There are the times, the seasons or changes of seasons, which often wrap themselves around people. The associations which define our passage through experience, in the end, become the very bedrock of our individual existence.
And so it is that January has for me been a whole lot more than a month or part of a season. It has been a passage from innocence to experience, from an idealistic view of the world to a comprehension of an expanding universe of the mind.
It was in January 1963 that politics and death tiptoed into my pre-teens when Mohammad Ali Bogra passed away. He was Pakistan’s minister for external affairs (as foreign ministers were then officially addressed). He had died and his lifeless being was in newspaper photographs. I did not sleep well for days, for that image of Bogra, cotton stuffing his nostrils, kept coming back into my imagination.
Within days, though, that certain fear resultant on death was replaced by the image of the deceased minister’s successor. ZA Bhutto, minister for industries and natural resources, was the new external affairs minister. His image was pleasing to the eye.
The beginning was with January, for me. In January 1965, Ayub Khan defeated Fatima Jinnah for Pakistan’s presidency. I recall my father and his fellow Bengali colleagues in the geological survey feeling rather upset that Miss Jinnah had lost. They had really expected her to win. It was also a time when the name Winston Churchill first made an entry into my lexicon.
He had just died and the foreign news pages of newspapers went on for days about his politics and his reputation. Every January was a time when my father brought new school textbooks for me and my siblings, for new classes would commence at the end of the nearly three-month winter vacation in March. Those long holidays, in the company of dreadfully beautiful winters, were the moments I loved. There were the newspapers to be read without the bother of homework or class tests.
In January 1966, under a cold sun, I kept track of important things happening in Tashkent. The name of the city was fascinating, and when Ayub Khan and Lal Bahadur Shastri journeyed there to talk peace, I could not but read every detail of the deliberations.
On January 10, the two men signed what would become known as the Tashkent Declaration. A few hours later, on January 11, Shastri died. Once again, images of death slipped into my experience as I observed photographs of Alexei Kosygin and Ayub Khan shouldering Shastri’s coffin to the gangway of the aircraft that would carry his remains back to Delhi.
The name Gulzarilal Nanda came back once more, for he was India’s acting prime minister. Before January ended, the newspapers wrote of Indira Gandhi taking over as the country’s new leader.
The seasons passed. The moon rose and declined, to rise again at a point. And my boyhood began to fill out into curiosities and discoveries. In January 1968, the name Sheikh Mujibur Rahman created ripples in the mind. He had just been named the principal accused in a conspiracy case by the Ayub regime.
My father was flabbergasted, refusing to buy the regime’s argument. He explained to me who Mujib was. Why then didn’t he speak on the issues? Why hadn’t he been in the newspapers like other politicians? My father answered my questions. Because, said he, Sheikh Shaheb -- that is how he respected him -- had always been in prison per courtesy of the regime.
In my teens in January 1969, politics became a good deal more comprehensible for me. I had minutely pored through news reports on the Agartala case in Dawn and the Pakistan Times. I was thrilled that Ayub Khan was in trouble. Maulana Bhashani’s “jalao-gherao” politics was inspirational. I loved the man even as I took pride in what the students of Dhaka University were doing as part of their goal of seeing democracy restored in the country.
In January 1970, when Bangabandhu launched his party’s election campaign, I looked forward to his victory at the polls and audaciously told my friends he was Pakistan’s future PM. A year later, in January 1971, politics began to fill my world with new substance when Bhutto and his team flew to Dhaka to argue for a grand coalition between the Awami League and the People’s Party. Happiness was mine when Bangabandhu did not oblige him.
These January tales do not end. On a morning in January 1972, I waited at the reception at Bangladesh Betar to be summoned to an audition for English language news reading. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a young man rushed into the room, telling everyone in his shrill nervousness that the Pakistanis had put Bangabandhu on a plane and no one knew where the plane was taking him or had taken him.
I forgot all about the audition and ran home, where all morning and all afternoon I tried all the available radio frequencies for news on the Father of the Nation. It was evening when the BBC World Service gave us the news we had been waiting for. The day was January 8, 1972.
In January 1973, policemen fired on an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Dhaka. In early January 1975, the newspapers reported the arrest of the underground leftist Siraj Sikdar. Toward the end of the month, the Jatiyo Sangsad adopted the Fourth Amendment to the constitution. Bangabandhu took over as president of the Republic.
Thus my memories of January lost to time. In January 2020, life’s stars have begun to shed brilliance. It is a twilight season.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.