Iqbal Rabbani's blood-stained shirt |
December 16 - a day forever etched in the collective consciousness as a moment of profound national rupture. Yet, for countless families, particularly those of the Urdu-speaking community caught in the devastating aftermath of 1971, this date is not just a historical marker; it is an annual, visceral commemoration of personal agony, and for me embodied by a single, blood-stained white shirt. This is the story of my family, and the painful memory of my eldest brother Shaheed Iqbal Rabbani, whose fate became a silent testimony to the atrocities that followed the conflict.
Iqbal was just a boy, a teenager brimming with the quiet dreams that define youth. Of course we are Urdu-speaking, a cultural identity which, in the chaotic and brutal post-war climate, became a perilous label. Like so many, my brother too vanished, swallowed by the widespread violence and reprisal that swept through the newly........