Tuesday, 19 March, 2024, 11:17 AM
Advance Search
Home

Remembering Rajib

Published : Saturday, 3 June, 2023 at 12:00 AM  Count : 1387

Remembering Rajib

Remembering Rajib

Friday, 26 May, 2023

It was the last paragraph of Saturday's editorial I was editing, and suddenly my mobile phone kept in silent mode vibrated. The WhatsApp display showed my brother's name. It was precisely 11:36 AM, an odd time for Feroze senior to call on a quiet Friday morning.  

Curiously enough, I received the call. What I heard from the other end left me speechless. Another star has fallen within my orbit.

My Elephant Road friend from the schooldays, Rajib passed away in the wee hours at Jeddah leaving behind his wife and two daughters. He had a massive heart attack. He neither drank nor smoked. And if he had, it was perhaps an occasional affair.
 
I stood up, turned left and looked out of my 16th floor balcony, facing the Science Laboratory football ground. It was a clear shiny day with boys playing football, cheering out with juvenile cries.

It was here when I first met Rajib on a hot summer afternoon in 1987. And now I was overlooking the football ground from up above cherishing his memories.

Rajib was a couple of years senior to me in a different school, but for the next four years he would turn out to be one of the most treasured and memorable friends of mine.

Rajib lived with his widowed mother, an elder brother and two sisters at a nearby villa type house made out of corrugated iron sheets in Elephant Road. Full of humour, wit, do-daring and adventurous activities, Rajib instantly matched my type. Moreover, it was unconventional in those years for a senior to befriend a junior so effortlessly.

We both loved football, war and martial arts movies, translated English classics and of course trendy rock music. Our seniors often branded us as rebellious without a cause.

Most important to say is that we always attempted to live our experiences on our own terms. This tribute piece for Rajib is meant to recall some of those memorable adventures and sprightly experiments we did together.

It was winter when I had finished reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of my all-time favourite Sherlock Holmes story and passed it on to him. We both become so energised, inspired and thrilled that we felt like creating our own Baskervilles hound. We just didn't know how, but where there is a will, there is a way.

There was a black stray dog which often sat in front of his villa. He often fed it. As time passed, the dog turned very obedient to him.

However, following immense scientific enquiries from our science laboratory quarter friends coupled with a clear hint from the Sherlock Holmes story, we came to learn phosphorus glows in the night.   
    
While he managed the chemical in the form of powder, I stole coconut oil from grandma's dressing table. It took us one whole evening to coat the dog with a mixture of coconut oil, phosphorus and Boric powder. Well before midnight, our hound was ready for its run glowing in the winter night. It was kept hidden at our carpenter's room beside the main gate.

We sneaked out after 11 PM as planned, released the beast and made it run a few rounds back and forth from our main gate to Bata shoe shop. Everyone in the main street looked at it with awe and perhaps terror. We named it the 'Hound of Elephant Road'. The next day we had to give a scrubbed the dog clean.

Our adventures and experiments with then the popular Hollywood movies went even a degree further. In the late 80s Dhaka's video clubs had been swept away with American Ninja, Karate Kid and Rocky boxing movie fever.

Easy said, but was not so easier to have materialised. We went from locksmiths to metal shops to produce our indigenous Ninja weaponry gadgets and apply them on whatever possible without inflicting harm.
 
Sadly enough, we did injure a few with our locally produced Ninja arsenal, namely with the Shuriken, hand throw lasso and the throwing knife. We scarred our wooden doors with shuriken and knife marks.

Exploring rock music was the most innocent but financially demanding of all our obsessive adventures.
I still remember recorders of Sur Bichitra and Rainbow had been literally fed up taking recording orders of three particular songs by their customers in those days , the excessively recorded hits were - Europe's Final Countdown, the Scorpions hit Rhythm of Love and Bon Jovi's You Give Love a Bad name.
 
We two school boys clad in shorts and t shirts went inside Sur Bichitra and demanded to have a blank cassette recorded with these 3 songs. We took out whatever cash and coins we had with us. The recorder looked at us with utter amusement, praised our passion for rock music and told us we needed more songs to fill up the blank cassette tape. He then handed us a TDK-D 60 blank tape and enquired if we could afford it. Our combined fund surplussed by 20 Taka and we gave him the job to select the blank spaces with other songs.

He did that job by filling up the space with Doors and Dire Straits hits. That's how we came to listen of more other hits of the two renowned bands. Later on we practically destroyed the cassette because of frequent exchanging and excessive rewinding and forwarding our favourite three songs.

Our joint re-living of Rocky Balboa boxing frenzy took place during the latter half of 1987. We hired all the Rocky legend boxing movies (Up until Rocky 4 at that time) from the once iconic Video Connection. We filled empty gunny sacks with sand, hanged it on my rooftop and punched our heart out. We converted 2 kilo ceramic bricks into dumbbells and gobbled down raw eggs after every workout session.  
     
Interestingly, just a year before Bangladeshi boxer Mosharraf Hossain had clinched the first ever medal (Bronze) in the 1986 Asian Games under the light heavyweight category. His winning was an added boost to our failed boxing accomplishments. Our boxing mania fizzled out in about 4 months; it was replaced by some other craze that I fail to remember.  

For a good couple of years my Friday afternoons were booked in his tin shed villa for watching the cartoon serial Thundercats together. We preyed on Macgyver TV serial. We devoured Chinese food, whatever I could afford within 200 Taka given to me on my birthdays at the now- defunct Duck Chinese restaurant. We saved money for sharing a single bowl of chicken corn soup at the vanished Coffee House.  

Rajib was a master at exploring, buying and stocking firecrackers before every Shab-e-ba-Raat religious festival. I was often jealous for not knowing where he managed to collect all the off-beat firecrackers. He loved roller skating, I envied his pair of roller skaters and skating skills. Sensing my pain at the core, my friend Twinkle handed over his pair to me. Obviously, I couldn't do anything out of them.  

As far as football was concerned, Rajib and I had been born arch rivals. He loved the local Mohammedan Team, I supported Brothers Union. He supported Argentina; in victory or defeat, I always remained loyal to Germany.

However, it was sometime in the early 90s, Rajib and his family permanently moved out of Elephant Road. Before he moved out, he came to see me with a pocketful of sweet guava. There was a small tree in front of his house which no longer exists. And then there was a pause of more than full two decades. I coincidentally stumbled over him a couple of times at Dhaka College.
He had finished studies, got married and settled in Jeddah. I remained the same old Bohemian. We got connected via the Facebook and kept following and commenting on each other's posts for over a decade.

Rather unexpectedly, in 2021 he landed in Dhaka with his family as one of those unfortunates to have been laid off from job because of the pandemic fallout.

As luck would have it, I was the first he would approach among all his near and dear friends.
 
It was the same old Rajib who visited me - witty, unpredictable, adventurous and humorous, as if nothing had happened in the past three decades. It was the same person who could cover up all pains and pleasures with a miraculous smile. He was with me for just over a couple of hours. That was the last time I saw him. Now he is history in my timeline.

While penning a tribute - writers usually explains the deceased or a death of an admirer as an 'irreparable' or an 'irreversible' loss. For this writer, death is a reality and I am only happy to have had a friend like Rajib.
The only regret, however, if I could have spent a little more time with him on my own.

Distant memories of those four formative years will always remain with me with Rajib under the spotlight. We were failed Ninja warriors, failed footballers and of course no Sherlock Holmes.

Sipping coffee, staring at the now empty football ground from up above, I spent the whole Friday afternoon walking down the memory lane with Rajib listening to Deep Purple's Soldier of Fortune.

Rajib's untimed death eerily resembled the song lines... 'But I feel I am growing older, and the songs that I have sang, echo in the distance...like the sound of a windmill going round...I guess I will always be a soldier of fortune."
Good bye Rajib, time to rush to office.
 
The writer is editorial - chief, The Daily Observer







Latest News
Most Read News
Editor : Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury
Published by the Editor on behalf of the Observer Ltd. from Globe Printers, 24/A, New Eskaton Road, Ramna, Dhaka.
Editorial, News and Commercial Offices : Aziz Bhaban (2nd floor), 93, Motijheel C/A, Dhaka-1000.
Phone: PABX- 41053001-06; Online: 41053014; Advertisement: 41053012.
E-mail: info©dailyobserverbd.com, news©dailyobserverbd.com, advertisement©dailyobserverbd.com, For Online Edition: mailobserverbd©gmail.com
  [ABOUT US]     [CONTACT US]   [AD RATE]   Developed & Maintenance by i2soft