On a night of the full moon, I sat by the resting place of the Liberator. The breeze stirred the grass on the grave. All night long I sat and prayed and wondered. Here I was, at the grave of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the great man we will eternally be indebted to for the path to glory he showed us. Twenty one years had gone by since the pack of wolves, ferociously out of their lairs, had put paid to the life of the Father of the Nation, to the lives of the family he loved beyond measure.
In the gleam of the moon, with the monsoon clouds floating past the orb, it was the images, all those tales of Bangabandhu which came rushing back into the imagination. On the front page of the Pakistan Times newspaper in early February 1969 was the pictorial representation of a man, in thick, dark-framed spectacles, a dark moustache heightening the personality. That, my father informed me, was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
I had heard the name, but I had had no idea of how he looked. And here he was, at a time when the Ayub Khan regime was in irreversible decline, inexorably ascending the heights. He was yet embroiled in the Agartala Case, but there were all the signs that he would soon be free, to tell the world that his Bengalis mattered. These were the thoughts in me as I sat beside Bangabandhu’s grave, wishing I could speak to him one more time, could see him one more time.
That beautiful summer evening in Quetta, as the scent of roses wafted through the air, came alive once again in the landscape of my imagination. Bangabandhu, tall and regal and assertive, strode toward the guests assembled for dinner in his honour. Among all those adults, all politicians and leading personalities in Baluchistan, I was the only schoolboy. I needed his autograph and had ended up being invited to the dinner. Bangabandhu placed both his big hands on my cheeks, pulled them in fatherly fashion and made me sit beside him as he conversed with his guests. Dinner done, I had my autograph, took unwilling leave of him (for it was getting late) and danced and skipped my way home, the autograph book in my hand.
Beside that resting place of the nation’s founding father, I missed the warmth of those hands on my cheeks, middle aged though those cheeks were becoming. I heard those affectionate words again, those he had said to me in distant Baluchistan in July 1970. He was now at peace, after a lifetime of struggle for the dignity and rights of his people. I looked behind me, for there on the verandah of the ancestral home of the Sheikh clan was the makeshift coffin in which his mortal remains had been carried to Tungipara by his killers. The heart in me wept, copiously.
And it wept in remembrance of all the late evenings I spent waiting for Bangabandhu to emerge through the gates of the old Ganobhaban at Ramna, in his official vehicle, on his way home at the end of the day. I always waved at him and he always waved back. In the monsoon rains, beneath the banyan tree outside Ganobhaban, the evening went slowly by one day as I waited. On that evening, Bangabandhu had his car stop a few paces beyond the gate, beckoned me to him, gently admonished me for waiting to see him every day. ‘Where do you study?’ He wanted to know, that natural smile playing on his beaming face. Notre Dame College, I told him. ‘Go home and study’, said he. I went home, happy that the Superman had spoken to me yet again.
The night got deeper in Tungipara as the past swiftly, sadly invaded my sadder present. I travelled back to the day when the Liberator came home on a January day in 1972, I hanging on to the rear of the truck which carried him all the way from Tejgaon airport to the Race Course. On that evening, when his homecoming gave fullness to national freedom, Bangabandhu wept in remembrance of the millions who had perished in the war. We wept with him. And we knew that nothing would henceforth go wrong with us, for our leader was back home among us. On that night at the moonlit grave of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, I heard that voice again, I heard him speak through his tears. The breeze blew, making the grass create waves over his grave.
The images flow on. Here is Bangabandhu speaking at the United Nations, expounding on our dreams in our very own language. And there is the Father of the Nation at Lahore airport, amused at Tikka Khan, his old tormentor, saluting him. All the great men — Josip Broz Tito, Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Kenneth Kaunda and all — make it a point to see the great man who has given rise to the nation-state called Bangladesh. I see Bangabandhu rising from his seat when university teachers troop into his room, greeting them in deep reverence, behavior that is part of our historical tradition.
These days, everyday and everywhere — at home and abroad — Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the epic I read in the luminosity of the stars dotting the heavens. When the monsoon skies overwhelm the earth with its ceaseless showers, I remember the Father of the Nation, for on the day he was lovingly laid to rest by his heartbroken people in Tungipara, it rained in the evening. That was a long-ago monsoon.
My Bangabandhu. Our Bangabandhu. There will not be another like him. There will not be another North Star in the firmament of Bengali dreams. (Syed Badrul Ahsan is an independent journalist and author of ‘From Rebel to Founding Father: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’)
Syed Badrul Ahsan is an independent journalist and author of ‘From Rebel to Founding Father: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’
