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NON - Fiction

Zeenat Khan
Sixteen years ago, I went to bid my father farewell. He sat on a leather recliner on the veranda of our ancestral village home in Ghorasal. on the outskirts of Dhaka. He held onto my hand very tightly. We have the same hands, father and daughter, hands that many found hard to tell apart. At that moment, it seemed our two hands inter twined as if they belonged to the same person After a while, he let go. and 1 was sure it would be for the ven last time.
This year marks the fourteenth year since my father passed away. He was a lean, tall man who commanded respect. My father, in fact, looked much like Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his pin-striped sherwani, his Jinnah coat, which was his formal attire. (He shunned Western clothes in support of Gandhi 's nonviolence movement.) fie was an educator, and his coat gave him an added air of composure and grace. He was a person of rigidity and lived his life with extreme discipline. Young and old alike were fearful of him because he did not hesitate to speak his mind.
My lasting image of him is of how he looked as he prepared ritually for his Jumma prayer. The barber would show up to groom him in the morning. After bathing, he would wear a simple, crisp pajama-and-punjabi set. and with a dab of attar he would be on his way, with long steps, towards the village mosque. When he returned, we would all gather for a grand Friday mid-day meal We could never relax, however, knowing at any minute Baba would lob a question about geography or a math problem our way as we ate. We would hurriedly finish our meals, just to avoid the embarrassment of being caught out at not knowing the correct answer. Our time spent with my father was never in vain. He taught us how to read the Qu ran in Arabic, and he taught me multiplication, even though we had three live-in tutors and another Hindu teacher, the very best at the time, who would come in the morning from another village just to teach us children arithmetic. Baba taught me, painstakingly, to read the time from an old grandfather clock that chimed in our main house. The clock face had Roman numerals and I had a lot of difficulty. Yet. he didn't give up. He would ask me to tell him what time of the day it was, calling on me at the most unexpected moments, as when engrossed with my sisters arranging a pululer wedding.
He was a product of English educatiort at a time when most people in his generation did not go beyond high school. Most lived on their family assets, on the yearly revenues from the peasants who worked on their lands as sharecroppers. He left Ghorasal at age twelve to attend the Dhaka Muslim high school. His father, my grandfather, a well-known pundit in his own time, versed in /Arabic, Farsi and Sanskrit, saw the need for an English education. With a heavy heart, despite my grandmother's hysterical weeping, my grandfather packed up his only son and took him to his maternal aunt’s house in old Dhaka. Later my father attended the-then newly built Dacca University, and matriculated with the second batch of university graduates, with an M.A. in Economics, and then went on to obtain a law degree. His official title was M.A.B.L.
Instead of practicing law he took a job with the government and moved to Calcutta with my mother and three young children. 1 he conditions in which Muslim families lived in Calcutta then were not ideal. The small flats were cramped and my mother was becoming anemic from staying indoors without any sunlight. Moreover, my father s lungs were also giving out; he used to chain- smoke. After consultations with doctors, my parents decided that a country life would suit them best. They returned to Ghorasal and had to re adjust to the village life that they had left.
My father became an educator. He devoted his entire life to rebuilding die primary school that my grandfather had built, and worked tirelessly to see that Ghorasal High School got its accreditation from the school board. He was the headmaster, and his children, students, and teachers all knew him as such. When I was in grade school, 1 would watch him pace the halls of the school to ensure the teachers were performing well. At the school he drew a nominal salary so that he could hire other qualified teachers who were hard to find for a village school. He lured Kumud Babu, a well-known teacher, from another school by offering him a higher salary than his own. (As an only son, my father inherited all that his parents owned, and his large family survived on that additional income.)
Education was, in Baba's eyes, undoubtedly the pass to a greater life. He sent his eldest son to high school in Calcutta, the second son to the Air Force Academy in Sargodha in the then West Pakistan, his third to Ghorosal High School, and the youngest was dispatched to Faujdarhat Cadet College. Progressive-minded for his time, he was a believer in equal education irrespective of gender. So the idyllic time with my parents was short-lived; as soon as I turned twelve I was shipped off to Dhaka to attend an allgirls' school, soon followed by my younger sister. My transition to the city school was smooth because of my home’s nurturing environment - though while there, I would eagerly wait for the long school vacations and often went home the same day taking the train. We were made acutely aware that we were meant for a life outside of the village: a 'modern' life.
My father loved all his eight children without having a favorite. Ihe way he raised us can be best described as 'no-nonsense.' He never gave us any illusions about the life that lay ahead for each one of us. Today I draw strength from his teaching. Then I was a mischievous child who loved reading fiction. Often 1 would get caught reading a novel right before my annual exams, and my father would lecture me on the 'evils' of novel reading. He believed education was synonymous with text book reading. Sometimes, though, he would show his playful side, as when he would play a rambunctious game of ludu with us.
Baba was an early riser and at dawn, after prayers, he took his morning walk. After coming back into the house he would lift our mosquito net to sit at the edge of the bed. where we three sisters were snuggled up with our mother, and tell us stories. He recounted how it was for his generation, growing up in an East Bengal within the stifling ethos of the caste system. He also told us captivating Quranic parables which he knew from heart, and finish by asking us to tell him the moral of that story. Often we didn't know, and patiently he would explain.
Baba lost a five-year old son before I was born. He was a special child with severe joint problems. When my father told us about this lost brother, he only emphasized the positives: What a good-looking, bright child he was, and how he loved picture books. He told us the boy was about to have an operation at age nine, and how he was going to get better. When my brother passed away, my father was in a place named Raipur. When he missed the connecting train, he bi-cycled the rest of the way home to see his son one last time. His story about the great Bengal Famine (1943) will forever haunt me: My parents were having their mid-day meal. A beggar woman came in with three or four skeletal children to ask for food. It was obvious from their condition that none had eaten a full meal in days. So they were offered food, and as soon as the children started to eat, their mother pushed them aside and ate up every bit of
food herself. I he pain of hunger was so severe that instead of letting her children eat first, she ate it all. Because my late older sister used to tell rne stories about the glories of Calcutta life, I have harboured a life-long fascination for pre-Partition Calcutta. I would press my father for the tale of how he saw Jawaharlal Nehru whipped by a lash on his forehead during a rally he was addressing. A British sergeant rode in on his horse and started to whip the crowd indiscriminately. Nehru got a direct hit of the whip, and his coat was covered with his blood. I was proud that my dad was in that rally and witnessed a part of history.
When he passed away, my father received a lot of recognition in death. During the shokshava (or wake), hundreds of people from all the adjoining villages and all his former students who heard about it came to the gathering from across the country. I could not be there, but heard about it from my other siblings who were. Everybody who at one point had benefitted from his generosity stepped forward to speak. My older sister also spoke at that shokshava, her first public speaking experience. With my four brothers standing next to her, she addressed the crowd and talked candidly of him as a father. If Baba was looking down from up above, he would probably have disapproved, for he was not much of man for ceremonies.
My father has passed on, but his name remains with the ones who are living now. One of my brothers ensured that what my father represented lives on through the education of Ghorasal's children. He had the entire school rebuilt in the last thirteen years, furnished with all modern amenities: Science lab, computers, and yes, lots of books, at the new library that bears his name. The school students now wear uniforms, and there are living quarters for the teachers. There is a newly built bungalow for the headmaster to reside with his family.
A life-sized portrait of my father hangs in the school library. In it, he sits with his Jinnah coat on. On the anniversary of his death, the Bangladeshi flag flies half mast in the gentle breeze from the adjoining Sitalakhya river.
* The above piece was written as a Father's Day tribute -Father’s Day is on June 21
Zeenat Khan, after three decades in America, finds wnting to be a most liberating expenence.