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Remembering Mr. Justice Muhammad Habibur Rahman

Mahfuzur Rahman
HE was always Shelley Bhai to me: Shelley Bhai while he was Chief Justice of Bangladesh, Shelley Bhai while he was head of caretaker government, just as he was Shelley Bhai when we were students. His passing has robbed me of a true friend. And yes, to him that was what I had always been - a friend despite a very large difference in our stature. He never cared about stature.
It was year 1950. I met Shelley Bhai on the veranda of my khalujan's house in Bakhshibazar where old Dacca and new Dacca meet. He was there with his father, a close friend of my khalujan, Maulana Sheikh Abdur Rahim. A brilliant student, he had earned his B.A. in history with a first place in first class, and was to enroll in the first part of a two-year Master's course in history at Dacca University. He stayed with us for a few days till he found a 'seat' in Salimullah Muslim Hall.
Those were heady days. I was only a few years younger than him and a student in Dacca College. I was greatly taken by his radical ideas for an exploitation-free society. We argued over just about anything. An argument over romantic poets turned hot. To me Wordsworth was a greater poet than Shelley. It was the other way round, he insisted. His idealism soared with Shelley's skylark. The argument stopped abruptly, with Shelley Bhai staring at an inchoate boy.
Soon came February 1952. Shelly Bhai was a leading light of the language movement. By that time he was Shelley Bhai to a lot of students of the University. On February 21, after the lathi-charge on the students gathered in the Arts
Faculty campus, I watched him as he climbed the grilled gate of the Faculty building, exhorting students trying to go out in defiance of police ban on processions. Soon he was arrested and hauled away, along with the other members of the first group of students to go to jail.
From the late 1950s I lost touch with him. He went on to Oxford and Lincoln's Inn, came home, taught at universities, joined the bar, and became a judge. And he read. He was one of the most erudite persons I ever met. And he began to write, the volume of writing growing steadily. Koransutra, his Bengali translation of the Koran, has run into many editions. His Bengali thesaurus, Jathashabda, has been widely acclaimed. Satyajit Ray was among the admirers. The pace of output of his book seemed to increase as he grew old. At the end he had written well over fifty books, on a huge array of subjects. The love of the Bangla language that he imbibed early in life, especially during the language movement, remained with him all his life. A great deal of his writing centred around Rabindranath. Few matched his knowledge of Rabindra literature. He always believed that the medium of instruction in national education should basically be Bangla. He called for use of Bangla in all walks of life.
His love of the mother tongue went beyond loving Bangla. He saluted all mother tongues of the world. That is how he came to write his Twenty-first February Speaks for All Languages, his 2011 publication, on which he spent an enormous amount of time.
We renewed personal contact in the mid-1990s. He had come to New York on a short visit. Except for that first visit he always stayed with us while in New York or in the neighbourhood. Every time, we would walk the streets of New York, go to the museums and theatres, and have donuts and coffee, his favourite. He loved my wife's cooking. He loved my collection of books. He loved the plants in our apartment. "You have turned your apartment into Bangladesh, Mahfuz," he said as he admired my plants of Bengal. He had great affection for my wife whom he treated as his younger sister.
We remained close to each other. Over the last one decade I have telephoned him from New York almost every' month, sometimes oftener, and we had long conversations. We invariably met whenever we were in Dhaka for a visit. We would visit him at his home in Gulshan. He would always find time for us. He would greet us in his lungi and punjabi. He never looked like a chief justice or head of a government. He was just Shelley Bhai to us.
The last time I spoke to him on the phone from New York was on New Year's Day, 2014. We spoke long. He told me was sending, in the next hour, two articles to two different newspapers for publication. He was fine, he said. A month or so earlier we also had a chat. The usual inquiry about his health was followed by the usual "I am fine." The conversation drifted. And then suddenly he mentioned death. 1 do not know why, he also said he had come to believe that death was painless. I hope he was right.
Always a plain speaker, he surprised me once. "There two people I have the most affection for: you and Anis" (Prof. Anisuzzaman), he said to me.
Thank you Shelley Bhai. Thank you Mr. Justice Muhammad Habibur Rahman.
The writer is a former United Nations economist.