The first time I thought I might die, I called my father.

"Abbu," I said, trying to keep my voice steady, "the police are firing at us. I don't know if I'll make it home today." For a moment, neither of us spoke.

"If I do make it," I continued, "I don't know when. Pray for me. Forgive me for everything I've done wrong." Then I added one last request.

"Don't tell Amma yet. Only tell her if you don't hear from me by tomorrow morning."

It was July 2024. I was standing near Mohakhali, where clouds of tear gas drifted through the streets and the sound of gunfire echoed between concrete buildings. Only a few months earlier, I had been married. My wife was expecting our first child. My parents were growing older in our village.

As people scattered around me, I wasn't afraid of being arrested. I wasn't even afraid of dying. I was afraid of leaving my life unfinished. For years afterward, I told myself that was the day I became a coward.

But the story began long before July.

When I entered the University of Dhaka in 2016, politics existed mostly inside my phone. Like many students, I spent hours on Facebook. I argued about history, foreign policy and the future of Bangladesh with strangers I would never meet. One afternoon I posted a question that seemed ordinary enough:

"Who is Sushma Swaraj to tell Bangladesh what to do?" Within days, relatives began calling my parents. “Tell him to stop.” “He's ruining his future.” “He'll bring trouble on the family.”

For a while I would stop posting. Then I would begin again. The cycle repeated itself so often that it became part of family life.

Looking back, I realize how insignificant I was. I was an eighteen-year-old freshman with opinions and an internet connection. The state had little reason to notice me. Social media did.

More people began sharing what I wrote. My audience expanded beyond classmates. Without realizing it, I had started building a public voice. One afternoon a faculty member asked me to come to his office.

He began politely enough, asking what year I was in. "First year," I replied. He leaned back. "You know," he said, "teachers are like second gods here." Then he asked if I had been writing about politics online.

When I nodded, he smiled.

"You've just entered university," he said. "Already you're talking about national politics and geopolitics." He paused. "Nobody cares what you think." I walked back across campus embarrassed.

Perhaps everyone had been right. Perhaps I was simply another young man mistaking attention for importance.

But another thought stayed with me. This was the University of Dhaka. Its history had never been confined to classrooms. It had shaped language movements, democratic struggles and moments that altered the country's future. Generations of students before mine had believed that ordinary voices could become part of something larger.

Perhaps mine could too.

The arguments at home continued. Every new post brought fresh warnings. My father worried quietly. My relatives spoke loudly. My mother feared both for my future and for my safety. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she simply stopped talking to me.

Eventually she accepted that I wasn't going to stop. One evening she sat beside me and said something I have carried ever since. "This country has become difficult," she said softly.

"But remember—you don't belong to any political party. If something happens to you, nobody will come looking for you." She waited before continuing.

"If you choose this path, then become enough on your own. One person can become an institution. Only Allah knows what lies ahead. If you believe speaking against injustice is your responsibility, then do it in a way that leaves you with no regrets."

No speech I have heard since has stayed with me the way those few sentences did. I stopped waiting for someone else to speak first. If there were consequences, they would belong to me.

By the end of 2017 my university life had begun intersecting with people who treated politics less as ideology than as daily survival. Through friends I met members of Chhatra Dal.

The first was Shafi Bhai. I no longer know what position he holds today, but titles were never what distinguished him. He possessed an unusual confidence that made impossible outcomes feel almost inevitable. After speaking with him, authoritarianism seemed temporary rather than permanent.

I was honest with him from the beginning. "I'm not made for street politics," I told him. "You won't find me leading marches. But if the battle is one of ideas, arguments and words, I'll stand there."

He understood immediately.

Through him I gradually met others—Noyon Bhai, Emon Bhai from my department, Kawsar Bhai of Bijoy 71 Hall, Alamgir Bhai from Savar. They differed in personality but shared one remarkable characteristic.

None of them believed the political order surrounding us would last forever. Meetings were discreet. Conversations moved from one corner of campus to another. People lowered their voices instinctively. Everyone assumed someone might be listening.

What struck me most was not their anger. It was their composure. They spoke matter-of-factly about arrests, surveillance and beatings, as though these had become ordinary features of university life. Their certainty fascinated me.

They never claimed to know when change would come. Only that it would. Years later I realized I had witnessed something important before most of the country did. Political movements rarely begin on the streets.

They begin quietly….in conversations that seem insignificant at the time.

Around the same period I became one of the administrators of Shopner Dhaka Bishwabiddaloy, a Facebook community that had evolved into one of the university's largest online forums.

It became more than a discussion page. Students exchanging information there when speaking openly elsewhere felt risky. When the Quota Reform Movement erupted in 2018, the page became one of its digital meeting places.

I wasn't among those leading rallies.I worked behind the scenes. I wrote updates, verified information before posting it and tried to stop rumors from spreading faster than facts. It felt like small work.

It wasn't.

One by one, familiar faces disappeared. Some were beaten. Some were arrested. Some resurfaced after days of interrogation. Others remained missing long enough for their friends to imagine the worst.

Then our Facebook page was hacked. Messages appeared announcing that the movement had ended and urging students to return home. The announcement was false.

Because many students trusted me, I knew silence would only deepen the confusion. I went live on Facebook. The movement, I said, had not ended. When the livestream finished, I sat alone for several minutes.

I remember thinking that perhaps this would finally be the moment they came for me. They never did. Others paid that price instead. The guilt of surviving became familiar. Every arrest raised the same question.

Why them? Why not me? By then I had learned something else. Political violence rarely asks whether you belong to a party. Opposition alone can be enough. Although I never formally joined any student organization, my criticism of repression made me unwelcome.

Repeated intimidation forced me out of Bijoy Ekattor Hall, where I had lived in a crowded gono room with other students who could afford little else. Losing that room felt, briefly, like losing the university itself.

Still, leaving entirely felt worse. So I stayed. Not because I was fearless.

Because surrender seemed permanent. After the Quota Reform Movement subsided, life appeared to return to normal. It never truly did. Fear simply became routine.

I finished my degree and, like many graduates, buried myself in work. For a time I practiced journalism because I believed stories mattered. Later I joined an international educational institution while also teaching at a language institute. Outwardly, my life looked stable. I had steady work, I had recently married, and my wife was expecting our first child.

Politics had receded into the background, but it had never disappeared. Then came July 2024. The protests spread faster than anyone expected. Demonstrations that began on university campuses spilled into neighborhoods, highways and district towns. My office sensed the situation was deteriorating and asked everyone to leave early.

Outside, Dhaka had already stopped functioning.

Buses no longer moved. Intersections became parking lots. People stood beside stalled vehicles, trying to decide whether to wait or begin walking. Home was nearly two and a half hours away.

So I started walking.

By the time I reached Mohakhali, the city no longer resembled the place I crossed every day. Students filled the streets chanting slogans. Teenagers marched beside them. Office workers who had never imagined joining a demonstration walked alongside university students. 

Rickshaw pullers watched from the roadside before quietly joining the crowd themselves.I had left work wearing formal clothes and polished shoes. I looked less like a protester than someone returning from a meeting.

My plan was simple. Walk home. Stay out of trouble. That lasted only a few minutes. The chants were familiar. The determination on people's faces was familiar too. Without making a conscious decision, I stepped into the procession.

Police were already forming a line ahead. The confrontation escalated with startling speed. First came tear gas. The crowd scattered. Then rubber bullets. People stumbled, regrouped and advanced again. Then came live rounds.

The atmosphere changed instantly.

The slogans disappeared beneath panic. Until then, I had known political fear mostly through stories, surveillance and intimidation. Friends had been arrested. Others had vanished for days. I had spent years expecting a knock at the door.

Standing in the path of bullets was different.

The tear gas burned so intensely that I could barely keep my eyes open. Every breath felt like inhaling fire. My throat tightened. Around me people ran in every direction. Some carried the injured. Others froze, unable to decide where safety lay.

I ran toward the nearest building with walls. It was a shopping complex called Mama Plaza. Several others had reached it before me. Moments later, the gates were locked. Those outside remained outside.

Those inside could only listen. Gunfire. Explosions. Screams. The market had become an accidental shelter.

Inside were people who had never expected to find themselves in the middle of a political confrontation: elderly men returning from hospital appointments, office workers still wearing identification cards, women carrying frightened children, patients too weak to stand without assistance, shopkeepers and passersby.

Outside, the violence continued.

Inside, everyone struggled to breathe. The shopkeepers did something I have never forgotten. Without asking who supported which political party or why anyone had been on the street, they opened their stores to strangers. Plastic chairs appeared. Bottles of water were passed around. Small spaces were cleared for elderly people to sit.

Nobody asked questions. ‘Need’ was explanation enough. The tear gas seeped into the building despite the locked gates. Children cried because their eyes burned. An elderly man leaned against a wall, coughing uncontrollably. A woman tried to comfort her daughter while struggling to breathe herself.

I had one bottle of water. It disappeared quickly. Eventually I found a washroom with running tap water. It was hardly clean, but cleanliness had become a luxury. I washed my face, drank from my cupped hands and filled whatever containers I could find before carrying water back to the others.

We rinsed burning eyes. We helped people breathe. We did what ordinary people could while extraordinary violence unfolded just beyond the entrance.

At one point I looked through the gate. Students were still outside. Some were running toward the police. Some were carrying away the wounded. Everything inside me urged me to go back.

For years I had imagined that, if history demanded something of me, I would answer without hesitation. But another reality stood behind me. A child crying for water. An elderly man who could barely stand. A patient still wrapped in hospital bandages.

People who had nowhere else to go. Only months earlier I had become a husband. Soon I would become a father. My parents' faces appeared before me with startling clarity.

I remember thinking that if I walked back into the street and never returned, my child would grow up knowing me only through photographs. For years afterward, I interpreted that hesitation as weakness.

I told myself I had failed.

Others had faced bullets. I had remained behind a locked gate. It became the story I told myself about that day. Eventually the firing subsided enough for people to leave. It took me nearly midnight to reach home. The journey felt unreal.

Smoke still rose from burning tires. Shattered glass covered sections of the road. Ambulances sped past one after another. People spoke in whispers, as though raising their voices might summon another volley of gunfire.

When I finally walked through my own front door, I realized something inside me had shifted. For years I had measured courage by proximity to danger. July forced me to question that definition. The days that followed transformed the country.

Crowds poured onto highways waving flags. Trucks carried young people celebrating what many believed was the beginning of a new Bangladesh. Motorcycles filled the roads in long processions. Complete strangers embraced one another.

I found myself on the Savar highway wearing an old University of Dhaka T-shirt. People stopped me for photographs. Some assumed I had spent every day on the front lines. I accepted the photographs. But each one felt incomplete.

Because the same roads carrying celebrations also carried ambulances. Between the victory processions came vehicles transporting the injured. Some families welcomed their sons home. Others prepared to bury them.

Those two realities existed side by side. They still do. Over the years I have often returned to that afternoon inside Mama Plaza. For a long time I remembered only my own hesitation.

I remembered standing behind a locked gate while others confronted live ammunition. I remembered believing that I had chosen safety over courage. Now I remember something else.

I remember the shopkeepers who opened their doors to strangers. I remember people sharing the last of their drinking water. I remember ordinary citizens comforting children they had never met. I remember frightened people choosing to help one another instead of themselves.

The men and women who stood in front of rifles deserve the country's gratitude. Many paid with their lives. Others paid with permanent injuries that history can never fully repay.

Their courage made change possible.

But they were not alone. History is also carried by people whose names rarely appear in newspapers. By mothers who let their children leave home despite their fear. By doctors who worked through the night. By journalists who continued documenting events when it was safer to look away.

By shopkeepers who unlocked their businesses for strangers. By countless people whose only act of resistance was refusing to abandon another human being. Perhaps that, too, is a form of courage.

I no longer know whether I was brave that afternoon.

Perhaps I wasn't. Perhaps I simply did the only thing I was capable of doing. What I know with certainty is that many people are far braver than when I never returned home to tell their own stories.

Mine survives because theirs does not. If this memoir has any purpose, it is not to place myself among them. It is to remember them honestly.

Eight years after an impulsive Facebook post first altered the direction of my life, I finally understood what my mother had meant.

"One person can become an institution."

—

Niaz Mahmud Sakib is a writer and translator