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Lest we forget

Abu A. Abdullah: Some sweet recollections

Abdullah Shibli
WHEN I heard from Kazi Belal that Abu Abdullah passed away a few days ago, a kaleidoscope of images flashed through my mind; our first meeting at the Bangladesh Economic Association's (BEA) Conference atTSC in 1976, our regular nightly adda and jalsha in Medford in the late '80's, the musical soiree at his apartment in Dhanmandi in the summer of 1990, and then my last encounter with him following the brutal attack by an intruder that left him partially blind and scarred his face but could not take away his calm demeanour and his peacefulness that I had always seen.
Abdullah Bhai, as I always called him, was well-known to me even before I met him. As a student of the Economics Department in the seventies, we were regaled by our professors and Economics alumni by stories of his brilliance, his performance in the B.A. (Hons) and MA exams, and his erudition and scholarship. In the 1960s, the best and the brightest of Pakistan’s economics graduates and faculty members gravitated towards Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE).When PIDE moved its office to Dhaka in October, 1970, Abdullah Bhai was out of the country on study leave, and I subsequently heard about his active role during the War of Liberation in the US.
However, our paths crossed many times during the peripatetic life that we experienced. Our first encounter was probably in Mymensingh where we both lived for a short while and only a few blocks away. His nephew and niece and my brothers and I were in the same school, and would often hang out at their place in the evening.
He subsequently left for Dhaka College, and then attended Dhaka University. When I started attending Dhaka University in the 1970s, Abdullah Bhai had already graduated and left to pursue higher studies in Economics at Harvard University. When he came back to Bangladesh in 1976,1 was a Lecturer in Economics at Dhaka University.
It is in that setting that I met him again at the Second Annual Conference of BEA, in 1976. He made an impression
on all of us — the tall, slightly balding, scholarly, and legendary person in a very plain pajama and punjabi.
I left for higher studies soon thereafter, but after three years came back to work with him and his team at BIDS during my dissertation. I had the good fortune of having him as a senior adviser of the Food For Work project that I was associated with as a Doctoral Fellow of IFPRI.
My next round of interactions with Abdullah Bhai is the one I remember and cherish the most. The opportunity came when Abdullah Bhai visited University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1976 as a faculty member for one academic year.
Thanks to the hospitality of a common friend, Kazi Belal (our Shajahan Bhai) and his wife, Pushpa Apa, my wife Rumi and I spent many evenings at their house in the company of Abdullah Bhai listening to songs rendered in his rich voice. In the early hours he and Shajahan Bhai would join in a jugal bandi. The ambience was just incomparable, because of the variety of songs, the camaraderie of the group, and the energy that permeated the jalshaghar.
Another memorable moment for me was when I sang a duet, the Rabindra Sangeet "poth diye key jaye go choley," with Abdullah Bhai at MIT at the 1987 Pahela Baishakh celebration. I was probably lacking in taal and loy, but Abdullah Bhai never let these weaknesses get in the way of my enthusiasm and eagerness to perform with him. I wish, as I remember Abdullah Bhai today, I had asked him to sing with me another Tagore song, one that I am constantly humming on this sad occasion, "jey phool jhorey."
The writer lives and works in Boston, USA.