Arts & Letters, April 2018

Remembering Shahidul Zahir
Tribute
• Golam Faruque Khan
Shahidul Zahir, a story-teller who could weave a spell over his audience
with the ease of ST Coleridge’s ancient mariner, died of a massive
heart attack on March 23, 2008 in his prime. For his readers and
friends, his exit was too sudden and untimely to seem real, and it
could have appeared to them as part of a sequence of events in a new tale that
he was probably about to spin. Those who were familiar with his narrative
style could well have been under an illusion for some time that he had moved
house like Abdul Majid, a character he so deftly crafted in his first novel Jiban
O Rajnaitik Bastobota, and would reappear after a certain time much in the
same way as Subodh Chandra, another of his memorable characters, comes
back from the well in which he was thrown by the residents of Bhuter Goli. But
the harsh reality is that he has not yet come back and never will.
Born in 1953, Shahidul Zahir had his early education in Dhaka and was
deeply familiar with the way of life in what is now the older part of the city.
Then he was schooled in some rural and semi-urban areas where his father
worked as a government employee, and had considerable exposure to life in
the countryside of Bangladesh. He came back to Dhaka to finish his college
and university education and then settled here. He too was a government employee
and inherited his love for literature from his father who had a deep
interest in literature. Shahidul started writing short stories in his student days
but had little interest in making it known and very few people around him
knew that he was a writer.
On the surface, Shahidul’s life was quite calm and orderly. Despite the
spark of creativity always ablaze within him, he somehow threw in his lot
with the government bureaucracy and rose high in the pecking order. But in
his apparently regulated, routine life, he managed to nurture a kind of chaos
-- living as he did in a scantily furnished, dusty and sooty house with the
help of a cook -- as if to protest against the career choice he had made and to
protect his inner beauty and creativity from the drab bureaucratic routine. He
had a unique lifestyle that set him apart. To be more precise, he was noticeably
original both in his life and art. Like Robert Frost’s famous protagonist,
he preferred to take the “road less travelled by” and subordinated his whole
existence to his art.
How can a reader afford to miss the
harrowing description of a butcher of a war
criminal, Badu Mawlana, and his ruthless
sons throwing around pieces of murdered
women’s flesh to feed ravens?
Parapar, a collection of short stories, was the first book by Shahidul Zahir
and it was published in 1985. The book went largely unnoticed. His second
book, Jiban O Rajnaitik Bastobota, which is a short novel of 61 pages, came out
in 1988. It was after quite some time that one of his friends picked up a soiled
copy of the book from a heap of rubbish in his bedroom and discovered with
much excitement that Shahidul was a powerful writer. He reviewed the book
and desperately tried to take it to as many readers as possible. Gradually, a
DHAKA TRIBUNE | SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2018 ARTS & LETTERS
good number of readers went through this thin book and were spellbound by
its innovative language, captivating narrative, deft portrayal of characters and
the immense political relevance of the subject. The only concern of his friends
then was if the book would be able to reach the larger readership, given the
perfunctory way it was published and the miserable way it was stacked up instead
of being marketed. Surprisingly, their fears and misgivings gave way to
great joy soon and a huge number of fiction-lovers could see the writer in this
reclusive man. Once the book reached the fiction-lovers, it was almost impossible
for them not to sit up and take notice. After all, a good reader cannot help
being gripped by a story depicting a gloomy afternoon when Abul Khair, a
hitherto-absconding war criminal, triumphantly returns to his neighborhood
under a dim sky filled with the croaks of ravens wildly preying on swarms of
termites. They cannot afford not to notice the muted pangs of Abdul Majid
who saw his sister being raped and killed in 1971 and has now to helplessly
see the war criminals’ arrogant reappearance that breaks his heart and, at the
same time, makes his slipper-strap break with a loud pop. How can a reader
afford to miss the harrowing description of a butcher of a war criminal, Badu
Mawlana, and his ruthless sons throwing around pieces of murdered women’s
flesh to feed ravens? Such piercing moments woven into Shahidul Zahir’s narrative
were enough to touch a chord with readers, particularly with those who
had lived through the war of liberation.
Then it was only a short time before he won his spurs as a writer.One by one
came out books like Se Raate Purnima Chhilo (1995), Dumurkheko Manush O Anyanya
Galpa (2000), Dolu Nadir Hawa O Anyanya Galpa (2004) and Mukher Dike
Dekhi (2006). The novel Abu Ibrahimer Mrityu was posthumously published in
2009. Familiar places like Bhuter Goli, Narinda, Dakkhin Maishundi and Agargaon
in Dhaka city figured in his writings as strange new worlds inhabited by
fascinating people. Villages like Suahisini and Baikunthapur, with all their drama
and mystery, continued to stir his readers’ imagination. Very ordinary poor
people sketched by him became larger than life. While dealing with stark social
and political realities, he looked deep into the human existence and tried to
unravel the stories within stories that human beings always live out.
In his language and narrative style, Shahidul Zahir tried to go off the beaten
track and tread a new path. Certainly, he was not unaware of his literary
predecessors and one can trace a few traits of Syed Walliullah, Syed Shamsul
Haque and Akhtaruzzaman Elias in some of Shahidul’s pieces. Nonetheless,
he could creatively assimilate whatever he inherited from his predecessors in
terms of language and style and work that into a form of art that was distinctively
his own.
See page 23
Golam Faruque
Khan is a writer
and literary critic.
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