Jahanara Villa

Now let’s take a look at our kadirganj house where I lived. It was a simple one-story house like many others in the town, square, unimpressive and bricky, and surrounded by coconut trees. The kitchen was in a separate shed, in the inner courtyard just beneath a plum tree, and there had been a wood-burning hearth in one side, and dry wood sticks are kept in piles in another. Before we get to the inside of the house lets take a look at the outside. It had a round front veranda with some open space, and walled with a prototype gate made of GI pipe gate. The wall has required some explanation, because that was required for sitting on with my friends and siblings, for jumping off of, for standing on, and for walking on like a tight rope. A huge wood apple tree by the corner of the wall was the prominent landmark of our house, and we used to make people find our house by that. Most of our relatives, friends, and neighbours had the wood apples every year and praised the quality of the fruits that the tree used to yield plenty. Alas! The tree is cut off now by my elder brother that lives in the house with his family to save the boundary wall of the house as well as to picking up quarrels with the new generation of unruly youngsters.

Now, I'll let you get in the ordinary house that I lived for some part of ten or twelve years. That house though wasn't smart in any count, but was a home for us to grow up in. It was interesting now as well as painful to look back at it: Interesting in the sense we had many sweet memories of that simple house and painful because the house was partitioned in 1987 to occupy a portion by my younger maternal uncle's family. Anyway, I'm going to describe the house I lived in. Facing the front of the house, there were two front doors, one placed off to the centre of the round veranda, and the other on the right side of our house. Upon entering the small house of only three rooms, one either were in the drawing-cum-bedroom of my elder brother or in the courtyard area from where we, as well as most of the visitors used to enter two of other rooms that were shared by my mother, two of my sisters, and me. Way back in my childhood, oh, say about 40 years ago I ruined my sister's understanding of privacy. You have to have an understanding of the house in which we lived. My eldest sister wanted to have a separate room always, the inner corner most room, that I had to violate sometime though I used to sleep on a chowki (countryside cot) that was placed in the room, in the middle of my elder brother's and sister's room. In that room, my mother used to sleep with my youngest sister on a Victorian cot. Whenever my father used to come, I however used to take refuge either to my brother or sister's room. At that time, both of them used to get annoyed, you know? I can remember the years, through 1966 to eve of 1971 that it was during that time that my family and I lived in our house in Rajshahi happily until the War of Liberation set off that took my father's life in August 1971 while he was posted in Bera (Pabna) then. The simple funhouse became ghostly for some months, and then we begun to struggle to eke out our living. That is also another story I don't want to tell you over here.

In 1971, someday in between 11 to 12 August my father left this world without letting his near and dear ones to know that he had gone at age 42 while I was a student of class ten in Rajshahi Collegiate School, my eldest brother in ‘Intermediate’ 2nd year at Rajshahi College, my elder sister in class nine in P.N. Girls High School (though she was two years senior to me, she was one year junior to me in her studies!), and my younger sister was yet to start her studies. After 5 to 6 days later, on 17th of August perhaps, we’ve got a letter from an unknown person from Bera through Baku, one of my closest friends who hailed from Bera (Pabna) where my father was last posted. They told us he had been lifted by the army there, and since then there had not been any trace of him! We rushed there immediately braving the khansenas at different points, and began a hectic search, by whatever means possible, but without any success. He had gone and had never awakened!

My Minu jamai (fufa) and I went Bera by bus forty-two miles or something like that braving the monsoon-flooded roads and the khansenas to Bera on 18th August 1971. That had been the only time I've seen accomplishes and colleagues of my father, his orderly peon, and other staff cry and not be able to express their feelings without more tears rolling down their cheeks. My father had always been there for all of us. And I think we had never really stopped to think what an important role he had played in our lives. We miss my father everyday, and even today after thirty-five years I don't suppose we ever ‘told’ him we loved him. Men of our generations frequently could not say the words ‘I love you,’ to another man as it was not considered masculine to tell each other how we felt. It was the biggest mistake and the ugliest-most crime in this entire globe to kill my father for nothing. It didn’t benefit anybody; it didn’t benefit any nation whatsoever, but harmed us by what depth and magnitude only we know.

Thanks abba, for taking the time with us those many years ago, so we could experience some of the most wonderful times in our lives. I'm just sorry for my children never knew their grandfather except through the stories we could tell them. Fortunately, they have the privilege to have a ‘storyteller’ father through whom the lessons my father taught us live on in the traditions we pass to them.