“My Time with the Bangladeshi Bloggers Facing Terror and Machete Attacks”
By Ranbir Sindu Singh, originally published on VICE.com (2016)
Illustration by Deshi Deng
The killers walked along Shahbag Road, a wide, chaotic avenue in Dhaka, Bangladesh, bisected by a concrete divider, and entered Aziz Super Market, an indoor mall situated between the gaudy storefronts of Muslim Sweets and Juicy Fast Foods. The building's interior, three floors of ugly 70s concrete chic embittered by age, was little more than a series of poorly lit and dingy tunnels lined mostly with jeans and T-shirt shops.
It was around five in the afternoon, on October 31, 2015, when several men appeared. They ascended the staircase to the third floor, passing a row of brightly lit clothing stores with mannequins standing outside. At the far end of a secluded hallway, they reached the cramped office of Faisal Arefin Deepan’s publishing house. Deepan was a handsome man with a boyish face, always well-dressed. At 43, he had made a name for himself by publishing both secular and religious works, including the works of Ajivit Roy, a prominent secular blogger who had been murdered earlier that year.
Deepan’s father, Abul Kashem Fazlul Haq, an intellectual in his own right and professor of Bengali at the prestigious Dhaka University, found his body early that evening. He had rushed over when he heard of an attack that same day on another publisher with offices nearby and was unable to reach his son by phone. That publisher, Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, along with two writers who were also attacked that night, survived, though Tutul lost his hands.
“A few years ago, this couldn't have happened,” Faruk Wasif, a local poet in his 30s, told me. We had met at the Dhaka Lit Fest, where I was an invited author, and he offered to take me personally to the market. Less than a month had passed since the killing, and he warned me it was unsafe for a foreigner to go alone. The building had once been a center for culture, filled with bookshops and publishers’ offices, but in recent years, those businesses had shuttered. “Deepan’s office would have been surrounded by students, by intellectuals, by people talking and discussing. Everyone knew one another then; there was a community here. That’s all gone. Now no one knows anyone, and they all pretend they saw nothing.“
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