On the evening of July 7, Syed Humayun Kabir left the world peacefully with a host of admirers remembering him in his wake. Over the last few days, tributes have poured in from people around the world to remember an unusually kind and intelligent man who touched the lives of many. Many have rightly pointed out what an extraordinarily accomplished man Mr Kabir was.
Although his business career reached towering heights when he led renowned companies such as Pfizer and served as the head of several important business institutions, what ultimately proved to be the zenith of his professional achievements was SAJIDA Foundation and the way in which he treated corporate social responsibility as an essential component of everyday business rather than a supplementary initiative. His business and philanthropic activities are a great legacy to leave behind, but these were not parts of his life that I was ever particularly familiar with; to me Mr Kabir was just my Khalu.
As it usually is with people like Khalu, you don’t hear about their achievements first-hand. I wasn’t aware of Khalu’s accomplishments until well into my late teens. To me, he was someone I first became close to when I was three to four years old and he would come to our house to play golf on the computer.
Even then, I wondered how he knew so much about the mechanics of the game, blissfully unaware that the man my sister and I were playing with was an actual golf champion. I don’t know how I never noticed the golf clubs resting beside his rocking chair in Bailey Road. One of my sister’s favorite memories of Khalu is of when she beat him at that same game of golf on the computer and how he laughed and took it in his stride.
When my Nani (Khalu’s mother-in-law) passed away, I experienced one of the most traumatic events of my childhood. I was inconsolable, and Khalu’s actions on that day stayed with me forever and brought me closer to him than ever before. Right before Nani was being taken away for her janaza, I could not stop crying, and Khalu gently took me with him in his car and told me that he needed me to do something for him.
For some reason, it was important for him to know how many numbers it was possible for someone to count between our house and the Banani cemetery. Not realising that this was a diversionary tactic, I immediately committed to the task he had assigned me and every time I counted up to a hundred, Khalu would tell me that I then needed to count backwards. His kindness had made everything right in the world again, even if temporarily.
In those early years of my childhood, I never realised that Khalu had a family of his own in his brother and sisters and their children and grandchildren. The credit for this goes as much to him as it does to the same warmth and kindness of spirit that his siblings possess. Khalu never made us feel as though we were his nephews and nieces through marriage rather than blood.
This was largely due to the fact that the monthly milads he and Nanni Khala used to have at their Bailey Road home would have everyone from both sides of the family present, and I would assume that our family was an unusually big one. He never missed a single family gathering, be it a birthday or an informal dinner, until only recently due to health issues. Eid at “Matiaburj” was the best time of the year. When I was little, I would have to tell Khalu that he needed to remain seated while we did our “kolakoli” or I would only get to hug his legs. Till today he continues to be one of the tallest people I’ve come across in Bangladesh.
Khalu and I learned to use the internet together and it was in those years when we were closest. From Eudora to Google, our learning trajectories were always aligned. The first time I had internet on my phone, he was excited to see that I could check my email on it. It was on the day of his wedding anniversary and, as soon as he saw that I could access the internet on my phone, he asked me to go on Google and find out how many years it had been according to the lunar calendar that he and Nanni Khala had been married. As soon as our calculations led us to realise that it had been 50 lunar years, with great excitement he shouted out to Khala that they had been married for 50 years!
The last time Khalu and I communicated was through a message on Facebook. I had told him about an article I had written for this newspaper and that it was coming out later that week, and he said that he was looking forward to reading it. Later I found out that he had shared it with others, telling everyone how proud he was to see my name in the paper. This eulogy would have bothered him because one of his defining characteristics -- other than his unflinching altruism -- was the shunning of any attention directed at him.
Khalu’s passing has left a hole in the world. Although we lull ourselves into believing that time heals all wounds, what it really does in instances such as these is build up an ersatz normalcy within which we learn to acclimatise. Over the last few years of my peripatetic life, I saw Khalu infrequently on account of being away from Dhaka.
Each time I came back, though, he would be among the first I would go visit. I was waiting till Eid to tell him about my forthcoming plans to go abroad again for my graduate studies, because moments such as those were what Khalu loved to celebrate with the entire family around.
There are days when even the best of us are tempted to resort to unkindness and it is in those moments that we should ask ourselves how to best deal with the situation at hand with as much grace as can be mustered. When I go through such moments, I see various faces flash in front of me, and one of those is Khalu’s. Although he would not welcome the attention this article will bring him, I have written it in the hope that even those who did not know him may be inspired to emulate his best qualities and make kindness and humility virtues that are not becoming scarcer in our lives, but flourishing in remembrance of those like him.
