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Let the Story Never End …
Prof Syed Moqsud Ali and Dr N Fyzennessa at Hill Top Lake, Syracuse, 1967.
The couple at Niagara Falls, 1997.
I kept telling myself that my grandmother - Jana I called her - was waiting for him. He must be anxious also. He hadn't seen Jana for nine long years. What must have been going through his mind, I wonder, as the doctors fussed over him. And then on a quiet evening of October 26, he left us behind. I lost not only my childhood storyteller, but a grandfather who was more a friend than a guardian.
Most of his friends called him Moqsud, his students at Dhaka University, Professor Moqsud Ali. His creative mind always at work, he would play with his name himself, sometimes even signing articles as Max Wood. He loved writing. When I wrote my first newspaper article, it was Nana who worked on his old typewriter to crank it out.
His love of the language and his ability to hold listeners in a spell always marked him out as a teacher, an academician. His distaste for mathematics was legendary. When his final math exam was over, he is said to have made paper boats from his text book and happily watched the flotilla down the river at his ancestral home in Barisal. Philosophy and political science were his passion. I heard so many stories about Aristotle and Plato from him that I knew of a place called Utopia before I knew of Fuller Road where my grandparents lived.
His passion was infectious. During the four decades of teaching he would influence a generation of leaders who would impact the country in politics, civil administration and education. His books on Political Science have been the authoritative text at universities. For his immense contribution to publications in Political Science, he was awarded the Sher-e-Bangla Gold Medal in 1996.
His academic pursuits had taken him to the USA in the early sixties. He travelled with Jana (Dr N Fyzennessa), who was also going to start her PhD studies as a Fulbright scholar. His photo albums from that time are filled with pictures. Travelling from state to state, they must have had the time of their lives. Posing heroically in the Arizona deserts or dramatically in front of the Niagara Falls, Nana and Jana were a picture of happiness enjoying not only a sense of freedom but also each other's company.
His love for life is also enshrined in his scrapbook. Over a period of fifty years, any newspaper article or picture relating to our family would find a place there with his personal comments next to it. Saad Mama performing a sitar recital, my mother on the cover of Bichitra magazine, Nazia Khala launching her poetry book or Khokon Mama lifting the shield at a football match - they were all badges of pride to him. Jana, though he would never admit it openly, was the centre of his life, featuring more often in those pages than anyone else.
When they returned from the US a few years later, their respective academic careers absorbed a lot of their time. Jana in time would take up responsibility as Provost of Rokeya Hall and Nana as Dean of Political Science at Dhaka University. But they never drifted from family life or from pursuing their love of life.
I remember childhood weekends where Nana would cook a roast over hot coals in their massive garden. And he always had a story for me of cowboys and Indians, kings and emperors or even fairy tales. I would lie down back-to-back with him as he would open his box of stories. Nana being Nana, he would always add his own twist so that I could hear the same stories a hundred times and still not be sure how it would end. At other times he would teasingly provoke me to a debate. If I supported Argentina, he would support Brazil, me Liverpool, him Everton.
Music was the other love of his life. In the early morning I would inevitably wake up to a song on the radio. Nana would clutch the radio close to him, so he could be woken up to the sound of music. When he was at Haj, he told me that he didn't have fitting words to describe his feelings under the open Arafat sky. So he hummed a long favourite song of his “Ei Lobhinu Shongo Tobo Shundoro Hey Shundoro”.
Even after he suffered a stroke in 2000, he refused to let it weaken his mind. I'd been so inspired by his travels that I tried writing down my own travel experiences. Many years later when he had become feeble, imagine my surprise when he pulled out my travel notes and started weaving a story of his own experiences at those locations.
It was the passing of Jana that finally took a toll on him. Suddenly the effects of the stroke started to bear down heavier. Little known to his friends, he started to write a personal journal, a collection of letters about everyday life he would write to Jana but never post. The details of my wedding, the birth of a grandchild, the dinner with his sons, he would write it all, stories intertwined, stories that were incomplete without Jana.
There was a deep sense of hollowness when I heard the news of his hospitalization. He'd sunk into a deep and restful sleep. Wake up! Wake up! I kept trying to beckon him from a thousand miles away. But deep down I sensed that his patience with this world had run out. In my mind I could picture the striking pose he would put on to meet Jana. I can hear the song he is humming to himself. I know the stories he has in store for her.
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