KARACHI, Pakistan, April 23 —“Sometimes I feel homesick,” said Jalal Ahmed, looking down shyly at his hands, “but then I take a trip to Chittagong and I am all right for a couple of more years.”
For Mr. Ahmed and the other members of Karachi's small Bengali community, their native Bengali soil—now embattled East Pakistan—seems very far away. The Bengalis, a few score thousand strong, are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the Sindhis, Pathans and other West Pakistanis in this city of more than three million, and they have been subdued and anxious since the East Pakistani crisis began last month.
A thrill of pleasure went through the group of Bengalis at Mr. Ahmed's fruit‐juice stand when word arrived that airmail service to the East had been resumed after being interrupted since last month.
Family in Chittagong
“Now I will write to my family,” said Mr. Ahmed, whose wife and six children are away in the East Pakistani port of Chittagong. They were staying there when the crisis began.
Like many other Bengalis, Mr. Ahmed came here years ago, full of hopes of making his fortune. “Things were not good at home,” he said. “I thought I would come to Karachi — it is a big city with much life.”
A quiet, conscientious man, Mr. Ahmed started squeezing oranges by hand and selling the juice. Now 19 years have passed, his beard is gray and he has built his business to neat wooden kiosk with its own billboard reading “Karachi Fruit Juice Cottage.”
He has long had a West Pakistani business partner, and most of his customers are West Pakistanis—including many officials from Government buildings in the surrounding quarter called Saddar.
But over the decades Mr. Ahmed has remained very much a Bengali, a man apart just as the Pathans and the Sindhis retain their ethnic identities in this city beside the Arabian Sea.
“The Bengalis have the map of Bengal written on their faces,” one Karachi intellectual put it this week, and the Bengalis are indeed generally finer honed, slimmer and smaller I than most other Pakistanis. They tend to have squarish cheekbones and quick emotions, as Mr. Ahmed does.
“I own land near Chittagong,” he said fondly. It is planted in rice and I will go there when I retire.” Bengalis here like to keep their ties to their home land. Mr. Ahmed has sent his wife and children back for extended stays over the last few years while he minded the store here.
All told, officials estimate that there are 60,000 to 70,000 Bengalis here, although Bengalis say the figure is higher. Some are Government functionaries and others are small business men like Mr. Ahmed. But most work as servants or in the cotton mills or at the port.
Master the Language
“We have always known about boats,” Mr. Ahmed said with a touch of pride in his homeland. He and other Bengalis here are also proud that they have mastered Urdu, an exotic, tongue full of Arabic words brought by conquering Arabs a millenium ago. Mr. Ahmed spoke in Urdu through an interpreter.
Yet some Bengali parents send their children to special Bengali schools here. Bengalis still like to go to Bengali movies and signs in the graceful Bengali script stand out in the half dozen neighborhoods where most Bengalis are concentrated.
Some Left for East
Some Bengalis—no one is quite sure how many—departed for their homeland last month after the crisis broke out. As tension rose throughout the country, scattered incidents here involving Bengalis and West Pakistanis were reported in the press.
But West Pakistani notables, including Mrs. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the wife of the West Pakistani political leader, toured the Bengali neighborhoods assuring Bengalis that no harm would come to them.
Nonetheless, Bengalis here are shy with outsiders these days. They do not talk about events in the East. And no statements by local Bengalis have been reported lately in the press.
“I come and go as I like, and my business is as usual,” Mr. Ahmed said with a small smile. “Chittagong is a long distance away.”