Two nights that lit Azimpur

In the Azimpur government colony of the 1970s, two occasions—Ashura and ShabeBarat—turned familiar lanes into processional corridors and classrooms of companionship.

In the government colony blocks of Azimpur, the 1970s felt like a long conversation that picked up each afternoon where we had left off the day before. We belonged not only to our own flats but to shared stairwells and open courtyards, to verandas with gossip flowing like tea, and to a playground that doubled as parliament, theatre and auditorium.

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Ashura arrived with the hush of a story you don’t interrupt. The Hussaini Dalan complex lay roughly two kilometres from our colony, near enough for curiosity to tug at our sleeves. In the days leading up to the tenth of Muharram, we sometimes walked over in small groups to watch preparations: the measured fixing of banners and standards, the careful laying out of routes, the way elders explained, in low voices, the meaning of what was to come. It was a lesson given without a classroom. Even the silence of the workers felt like part of a longer recitation.

On the day itself, a grand mourning procession would emerge from Hussaini Dalan and move through the city streets. We stationed ourselves at the Salimullah Orphanage intersection, where, year after year, the procession seemed to collect and release the city’s breath. To secure a view we formed a small wedge at the front of the crowd—half strategy, half bravado—leaning forward as if those few inches would let us better understand grief carried across centuries. Chests beat in rhythm, eyes glistened, and yet the atmosphere felt protective rather than frightening, the way adults will form an invisible ring around children in a sudden rain.

If the procession supplied our solemn awe, the fair supplied our giddy hunger. The long road between the Azimpur bus stand and the graveyard would wake up like a travelling caravan, the ‘official’ oneday fair stretching, quite naturally, into a week and peaking on Ashura. It was a child’s university: you learned to bargain for toy pistols and tin cars, to press your eye to a bioscope’s small window and gasp at a parade of painted frames, to feel important holding a plastic binocular that made the world nearer by stubborn faith alone. The dhol beat from a few stalls at once as if sound itself were a banner; clay dolls sat in patient rows, their eyes permanently surprised; and a creaking nagordola—our modest Ferris wheel—climbed and descended like a lesson in bravery. Father gave me five taka and with that money I bought a bioscope and a tin car. How happy I was!

We returned home from the fair carrying a mathematics of delight. If I saved two taka on toy money here, could I add a packet of muri-murki there? If I skipped the binocular for now, would the stall still be open tomorrow? These negotiations felt like a first apprenticeship in adulthood, though our parents pretended not to notice, smiling at the way we reported our victories with straight faces. The colony community absorbed the energy of the day: khallamas compared prices as if they were recounting cricket scores; uncles developed brisk opinions about bioscope morals; neighbours tried the nagordola to show the younger ones that fear is a muscle that improves with use.

If Ashura took us into a history of courage and loss, ShabeBarat returned us to the night as a neighbour. In our colony it had a robust presence—part supplication, part streettheatre of generosity. Every home cooked halwas and sweets; ricerotis stacked high on trays seemed to multiply, as if the house itself had become a small bakery. Before the call to Magribh, families began a gentle choreography of distribution: plates travelling to the next flat and the next; portions set aside for those who slept outside our gates or simply needed the comfort of a soft, sweet bite. The flavour of the night was mercy.

But if you ask what we children looked forward to most, the answer is shamelessly simple: we were allowed to stay out all night. In groups that reshuffled like playing cards, we visited almost every mosque within walking distance, including, with a certain pride, the old Shahi Masjid of Chawkbazar. Our piety, I admit, was often a cover for adda—long conversations that circled the same topics and somehow never grew dull: the speed of a leftarm bowler, the possibility of a new cassette deck, the mystery of a classmate’s smile. We lit candles and tarabati sparklers that scribbled light on the air, our laughter briefly drowning out the night birds.

Our vigil had a ritual ending. Just before dawn we would make our way to the Tin Gambuj mosque—some three hundred metres from home—to offer Fajr. But what drew us there, alongside prayer, was an older comfort: warm tehari served on daora woven from dried jackfruit leaves. The first bite felt like a promise kept. We ate not only with our mouths but with our shoulders and eyes, borrowing warmth from each other under a sky that was just beginning to colour. By the time we emerged, the alleys were narrower, the hush clean, and the permission of the night had become a memory we could carry into algebra and homework.

Looking back, I realise how elegantly these two nights taught us about companionship. Ashura asked us to witness another community’s wound with sincerity and respect; ShabeBarat asked us to enact generosity until it felt like habit. Both made room for us, children of many flats and a few religions, to belong to a city larger than our block. The lessons were practical rather than preachy. Hold your ground at the intersection, but do not shove. Stand aside so an elder can see. Share your lanterns. Give your last halwa without counting.

We sometimes say that those days were simpler, as if simplicity were a property of the calendar. They were not. Grownups still flinched at newspaper headlines, and budgets were still a kind of puzzle. But the colony’s distances were small enough for hope to travel fast. A call from one staircase would be heard in the next; a rumour of trouble would fetch a father in sandals and a mother with a shawl around her shoulders; a plan for a midnight mosqueround would produce, from somewhere, an extra sweater for a younger cousin who insisted he was not cold.

I still picture the Hussaini Dalan preparations in the hush of late afternoon, the banners catching the smallest breeze. I still hear the bioscopeman calling out a story in a voice that had absorbed a hundred other stories. I still see the slow carousel of the nagordola tipped against the sky. On ShabeBarat I still taste a spoonful of halwa platehopped from one kitchen to the next and feel the soft warmth of tehari on daora after Fajr. When memory lines up these images like frames in a projector, the throughline is easy to read: religious in nature, secular in spirit, these occasions took private devotion and turned it into public companionship.

Azimpur taught us that a neighbourhood can be a syllabus. Ashura showed us how a people remember—out loud, together, and with beauty that does not hide pain. ShabeBarat showed us how a people feed—quietly, door to door, until nobody feels left out of the night. In the morning after, when we washed our faces and headed to school, we carried the residue of those lessons like a second skin. They have not rubbed off. Even now, all these years later, I still find myself glancing up when the air changes, as if a procession might turn the corner or a lanternline might suddenly appear, and the colony of our childhood might, for a moment, come back into view.

Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman is professor of English at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB). He can be reached at: ahsanuzzaman@iub.edu.bd.