I have lived a reasonably full and eventful life where I have been witness to the historic events that include the birth of the new nation state of Bangladesh. I was, myself, in a modest capacity, involved in some of these events that have provided me with a somewhat closer perspective to reflect on them. While others have also written accounts of these events, whether in memoirs or as history, my own point of departure moves beyond a historical narrative and aims to present my story rather than a history of these events. My story narrates the tale of an ordinary person whose life’s journey began from a place where its culmination in my engagement in a political struggle to establish a new country, Bangladesh, appeared highly improbable.

I was raised in a world of privilege and educated in institutions such as St. Paul’s School, Darjeeling; Aitchison College, Lahore; and Cambridge University, which catered to the elite and where English was the exclusive medium of instruction. I first came to live in Dhaka in January 1957, at the age of 21. At that time, I could not speak Bangla as I had been raised in a family with little exposure to its rich culture. I could never relish ilish, I had rarely heard any Rabindra Sangeet and could not take inspiration from the poetry of either Tagore or Nazrul Islam. When I landed in Dhaka after three years in Cambridge, I was, true to my upbringing and education, a brown sahib, fit for a career abroad, or in the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP), or as an executive in the head office of a multinational company located in Karachi.

By the time I departed from Cambridge in October 1956, I had already made the critical decisions that have guided my life over the next 59 years. I chose, quite deliberately, to make my home in Dhaka, which has remained so ever since. I opted for a career as an economist, whether in public service or as a university teacher, and to commit myself to a life of political engagement dedicated, however imprecisely, to the people of a land with which I was completely unfamiliar. Even before I left Cambridge, I had been offered a position as a Reader in economics at Peshawar University, which I turned down because I had decided to work only in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and, in consequence, never sought employment anywhere else. At that stage of my life, my adopted homeland was for me, an idea, not a real place. I thus, chose to make my home in Dhaka, not out of the compulsions of circumstance, birth or ancestral inheritance, but as an ideological decision to proclaim myself a Bangali.

This memoir seeks to track the improbable journey of a child born at an elite nursing home in Calcutta, with a British doctor in attendance, to a mother from the Dhaka Nawab Family (DNF) and a father who was a member of the Imperial Police Service of India. The central theme of my story is intended to explain why, how and under what circumstances the great-great-grandson of Nawab Ahsanullah, the son of a police officer who was once a contemporary of Field Marshal Ayub Khan at Sandhurst, would, on 27 March 1971, have his home in Dhaka invaded by an officer and his troops from the Pakistan army with orders to take him into custody on charges of high treason to the State of Pakistan.

In tracing this transformation in the trajectory of my life, I am fortunate in being able to draw upon my exposure to important historical events and some of the great and lesser personalities who contributed to the shaping of these events. As far as possible, I draw upon my own first-hand experiences, as also on the narratives of those whom I trust, who were themselves exposed to these events, which they have narrated through their own memoirs or through conversations with me. On some rare occasions, I draw on works of scholarship on the emergence of Bangladesh that serve to illuminate aspects of my story which were not within my immediate vision.

As may be expected, some discrepancies may be found, as between these narratives, as to dates, logistics, activities and interpretation of events. I leave it to historians to evaluate and reconcile these differences within a more scholarly work, treating our subjective musings as useful intermediate inputs based on first-hand experiences.

My story, as narrated in this book, concludes at the liberation of Bangladesh, when I returned to Dhaka on 31 December 1971 after spending nine months abroad as an envoy for the Government of an independent Bangladesh. At that moment, at the age of 36, I experienced a sense of fulfilment, which I was never destined to experience again over the next 43 years of my life. This story ends at this high moment in my life.

For me and all my generation who participated in or even witnessed the epic struggle, which culminated in the birth of a nation, this journey, with all its ups and downs, was full of excitement and promise where “bliss was it to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” In our uphill journey, our occasional flagging spirits were always recharged by a glimpse of the mountaintop above us which inspired us with the hope that we would eventually attain that summit. That is why I have titled my recollections, however untranquil they may appear, as a memoir of fulfilment.

All those alive today-who, “like Cortez upon a peak in Darien,” looked down on the glorious new world of Bangladesh that lay before us at that historic moment in December-will share my sense of fulfilment, so it is better that I end my story on this high note. This high point in our lives should remind the present generation of Bangladeshis that there were moments of infinite possibility in our history, where a generation once believed that a new nation could be built that would give meaning to the lives of the millions who made enormous sacrifices so that we would live as free people in a just society. How far our dreams for a new order were realized within an independent Bangladesh will be narrated by me as part of another, rather less fulfilling, part of my life’s story, if divine providence wills that I should live long enough to narrate it.