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Afsan Chowdhury's four-volume history of 1971
Afsan Chowdhury's four-volume history of 1971
Seeing Afsan Chowdhury invariably reminds me of our student days at Dhaka University in the early '70s. All of us 'batchmates' in different departments were habitués of Pedro's, a thatched tea-shack that used to squat where today the modern languages institute sits. It was actually owned by Sharif Miah, but we called it Pedro's in honor of its urchin-boy waiter. Pedro's was our real classroom. It was there that we escaped from lectures for the watery tea, adda, debates and arguments, sitting in a long line by a tree-shaded low wall running alongside.
Afsan of course was a regular there, noticeable not just for his beard and height, but for his laugh, which was frequent and--if somebody had yanked loose Pedro's lungi and exposed his bare butt--very long. Those kinds of things amused him vastly. They still do. But he was also somebody willing to get into a serious exchange, any time. Back then, not having met many who were, I remember being impressed by his bi-linguality, of being at home in both Bengali and English. Given that he could draw on these twin sources, and not just in terms of books and authors, but also with regard to friendships and associations, he tended to be the most informed amongst us on certain things. Huge addas, especially on left politics, were also held at all hours of the day in the drawing room of his house at Magh Bazar, but which I didn't attend since I was more a working class Pedro's line man, not a drawing room kind of guy. Memories of 1971 were still fresh then, and all of us certainly thought and talked about it far more than we do now, but Afsan's thoughts and talk about it, I remember, were qualitatively different than ours. He certainly brooded on it far more. Today, having re-connected with him after a very long gap, I am equally impressed by the fact that he has remained true to that brooding, the fruit of which so many decades later is a four-volume history of our year of grief and liberation.........
Afsan of course was a regular there, noticeable not just for his beard and height, but for his laugh, which was frequent and--if somebody had yanked loose Pedro's lungi and exposed his bare butt--very long. Those kinds of things amused him vastly. They still do. But he was also somebody willing to get into a serious exchange, any time. Back then, not having met many who were, I remember being impressed by his bi-linguality, of being at home in both Bengali and English. Given that he could draw on these twin sources, and not just in terms of books and authors, but also with regard to friendships and associations, he tended to be the most informed amongst us on certain things. Huge addas, especially on left politics, were also held at all hours of the day in the drawing room of his house at Magh Bazar, but which I didn't attend since I was more a working class Pedro's line man, not a drawing room kind of guy. Memories of 1971 were still fresh then, and all of us certainly thought and talked about it far more than we do now, but Afsan's thoughts and talk about it, I remember, were qualitatively different than ours. He certainly brooded on it far more. Today, having re-connected with him after a very long gap, I am equally impressed by the fact that he has remained true to that brooding, the fruit of which so many decades later is a four-volume history of our year of grief and liberation.........
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