spend half-naked, was found in the concentration camp, along with many other girls who had been captured from the nearby village. In those camps, the screams of the prisoners deepened in the day-night air of the house. Professor Najmul recalls the words of the labor-farmer leader Rafi. After killing this Rafi, the merciless Razakars (Pakistani Collaborators) cut off his head and hung it on a tall betel nut tree inside the market. In the meantime, the Pakistanis understand that the educated class must be eliminated. When the brother-in-law of Professor Nazmul, the principal of Narail College, is captured, an uncertain adventure begins to rescue the relative. With a Bihari student and an Urdu-speaking driver, Professor and his sister traveled from Khulna to Jessore, Jessore to Navaran area of the border. Again, the Jessore cantonment, they have to eat with the Pakistani major doctor, and listened to the scolding and scornful words of the colonel in the circuit house.

However, time gives an understanding of another reality. War changes people's thinking and behavior. People who are known in the tribe turn back with hatred, and people who are strangers like enemies extend a helping hand. Even the writer was ashamed to feel the opportunism and meanness of his own middle class when he went to the house of the poor young Mikhail in the village and took shelter, on the night of the terrible bombardment. The poor people do not forget their responsibility to the guests. Eighty-year-old professor Nazmul brought up a surprising reality of Bangladesh to Supriya day after day. Supriya herself, whose ancestors fled in fear during the 1971s, to neighboring India - as if rediscovering the life of the people of that time. The professor concludes his memoirs, giving a brutal picture of the defeat at the end of the Shiromani war of devastated, exhausted, and dying Pakistanis. Standing on the Shiromani field, he saw how a proud, tyrannical, unprincipled army lay like dogs and cats in the ruins of war. For nine long months, those who provided food for foxes, dogs and vultures, killing millions of people, themselves fell prey to those vultures, in the end.
Professor Nazmul's description is not just a memoir, but an excellent depiction of Bangladesh's independence history. It is as if he is not telling any history, but history itself is told by his voice – and we see that visualization throughout the story of the film.