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Tribute to Humayun Ahmed

Tariq Iqbal
I have not read a single book by Mr. Ahmed in the last seventeen or eighteen years, but I remember what I read before 1995/96. Surprisingly, his style remained unchanged, or so I guess from occasional viewing of snippets of his dramas and glimpses of teaser passages from his books posted online. So, on his passing to a different dimension I feel like saying something.
I don't know if literature has any purpose other that what we impose on it. One can always argue whether Humayun Ahmed's works were literature or not. But, if literature is meant to influence a people or a generation who are a subset of those people, if literature is meant to shape their thoughts, their mode of mutual interactions, their linguistic as well as everyday emotional expressions to a visible, discernible extent, then it's fair to claim that Mr. Ahmed's work served quite a significant purpose --whether he intended it or not.
He is one of the very few authors who successfully superimposed Western style conversational forms in Bengali fiction. Also unique is his extensive use of psychological insights, theories of the unconscious, the ideas of shadow-self, the animal self of a human entity, and his favourite I think was the power of the unconscious mind. He used a lot of elements from Jungian theories, which themselves were derivatives of Freudian concepts. But reading his Mishir Ali stories will certainly enlighten one about how one's unconscious affects one's behaviour and drives one in a direction without one's being aware of it. The free-spirited nature of another of his famous characters Himu is also a manifestation of unconscious desires latent in all of us to be free from conventions and norms.
Humayun Ahmed was not unique or original as a writer in that aspect -- most experiments in that track had already been done by authors in the west way before his career as a writer began. But Humayun Ahmed was first to reconfigure the results of those experiments in Bangladesh's context and give his readers a taste of something global, on a local plate.
The young generation of Bangladeshi writers or thinkers owes him sincere thanks for his pen, since he opened up several windows for them to look at the reality around them. Of course, what each of us sees through those windows are subjective, and depend on the individual's intellectual and emotional makeup. Yet, Humayun Ahmed introduced a sense of clarity that was absent in classic Bengali literature. The logical and rational directness with which his characters progress through a story has been emulated by many of his mostly younger readers. He influenced how young middle-class readers feel about romance, and enriched the verbal repertoire of many with idiosyncratic use of words tinged with humour, and even fashion.
His minimalist use of words could possibly be a result of his science background and his exposure to America, and readers have been better served for that. Simplicity is his strength, like a good draftsman's who can show vivid details of a scene with a few lines of a pencil on a sketch pad. I don't think the analogy of a painter will be appropriate for late Humayun Ahmed, rather, let me call him a "draftsman of words."
I don't think I should wish the obvious wishes common for an obituary for him (i.e. RIP, "may he rest in heaven," etc), since I believe he was too philosophical for that, and even more so because of his apparent ambivalence about the whole heaven-hell dichotomy in a religious sense. He himself had doubts about his post-mortem status, and would write something with his trademark dry, tragic humour. I am certain of that.
Once, in one of his science fiction novels, he toyed with the idea of how one's conscious thinking or imagination creates reality in a different dimension of the universe. In other words, he implied through his protagonist that whenever one thought about anything, good or bad, object or individual, that thinking manifested as reality in a different universe. If that is true, I guess it won't be misplaced if I wish him good times with his own creations, i.e. Mishir Ali, Himu, Jori, his Mayaboti women, etc, in a different dimension, in a universe far removed and far different from us. I am sure he would appreciate my lighthearted approach towards the news of his departure from this mortal world. He was too good an artist to take offense at such an effort like mine.
The writer lives In USA.