They held the stengun to the back of his head in the half darkness of the late winter evening. A lamppost threw uncertain light as they stood in a group and smoked and talked cheerfully. The man had been to taken out of his home and made to stand on a vacant lot in the upper middle class neighbourhood. Nothing very extraordinary. It was just Bangladesh in mid-December 1971.
His name was Shahbaz. A noble name. But he was the typical neighbourhood thug, swaggering drinking, fornicating man. Yet he alone of all would- also dare to take the small-pox patient to the hospital by himself when others turned away. A braggart and a bully but not exactly a criminal. Not even by the more uptight standards of that era. But Shahbaz, unwittingly and through no particular choice or resolve of his own, had broken a cardinal rule of history. He had stepped into one of its wrong moments. Bangladesh had just become independent and there were more guns in young, angry, impatient hands than the trees and leaves that populated a Dhaka December of that time. And guns sought enemies like the flies and vermin sought the garbage on the street.