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In Memoriam

K. Z. Alam, my friend

Mahfuzur Rahman
THE news of his passing away came late to me, but did not come as a shock It came as an immense sadness. K. Z. Alam, Shelley to his friends, had been fighting death for many long months. He lost the battle on September 14.
Shelley and I had been friends for well over fifty years. We were classmates in Dhaka College in 1949-1951.1 did not personally know him then. But I knew those who were expelled from the college for taking part in a student protest against the government's education policy. Shelley was among them. Protest came naturally to him and he paid the price for it.
He transferred to an unknown college from the premier college of Dhaka, passed his Intermediate examination, and entered Dhaka University, without having to lose a year. There, in the first year of our honours classes in economics, we became friends.
Small, slightly built, fair, a scimitar nose dominating his thin face, Shelley was quick to smile. He laughed lustily. Those lips could also curl back as easily in disdain at the slightest hint of hypocrisy from his interlocutor. He remained a straight talker all his life.
February 1952. Shelley was among the thousands of students who plunged into the language movement. No leader, he was not a Bhasa Sainik, but he was indeed a Bhasa Sramik, a term I coined many years later for the countless thousands of ordinary students without whose labour the language movement would not have achieved the glory it did.
In February 1955, when a repressive government rounded up hundreds of students from the Dhaka University campus, the university halls of residence, and elsewhere, we both found ourselves in close proximity to each other in Dhaka Central Jail.
Our contact became intermittent. We met again in England after a long gap, in 1964.1 was in Manchester reading economics and he was in London, and had just been called to the bar. In the winter of that year he, along with our common friend Lutful Huq and his 3-year old son, drove to Manchester to see me. Those were days of a great personal tragedy for him but, resilient as ever, he talked of other things and of old times.
Back home in the late 1960s. Shelley
the barrister joined the bar at the High Court in Dhaka. Not long after, he was defending Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and others as an important member of a team of lawyers appearing for the defence in the Agartala Conspiracy case. He was soon to pay a heavy price for this.
In April 1971, he was picked up by military intelligence and taken to Dhaka Cantonment. There he was kept for two weeks in a filthy airless room crowded with detainees, and was interrogated and tortured. He was finally allowed to leave. Barely able to walk, he limped towards the gate of the cantonment expecting at any moment to be shot for "trying to escape."
He managed to reach the house his brother, K.S. Alam, a respected professor of surgery at Dhaka Medical College. Professor Alam was aghast. As the two brothers embraced, the usually stem Dr. Alam cried; "What have they done to you?” Impulsively, he ripped the shirt from Shelley’s back, looked at the battered body, and wept.
Shelley and I had been meeting in Dhaka at least once a year since 1978on my visits home from New York. I would call him and he would turn up, usually unannounced, chewing his occasional paan. He told me the story only sometime in 2004. He kept it to himself all these years. Such was the resistance of the man to self-advertisement to which so many of us succumb so often.
After liberation of the country, he was made a deputy attorney-general. This did not last long. There was violent change in the political regime. He resigned his post and returned to private practice. Somewhat to my surprise, he also became an entrepreneur: he set up a garments manufacturing I factory and ran it successfully. i
Shelley was an admirer of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur I Rahman. What was more, he was an I unabashed admirer. He would defend I the Father of the Nation in places where I others would consider such an act quite I inconvenient. And I never saw anyone I daring to tell him to shut up. {
In 2007, he contracted cancer of the I lungs It soon spread to his hip bones. I Painful surgeries followed, but to no I avail. He had been reduced to using a I walker when I saw him last. But he was I not to be cowed. He laughed as we I talked, pretending he had no pain. He I was mighty glad to see me. He was still I working, still accepting legal briefs.
I salute his courage and fortitude. I I shall miss the true friend that he was. I