ঢাকার বিশিষ্ট সাংবাদিক সরদার ফরিদ আহমেদ ভাইয়ের ফেইসবুক আইডি থেকে

ঢাকার বিশিষ্ট সাংবাদিক সরদার ফরিদ আহমেদ ভাইয়ের ফেইসবুক আইডি থেকে

Shafiqul ALAM
In a way Zainul Abedin’s life mirrored that of the Bihari community in Bangladesh. They migrated to Bangladesh in search for sanctuary and jobs in East Pakistan’s fledgling new urban centres. Thanks largely to their growing presence, Dhaka emerged as a multicultural melting pot in the 1950s and 60s with Urdu its second language. Abedin was the proud product of this decade. He would write Urdu scripts for a handful of Urdu films, several of them made by Dhaka’s new elite led by multi-talented Jahir Raihan. He was a doyen of cine journalism in Dhaka. He would also write reports for Dhaka’s flourishing Urdu newspapers. On the factory floors of Jute and Textile plants and on the train terminals, new Urdu-Bengali kichuri vocabulary was slowly emerging.

Those days were brought to an abrupt end in the general election of the 1970. The air was thick with nationalistic-patriotic languages. Suddenly, the Biharis became objects of suspicions. To many Bengalis and several hate-mongering politicians Biharis were the agents and foot-soldiers of the Pakistani military rulers. The trust and friendship that was built on the factory floors, on the barber’s shops, in the blood-stained Ashura processions, or in the railway terminals were frayed. And it was gone for good on the genocidal night of March 25, 1971.
After the war, Abedin found himself to be identified as a stranded Pakistani. No longer he was a proud torch-bearer of multicultural Dhaka of the 1950s-60s. There were stories of massacres everywhere. His Urdu speaking friends and Bihari elites left the city for Karachi or London. He went to Karachi several times in the 1970s. His brothers were well established there. But it was not his city. He told me he hated almost everything in that sprawling Arabian sea metropolis.
Treated as traitors, the hundreds of thousands of poor Biharis had nowhere to go. They found refuge in the ghettos of Geneva camps. Multicultural Dhaka was dead, never to rise again.
In later years, Abedin found sanctuary in the press club. He would work as a stringer for a Pakistani newspaper to eke out a living. He would keep his clothing in the press club’s chest of drawers, spend the day reading dailies and sipping tea on the corridor of the club. In the night he would sleep on the sofa. It has been his daily routine for decades. I pressed him several times about the stories of Dhaka’s Urdu speaking people, he would only share the sunny side of it. He would never talk about the loss of his friends or the loss of Dhaka that he knew or fell in love with.
Dhaka Reporters Unity has announced it would name a reporting award on Zainul Abedin. Let’s dedicate the award for reporting on the issues of our treatment of the minorities (of all kinds). That’ll be the best tribute for Abedin bhai.