Not entirely like him. I had experience, he did not, I said to myself. I had a month’s salary in my pocket and some savings that I had put aside over the last two years. I saved money by quitting smoking, by walking from place to place instead of hiring a rickshaw, by taking buses for long-distance trips instead of renting a taxi, by not inviting friends to my flat on social occasions. By contrast, Nur Hussain was penniless. I knew people; I had connections that could be of immense help. He had nobody. My friends had not done anything for him, but I was sure they would do something for me. At least they could make some phone calls to potential employers in their circles. They could spread the news: ‘One hard-working, vibrant, dutiful, far-sighted and forward-looking journalist with an extraordinary writing portfolio, Khaleque Biswas, is now available for hire.’ They would be happy to stand as referees for me. If they could not do that, what was friendship for? And I had ideas, I said to myself; finding a lucrative job would not be that difficult for me. By contrast, Nur Hussain was stuck; he would go nowhere; his life was created to be wasted. My accidental caretaker, then somebody else’s professional caretaker, and then one day, after many seasons, an old man who couldn’t even take care of himself. He would disappear as nature’s unplanned production.
I stayed at home for a week coming up with a strategy. I must begin serious and well-organized networking with the specific purpose of landing a suitable job. There must be a crack somewhere in the industry. I must find it and enter through it. Then I would make my presence felt, using my energy, intelligence and perseverance. I would move so fast that that crack would soon turn into a tunnel leading to a golden gate. My colleagues would be astonished at my capacity.
I prepared my résumé, revised it several times to perfect its wording and to rectify all spelling errors, used bullet points to highlight my skills, clearly stated what I was going to bring with me to my new workplace—like leadership, management, investigative skills, and the ability to produce an extraordinary piece of writing within a short period of time. I then wrote customized cover letters for every appropriate position I could think of. The newspaper industry was expanding rapidly. It had drawn an obscene percentage of the new investment in the private sector. Money was pouring in from nowhere. Who could tell before the war we had so much money in our country? Who could tell that in a country with only a twenty per cent literacy rate people would love and respect the print media so much?
Soon, thanks to my good luck, I met two editors of daily papers and had a long, unhindered, stimulating conversation with them. They were two rising non-academic political thinkers of the country who kept themselves away from salacious trivia. I knew they were jealous of the extraordinary growth of the Freedom Fighter; I had the insider’s information. Wouldn’t they want to know what had made that growth possible and the secret to making that growth sustainable in the post-war period? I had my thoughts about a well-governed society, but I did not want to overwhelm them with my arguments and interpretations, especially in our first conversation. I wanted them to go home and think about me, look at my résumé when they were free, and then decide how I would add a new dimension to their papers. But I could not resist mentioning one point. I said the time of process journalism was over; it was important we offered readers news as it happened, so that people believed we were on their side. We could not hide anything. People had become conscious and they had proved it during the liberation war. Guns could not terrorize them. Tanks could not stop them from marching. Wave after wave of carefully fabricated propaganda could not break their determination. The only way for us to go forward was to respect our readers and countrymen.
One of the editors opened his cigarette pack and lit a cigarette, releasing a large spiral of smoke. The other walked to the kitchen and poured a glass of water for himself. I have been able to torture them, I thought. I have put them on the sword. They are now suffering. They will suffer until they have heard the rest of the story from me. My strategy was working.
Everyone I spoke to in the press encouraged me. They understood my plan. Some of them who hesitated to support me before their superiors patted me on the back in private. ‘Extraordinary,’ they said; ‘smart thinking. Go ahead. We’re with you.’ They would do anything to help me out. They were real people, I thought, people with brains and vision. They sensed danger before everyone else.
I was satisfied with my progress. I needed only one opportunity, and I had the unshakeable confidence that it was going to come from one of the papers. It was only a question of time.
At home I began to share more and more hours with Nur Hussain. He could not talk about anything other than Gangasagar and its seasons, its landscape and marketplace, animals and vegetation. But I accepted him with kindness. I spoke softly. We went to the market together to buy stuff. We ran in the school field together and went to the lake to swim.
‘There is a famous song in Gangasagar,’ he said one day. ‘Everyone seems to like it there.’
‘What is it?’ I asked, seemingly curious. ‘Can you sing a line?’
He sang the opening four lines of ‘O My Gold Bengal, I Love You.’ He did not even know that was our newly declared national anthem. I let him sing the lines twice and then said, calmly: ‘Yes, that’s a lovely song, a very lovely song indeed; no wonder people love it so much there.’
When he got to the story about the bamboo bridge that connected the village to the main road, and the fact that it broke down every year because of the huge current in the canal during the monsoon, I knew that that was the end of his stock. He always ended there. That bridge brought the whole country to the village, thus it had a symbolic significance, which did not escape his attention. Nostalgia choked his voice. He could speak no more.
In contrast, I could tell him stories of the whole war, chronologically dividing it month by month, analytically dissecting it incident by incident and area by area. In fact, I told him the story of the subcontinent beginning with 1757, when India fell to the British imperialists. The British had bribed Nawab Seraj Ud-Daulah’s army chief, Mir Jafar, and with his help had captured and brutally killed the Nawab. I spoke about their barbarism, which had lasted almost two hundred years. They enslaved us to produce raw materials and then compelled us to buy their processed goods. I also narrated how they divided the subcontinent in 1947 on the eve of departure, and what happened in Pakistan in the two decades that followed. With reference to the general election of 1970, I told him how Pakistani dictators did not bother to democratize the country when the grand occasion came, and how they wanted to control us with might in our own home.
It was not clear how much of it he understood, but he respected the passion I put into my story. Since I did not go out every day, I told him the story of the war again and again, and he heard me again and again with the same reverence in his eyes.
My savings were dwindling fast. It was not my flatmate that I worried about now; I worried about myself. In particular, I worried about losing the flat, becoming one of the homeless, the utmost tragedy at this time. It would be too much to bear.
When I did not hear from any of my potential employers and no offer came from my friends and colleagues, I reflected on my conversation with the editors. I could not understand what had gone wrong. If they were future keepers of our democracy, they would have needed me. Then I read their papers. Their columns were boring. They created a surreal world with words and pictures. They filled page after page with garbage, as if they had willingly surrendered to the stifling control of the government instead of attacking it. I guess they considered me an enemy of the people. The person who goes against the government is not an enemy of the people. Those who accept their government’s limitations in silence are the real enemies. I had never felt so disheartened.
The situation compelled me to go back in time, to refocus on Sheikh Mujib’s speech delivered in Dhaka on 7 March 1971.
It was a historic speech—the seed of our independence. It had the unique power to motivate Bangladeshis from all walks of life to stand up for their right to self-determination. It kicked off the celebration of our Independence Day. The Freedom Fighter regularly published a quote from it in a box in the upper-right corner of the front page. This is the struggle for independence, it read; this is the struggle for our freedom. Now that we had achieved our nationhood, I wanted to understand what Sheikh Mujib had in mind for me as an individual citizen.
I played a part of the speech on my cassette player, listening to every sentence carefully. I played it in the morning and at night. I played it whenever I could not decide what else to do. I listened to it loudly, quietly, and spoke along with it so that the words could not cheat me and I felt them in my heart. Sometimes I carried the player in my hand, walked from my bedroom to the sitting room, where I sat for hours listening to it. I pressed the auto-reverse button. The speech ended and began again only to end and begin again.
Nur Hussain understood the trouble I was in. He had instincts, if not knowledge. ‘You’re a good person,’ he said. ‘Soon someone will understand you and offer you a place at the table.’ Then he sat beside me silently, probably thinking he had said almost too much and put himself in trouble. He took small breaths. His hands and feet did not move. Then, after a few minutes, he turned his face to me and smiled to cheer me up. Though I was much older than him, and was supposed to take his responsibility on my own shoulders, day by day he was becoming my most valued companion.