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<i>Two of our foremost intellectuals</i>
Kaiser Haq and Syed Manzoorul Islam
Syed Manzoorul Islam and Kaiser Haq are two of our internationally known intellectuals. While the former is one of the foremost of story-tellers or essayists or critics, the latter is our best poet writing in English. Why have I decided to focus on them? Both of them reached sixty in January this year, the former on January 18 and the latter on January 20. So, even Syed Manzoorul Islam reaches sixty! Slim, always smiling, he is almost boyishly young. And now we hear that he is sixty. Wasn't he fifty only the other day? Even a boyish, long-haired forty a few years back? God knows time does fly truly quickly. What do His angels gain by making these bright, brilliant people getting on in years? Syed Manzoorul Islam began writing as a student. And what a student he was! One of the very best to study in the English Department of Dhaka University. He graduated in the mid-seventies and joined the department as a lecturer. Today he is one of Dhaka University's most popular senior teachers. He has written stories and essays, art criticism and columns during the last thirty seven years or more. He has earned his popularity as a writer and a teacher. He has written his brilliant, postmodern short stories during the last two decades. I sincerely believe that these stories will give him a permanent place in the domain of Bangla literature. Syed Manzoorul Islam's short stories are not at all traditional. They differ a lot from the stories that we have been reading. He is a post-modernist with a very racy prose style. His characters are varied: an old, aristocratic housewife of Sylhet, a lady owner of a ferry ghat hotel, Ferguson Dinnerwallah, a tea garden 'combined hand' with an interesting past, a police detective, a struggling garments worker and a garage apprentice, commonly known as a 'grease monkey'. He treats them with great affection and turns ordinary people quite known to us into memorable characters. He delineates them with his effortless postmodern craftsmanship. He practices magic realism and often shifts time sequences to blend the past and the present. He is a very sensitive and careful observer of human nature. He dips like a poet into the conscious and subconscious areas of the human mind. He portrays the complexities of city life with enviable ease. He describes our loneliness, our nostalgia and our sorrow. A craftsman like him is rare on either side of Bengal. His deep insight turns him into a truly brilliant writer. He is smart, fresh, witty and completely original. He begins his stories in an easy conversational style and slowly takes the reader to the bottomless pit that is the human mind. He is brilliantly satirical. He is a master of narrative and that makes his characters very lively. Syed Manzoorul Islam paints contemporary Bangladesh quite skillfully in his stories. A student struggling to survive, a wayward terrorist, an honest worker of meager means, a sad and affectionate housewife, a robber-turned-billionaire, a poor farmer, a nice middle-aged lawyer, a working adolescent sacrificing his boyhood, a poor youth with shattered dreams and a dignified 'fallen' woman are some of his memorable characters. He is an effortless turner of the ordinary into the sublime. We find it difficult to forget his Dolai Khal garage mechanic, the terrorists of Bangshal and Shankar, the poor but noble tea garden worker, ordinary police detectives and the old lady aristocrat. The grandma of his story counts time with the help of an earthquake or an epidemic. The poor, middle-class boy who loved to go to school one day finds himself in Nantu Miah's 'Car King' garage after the death of his father. He must support his mother and sister. Before reporting for work, the boy grabs his books and cries bitterly. The reader weeps with him. Observe Mr. Alam, an established doctor and formerly a farmer's son. He loves to call Jafrabad 'West Dhanmandi' and sometimes only Dhanmandi. He can't be a Jafrabadi and equate himself with a police sepoy or a bank clerk! The only distance he walks is up to the mosque and he likes the big salute of the darwan. The writer brilliantly satirizes the nouveau riche. He doesn't spare the old aristocrats either. The zamindars of Prithvim Pasha bring blankets from abroad for their horses. 'The horses slept well but the grooms shivered'. As a critic and essayist, Syed Manzoorul Islam has written extensively on world literature, art and culture. He has discovered and promoted many a brilliant young writer. He has also written on politics and society. But I admire him most as a novelist and a writer of short stories. His fiction speaks against social hypocrisy and thuggery, the heart-rending repression of women and the dishonesty of the fake men of religion. He depicts the great sorrows of small people. At the same time he gives us hope and helps us to dream of the noble and the beautiful. Kaiser Haq is our premier English language poet. He is admired by poets, pundits and common people alike. Shamsur Rahman once said that Kaiser Haq was to be compared with the best of the English and American poets. Kaiser Haq, two days younger than Syed Manzoorul Islam, passed SSC a year after the latter from St. Gregory's High School. He passed HSC from Dhaka College. He was first in both his BA Honours and MA exams in the English Department of Dhaka University. He did his PhD from Warwick as a Commonwealth scholar. He was a senior Fulbright Scholar and Vilas Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in 1986-87. For the last thirty five years he has taught at Dhaka University and is now a senior Professor. He fought valiantly during our war of independence as a company commander. He is a freedom fighter poet like Rafiq Azad and Abid Anwar. At sixty he is as fit as a young athlete. It is said he knew judo and karate as a young man and even today doesn't miss his daily exercise. Add to that the fact that he is a sensitive, soft-spoken person. I had the privilege of knowing Kaiser Haq as a boy. I was a junior student of the same school, five years younger. He was a teenager with very sharp features the eyes and the nose were prominently sharp. He was tall and slim too. The famous bushy moustache appeared a few years afterwards, only to disappear more than twenty five years later. The superb physique came after twenty. At sixteen or seventeen Kaiser Haq wrote brilliant prose for the Young Observer page of what later became The Bangladesh Observer. Brother Hobart, to whom he dedicated his The Logopathic Reviewer's Song, was meanwhile discussing the rudiments of critical appreciation with him at school. They discussed The Snake of D.H. Lawrence. Brother Hobart used to tell us that he would never get a student like Kaiser, whose Observer prose and poetry endeared him even more to me. We enrolled ourselves as first year Honours students in English only a few months after Syed Manzoorul Islam, Kaiser Haq and Fakrul Alam had joined as young lecturers. Fakrul Alam will be sixty on July 20, 1951. I shall be writing on him too! He also looks amazingly young. 'Spending your day with young people helps, you know', he was telling me the other day. I can still see the twenty-five-year-old Kaiser Haq walking down the English department corridor, a barrel-chested young man with long hair and a big moustache, talking little but smiling a lot at friends and students. Six of us classmates formed an adda group that lasted all through our university life. We were the six Pandavas Badrul, now a very senior journalist, Farhad, now teaching at Frostburg and coming to Dhaka every year, Shafiq, now a senior civil servant and a Shakespeare buff, Sadaquat, a successful businessman, Khairul, a 'softie' teaching at Wollongong and myself, a modest writer of fiction. The other five certainly remember how much I praised Kaiser Haq with them. I used to do tutorials with him in my second year Honours and I enjoyed every moment of the stint. The girls of my group, Ruhi and Shopna, very decent and beautiful young ladies, would sweetly envy our rapport. They would affectionately 'threaten' me not to discuss Jibanananda Das and Sudhin Dutta with him! Is Kaiser Haq our best English poet only? He is perhaps our best writer of English prose too. His brilliant essays would testify to that. He is perhaps our best translator too. Shamsur Rahman used to tell yours truly that Kaiser Haq was the best translator of his poems. Scholars as brilliant as Dr. Fakrul Alam are calling The Wonders of Vilayet a superb 'original' book. As a poet he is as good as Nissim Ezekiel or Dom Moraes. Forgive my audacity I consider his ability to create striking, memorable images better than theirs. And I find that he has a deeper insight. His emotions are honest and deep and his craftsmanship superb. His use of words is brilliant and his use of wit and irony matchless. He coins new words and gives old words new meaning. He is a brilliant painter of modern man's loneliness, nostalgia, boredom and fatigue. Read his Starting Lines, A Little Ado, A Happy Farewell, Black Orchid and The Logopathic Reviewer's Song and find out for yourself. May the Almighty grant these brilliant, creative men forty more years to live in good health and write profusely!
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