I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know Faisal Arefin Dipan.
He was a few years younger than me. My enduring mental image of him is on that enormous tree-trunk that served as a park bench in the playground at Fuller Road, laughing and chatting with his friends.
I would go there to visit my friends’ apartments, see Dipan and his buddies when I was going in, and as I’d come out hours later, they would still be there. That indefatigable adda, still continuing.
Avijit Roy -- Gullu to those from the campus -- was part of that same crowd, I think. I see their two faces in close proximity when I look back. It’s been many years since those days, of course; I can’t say for certain if they were all that thick back then.
That was the thing about Dhaka University campus in our youth, though: We were all over each other, all the time.Everyone was everyone’s friend, many of our neighbours were kin. So Dipan’s smile meshes with Gullu’s in my memory, and their faces intermingle with so many others’.
We were all together. We were the same.
Except, of course, we weren’t. Dipan stayed true to his academic heritage and founded his publication house, Gullu developed into a formidable intellectual and a polymath, my circumstances took me down the corporate route -- we all went our separate ways.
Strange thing, though: Dipan never struck me as the intellectual sort. I remember him always laughing, forever in a crowd.
He probably went into publishing because he’d grown up around books, like so many of the rest of us. And now that has cost him his life.
Dipan wasn’t an activist. Just look at the books he published: Novels, short stories, essays, poetry, travelogues. And, in amongst these books, were those by Avijit Roy -- his childhood friend Gullu.
Dipan just had the tremendous misfortune of being alive in a time when men murder each other for the thoughts in their heads, for the words printed on a piece of paper.
The calamity that befell him was to be a citizen of a land where apathy is the order of the day.
Not that it should matter, but let me also say this: Dipan wasn’t irreligious.
His sentences were liberally sprinkled with “Insha’Allahs” and “Masha’Allahs” like most Muslims you’ll come across. What was he doing then, publishing books by the dreaded Muktomonas, you want to know? Well, I never thought to ask him, but can hazard an educated guess.
He believed in the free expression of ideas, you see. He was committed to this simple philosophy of tolerance and acceptance that makes a person a heretic here, turns him into a walking corpse.
That is how we were all brought up, you know. For a large portion of our childhoods, we were completely oblivious as to which religion, ethnicity, or social class our peers belonged to.
We were taught to believe that all of us were brilliant scholars, great sportsmen, talented artists, and stirring musicians. Then, at the appointed time, the real world intervened, we chose our calling, and went on with our lives.
I like to believe, though, that we each carry a bit of that wide-eyed, ebullient child with us still.
The Bangladesh we held in our hearts was a nurturing land, a compassionate and inclusive nation, an idyllic place that embraced each and every last one of us: “Shokol shoha, shokol boha, matar mata.”
These young men who are sent to creep up behind writers and publishers and hack at their necks with medieval weapons until they die: Just like the daggers they wield, they are mere instruments.
They are pawns in a game played by people who aim to silence all of us this way and defile that vision we had of our land. These men in the shadows, they mean to turn our vibrant, generous, lustrous Bangladesh into a grim and dour and monochromatic place.
Will you let them?
