Thursday | 16 January 2025 | Reg No- 06
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Thursday | 16 January 2025 | Epaper

Reflections

In the company of book lovers

Published : Saturday, 21 January, 2017 at 12:00 AM  Count : 757
Syed Badrul Ahsan
On a beautifully cold day in December, my friend Kanan Puryakayastha and I met over lunch in the cafeteria of Waterstone's in Piccadilly, London. It was stimulating speaking of books and indeed of so many other issues around the world. Once lunch was over, we went up to the bookshop proper, for it would be unacceptable to go back home without getting hold of a work or two.
The difficulty, once you are in a bookshop anywhere in the world, is that you are in little mood to walk away from it without finding something you would dearly love to read. And then the problem gets compounded, for you realize that it is an entire bookshop you would like to carry home because most of those books, in the section you happen to be in, are those you crave. At Waterstone's, therefore, even as the grey afternoon descended into a greyer evening, I did not have the heart to leave. Eventually I did, had to, but not before I chose three truly rich books for myself. Kanan would not let me pay. I was his guest, he said, and so the books were on him.
Where in the world can you find such wonderful friends? Nothing can beat the joy of the company of friends for whom reading is a pleasure and who are forever willing to share that pleasure with you. My very good friend Muneera Parbeen, who now lives in London, cheered me mightily when she invited me to a book launch at Foyles sometime in November last year. Muneera, who has worked as a diligent journalist and still stays linked to the profession, is not only an avid reader but has for the past many months been engaged in creating art of her own. Creativity wells up from somewhere in the depths of the soul. And it has with Muneera. At the end of the Foyles book launch, Muneera saw that I was safely deposited home in Leytonstone in a cab, but not before she had handed over to me a number of books to read before returning them to her. I loved the gesture and I have promised to go visiting bookshops with her again when I am next in London.
And there is my young and very vivacious friend Sonia Zaman Khan, whose flat in London is a treasure trove of some of the most well-known books written over the decades. It is hard to keep myself glued to the sofa and speak to Sonia without getting up now and then to pick up a book or two and flip through the pages. Sonia knows what is coming next. I ask her, half in mischief and half in the expectation that she will not say no, if I could borrow a particular book, or perhaps a few books, to read and then return them to her. She laughs loudly, and that twinkle in her eyes is there when she does that, before dumping on me the books which have seduced me. I go back home in the state of a man who has just discovered a new continent.
Ainon N, for that is her name --- I address her as AN and she calls me SBA --- is a precious friend with whom discussions on books are consistently a stimulating affair. She has showered me with books of intense richness, one of them being an entire collection of Anna Akhmatova's poetry. There have been others, Henry Kissinger's World Order for instance. Ainon is a profound reader and a deep thinker, which is why when we meet or when we converse long distance, it is generally about books and ideas. The soul is made glad by such interaction with her, a pleasing experience that I treasure until the time comes for another such conversation with her, when dollops of new thoughts add substance to the links Ainon and I have always maintained.
The other day my very respectable Mustafa Chowdhury came over to see me at my office with his well-acclaimed book, Unconditional Love: Story of Adoption of 1971 War Babies. Mustafa Bhai lives in Toronto but makes it a point to travel down to Dhaka every winter to connect with the various literary and other cultural programmes organized during the period. His book is certainly an eye-opener, for the good reason that it deals with an aspect of the War of Liberation hardly anyone else has touched upon in terms of the historical narrative.
My good friend Rummana Chowdhury --- she was my batchmate at Dhaka University and was a brilliant student, a radio compere, star debater and four times national badminton champion --- is here in Dhaka as well. For the last three and a half decades she has been a Canadian citizen resident in Toronto and spends her winters here. She has a large number of volumes, poetry and fiction, to her credit and she certainly makes me hugely happy with gifts of her books. I have just had the pleasure of receiving a copy of her newest work, a novel called Shadow Over The Henna Tree. The other day, she and I visited the very eminent scholar, Professor Harunur Rashid, at his home in Dhanmondi. Harun Sir, who has in recent times worked on such literary personalities as the poet Abdul Mannan Syed, added to my happiness by giving me a copy of his new work, Smritir Rekhachitra: Chherha Megher Bhela. A few days earlier, my friend Enayetullah Khan, chief of UNB and editor-in-chief of Dhaka Courier, handed me copies of Harun Sir's work, Moments in the Mirror (the work is in two volumes) when I dropped by at Cosmos Centre to discuss a book-related project with him.
Ah, books surely gladden soul. In these past couple of weeks, I have been to Pathak Shamabesh quite a few times, coming away each time with a new work in hand. At the end of December, my wife Zakia and I trooped down to Oxford Bookshop on Park Street in Kolkata, where it was sheer pleasure for me to come across a biography of the artiste Mohammad Rafi. Zakia, who regularly buys books for me when I visit her in London, was thrilled to discover that Oxford had my book on Bangabandhu on display. I must now, I know, provide the finishing touches to my next work, a comparative study of the politics of Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and send off the manuscript to my publishers, who have patiently been waiting for it for a long time.
In London this time around, I bought no fewer than fifty books. And how many of them could I carry back to Dhaka with me? Not very many, owing to that luggage weight factor. Let me not go into the details of the new collections which now fill the shelves at home in London and here at home in Dhaka. You can get an idea --- and I can get inebriated again --- through some of the images accompanying this write-up.
Enjoy the day, with a book in hand.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is with The Daily Observer







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