My Life Through Six Continents

By Azm Fazlul Hoque

This book tells the story of the author's life, work, travel and experiences. The book also deals with the geopolitical circumstances of the world specifically of Asia and South Asia during his life time and provides some dream-like options for future. The book also vividly describes some conflicts - economic, social, political and familial- that the author experiences at personal, national, regional levels. It is a real life captivating story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456884154

Azm Fazlul Hoque

Mr. Azm Fazlul Hoque was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Following his graduation in civil engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, he came to Canada with a British Commonwealth scholarship. After completing his graduate studies at the University of Alberta and at McMaster University, he worked with the Federal Government of Canada for nearly ten years. He then joined the United Nations and worked in Asia and Africa for almost twenty years. He retired from the UN as a Senior Economic Affairs Officer and now live in both Bangladesh and Canada. In 2011, His autobiography "My Life through Six Continents" was published by the Xlibris corporation of Indianapolis and detailed his travel through some eighty countries in six continents continents. This current publication is a collection of some memorable events that happened in his life since the publication of his autobiography.

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Copyright © 2011 by Azm Fazlul Hoque.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011903717

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4568-8414-7

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4568-8413-0

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4568-8415-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Disclaimer: The names of some characters in this real-life story have been changed or modified to protect their privacy, confidentiality and integrity. Despite that, any resemblance and/or embarrassing references to their real-life identities are coincidental, truly unintentional and deeply regretted.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Dedication

To my parents as a show of respect and gratitude; my children Arman, Sabrina, and Rubina as a token of my unending love; my nephews and nieces; my Dadu Moni Omnia; and to my posterity as a record of my time in this world.

And

To the memory of my wife Minu who had married me at her very tender age, lived a short, tumultuous life, and then still at her prime suddenly slipped away into eternity

Contents

Countries I Visited:

Prologue

Chapter One The Beginning: Early Life

Chapter Two Outside The Box: College And University Education

Chapter Three Venture Into The Outside World: A New Life In Canada

Chapter Four Bride-Hunting Trip 1 To Bangladesh

Chapter Five Back In Canada After A Failed Attempt To Find A Bride

Chapter Six Second Bride-Searching Trip To Bangladesh

Chapter Seven Return To Canada With A Wife: Life As A Married Man

Chapter Eight International Civil Service—Career With The United Nations; Life In Bangkok

Chapter Nine Life As Un Officer In Addis Ababa

Chapter Ten Retirement And Life-Changing Events Soon After

Chapter Eleven Life As A Single Man Again

Chapter Twelve A Series Of Travels Again

Chapter Thirteen Fire On My Bed

Epilogue

COUNTRIES I VISITED:

PROLOGUE

I did not set out to write a literary masterpiece, nor is this book about a scientific breakthrough or a fictitious, romantic love story. It is rather simply the life story of a common man who had the opportunity to travel from a small village in Bangladesh to the far-away, historic, remote settlement called Batoche in Saskatchewan, and to several hundred big and small cities in between Helsinki to Canberra and Moscow to Honolulu throughout the six continents of the world. That common man is me, and it is the story of my life and of my experience in that extensive travel and life around the world.

I never ever thought about writing my memoir. As such, I never kept any diary or notes during my travel. Therefore, the accounts in this book are primarily based on my memory. When I was writing this book, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that although my age has caused me to forget where I put my reading glasses twenty minutes earlier, my memories of events that had happened in my life some forty or more years ago were pretty vivid in my mind as if they had happened only recently.

My niece Chabi, being impressed with my extensive travel worldwide first suggested that I should write about my travel for record and for future generations of at least our own family. I put her suggestion on the back burner in the scheme of things that I had planned for after my retirement. I said to myself that in these Internet days of declining book readership, nobody would be interested in reading a book on memories of a common individual like me with no extraordinary accomplishment in life.

It is true that when I was in grade 5 or 6, a teacher one day asked us in the class what we would like to be when we grow up. I said I would like to be an engineer. That was because I had the notion at that time that an engineer could tell what was underground when she/he walked on the ground. That inner desire to know the unknown, to see the unseen, motivated my adult life and resulted in my extensive travel around the world in later years. Several years after that initial exposé of my inquisitiveness, when it was time for me to really choose a course of study for future career, I chose engineering from a more pragmatic point of view. One thing, in those days in my native Bangladesh, students with higher grades, by and large, chose engineering as their first option for their prospective future careers. Pursuing a course of studies in engineering in those days promised a job soon after graduation and a hope for a reasonable means of livelihood. Moreover, getting admission into the country’s only engineering college in those days was a big challenge by itself as the screening process was quite rigorous and the competition was tough. My competitive mind took over my brain at that time. I accepted the challenge and pursued engineering vigorously, even though I knew deep down that technical studies were not particularly suited to my personality. I often regretted in my later life for not having studied, during my university days, English literature or the political history of the world. My personality leanings since early boyhood were toward international affairs. I had a burning desire to travel to unknown places, to see the world outside of my limited circle. I pursued this inner dream more vigorously soon after my graduation from the engineering college, which during my time there had been converted to the country’s only technical university at that time. It was later renamed as Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Soon after my graduation, I took a job with a semi-government development agency simply because it provided me the opportunity to remain in the capital city of Dhaka, in Bangladesh, which would facilitate my efforts to look for an overseas scholarship for future study abroad. Within a short span of less than two years, I was successful in obtaining a chance to come to Canada with one of the country’s most prestigious scholarships i.e. the British Commonwealth scholarship. By the time I completed my studies in Canada, the political map of my birth country had changed. The country of the then Pakistan was broken into two. The eastern part became the sovereign, independent country of Bangladesh. Soon after, I had to make a personal decision based on the economic situation in the new country vis-a-vis my early life struggle to attain personal financial independence. I ended up migrating to Canada, found myself a job, and slowly progressed to a position of a senior engineer with the federal government of Canada. That provided me with reasonable financial independence, but my inner desire to see the world at large still remained unfulfilled. Having worked for nearly ten years as a member of the public service commission of the federal government of Canada, I started asking myself again what my next goal was and about my childhood desire of seeing the unseen in the wider world. I then started dreaming about and pursuing a job in the international arena as a member of the international civil service. That pursuit also somewhat unexpectedly came to fruition as I was later successful in finding myself a job initially for only two years with the United Nations (UN). That two-year initial contract ultimately transformed into a career for nearly twenty years that gave me and my family the opportunity to see the world to a great extent.

Shortly after retirement from the UN, events in my life took an unexpected turn, which I was least prepared for. Suddenly, I was faced with a new and unplanned course of direction in life. In the changed situation, I found myself in a new environment and with new responsibilities in life but yet with a lot of apparent available time. My daughter Sabrina at that time started to persuade me to write about something of my own interest, at least to keep myself busy. Then, I met Lila early during this changed course of my life. Over the following several years, I told that vivacious blonde lady from somewhere in Eastern Europe of a number of incidents that had happened earlier in my life. Lila was amazed, impressed, and trivially commented that they sounded like pages from a storybook. Even that did not convince me to begin writing. Then, during one Christmas holiday season, she bought me, as a gift, a notebook with my first initial inscribed on its cover. A little comment on the notebook included a request to write my story. I felt obligated and thought that perhaps I do have a story to tell, especially to my posterity, if not to the world at large. As I began writing, I felt that writing my life story was not necessarily for others to read, but it was a kind of an opportunity for me to relive my own life, to reminisce the various incidents that had happened in my only one available life on this earth. Soon, I found it quite interesting to first handwrite these memories beginning in the notebook that Lila had earlier presented me with. The end result was a five-volume handwritten manuscript.

I am enormously thankful to several people who inspired, encouraged, and helped me in this exercise. First and foremost, I wish to express my heartfelt thanks and deep appreciation to my dear friend Lila for having given me that initial incentive to undertake this project and for providing continued support and encouragement until its completion. I thank my niece Chabi, and my daughter Sabrina for motivating me to undertake this work. I am grateful to my son Arman, my daughter Sabrina, and my teenaged daughter Rubina for helping me out in computer glitches that I encountered on many occasions in typing and revising the manuscript. I also thank my friend Mr. G. K. Vashist, retired professor of English at the Government College of Education at Patiala, in Punjab, India, who on his short visit to Canada took time out to read the manuscript very thoroughly and made many useful suggestions, especially in linguistic and grammatical usages. I thank my son Arman for diligently and painstakingly reading the draft manuscript twice and for making many suggestions to improve its readability. Finally, I thank my publisher, Xlibris for their final copy editing of the manuscript and for other assistance in bringing my two-year-long effort into a concrete reality.

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginning: Early Life

Circa 1942—The world was engulfed in the second of history’s two worst man-made disasters, i.e., the Second World War. The two world wars started in Europe within a span of less than thirty years. However, their disastrous effects spread to all corners of the world. India, far away from the origin and causes of the war, was not instrumental in the start of the conflict. Nevertheless, India’s colonial links with one of the major powers in the Allied Forces compelled, one way or the other, India’s national leaders at that time to get the country militarily involved in the war. The result was that India became a direct military target of the Axis Powers on her eastern frontiers. The concurrent economic effect in India on that frontier was even more disastrous, mostly because of a war policy of the colonial government that contributed greatly to the history’s worst famine in United Bengal, which was close to that frontier. The United Bengal was, at that time, one of the largest and most politically and socially advanced provinces of India. Bengal was the intellectual leader of India in that century in literary, cultural, political, and other areas of renaissance in the country that lead to the common cliché of that time: What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow.

In that background of the world and of the economic, military, and political situations in United Bengal, I started my life’s journey. My journey began in the southeast corner of the Indian province of United Bengal at a district called Chittagong. The city of Chittagong, which was the administrative headquarter of the district, became, years later, the commercial capital and major port of the newly constituted, independent country of Bangladesh. I was born at the south end of a small village in the southern part of the district of Chittagong. The name of the village was Yakubdandi. It was within the administrative units of Janglekhine Union and Patiya Police Station, as these units were called in the country. The village was also known, at least off the record, by another name, Gazir Para, meaning in local language, the village of Gazi. The word Gazi itself means a warrior. I never read or heard anything about the Gazi, as to who he was and why the village was at least unofficially named after him. However, I do know that a number of people of the village, including my own older brother Ekhlas Mian, had the prefix Gazi before the names given to them at birth by their parents. It was perhaps because they wanted to trace their heritage to that famed warrior, who himself unfortunately remained anonymous. The main section of the small village had two units. The smaller southwestern unit at the end of the village was known as Moghal Para. I do not know if that meant any linkage with the mighty Moghal Imperial Dynasty of India, some half a millenium earlier and headquartered in far-away Delhi. But I do know again that some people living in that unit of our village liked to add Moghal at the end of their names.

The village of the warrior (Gazir Para) might have been obscure in the international and even national context unlike Bikrampur area in the Dhaka district of the country for example in earlier ages; but the small village of Yakubdandi made tremendous progress in the field of education in the second half of the twentieth century (my time in this world). By the end of the century, the village had produced a number of accomplished sons and daughters who became doctors, engineers, lawyers, university professors, senior civil servants, successful local and national politicians, and other valuable members of the society. It was said that almost every household had at least one high-school graduate and the village attained the literacy rate of almost 100 percent, which was a distinct accomplishment compared to most in the sixty-five thousand strong villages in the country. The village, thus, became distinctly and singularly known at least in the surrounding areas.

Prior to this renaissance period, however small, rural, and obscure as the village was, the south end was even less developed educationally, economically and socially, perhaps in keeping with the great divide between the global north and the south. This divide was and still is manifested also at the district level as the south side of the district is still less developed economically, socially, and even politically. The reason perhaps, at our village level at least was that the economic development infrastructures, like the only paved regional highway, the local market, and the local schools were, at that time and still today, located to the north side of the village. Even the then richest family of the village had their homes at the north end. However, this great divide between the north and the south ended within my lifetime, at least within the boundaries of our village, as the south side gradually and consistently prospered in education. The south end of the village thus produced, the first ever for the village, one of the highest-ranking government officials of the country; the first-ever qualified professional engineer; the first-ever Ph.D. and university professor; the first-ever woman university graduate; and even the first-ever local elected member of the country’s national assembly, all from within my extended family. It is my hope that this trend will catch on and will end the great divide between the global north and the south during the lifetime of my children as the global south continues to prosper in education and social development.

Our house was, and still is, located at the south end of the village. Near the north end of our house compound, the major pathway of the village, with homesteads on its both sides, took a turn toward the west and continued for another half a kilometer or so toward the so-called Moghal Para. There was a mosque and a nearby huge rainwater storage pond known as the Moghal Dighi in that part of the village. The mosque and the south bank of the Dighi were the central meeting places of the residents in that area. To the south of our house, there has been a huge dugout water-storage pond, which, at that time, was the main source of water for drinking as well as for general-purpose washing for the families to the north and west side of the pond. To the east and the south side of the pond, there was a huge open paddy field, which usually got inundated during heavy monsoon seasons. Before the recent irrigation system was developed in the region, this wide open field used to serve, during dry seasons, as a huge grazing area for livestock and as sporadic playing fields for the local children.

Soon after birth, I was given the name Shiraz—after the last sovereign Nawab of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in undivided India, before the British East India Company, in collusion with local perpetrators, overthrew the Nawab almost two hundred years earlier and took control of his kingdom. Long before I was born, the British controlled almost all parts of the sub-continent and Queen Victoria was the empress of India—the jewel of the British Empire. During my infant years, the British colonial government was having tremendous problems running its Indian Empire, in the face of the growing power of the Indian independence movement. By then, the British were forced to allow elected local governments to run the Indian provinces under British control from the capital in Delhi.

I was two or three years old when my father left our village and went to Calcutta—the provincial capital where a politician by the name of A. K. M. Fazlul Hoque, from our part of Bengal, was the chief minister of the provincial government. My father was fascinated by this politician and decided that his newborn second son (me) should be named after a more modern hero rather than after one that had ruled the country some two hundred years earlier. From Calcutta, my father urgently sent an aerogram letter to my mother suggesting that my name should be changed to what I came to be known as for the rest of my life. The politician after whom I was renamed by my father had three initials with dots in between (A. K. M.) before his actual names. My father, however, did not bother about those initials, perhaps leaving the option for me to choose those initials which I did a few years later. Incidentally, my name had no link whatsoever to my father’s name, which was Abdul Jabbar. It was, and still largely is, the custom in the country to give a newborn his/her own complete set of names. Nor does my name have anything in common with my mother’s name or with those of my siblings. My mother’s name was Azma Khatun. Coincidentally, in my teen years, when I chose those three cherished initials before my name and later on joined them together by eliminating the dots in between them and used the resulting word as my first name, it became very close to my mother’s first name in terms of spelling. I had no idea about this closeness when I had chosen the three initials in my teen years. It became apparent to me much later.

It is difficult for a Westerner to believe how a group of people in the same family could be blood-related and still do not have a common family or surname. In our part of the world, there was no such thing as family name as we know in the West. When I grew up, got married, and my first child and only son was born, I gave him two names of his own with the last part of my name attached to his as his family name. I also followed my father’s example of naming me after a celebrity of his time, by giving my son a nickname after that of a popular American president at the time of my son’s birth. Thus, history kind of repeated itself within my small world. I was, however, destined to go through further modifications of my names in later years voluntarily or otherwise.

In late 1950s, when we were completing papers to register with the then East Pakistan Secondary Education Board, to sit for the province-wide matriculation examination, it was time to list our names and dates of birth officially for the first time. In those days, there was no system or even requirement to register a child birth, hence no official record at birth for the names and the dates. At the time of my teenage years, it was a fashion with the youngsters in the country to add three-letter abbreviations before one’s name given at birth by their parents. In keeping with this trend, I added three letter abbreviations (A. Z. M.) before my name without thinking seriously what they meant and what their implications would be in the following months and years. Later, during my college days, I gave my own elaboration of these three letters translating them into Al-Zaidi Mohammed in keeping with the prevailing Islamic and Pakistani flavor in the country. But these three full words remained relatively unknown to most of my close friends and relatives. My friends, at times, referred to me simply as A.Z.M. These three letters were to have further important significance in my life later. In mid-1960s, when I came to Canada for graduate studies, these three abbreviations before my names became somewhat of a puzzle in the eyes of most of my Canadian friends and acquaintances. It was also the case I am sure, with other people from that part of the world with such attachments to their names. Years later, I found quite unexpectedly a solution to this puzzle. Long after I had come to Canada and finished my graduate studies, I went one day to Hamilton, Ontario, for a job interview. The interviewer obviously had looked at my name and resume and decided to ignore the two dots in between the three letters before my main name and joined the abbreviations together to make a first name for me out of his own wit. As I entered the room, he got up and greeted me as Azm (sounded similar to Arm). Voila! I instantly nodded in agreement and rather liked my new first name given by a total stranger. I liked it better than the other first names like Fazu, Fazlu, Fazl, etc., by which I was called by my friends and relatives. The man in Hamilton did not hire me, but I gained from the encounter something much more important that was to stay with me for the rest of my life. Going through such variations or even changes in one’s name is not uncommon for people from the East who come to the West for a living. The trend started in South Asia perhaps a hundred years ago. One early example widely known in Bengal was the addition of Michael before the name of a famous Bengali poet Modhusudan Dutta when he had gone to England a long time ago. He became known as M. M. Dutt. In modern days, such name adjustments are more widespread. Thus Mohammed from the East becomes Mo in the West; Yousuf becomes Yo; Quashem becomes Quash; Fatima becomes Tima; Surinder becomes Sid; and so on. A fellow from Bombay that I knew used to introduce himself as In There when his Indian name was simply Inder. I knew a senior Bangladeshi official who had three letters (S. A. M.) as abbreviations before his own name, as I did before mine. He used to introduce himself to his Western colleagues and friends as Sam. I also knew some others who could not effectively combine the initials in their names into easily pronounceable words and simply used their initials as their first names. I met people who would introduce themselves as P.K.; A.J.; K.Y.; G. K.; K.C.; etc., as their first names.

I grew up in a mud-walled house in our village with my mother, an older brother, an older sister, and a younger brother at that time in the early 1940s. In early 1950s, my parents had another baby boy born to them long after my only sister had died prematurely. In those days, there was no house in the village built of bricks or other durable materials. Those who could afford built the walls of their houses with clay mud, sometimes mixed with sands. Others built the walls with thin bamboo slices. The irony was that the seasonal floods, which were more common than not, often damaged the mud-walled houses more than they damaged the bamboo houses. But the resilient dwellers rebuilt with mud again as the mud-walled houses were more secure, warmer in the winters and cooler in the hot seasons. There were, of course, no plumbing inside any of the houses and no electricity or gas either. People used outhouses, one for men in the front of the homestead usually on the far side of the dugout water storage pond, and one for women in the back of the inner unit of the house, separated by a small backyard. The kerosene lanterns provided light in the darkness of nights. Discarded straws, tree leaves and branches, stumps of paddy crop, or even dried cow dung were used as cooking fuel. Most of the family house complexes in the villages consisted of two units, separated by a small open courtyard locally known as the utan. The utan had multiple uses like family congregation place and children’s playground. The outer unit called daory ghar was for the older adults and the older children of the family and occasionally for visiting relatives. The inner unit was for the parents and the younger children. The inner unit usually comprised of one or two bedrooms and another room, part of which was used as the kitchen. The cooking stove in the kitchen was usually a small dugout hole on the mud floor about a foot or so deep with three short upward legs for a single burner or five for a double burner at the floor level for supporting the cooking pots and pans. The hole below was to accommodate burning fuel inserted through a protruded opening on the front. The device was locally called chula. In today’s rural Bangladesh, these devices can still be found in many households even though some houses now have access to portable metal gas stoves as well as electric power.

One significant event of this stage in my life was the untimely death of my only sister who was then ten or eleven years old and the death of another infant in the family—my maternal cousin Mamtaz—both within a span of a couple of days. My sister Anwara, or Aanu, as she was known in the family, was a petite little girl. Of the five of us siblings in the family, she was the only one who inherited my mother’s physical beauty and complexion. We four brothers took the physical traits from my father’s side. In my mother’s family, everybody had fair complexion like the caucasians of Central Asia. Even though my maternal aunt was of dark complexion (she was from a different family), all her children with my maternal uncle inherited lighter skin from their father and their grandparents. My sister Aanu was fair and beautiful, but she was also petite, very fragile and sick most of the times, as I remember, from some kind of enlarged spleen problem. My cousin Mamtaz, who was barely a few months old, fell from her parent’s bed and got hurt in her head that resulted in some swelling. My maternal grandfather called a quack, who made an incision on her head to release the extra accumulated fluid from the bump. A day or two later, Mamtaz got an infection and died. Penicillin in those days just appeared in the market and was not readily available in rural areas. I remember a distant uncle of mine, who was a grown up man, had once a cut in his face while he was shaving his beard. He developed an infection and died from it. Such was the state of medical facilities in the villages then. The only qualified doctor in the area lived several kilometers and villages away. Walking was the most common mode of transportation. My mother went to her parents’ house to grieve the death of Mamtaz with her parents’ family, who also lived in our village less than a kilometer away. Before my mother had left our house, Aanu asked her to bring, on her return from my grandparents’ house, some long-stemmed aurum roots (similar to asparagus) that she wanted to eat as vegetables. After the funeral of Mamtaz, my mother returned home without Aanu’s cherished vegetable and explained to Aanu that she could not manage to bring the aurum roots because everybody in the family was in bereavement. Aanu was visibly displeased and turned to the other side in her bed where she was confined most of the time. A day or two later, she died without getting a chance, to the best of my memory, to eat her favorite vegetable. This would have a similar resonance in my life years later with a death-bed wish of my wife who wanted a sip of sprite. At my grandparents’ house, the local quack came back after a few days for a follow-up visit to the infant patient whom he had earlier operated on, without knowing that the patient had already passed away. My grandfather– Haider Ali Sukani got hold of the quack and gave him a piece of his mind by soundly beating him up with his sandals. My maternal grandfather was a man of class, even though his means were modest. He had some landed property, but he never tilled them himself. He would rather give them on contract to others for cultivation in exchange for cash. He had some rental and other income, which we did not know about, and he used to boast that he did not like cultivating paddy, rather he cultivated money. He lived a long life and rather lived well, especially when it came to eating. He would buy the best kind of rice, best kind of fish or meat and vegetables that were available in the market, and he had a life-long license from local administration to buy opium from controlled official outlets on a regular basis for health reasons. To the end of his long life, he could go without food or drink but not without opium for any length of time. He died when he was over a hundred years old. My memory of my maternal grandmother was of a petite, quiet, fragile lady who ate sparingly and lived to be nearly a hundred years old. I never saw my paternal grandfather who had died before I was born, and my memory of my paternal grandmother was that of an old lady sitting up on a low stool (piri) hugging her two knees close to her chest.

One other memory of that period that is still vivid in my mind was how I was spending my pre-school days at home. I was barely two or three years old. I would often stand in the kitchen by holding its door and keenly observe my mother as she cooked. In the process of cooking, as soon as she would taste the salt on any food, I would demand that I do the same thing as my taste bud would drive me to do that. My mother would, of course, grudgingly oblige, as she did not think it was appropriate for a three-year-old to taste the salt on hot samples of food. Surprisingly, my taste bud for food dramatically changed in later years, especially after my retirement when I started believing in the philosophy of eat to live, not live to eat. As a result, I have so far been able to maintain a reasonable body weight.

The early 1940s was a dark era for most parts of the world and particularly so for Bengal. Most of Europe and Asia were raging battlefields of the Second World War. The British global empire was under serious threat from the German-Japan-Italian Axis forces. India, under British Raj, had no choice but to fight on the side of the Allied forces even though India had no direct stake in the war. The Raj used the war to dampen the Indian independence movement and appealed to the Indian leaders to support the British cause with the promises that once the war was over, the matter of Indian independence would be given favorable consideration. Mahatma Gandhi, in his infinite wisdom and pacifism, trusted the British. He put a temporary halt on the activities of the movement and appealed to thousands of Indian youths to join the war on the side of the Allied forces. Gandhi’s action created a rift in the Congress party leading the independence movement. A past president and leader of the Congress party from Bengal—Netaji Subash Chandra Bose—broke rank with Gandhi’s Congress party and decided to join the Axis powers to fight against the Raj. He created his own liberation force—the Azad Hind Fauj (Free India Army also known as the Indian National Army)—drawn mostly from the prisoners of war of Indian origin captured by the Japanese in the Far Eastern theatres. He led them in getting organized and actively involved in fighting the Raj in the eastern jungles of India and Burma. In the early 1940s, the Japanese and the Azad Hind Fauj were causing havoc in the British and Dutch colonies in the South and Southeast Asia. The Japanese military, with the help from the Azad Hind Fauj, advanced up to the doorsteps of the British Empire on the eastern front of India and reportedly dropped several bombs on India’s small port city of Chittagong. Legend, however, has it—and most local people believe—that none of these bombs exploded in the city, thanks to the blessings of at least a dozen Islamic saints who had been buried in the area. Because of this belief, Chittagong is also known as the city of twelve saints.

The global war and the presence of the Japanese and the Azad Hind Fauj at its doorstep brought in drastic economic effects on Bengal in those years. The British colonial government in Delhi feared that it’s most important eastern province might, at anytime, fall in the hands of the Japanese and the Azad Hind Fauj. To make it difficult for these forces in case of such eventualities, the Raj ordered large-scale transfer of food grains from the province and adopted policies that crippled the prevalent and more effective water transport mode in the riverine Bengal especially in its eastern parts. The result was a devastating food shortage in the province culminating in what was called the great famine of the century. Hundreds of thousands of people starved to death during this famine. I was growing up in our small rural village during this great famine oblivious and unaware of what was happening in the outside world.

With the defeat of the Axis powers, the Azad Hind Fauj was decimated and its leader, Subash Bose, was believed to have been killed mysteriously in a plane crash during the last days of the global war. Gandhi then became the unchallenged leader of the Indian Independence Movement. He was more than ever optimistic that after the war, he would be able to bank on the goodwill and conscience of the British people to be more sympathetic to his demand for Indian independence in exchange for his earlier support of the British causes during the war. He, however, miscalculated the resolve of the British wartime prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, who had always been unwilling to liquidate the British-Indian Empire under his watch. It took several more years and a new post-war elected Labor party government in Britain before the colonial government finally handed over political power in India to the Indian leaders. By then, the political landscape in British India had dramatically changed. The independence and the political change came at a huge cost to the people of the subcontinent. More than a million people were killed and almost ten million became homeless refugees in the newly independent countries of India and Pakistan. In Algeria, one of the century’s most violent independence struggles, the occupying colonial forces killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians. In the subcontinent, in one of the so-called most non-violent independence movements, the occupying colonial powers simply let the Indians kill each other by the millions. The all-time guru of non-violence throughout the world could not stop the mayhem of mass killing and uprooting of people in his own backyard. At the end, he himself was the target and victim of violence by one of his own people. The communal violence between the Hindus and the Muslims in undivided India that accompanied the outcome of the most non-violent independence struggle was probably one of the reasons why Gandhi had never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, even though many less-deserving recipients were awarded the coveted prize in subsequent years.

The separate sovereign country of Pakistan was created comprising the two main Muslim majority areas of India, although the two areas were geographically separated by more than a thousand kilometers and there was very little in common except religion among the people of the two areas. Historically, the political party—the Muslim League—that led the movement for separate homeland(s) in India in the Muslim majority areas of undivided India was established in 1905 in the eastern city of Dhaka (which is now the capital of Bangladesh), under the patronage of Nawab Salim Ullah—an elite of the area. At that time, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who later came to be known as the founder of Pakistan, was still a supporter and active member of the Indian National Congress working side by side with Mahatma Gandhi and other Congress leaders for Indian independence movement. However, in late 1920s, Jinnah became frustrated with the Congress policies related to power sharing with the Muslims in future independent India. He quit the Congress party, left politics for a while, and moved to England to pursue his legal practice there. After a few years, he was persuaded by the poet, philosopher Mohammed Iqbal, recognized as the dreamer of Pakistan, to go back to politics in India and join the Muslim League in its struggle for separate homeland(s) in Muslim majority areas. Jinnah took his advice and did just that. The Muslim League, at its 1940 annual convention in the western city of Lahore, adopted a resolution proposed by the then chief minister of Bengal (the same man by whom my father was so fascinated as to change my original name and give me a new one after the chief minister’s name). The Lahore resolution recommended that separate sovereign state(s) should be created in main Muslim majority areas of undivided India. By the time the British agreed to divide India on the basis of religion, Jinnah became the leader and main spokesperson of the Muslim League. He decided to ignore the historic Lahore resolution of the Muslim League and agreed with the British on a simpler solution of creating only two sovereign states—one comprising main Muslim majority areas—and the other for the rest of the Indians. During this political turmoil, history’s worst communal riots broke out all over India, especially in Bengal in the east and the Punjab in the west, where hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed by fellow Indians simply because of their religious differences. In the wake of this terrible communal carnage in Calcutta—the provincial capital of Bengal—my father, fearing for his own life, decided to leave the city for good and came back to Chittagong. He subsequently tried his hands in small business and, for a while, even in farming. He was unsuccessful in both endeavors and finally simply gave up both and retired. All I remember of his earlier homecoming from Calcutta was that he brought lots of canned fish, hard dark chocolates (which was a new invention in those days at least in that part of the world), and lots of writing papers and new books for us children.

At the local primary school, I was generous in sharing some of these chocolates and the writing papers with children of my class who could not afford such luxuries. My zeal for sharing and my expectation of them soon landed me in hot water with my teacher. One day, while I did all my classwork, a fellow student whom I had earlier given some writing papers did not finish his. At that, I became irate and rebuked him by uttering some foul language in front of the other students. Of course, it was reported to the teacher who gave me perhaps my first and the only physical punishment ever at school. It was a hefty spanking on my palm by the teacher with his thin flexible cane. The fact that I did what I did with good intention at my heart to get the other student do his school work was never a consideration to anybody. This was, perhaps, the beginning of my life-long experience of being misunderstood of my often unspoken and/or ill-expressed intentions in all kinds of real-life situations and that feeling, perhaps, defined or characterized my personality in later years.

By the time I was in grade 2, I captured the eyes of my teachers as a bright student. I was either first or second in order of merit at the annual class examinations. My main academic competitor was my maternal cousin Shaj who was also a very sharp and meritorious student. Since we lived in the same village, we often visited each other’s family. At my maternal grandfather’s house, my uncle, (Shaj’s father), would sometime give the two of us lessons and tests in careful listening and speed writing (shruta lipi). He would slowly read aloud a full sentence or part thereof three times, and we would be required to write the same thing down as fast as we could. The one of us who could write most of what he had read out with fewer omissions and spelling mistakes would win the test.

In grade 4, we were being prepared for the district-wide, competitive scholarship examinations at the end of the primary school education. These examinations usually took place at the district headquarters town. That meant we would have to walk a fair distance, cross the Karnafully River by a row and sail boat, and stay a couple of days in town to write the exam at a central location. The sail boats were operated manually by skilled but untrained strong men who usually inherited the trade from their ancestors. They were usually uneducated poor men, but they had good knowledge of the river and the weather conditions. It was quite risky to cross almost a two-kilometer wide, swift flowing river in those tiny manually operated boats, especially in stormy, rainy days. But there was no other alternative mode to cross the river. In those days, there was only one bridge over that river in that area, and it was at a place called Kalur Ghat. It was at least ten kilometers away from our village. However, that sole bridge was for exclusive use by railway trains linking the south side of the district with the city on the north side of the river. Even that train link continued only up to less than halfway of the south side of the district, and the train line passed through villages far from our area. So train communication was not convenient for our area, as it meant we had to walk several kilometers to and from the train stations. In the early 1960s, the Pakistan government, under General Ayub Khan, decided to convert the Kalurghat Bridge into a dual-purpose one, allowing motorized vehicles to run over it, but only during the times of the day and night when trains were not passing over the bridge. There were gates, signal lights, and guards posted on each side of the access roads to control motor vehicles when trains were due to pass over the bridge. Later, it would take decades and the birth of a new country of Bangladesh and several of its successive governments before one other bridge was built in that segment of the river for use by pedestrians and motorized vehicles.

One early fine morning, my maternal grandfather (Haider Ali Sukani) walked about two kilometers with five of his grandsons, including my cousin Shaj and me, to take a dinghy boat (sampan) to the district town across the river. We stayed at a place owned by a friend of my grandfather for two or three days to take part in that scholarship examination. It was, perhaps, my first trip to the town, and we were all excited. We especially enjoyed the sumptuous food in the restaurants usually called hotels in that part of the world. In the examination hall, a funny thing happened that was particularly unfortunate and embarrassing for me. In the vernacular test paper, a normal question used to require the students to write a poem from memory. That year, because of the Islamic fervor prevalent in the country soon after the creation of Pakistan, the examiner gave a twist to this question and specified that the poem to be written must have been composed by a Muslim poet. Unfortunately, the poem that I memorized had been composed by a non-Muslim poet, and I was at a quandary as to what to do under the circumstance. Under pressure in the examination hall, I proceeded to write the poem that I had memorized and hoped that the examiner would not notice the difference. Of course, it did not work, and it was a complete waste of time and effort on my part. It was also, perhaps, the first of many mistakes in judgment that I had made in my life when I had to make rush decisions under pressure. Needless to say, I did not get the scholarship. Out of the five of us, only Shaj somehow managed to get one.

Life in the village in those days was rudimentary in nature. There was only one unpaved mud path running through our village. It was flanked on both sides at various locations by dug-out water-storage ponds, graveyards, and ditches that were often used as latrines. The path was full of large potholes in rainy seasons. This village path joined with the semi-paved Arakan Road that passes by the north side of our village. The Arakan Road starts from the south end of the railway bridge at Kalur Ghat over the Karnafully River and continues up to the Arakan Province of the neighboring country of Myanmar, some one hundred kilometers to the southeast. Legend has it that the Arakan Road was built by the soldiers of the Mughal governor of Bengal, Shah Shuja. Shuja was the second son of the great Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who built the famous Taj Mahal—one of the seven man-made wonders of the world. He did that to express his love for his beloved wife Mamtaz who had died earlier during childbirth. The Taj Mahal—a symbol of India in the whole world even after almost four hundred years from the time it was built—is not only one of the most beautiful monuments in the world, it is also a majestic architectural expression of a love story that still evokes romance in the minds of visitors to the Taj as well as of people who read about it. In later years of his rein, Emperor Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his third son, Aurangjeb, in a palace struggle for succession among his four sons. It is said that Shah Jahan spent his last years looking at the Taj Mahal from his prison cell across the other side of the Yamuna River. Aurangjeb also defeated his older brother Dara and younger brother, Murad. By then, his other older brother Shuja declared rebellion against him from Bengal, where he was the governor. Aurangjeb’s army then gave a pursuit of Shuja toward the east. It is said that the soldiers of Shuja then built the pathway to enable the governor to flee to Arakan from which the road took its name.

During these early years in the village, another incident happened that even risked my life. I was seven or eight years old. One day, I was playing with a few of my buddies in a ditch by the side of the Arakan Road. These ditches used to be dug out by the farmers who owned the farmland by the road side often to elevate the farmland to protect the crop from floods. The ditches could sometime be quite wide and deep in the rainy seasons. I was not a good swimmer, and as I was playing in the ditch, I somehow drifted toward the deep end. I lost balance and was about to drown. Fortunately, another boy of my age, who was a good swimmer, noticed me struggling. He swam over, pulled me out and, thus, literally saved my life. That boy from our village became a rickshaw puller when he grew up. Whenever I happened to see him—which was not often—I remembered the incident and silently expressed my gratitude to him. I do not know if he ever remembered the incident or not. If he did, he never mentioned it to me.

In my preteen years, I did a number of foolish but adventurous things, which were normal for a village boy. One thing, I started taking interest in girls at an early age and had several incidents involving girls of my age in the neighborhood. Secondly, I used to do foolish, risky things, which I did not realize at that time that they were dangerous or even life-threatening. Those were and perhaps still are parts of normal growing up in rural areas, but their possible consequences still send a shudder in my spine when I think about them. For example, I used to go to the paddy fields during the beginning of the dry season and get into the large water storage ponds in the field to catch a few fish that might have taken shelter there from the receding waters of the field. During dry winter months, some fish would hide in small holes on the side walls of these ponds. I would put my hand in those holes to catch the fish without thinking that some water reptiles, including poisonous snakes, might have gone there before me to prey on those fishes. At times, I would lift out the small amount of water from these ponds and catch the fish. Some of them would go under the mud at the bottom of the pond. To catch them, I would put some water back in the pond again, put cactus branches in the water and leave it overnight when the fish hiding underground would come out for food and water contaminated with cactus secretions, die, and float on the water surface. I would go in the morning to bring those dead but not rotten fish home. Also, on the onset of rainy season, I would go out in the rains in the evening with a lantern in hand to catch Kai fish (a particularly favorite one in Bangladesh), which would crawl out of big ponds, would be on their way on land toward the larger inundated fields. I would try to find and catch some of them on their long crawl. The risky thing was that some hungry reptiles like water snakes and others would compete with me in chasing these fishes. But my temptation would lure me to ignore such risk.

In those days, there were hardly any facilities in the village for children’s games and sports, especially during rainy seasons. In the summer season, older children and late teenagers informally arranged soccer games in the dry paddy fields after the winter harvest. The children also played some game called Ha du du (also known as kabadi) and a local game called Par Khela. During my early teen years, I used to play both the games. In the Ha du du game, a group of children divided themselves in equal numbers to form two teams. Each team positioned its players on either end of an open space with a marker in the middle. One member of one team then would run over to the other team’s side holding his breath and citing aloud Ha du du as long as he could hold his breath. While holding his breath and citing those words, he would try to touch any member of the opposite team and run back to his own team’s side of the middle marker. If he could do that, then the member of the other team he touched would be out of the game. The members of the other team would try to capture him and hold him down until he ran out of his breath and thus prevent him from coming back to the middle marker. If they managed to do that, then that visiting player would be out of the game. Then one member of the other team would run over to the side of the opposing team and the process would be repeated. At the end, the team with last or most number of players not eliminated out of the game would be the winner.

The local Par Khela used to be played normally in the dry winter