Arre, baba, my mother-in-law would tell me how during the ’71 war, they'd hide the radio under the paddy basket in their Darjeeling kitchen—but my father-in-law, he was a forester in Siliguri, and he smuggled sacks of rice across the border for the refugees. She always said, “The real heroes weren't the ones with guns, but the village women who hid a family in their cow shed for four months on a handful of flattened rice.” That story makes me wonder, haan—how many of those ordinary, broke families got any compensation, ki, or do we just remember the famous faces? The data on post-war rehabilitation for the poorest districts is still so patchy, isn't it, and that’s where the real wound festered.
#memory#1971
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