When I met Moidul, but knew not

THE other day I was casually going through a page of a Bengali newspaper when I chanced upon a news item entitled, “Moidul no more” (my translation), accompanied by a colour photograph of a man.  I gave a fleeting glance at the picture, and for some reason, instead of skipping the obituary news, I started reading it. And, that kept me going until I reached the end of the news item, and, after having gone through the first two lines, I took a long and close look at the picture.  The news began with the disclosure of the identity of one of the group of regular participants at a coffee table mentioned in Manna Dey's immortal nostalgic ode to adda, that distinctive attribute of the generic Bengalis, something that is far better felt and experienced, rather than described.  The song, one of my own all-time favourites in any language, is, of course, “Coffee Houser shei addata….”
The first time I looked, really looked, at the picture, I thought the face looked vaguely familiar.  Once I had read the real name of the fictional Moidul, I went back to the picture.  There was no mistaking the face.  It was him!  Nur Ahmed!  The Moidul in Dey's Coffee House!  The years rolled back in my memory.  From 2014 back to…1978.  The place:  Chittagong.  The occasion:  the 4th national badminton championships.  I had joined as a Lecturer in the Department of Public Administration, Dhaka University, on 1 January 1976.  No sooner than I had taken up the position, bigwigs of the university thought me qualified to become a member of the Dhaka University Sports Board and of the Cricket Committee (well, all right, I did participate in some sports while a student of my alma mater, and even won team championships in cricket on multiple occasions).  In late 1977, I was informed that I had been made manager of the Dhaka University badminton team to participate in the 4th national championships to be held in January-February of the following year.  I chuckled inside.  I had never participated in any kind of badminton tournament till then, and had only occasionally played the sport.  But I could not refuse the offer, not without disappointing the senior faculty members who were in the Sports Board.  Besides, I really looked forward to the novel experience of managing a sports team, especially one that was representing Dhaka University.
We landed in Chittagong, four male and two female players making up our team.  The opening ceremony over, I got to meet a number of officials of the organizing committee, Bangladesh badminton federation members, some of the umpires, and officials and players of a few other teams.  I met a man who was wearing multiple hats --- that of a federation member (he was its joint secretary), organizing committee member, and an umpire.  He was soft spoken, when he spoke at all, and seemed reluctant to say more than a few words at a time.  A disconcerting “yes” or “no” to questions that required more than the monosyllable could be off-putting, but I suspected that he was not much of a conversationalist.  Not, at least, with those who were new acquaintances or complete strangers.  I had a few conversations going with him, but not for any long duration.  My principal interest in him was because he was an umpire or line judge.  And those officials' calls, especially those that were palpably wrong, could, and often did, have a decisive impact on the outcome of a match.  For my players' sake, I desperately hoped that he was a fair, and, therefore, good umpire.  As it turned out, Nur Ahmed was quite a good umpire/line judge.  I do not recall, even after all these years, of him making more than the occasional mistake.
Those days he wore a thinnish moustache above rather full lips.  He was shortish, somewhat stocky, and wore a thick head of oily black hair.  The photograph in the newspaper showed a man without the moustache, slightly gaunter, with unmistakable signs of aging etched on his face, still with a fair head of hair, but clearly Nur Ahmed as I remembered him.  I believe he wrote a badminton-related piece for the souvenir, but I did not go beyond the first few lines.  I did not know then, and not until his obituary news revealed it to me, that he was also involved in sports journalism.  Neither did I know then that he was both a football and a badminton player who had competed at high levels for a good length of time.  Actually, I had forgotten him almost as soon as the championships had ended with a belated prize-giving ceremony several hours after midnight, leaving us only  a couple of hours of shuteye before boarding the bus that was to carry us back to Dhaka.
And, thereby hangs a tale that I will not reveal in detail.  And I only got to know the better part of it once the tournament progressed.  In those days, two clubs, Dhaka Badminton and Metropolitan Badminton, were bitter rivals on the badminton court.  As I found out, the rivalry had a real nasty edge to it.  Metropolitan was participating in the championship, but Dhaka Badminton stayed away from it.  In fact, some of Dhaka Badminton's premier players, including the top female, were part of the Dhaka University team.  But so were a couple of Metropolitans, who would have loved to have represented their club, but had no choice but to come out for Dhaka University, of which they were students.  Without going into the murky details, I will just state that, primarily because of that unhealthy rivalry, the prize-giving ceremony was delayed by several hours.  In fact, I was caught right in the middle as the rivalry was played out, subtly as well as quite openly, around the Dhaka University team.  In the event, Dhaka University's Rummana Ahmed won the triple crown (incidentally she, and her women's double partner were my students in the Public Administration department).
As I stated, Nur Ahmed never even for a single moment crossed my mind once the championships had ended.  Until a chance reading hove him into my view after his death.  But, for me, he will now remain in my mind forever as the real-life image of Manna Dey's Moidul.  The badminton episode will soon recede to distant memory after having made its brief comeback.  Funny how “Moidul” followed, within a few months, the singer to the great beyond.

Prof. Shahid Alam is an actor, critic and former diplomat