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A tribute

Salma apa : Memories of conversations and candles

AFSAN CHOWDHURY
oF all the people i knew in Bangladesh, few could fill us with the confidence of unquestioned integrity as Salma apa. She was Salma Sobhan, legal expert, activist and a person of great learning but more than that i suppose, human being who had an open mind. That astonishes us more than many of her achievements especially as we stare at this world of ours being shrunk either by ambition or narrow mindedness.
We are losing those who made the darkness that shrouds Bangladesh a little less heavy. With her passing away, what ended was a sort of narrative on living which few practice, which she did effortlessly because the contradictions between her life and her work and more significantly, her mind were almost not there..
Salma apa, always in a hurry peering through her thick rimmed glasses, seemingly hiding some enigmatic anxiety i never understood, was also the most engaging conversationalist i have met. There are many talkers, more than we desire to meet, with enormous capacity of being boorish and boring but there are very few conversationalists. She didn't just talk but also listened and what few do responded. And she never ever imposed but sometimes offered corrections and then left the opinions to be reshaped on their own. Few were like that.
i refer to her conversations because there were a number of occasions where we spent hours talking on subjects that were hardly part of our formal topic. Many years back at my Unicef office, we chatted for a long time on the Suhrawardys who were her uncles. i had said that it was striking how brilliant and versatile the lot were and before and after. This was because we were discussing this book on the politician Hossain Shaheed -- once Pakistan's PM -- but i was more fascinated by the scholars and academics and more adventur- ous ones than the ambitious and controversial politician. it seemed at some point of time, of several Suhrawardys, one was at the Calcutta University, one at Moscow while the third was in the UK, all teaching from history of art to law. There was just no other brood like them.
She laughed and said, " Yes. We seem to have a great deal of education and a gift for the gab but never any money." it did describe her as well.
i think it's this gharana of sharafatee and culture that she takes away with her and which is not growing or happening anymore. She certainly represented a rapidly vanishing world.
She like many others was deeply disturbed by the failure of the Bangladesh state to deliver a poverty free land. it was not an abstract question that could be asked or explained away by academics but she was the more genuine one of those who interacted with citizens denied of any voice in the construction of this State. She heard the questions first hand and experienced them as recipients of failed policies. She felt that deeply and it almost haunted her with a kind of a guilt.
" i just don't think it's working and what we haven't been able to do is popularise this notion of sharing and sacrifice. We don't have enough for all and a few are taking far too much. We should reflect on what we can give up, how far we can give up. Maybe i can go as far as having an indoor toilet and no more. Maybe then others can further and that way others can have what is now my surplus."
it was not an economic prescription but words wringed out from a bleeding heart.
Perhaps she also knew that this would not make a difference but for a person who had staked so much in the dreams of a people that wasn't political independence as much as it was economic freedom, she felt pressed. But because she wasn't part of the establishment in the conventional sense, she could feel that she had a right to question and ask why things had gone wrong. But it went beyond just being resentful and she spent the last thirty years constructing with Hameeda apa and others what is today's legal aid world with its platform firmly planted on women's rights.
She was disappointed but didn't throw up her hands and gave in. She slogged on, never choosing the easy way out and did what she thought she could do best.
our social conversations were always tinged with her sense of obligation and she would sometimes do work that were tedious and boring. When i asked her about it, as part of a group trying to set up an organisation focusing on the rights of HiV + victims, she just smiled. " if you don't take care of the small things, they return and mess up the big picture."
This piece is not about personal and private memories but to remember a person who probably was as close as anyone when it came to being a complete human being. She bore many sorrows, private and public but she shone on like a daring candle in the dark battling the gloom even at noon.