12-22-2025, 07:51 AM
1. The Beginning
Fahim Rubel Masud. The Liberator, the saint, the man crowned in might-have-beens—it’s impossible to look at blighted little Andhrapur today without considering how it could have been so beautifully, wonderfully different if we’d been given just five more years with Muktipada Masud. His death shattered our horizons, made the stories we told about ourselves and the futures we imagined infinitely smaller.
Fahim was wise, gifted, and pure of heart. He was an angel. But he was not God.
Andhrapur means “land of the earthy ones,” and Fahim Rubel Masud, once he descended from heaven, could never return. This impure Andhrapuri earth is his grave. The first truth you need to know, and the one which colors all the rest of them: Fahim Rubel Masud was gone too soon.
2. The Enemy
It’s a little-known fact that Fahim Masud’s story began in an unlikely place: the small town of Karimganj in Semaria, what was then the southern borderlands of the Daryan Empire. He was born in 1924 to an upper-caste Zindist family of the Gouri ethnic group. The Gouri people have for centuries found themselves set apart from their neighbors on both sides of the Darya-Andhrapur border. Tall and pale-skinned, the Gouri believe their origins lie far to the south of Andhrapur itself, and modern genetic evidence suggests that a vast Gouri northward migration took place around the 12th century. Settling in villages dotting the plains, jungles, and riverbanks of this region of Caxcana, the Gouri made up a sizable minority on both sides of the border: around 40% of Darya’s Semaria province, and around 30% of Andhrapuris.
Fahim’s family itself was what was known in Darya as “returnees.” In 1920, rival claimants to the title of Maharaj of Andhrapur clashed in a brief, bitter conflict. Gouris, associated (with little basis) with supporters of the losing claimant were driven out; an estimated 120,000 fled across the border to Darya, among them Fahim’s parents. Living in a shantytown that had sprung out of a refugee tent city, forbidden by government fiat from seeking jobs besides subsistence farming, Masuma and Sajib Masud clung to their caste identity and their dream of return. Raised under a strict purification regimen mandating abstention from physical contact with anyone of lesser caste, Fahim’s parents intended for him only to receive a basic education before joining the tepasnanda clergy, as his two elder brothers had done. His school’s headmaster identified Fahim as a promising student and convinced his parents to allow him to continue in school, alone among his siblings.
In 1940, the Daryan Empire invaded Andhrapur, seeking to reclaim its wayward colony. Fahim was conscripted into the Daryan Army, where he attained the rank of sergeant. At one point, just eight months into the war, he attempted to desert and was beaten fiercely; only another soldier’s intervention saved him from execution.
That soldier’s name was Aminul Akther.
3. Aminul Akther
“Akther! Akther! A thousand deaths are not enough for Akther!” So goes the children’s playground refrain.
Before his name was forever blackened by his treachery, Aminul Akther was a comrade of Masud’s in the Daryan Army. Both Returnees who had been raised in the refugee camps of Semaria, Akther and Masud were once classmates, conscripted together, who fought together across the plains and swamps of Andhrapur. Akther hailed from a far lower caste than Masud, enough so that their friendship could never have taken shape in the stifling environment of the Returnee camp. More outrageous still, Akther was a Jena—a member of the Zindist sect known for favoring frugality and rejecting the authority of the tepasnanda religious hierarchy. Amidst the backdrop of a grinding colonial war, these boundaries of caste and religion faded away, and Fahim and Akther became friends. Promoted to lieutenant and Masud’s direct superior, Akther convinced his higher-ups that Fahim had been coerced into going along with two enlisted soldiers’ desertion plot. Fahim was only stripped of his rank and permitted to continue as an enlisted man; the other two men were shot.
The war ended in 1943, with Darya once again master of Andhrapur. A modern, industrialized army with tanks and aircraft had triumphed over Andhrapuri forces who had often been sent into battle with fewer than ten bullets per soldier. The nation was devastated, the royal family in exile, while its resources were pillaged to feed Daryan factories. With Andhrapur conquered, the Gouri Returnees were expelled from Darya en masse. Seen as educated and loyal, many would take up positions as teachers, bureaucrats, and plantation foremen in service to the Daryan colonial authorities. Among them was Fahim Masud, who, mustering out from the Daryan Army in 1943, became a history teacher at the prestigious Southern Navsari Boys’ School, where boys who would go on to serve in the colonial military or bureaucracy were educated.
4. Fahim Sir
Fahim Sir—for that’s how we refer to teachers in Andhrapur—was beloved among his students for his knowledge, his gentleness (he never once employed the lathi, or bamboo switch, that his colleagues so frequently used to beat students for the slightest of reasons), and the clear delight he showed when he lectured on the great battles of the past. At the Southern Navsari Boys’ School, history education was almost entirely centered on the military heroes of Daryan history, and Fahim Sir could keep an entire class of boys spellbound, talking at length about the battles of the Manvi War or the great war with Costeno.
I know this because I was one of his students—spellbound, practically in awe of the teacher who would lend books to his favorites. I took great interest in his class—I was Andhrapuri by birth, but at the time I harbored foolish aspirations of becoming a soldier in the Daryan Army—and the first inkling I had of his politics was when he lent me his copy of the Laeralian guerrilla fighter Hong Kuo-shu’s textbook On People’s War. By this time, in the year 1951, Fahim Masud, through his old army friend Aminul Akther, had become a part of the secret circle then known as the Andhrapur Front for National Unity. Although AFNU was just one of several organizations plotting to overthrow Daryan rule, it was the only one that united its burning desire for freedom with a progressive vision that would reject the old divisions of ethnicity and faith as well as the Maharaj-in-exile and the feudal past he represented.
By spring 1952, I had realized that Fahim Sir planned to depart his life as a teacher and take to the highlands to wage war against the colonial occupation. I confessed my desire to join him—the Daryan army held no allure for me anymore, and I couldn’t bear to take up any other career when my homeland lay under cruel Daryan rule—and on March 24th, 1952, he led me and three other students into the mountains.
5. The Struggle
The early years of the resistance were so difficult that it would take an entire book to relate them. Living in the highland jungles was difficult enough, surrounded by wild beasts, with heat in the summer and biting cold in the winter. We relied entirely on the kindness and sympathy of local villagers—as Hong Kuo-shu wrote in On People’s War, the guerrilla relies on the populace like a fish relies on water. We made ourselves useful to them through teaching, gathering firewood, and helping with the harvest, while seizing the opportunity to educate them on our struggle for liberation. They reciprocated by sharing their food and warning us in advance of the colonial policemen. We would have never endured without them.
We were barely a hundred men and eight women at first, with only a handful of guns to go around; many of our first operations were raiding rural police stations for arms. These were hard years. One of the three students who accompanied me, whom I knew only as Raihan, died just six months into our struggle, shot dead in a tussle with a policeman. He was the first of many men I’d see die.
Fahim was named the leader of our entire force, which underwent a change of names: from the Andhrapur Front for National Unity to the National Resistance Front. Our movement grew and swelled like a forest fire, subsuming the other resistance groups, and soon there were entire stretches of the countryside where the Daryans had no control whatsoever. By 1955, we had grown in confidence enough to declare ourselves the Republic of Andhrapur, hoisting our flag and making bids for support from the outside world.
The Maharaj, a foolish old man who’d spent the last decade in exile abroad, doing nothing of consequence, chose this time to make entreaties to Fahim and the NRF. He proposed an alliance through an envoy of little consequence, a boy barely older than me who’d hardly known Andhrapur before the Daryan invasion. Fahim turned him away. “Tell the Maharaj we’ll deal with his blood relatives, no one less.”
The Maharaj in exile sent back his cousin, and the negotiations began. Over countless cups of tea in a jungle camp, Fahim and the Maharaj’s man threshed out an agreement. The Maharaj would become the figurehead leader of the resistance, with Fahim as leader of the combined armed forces. There was a ten-point agreement on the future of the nation, with supple vagueties in all the important places. And there was yet another new name for the alliance: the Free Andhrapuri Forces.
On the eve of the signing, I wish I could have warned Fahim to back out. The Maharaj and the homegrown rebellion were incompatible in ways that the ten-point agreement could hardly hide. Our vision for the future of Andhrapur didn’t include a feudal system ruled over by a crowned head, and the Maharaj and his men surely knew it. But at the same time, Fahim was too canny to enter into such an agreement without a plan to come out on top in the end. The image of the Maharaj, he knew, would do wonders in rallying the peasantry behind our banner. And the Maharaj had contacts in foreign capitals our band of rebels could have only dreamed of. On a chilly October afternoon, the accord was signed; the Maharaj and our cause were now bound together.
6. To Victory
The struggle only accelerated once our accord with the Maharaj was signed. The Daryans, after years of relative lethargy, threw their forces into battle against our own with renewed vigor. Columns of armored cars climbed rain-slicked tracks into mountain valleys as aircraft dropped their bombs on the jungles where we hid. The weather and the rugged terrain were our greatest ally; under cover of darkness, we eluded the enemy, traveling sometimes days at a time on meager rations before striking swiftly and then vanishing into the dark.
Our forces grew remarkably over the late 50s. Acts of resistance sprung up across the country; even in Navsari, the heart of the enemy occupation, our fighters made their presence known. We began receiving arms and ammunition from the Laeralites, part of some shadow war their intelligence agents fought against Darya’s. They sent a series of advisors as well, whom Fahim heard out yet never let into his full confidence.
That is, except one. Violette Chakma, an Andhrapuri noblewoman raised in exile, had been sent from Laeral as a liaison to our forces, and she and Fahim grew close. Was there a romance between them, as a theater show now sweeping the stages of Navsari alleges? Perhaps there was, for they would have had plentiful opportunity for it over long nights in adjoining tents in our base areas and bivouacs, but I saw no sign of anything beyond a deep-rooted respect for one another. I, for one, have difficulty imagining General Fahim having space for any love in his breast besides love of country. But it is the case that when Chakma was captured, surely tortured, and executed in October of 1965, Fahim was anguished beyond any way I’d ever seen him.
He rejected any talk of mounting a rescue as foolish, of course. He was too good of a general to do otherwise.
Just six months later, the Coalition landed its soldiers in Darya. A year after that, the last Daryan holdouts surrendered. The empire was gone, and Andhrapur was free.
7. The Vote
It was a moment all had long hoped and dreamed for, one achieved only at massive cost in the tears of heroes and the blood of martyrs. Fahim Rubel Masud, the man who once had been my schoolteacher, now stood astride an entire nation now able to breathe free.
There’s a story that when the old Maharaj first returned to the land he claimed to rule, he was greeted by crowds cheering not his name, but Fahim’s. It was in that moment, the storyteller often adds, that his wicked heart set itself to conspiracy. I don’t believe this story—I think that as soon as the Maharaj heard of Fahim, he craved everything the liberator had as his own. What happened later was already written—we simply didn’t know it yet.
The Maharaj made his way first to his ancestral palace in Lalnipur, where he gathered around him a host of men still loyal to the royal banner, before leading this procession to the capital at Navsari. We were already there, of course, and we had six days’ warning that the Maharaj was advancing on the capital with three thousand men at his back. Whether he meant to parley, to kneel, or to purge us all, we didn’t know.
I remember well the fateful meeting we held, a council of war, in a high-ceilinged room at the old Daryan governor’s palace. The entire provisional cabinet: 11 men, two women. Many of them had served in the liberation struggle alongside us; a handful were newer additions, those who had worked with the colonial authorities yet emerged relatively untarnished.
For the briefest of moments, Fahim and I had the privacy of the antechamber to ourselves just before the meeting was to begin.
“Sir, I wanted to tell you that I will raise the motion to abolish the Maharaj and name you the first President of Andhrapur,” I said. “The council will surely back it, and people will rally behind you. They know who led them to freedom. We have no need to let the Maharaj and his throne endure.”
“You’re not the first to tell me of this,” Fahim said. He may have been about to say something more, but then the other members of the council walked through the door, and the meeting began.
To recount exactly what was said in that meeting over sixty years ago is far beyond this old man’s memory, and I have little desire to slander those who were there, many of them now long dead, by putting words they did not say into their mouths. I and many others argued for confrontation with the Maharaj; while his force was numerous, ours was more battle-hardened, and we could be confident of victory. Having just defeated the Daryans, after all, we felt unstoppable. What is remarkable, and this I remember clear as day, is that Aminul Akther, was among the young hotheads calling for Fahim to declare himself president and kick off a fight with the Maharaj.
Others argued for caution. Some of them were wary of the bloodshed this would surely unleash; skeptical of more war, they argued that the Maharaj could be negotiated into a subordinate position; that shedding more Andhrapuri blood would be a terrible calamity. Some, it is true, were likely sympathizers of the monarchy, who could not stomach taking up arms against the ruler whose ancestors their forefathers for countless generations had worshipped. To them, the Maharaj was Andhrapur. And while the forward-thinking of us shunned this as backwardness, Fahim surely feared that each of their words would be echoed in the hearts of many ordinary Andhrans, and that to declare himself President would tear the country apart. That, I believe, is why Fahim voted the way he did.
I choose not to believe that Fahim Rubel Masud was a coward, that after so much bravery and sacrifice, he shirked from his duty in the moment his country needed him once more. I choose to believe that Fahim, the teacher, the rebel, and the soldier, simply made a miscalculation.
We held a vote: “all those in favor of declaring Fahim Masud as President of Andhrapur?”
I voted yes, of course. Aminul did too. And when the turn came to Fahim, he held out his hands, open-palmed, in the traditional gesture of humility. “I abstain,” he said.
I like to think that in that moment, Fahim meant to rally the undecided councilors behind him. By signaling in that moment that he did not crave power, but would not reject it if thrust upon him, he meant to show that he was a humble man, not a tyrant in the making.
But in that moment, it doomed him. Those wavering saw it as weakness, and the remaining councilors nearly all voted nay, one by one.
We opened negotiations with the Maharaj and his army the next day.
8. Denouement
What happened after that crucial day has been told far better by others than I could retell here. In brief, the diplomats threshed out an agreement that saw the Maharaj returned to his throne and Fahim named as First Secretary, head of the civilian government. The key sticking point was over control of the military; the resulting compromise was distressingly ambiguous in its language.
In these years of fragility, I found myself charged with overseeing the integration of the royalist soldiers and our revolutionaries into a single, united military.
“I need someone I can trust as Inspector-General,” Fahim told me, privately, when he asked me to take on the post. “Someone has to keep the royalists honest.”
As I oversaw rural training camps where our Free Andhrapuri Forces veterans drilled alongside the Maharaj’s men, politics was never far from my thoughts. In these fragile first years of the Andhrapuri Union, I feared that a man like the Maharaj would never be satisfied sharing power with Fahim. Every new program that Fahim’s government announced—restoring the disused Daryan-built factories, the new legal code, land reform—seemed ripe to trigger some kind of reaction from the throne.
As is often the case, the blow from behind is more devastating than the expected blow from the front. March 19th, 1972, two decades after Fahim and I had first fled into the jungle—two of the policemen charged with protecting the First Secretary’s person strolled into Fahim’s office and shot him in the head. It is unknown whether he had any final words.
Within the hour, Aminul Akther sent soldiers loyal to him to seize the radio station and impound Parliament. Fahim Rubel Masud, liberator of Andhrapur, was the sole person to die in that coup. He was only 48.
When the news reached me, hours later, my first thought was that the sinister hand of the Maharaj had put Akther up to this. We would find out decades later, with the testimony of the Maharaj’s private secretary, that I was only half-right: the palace had never thought of using Akther against Fahim before Akther himself reached out, informing the Maharaj of their intentions and asking for their blessing.
Having lived a life defined by ideology, it was hard for me to conceive that someone could turn traitor based off of nothing but jealousy. Fahim likely hadn’t either.
The new First Secretary didn’t carry out the purge of his old comrades that I had expected. Two weeks after the coup, when it had become clear that Akther’s coup was a done deed, I received a missive reassigning me as ambassador to Milintica. This was an exile; the undertone was that remaining in Andhrapur would bring with it far worse consequences.
I was in Milintica, growing more tan in the sun with each passing month of pointless trade delegations and empty, halfhearted galas, when the word came that Aminul Akther—that wretched, traitorous, and above all foolhardy excuse for a man—had paid the price for his own miscalculations. Foolish and unable to rally the public or the Parliament behind him, the palace had struck to install their own man. Soldiers, many of them the same men who had marched on Navsari for the Maharaj after the war, had launched a coup at the palace’s bidding. Aminul Akther met a traitor’s death at their hands a few months later.
And there I was, one of those few still alive who could claim to have truly known Fahim Rubel Masud. Although the faces occupying the role of First Secretary would shuffle frantically over the following years as the Maharaj picked and discarded his favorites, the government in Navsari always took the same view of me: a curiosity, a tie to the old regime both too precious to discard and too worthless to fear. A man in a cage, growing older as my country did, I was marooned in the embassy in Milintica for years and years, where the occasional Andhrapuri traveler whom I hosted for dinner would press me for details on the Liberator I’d known. “Is it true, sir, that you knew Fahim Rubel Masud?”
“Me? I hardly did,” I’d say. “But he was a great man. Greater than any of us still living could ever hope to be.”
I think, often, about the poorer country his death left us—one where the generals are gone but the Maharaj, a new and younger one, remains on his throne; where the dreams of food and health and joy for all are still so very far away. One where every morning I shuffle with my cane past the statue of the Liberator on the street outside my house; the statue I picked because of all the countless ones dotting the capital city, it resembles the man I knew the most.
Fahim Rubel Masud. The Liberator, the saint, the man crowned in might-have-beens—it’s impossible to look at blighted little Andhrapur today without considering how it could have been so beautifully, wonderfully different if we’d been given just five more years with Muktipada Masud. His death shattered our horizons, made the stories we told about ourselves and the futures we imagined infinitely smaller.
Fahim was wise, gifted, and pure of heart. He was an angel. But he was not God.
Andhrapur means “land of the earthy ones,” and Fahim Rubel Masud, once he descended from heaven, could never return. This impure Andhrapuri earth is his grave. The first truth you need to know, and the one which colors all the rest of them: Fahim Rubel Masud was gone too soon.
2. The Enemy
It’s a little-known fact that Fahim Masud’s story began in an unlikely place: the small town of Karimganj in Semaria, what was then the southern borderlands of the Daryan Empire. He was born in 1924 to an upper-caste Zindist family of the Gouri ethnic group. The Gouri people have for centuries found themselves set apart from their neighbors on both sides of the Darya-Andhrapur border. Tall and pale-skinned, the Gouri believe their origins lie far to the south of Andhrapur itself, and modern genetic evidence suggests that a vast Gouri northward migration took place around the 12th century. Settling in villages dotting the plains, jungles, and riverbanks of this region of Caxcana, the Gouri made up a sizable minority on both sides of the border: around 40% of Darya’s Semaria province, and around 30% of Andhrapuris.
Fahim’s family itself was what was known in Darya as “returnees.” In 1920, rival claimants to the title of Maharaj of Andhrapur clashed in a brief, bitter conflict. Gouris, associated (with little basis) with supporters of the losing claimant were driven out; an estimated 120,000 fled across the border to Darya, among them Fahim’s parents. Living in a shantytown that had sprung out of a refugee tent city, forbidden by government fiat from seeking jobs besides subsistence farming, Masuma and Sajib Masud clung to their caste identity and their dream of return. Raised under a strict purification regimen mandating abstention from physical contact with anyone of lesser caste, Fahim’s parents intended for him only to receive a basic education before joining the tepasnanda clergy, as his two elder brothers had done. His school’s headmaster identified Fahim as a promising student and convinced his parents to allow him to continue in school, alone among his siblings.
In 1940, the Daryan Empire invaded Andhrapur, seeking to reclaim its wayward colony. Fahim was conscripted into the Daryan Army, where he attained the rank of sergeant. At one point, just eight months into the war, he attempted to desert and was beaten fiercely; only another soldier’s intervention saved him from execution.
That soldier’s name was Aminul Akther.
3. Aminul Akther
“Akther! Akther! A thousand deaths are not enough for Akther!” So goes the children’s playground refrain.
Before his name was forever blackened by his treachery, Aminul Akther was a comrade of Masud’s in the Daryan Army. Both Returnees who had been raised in the refugee camps of Semaria, Akther and Masud were once classmates, conscripted together, who fought together across the plains and swamps of Andhrapur. Akther hailed from a far lower caste than Masud, enough so that their friendship could never have taken shape in the stifling environment of the Returnee camp. More outrageous still, Akther was a Jena—a member of the Zindist sect known for favoring frugality and rejecting the authority of the tepasnanda religious hierarchy. Amidst the backdrop of a grinding colonial war, these boundaries of caste and religion faded away, and Fahim and Akther became friends. Promoted to lieutenant and Masud’s direct superior, Akther convinced his higher-ups that Fahim had been coerced into going along with two enlisted soldiers’ desertion plot. Fahim was only stripped of his rank and permitted to continue as an enlisted man; the other two men were shot.
The war ended in 1943, with Darya once again master of Andhrapur. A modern, industrialized army with tanks and aircraft had triumphed over Andhrapuri forces who had often been sent into battle with fewer than ten bullets per soldier. The nation was devastated, the royal family in exile, while its resources were pillaged to feed Daryan factories. With Andhrapur conquered, the Gouri Returnees were expelled from Darya en masse. Seen as educated and loyal, many would take up positions as teachers, bureaucrats, and plantation foremen in service to the Daryan colonial authorities. Among them was Fahim Masud, who, mustering out from the Daryan Army in 1943, became a history teacher at the prestigious Southern Navsari Boys’ School, where boys who would go on to serve in the colonial military or bureaucracy were educated.
4. Fahim Sir
Fahim Sir—for that’s how we refer to teachers in Andhrapur—was beloved among his students for his knowledge, his gentleness (he never once employed the lathi, or bamboo switch, that his colleagues so frequently used to beat students for the slightest of reasons), and the clear delight he showed when he lectured on the great battles of the past. At the Southern Navsari Boys’ School, history education was almost entirely centered on the military heroes of Daryan history, and Fahim Sir could keep an entire class of boys spellbound, talking at length about the battles of the Manvi War or the great war with Costeno.
I know this because I was one of his students—spellbound, practically in awe of the teacher who would lend books to his favorites. I took great interest in his class—I was Andhrapuri by birth, but at the time I harbored foolish aspirations of becoming a soldier in the Daryan Army—and the first inkling I had of his politics was when he lent me his copy of the Laeralian guerrilla fighter Hong Kuo-shu’s textbook On People’s War. By this time, in the year 1951, Fahim Masud, through his old army friend Aminul Akther, had become a part of the secret circle then known as the Andhrapur Front for National Unity. Although AFNU was just one of several organizations plotting to overthrow Daryan rule, it was the only one that united its burning desire for freedom with a progressive vision that would reject the old divisions of ethnicity and faith as well as the Maharaj-in-exile and the feudal past he represented.
By spring 1952, I had realized that Fahim Sir planned to depart his life as a teacher and take to the highlands to wage war against the colonial occupation. I confessed my desire to join him—the Daryan army held no allure for me anymore, and I couldn’t bear to take up any other career when my homeland lay under cruel Daryan rule—and on March 24th, 1952, he led me and three other students into the mountains.
5. The Struggle
The early years of the resistance were so difficult that it would take an entire book to relate them. Living in the highland jungles was difficult enough, surrounded by wild beasts, with heat in the summer and biting cold in the winter. We relied entirely on the kindness and sympathy of local villagers—as Hong Kuo-shu wrote in On People’s War, the guerrilla relies on the populace like a fish relies on water. We made ourselves useful to them through teaching, gathering firewood, and helping with the harvest, while seizing the opportunity to educate them on our struggle for liberation. They reciprocated by sharing their food and warning us in advance of the colonial policemen. We would have never endured without them.
We were barely a hundred men and eight women at first, with only a handful of guns to go around; many of our first operations were raiding rural police stations for arms. These were hard years. One of the three students who accompanied me, whom I knew only as Raihan, died just six months into our struggle, shot dead in a tussle with a policeman. He was the first of many men I’d see die.
Fahim was named the leader of our entire force, which underwent a change of names: from the Andhrapur Front for National Unity to the National Resistance Front. Our movement grew and swelled like a forest fire, subsuming the other resistance groups, and soon there were entire stretches of the countryside where the Daryans had no control whatsoever. By 1955, we had grown in confidence enough to declare ourselves the Republic of Andhrapur, hoisting our flag and making bids for support from the outside world.
The Maharaj, a foolish old man who’d spent the last decade in exile abroad, doing nothing of consequence, chose this time to make entreaties to Fahim and the NRF. He proposed an alliance through an envoy of little consequence, a boy barely older than me who’d hardly known Andhrapur before the Daryan invasion. Fahim turned him away. “Tell the Maharaj we’ll deal with his blood relatives, no one less.”
The Maharaj in exile sent back his cousin, and the negotiations began. Over countless cups of tea in a jungle camp, Fahim and the Maharaj’s man threshed out an agreement. The Maharaj would become the figurehead leader of the resistance, with Fahim as leader of the combined armed forces. There was a ten-point agreement on the future of the nation, with supple vagueties in all the important places. And there was yet another new name for the alliance: the Free Andhrapuri Forces.
On the eve of the signing, I wish I could have warned Fahim to back out. The Maharaj and the homegrown rebellion were incompatible in ways that the ten-point agreement could hardly hide. Our vision for the future of Andhrapur didn’t include a feudal system ruled over by a crowned head, and the Maharaj and his men surely knew it. But at the same time, Fahim was too canny to enter into such an agreement without a plan to come out on top in the end. The image of the Maharaj, he knew, would do wonders in rallying the peasantry behind our banner. And the Maharaj had contacts in foreign capitals our band of rebels could have only dreamed of. On a chilly October afternoon, the accord was signed; the Maharaj and our cause were now bound together.
6. To Victory
The struggle only accelerated once our accord with the Maharaj was signed. The Daryans, after years of relative lethargy, threw their forces into battle against our own with renewed vigor. Columns of armored cars climbed rain-slicked tracks into mountain valleys as aircraft dropped their bombs on the jungles where we hid. The weather and the rugged terrain were our greatest ally; under cover of darkness, we eluded the enemy, traveling sometimes days at a time on meager rations before striking swiftly and then vanishing into the dark.
Our forces grew remarkably over the late 50s. Acts of resistance sprung up across the country; even in Navsari, the heart of the enemy occupation, our fighters made their presence known. We began receiving arms and ammunition from the Laeralites, part of some shadow war their intelligence agents fought against Darya’s. They sent a series of advisors as well, whom Fahim heard out yet never let into his full confidence.
That is, except one. Violette Chakma, an Andhrapuri noblewoman raised in exile, had been sent from Laeral as a liaison to our forces, and she and Fahim grew close. Was there a romance between them, as a theater show now sweeping the stages of Navsari alleges? Perhaps there was, for they would have had plentiful opportunity for it over long nights in adjoining tents in our base areas and bivouacs, but I saw no sign of anything beyond a deep-rooted respect for one another. I, for one, have difficulty imagining General Fahim having space for any love in his breast besides love of country. But it is the case that when Chakma was captured, surely tortured, and executed in October of 1965, Fahim was anguished beyond any way I’d ever seen him.
He rejected any talk of mounting a rescue as foolish, of course. He was too good of a general to do otherwise.
Just six months later, the Coalition landed its soldiers in Darya. A year after that, the last Daryan holdouts surrendered. The empire was gone, and Andhrapur was free.
7. The Vote
It was a moment all had long hoped and dreamed for, one achieved only at massive cost in the tears of heroes and the blood of martyrs. Fahim Rubel Masud, the man who once had been my schoolteacher, now stood astride an entire nation now able to breathe free.
There’s a story that when the old Maharaj first returned to the land he claimed to rule, he was greeted by crowds cheering not his name, but Fahim’s. It was in that moment, the storyteller often adds, that his wicked heart set itself to conspiracy. I don’t believe this story—I think that as soon as the Maharaj heard of Fahim, he craved everything the liberator had as his own. What happened later was already written—we simply didn’t know it yet.
The Maharaj made his way first to his ancestral palace in Lalnipur, where he gathered around him a host of men still loyal to the royal banner, before leading this procession to the capital at Navsari. We were already there, of course, and we had six days’ warning that the Maharaj was advancing on the capital with three thousand men at his back. Whether he meant to parley, to kneel, or to purge us all, we didn’t know.
I remember well the fateful meeting we held, a council of war, in a high-ceilinged room at the old Daryan governor’s palace. The entire provisional cabinet: 11 men, two women. Many of them had served in the liberation struggle alongside us; a handful were newer additions, those who had worked with the colonial authorities yet emerged relatively untarnished.
For the briefest of moments, Fahim and I had the privacy of the antechamber to ourselves just before the meeting was to begin.
“Sir, I wanted to tell you that I will raise the motion to abolish the Maharaj and name you the first President of Andhrapur,” I said. “The council will surely back it, and people will rally behind you. They know who led them to freedom. We have no need to let the Maharaj and his throne endure.”
“You’re not the first to tell me of this,” Fahim said. He may have been about to say something more, but then the other members of the council walked through the door, and the meeting began.
To recount exactly what was said in that meeting over sixty years ago is far beyond this old man’s memory, and I have little desire to slander those who were there, many of them now long dead, by putting words they did not say into their mouths. I and many others argued for confrontation with the Maharaj; while his force was numerous, ours was more battle-hardened, and we could be confident of victory. Having just defeated the Daryans, after all, we felt unstoppable. What is remarkable, and this I remember clear as day, is that Aminul Akther, was among the young hotheads calling for Fahim to declare himself president and kick off a fight with the Maharaj.
Others argued for caution. Some of them were wary of the bloodshed this would surely unleash; skeptical of more war, they argued that the Maharaj could be negotiated into a subordinate position; that shedding more Andhrapuri blood would be a terrible calamity. Some, it is true, were likely sympathizers of the monarchy, who could not stomach taking up arms against the ruler whose ancestors their forefathers for countless generations had worshipped. To them, the Maharaj was Andhrapur. And while the forward-thinking of us shunned this as backwardness, Fahim surely feared that each of their words would be echoed in the hearts of many ordinary Andhrans, and that to declare himself President would tear the country apart. That, I believe, is why Fahim voted the way he did.
I choose not to believe that Fahim Rubel Masud was a coward, that after so much bravery and sacrifice, he shirked from his duty in the moment his country needed him once more. I choose to believe that Fahim, the teacher, the rebel, and the soldier, simply made a miscalculation.
We held a vote: “all those in favor of declaring Fahim Masud as President of Andhrapur?”
I voted yes, of course. Aminul did too. And when the turn came to Fahim, he held out his hands, open-palmed, in the traditional gesture of humility. “I abstain,” he said.
I like to think that in that moment, Fahim meant to rally the undecided councilors behind him. By signaling in that moment that he did not crave power, but would not reject it if thrust upon him, he meant to show that he was a humble man, not a tyrant in the making.
But in that moment, it doomed him. Those wavering saw it as weakness, and the remaining councilors nearly all voted nay, one by one.
We opened negotiations with the Maharaj and his army the next day.
8. Denouement
What happened after that crucial day has been told far better by others than I could retell here. In brief, the diplomats threshed out an agreement that saw the Maharaj returned to his throne and Fahim named as First Secretary, head of the civilian government. The key sticking point was over control of the military; the resulting compromise was distressingly ambiguous in its language.
In these years of fragility, I found myself charged with overseeing the integration of the royalist soldiers and our revolutionaries into a single, united military.
“I need someone I can trust as Inspector-General,” Fahim told me, privately, when he asked me to take on the post. “Someone has to keep the royalists honest.”
As I oversaw rural training camps where our Free Andhrapuri Forces veterans drilled alongside the Maharaj’s men, politics was never far from my thoughts. In these fragile first years of the Andhrapuri Union, I feared that a man like the Maharaj would never be satisfied sharing power with Fahim. Every new program that Fahim’s government announced—restoring the disused Daryan-built factories, the new legal code, land reform—seemed ripe to trigger some kind of reaction from the throne.
As is often the case, the blow from behind is more devastating than the expected blow from the front. March 19th, 1972, two decades after Fahim and I had first fled into the jungle—two of the policemen charged with protecting the First Secretary’s person strolled into Fahim’s office and shot him in the head. It is unknown whether he had any final words.
Within the hour, Aminul Akther sent soldiers loyal to him to seize the radio station and impound Parliament. Fahim Rubel Masud, liberator of Andhrapur, was the sole person to die in that coup. He was only 48.
When the news reached me, hours later, my first thought was that the sinister hand of the Maharaj had put Akther up to this. We would find out decades later, with the testimony of the Maharaj’s private secretary, that I was only half-right: the palace had never thought of using Akther against Fahim before Akther himself reached out, informing the Maharaj of their intentions and asking for their blessing.
Having lived a life defined by ideology, it was hard for me to conceive that someone could turn traitor based off of nothing but jealousy. Fahim likely hadn’t either.
The new First Secretary didn’t carry out the purge of his old comrades that I had expected. Two weeks after the coup, when it had become clear that Akther’s coup was a done deed, I received a missive reassigning me as ambassador to Milintica. This was an exile; the undertone was that remaining in Andhrapur would bring with it far worse consequences.
I was in Milintica, growing more tan in the sun with each passing month of pointless trade delegations and empty, halfhearted galas, when the word came that Aminul Akther—that wretched, traitorous, and above all foolhardy excuse for a man—had paid the price for his own miscalculations. Foolish and unable to rally the public or the Parliament behind him, the palace had struck to install their own man. Soldiers, many of them the same men who had marched on Navsari for the Maharaj after the war, had launched a coup at the palace’s bidding. Aminul Akther met a traitor’s death at their hands a few months later.
And there I was, one of those few still alive who could claim to have truly known Fahim Rubel Masud. Although the faces occupying the role of First Secretary would shuffle frantically over the following years as the Maharaj picked and discarded his favorites, the government in Navsari always took the same view of me: a curiosity, a tie to the old regime both too precious to discard and too worthless to fear. A man in a cage, growing older as my country did, I was marooned in the embassy in Milintica for years and years, where the occasional Andhrapuri traveler whom I hosted for dinner would press me for details on the Liberator I’d known. “Is it true, sir, that you knew Fahim Rubel Masud?”
“Me? I hardly did,” I’d say. “But he was a great man. Greater than any of us still living could ever hope to be.”
I think, often, about the poorer country his death left us—one where the generals are gone but the Maharaj, a new and younger one, remains on his throne; where the dreams of food and health and joy for all are still so very far away. One where every morning I shuffle with my cane past the statue of the Liberator on the street outside my house; the statue I picked because of all the countless ones dotting the capital city, it resembles the man I knew the most.