Dhaka Literary Life: 'shob shalarai aajkaal kobita likhay'

Prothom Alo Eid Magazine 2003

Envy bit me again when I had a preview of Prothom Alo newspaper's Eid magazine issue at an Iftar party they gave to launch it. A fat, thick, packed issue, brought out under the able guidance of Sajjad Sharif, the paper's literary editor. 'Here, Khadem Bhai,' he said on seeing me at the party, 'let me introduce you to some local literary talent,' and then proceeded to lead me through a blur of faces and names. Talking heads you read in print and sometimes see on TV. Writers, poets, journalists, columnists, teachers, essayists. All of them ready to write a piece for Sajjad whenever he needs one. D-a-a-a-m-n, I thought, look at these guys, they have to beat away writers with a stick. While it'll take me ten years to even think of the idea of a single Eid issue. And even then, who would actually buy it, without outstanding original fiction written in English here, without poets writing in English who are popularly known, without an English written with flair and individuality? And then, I gotta confess, I am momentarily seized by a pang of self-pity : what fun would I be having if I was somewhere else, say, in Kolkata! Or Karachi!

We sat outdoors at the Bengal gallery at Road Number 27 in Dhanmondi. A balmy afternoon, with a light breeze softly brushing the tops of trees. Sudden spurts of red dust would momentarily float up into the bright air over the boundary wall of the gallery--a powdery red against the powder blue sky---signs of Dhaka's never-ending, futile, wasteful road-digging going on out on the road. I saw Sirajul Islam Chowdhury (a.k.a. 'SIC sir') and went over to say hello--I hadn't seen him since '87. I told him I had spotted him taking his walks around 5:15-5:30 a.m. in Dhanmondi when setting out for a little jog meself. We then chatted a bit about the joys of 'doing one's constitutional' (as the old-time phrase went) without being harried by crowds till I saw a beaming Shamsur Rahman coming forward with his hand outstretched. I cut out then, thinking it best to leave them to their own devices. At my table Mohammed Rafique and I exchanged startled glances of delayed recognition, his hair now a flowing white. I hadn't seen him since the mid-'80s when he and I were side by side in a procession of university teachers protesting army rule. At that time he had just been released after being picked up by the DGIF hardboys and taken to the cantonment for questioning because he had published a poem, the beginning line of which ran something like:

Shob shalarai aajkaal kobita likhay

---here readers should remember that at that time we were under the darting-eyed rule of army man (and self-proclaimed poet!) H. M. Ershad and draw their own conclusions! It had been a hot day, the banner I was holding had been unwieldy, the whole issue we were marching for (or against) seemed lost in the dust, and Rafique had regaled us with floridly-recounted tales of his interrogation, which had made the march bearable : 'Why did you write that poem?' the security hats had growled. 'I am a poet, what else do you think I should do?' 'Why did you write that line?' 'Because it is true, everybody is a poet nowadays, I write poems, my neighbour's wife writes poems, you probably write poems, too, heh heh...' and then it would start all over again, 'So why did you write that poem?' 'I told you..." till they muttered bad, very bad, words under their breaths and let him go. Now, here with relentless Dhaka mosquitoes beginning to home in on my unshod feet, I thought that never would a poem like that be written in English, purely on the spur of the moment, directly connected with the here and now, not because the poets writing in English (those that do) can't write it, but because the idea would never occur to them. Spontaneity and authenticity of expression is the rarest of things in creative writing English here. English is hermetically sealed within a class, which results in its distance from real life. It is the broad middle class that has to connect with English properly for our stories to get written, for the hundreds of narratives to unlock. English has to escape from the prison of facile writing it is now locked in, from the hands of the upper class, who are so distanced from everyday Bangladesh life that it seems impossible sorrow will ever seep into their imaginative efforts, and what story of Bangladesh, of Dhaka, of Shiddhirganj, of Teknaf, will work if it ain't got sorrow? Or if the language ain't worth a lick?

'Don't you write in English?' I asked Rafique, who is in the English department at JU. 'No,' he replied. Well, then, there it goes, it is Bangla that flows from the gut.

I flipped through the pages of the magazine: a richness, a plummy plumpness, beyond my wildest dreams for my own li'l page here. How Stalin offed the Bengali revolutionary Golam Ambia Khan Lohani, actually a history lesson in Raj-era radical politics, a tour of the times when Indian firebrands and idealists looked to the Bolshevik Revolution for salvation, by Prothom Alo head honcho Motiur Rahman---who even now was chatting with Rafiqunnabi and Qayuum Chowdhury. A biography of Mir Mosharrof Hossain, something on Syed Waliullah by his wife Anne-Marie Waliullah; fiction by Syed Shamsul Huq, Razia Rahman, Humayun Ahmed, to name the few that I recognized; poems by Shamsur Rahman, Rafiq Azad (sitting near me at the table, who once had angered the authorities in 1974 by furiously penning the poem 'Bhat day haramzada'), Mohammed Rafique, Shahjahan Munni, the talented young poets Subrata Gomes and Bratya Raisu, Mahadev Saha, Ruby Rahman, and more; short stories by Shawkat Ali, Selina Hossain, Ebadur Rahman, Moshiul Alam, Kajol Shahnawaz, etc.; essays; the series on art I like in which artists pick out their own favourite artists and paintings (Najli Laila Mansur, for example, writes, in terms utterly different than yours or mine, why Indian painter Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and his Numance is one of her own favourites); a longish case-study piece by Shahduzzaman that looked like something hauntingly original on our hospital culture; a travel article by the ever-lively, ever-provocative Nirmalendu Goon on his jaunt through Japan. Plus a piece on her childhood by Ferdousi Majumdar, which my wife read later that night and laughed out loud at Ferdousi's pitch-perfect rendition of her parents' Noakhali-accented Bangla, 'outstanding piece of writing, never knew she was this good' was my better half's soberly measured judgement. Of course, as is only to be expected, some of the stuff--like the article on Satyajit Ray--looked on the surface to be repetitive stock material, while the one on Sheikh Mujib at first glance seemed merely to be the latest installment in the current, 'soft' rehabilitation campaign going on as part of the counter-drive against the distortions and neglect of the military years. But still, I thought, Jaysu Christo, da ya believe the range of this thing compared to the scene in English? I mean, dudes, this thing's a shock, the gap between the two, Bangla is Black Sabbath and Red Hot Chili Peppers, English not even a band yet!

I got depressed thinking about all the above and so I searched out Sajjad and said thanks for the invitation, see you around. It was time for my standard therapy against this kind of an occasional depression: an evening rickshaw ride (with the accompanying halitosis) lost in my favourite fantasy. No, you guys and gals, not the one about watching Aparna Sen crunchily bite into a cucumber slice across the table from me, not that one, though that does work wonders for the flagging spirit, nor the one where, accompanied by thunderous roars I remove, no, make that decapitate, the entire Pakistani batting line-up with some ferocious in-swingers at Bangabandhu Stadium thereby instantly being awarded the Ekushey Padak by a grateful nation, no, not that one either, but the one where I-- grinning maniacally, a cartoon cigar clamped between my teeth, clad in, as Rushdie wrote in Midnight's Children, 'white loosekurtapajamas' with my hands laced behind my head--am leaning back in a creaky old armchair surveying a desk piled high, I mean high, with articles, essays, short stories, fiction, poems, all sent for the literature page, all in black and white, all waiting to be read, edited and published, all for me me me, all in English English English...

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Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star