In Memorium SMI
Syed Manzoorul Islam, SMI to many students, friends and colleagues, was academically a year senior to me at the English department of Dhaka University. As often happens in such cases, we moved in different circles, and it was only when we became fellow academics that we got to know each other better. When I discovered that he was only a couple of days older than me, I started calling him by the Bangla phrase “Dui din-er dada” – to the amusement of our growing coterie, which included my classmate Fakrul Alam. The three of us – Manzoor, Fakrul and I – were identified by some as a trio. But, as Professor Niaz Zaman, our sometime teacher, senior colleague, and mentor, told me recently, we were each of us quite distinctive and yet the three of us were good friends.
Apart from enjoying addas we had shared literary interests, and in time Mr. Abul Khair Litu, better known to us as Litu Bhai, roped us in to help out with several publishing ventures launched by the Bengal Foundation, ranging from the popular to the highbrow. At one end were the somewhat glitzy ICE Today, named by Litu Bhai, and Charbela Chardik, named by Manzoor. At the highbrow end were Jamini, a sumptuously produced art journal, and later the literary journals Kali O Kalam and Six Seasons Review. Overall, Manzoor was the key figure in these ventures. He oversaw Charbela Chardik and, after the sad demise of Professor Anisuzzaman, edited Kali O Kalam, besides being on the editorial boards of the other periodicals as well. Apart from his commitments to the Bengal Foundation family, Manzoor was on several Civil Society committees, and on the editorial board of Anyadin, the magazine brought out by his publisher, Mazharul Islam of Anyaprakash. I’m afraid it’ll prove to be well-nigh impossible to find his replacement.
Manzoor’s literary career spanned more than half a century. Few are aware that his first literary publication was a clutch of poems. He told me that he realised that he couldn’t go very far as a poet, and decided to switch to prose. Quite early on he decided to carve out a niche for himself as an art critic, publishing reviews, essays and profiles in newspapers, exhibition catalogues and anthologies. It so happens that his last serious art-related essay is in the projected Routledge Handbook of Bangladeshi Literary Culture which I am co-editing with Professor Shamsad Mortuza.
These activities, as art critic and literary editor, are relatively specialised ones. Manzoor became a well-known public intellectual, a pundit, thanks to his op-eds, columns and TV appearances. I must confess I didn’t follow this aspect of his career at all. But from hearsay I was fully aware of his impact on readers and viewers. His column, “Alash din-er Hawa” (Breeze on a lazy day), I’m told, covered literary matters and had an educative influence on a generation of young readers.
Those who belong to Gen Z and Gen A will have to exercise their imagination to figure out what literary cultural life was like before the age of the internet and smart phones. We’d hear the name of the year’s literature Nobel laureate on TV news, and the literary editors of our newspapers would ask around for a write-up on the laureate’s life and work. If it happened to be someone hitherto unknown there would be a frantic search for their books and background material so that a passable article could be cobbled together. If I’m not mistaken Manzoor produced some readable pieces of this sort. Then there were social issues to pontificate on. These too came under the purview of Manzoor’s commentator’s gaze. Readers admired his balanced views, which he sometimes aired on TV shows as well.
But it is as a fiction writer that Manzoor is likely to be remembered by future generations. I believe he was primarily a short story writer, though he did stretch himself into the novel form several times, and not without success. I witnessed the birth of Manzoor the fiction writer at first hand. As young lecturers we had a heavy load of exam invigilation duties assigned to us. Between rounds of the exam hall, Manzoor would sit down and scribble a paragraph or a few lines. He was writing a story. He’d explain with disarming frankness that he had come across a piquant piece of news or witnessed a peculiar incident. He was now weaving a short story around it. It was a novel approach to fiction writing, though I couldn’t help feeling that the method carried with it the risk of ending up with a shaggy dog story. It is to his credit that he exercised enough control on the narrative flow to produce stories that readers found engaging. Later, he extended the same method to produce well-received novels.
The most fruitful literary influence on Manzoor’s work was no doubt that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He was so taken with the Colombian master that he even went through the Spanish language course offered by the Institute of Modern Languages at Dhaka University. Another name that must be mentioned is the American post-modernist Kurt Vonnegut. Manzoor became a proponent of Latin American magic realism and American postmodernism, and enjoyed teaching courses in postmodern theory and literature.
This was something of a bone of contention between us. Manzoor would at times lean towards the extreme postmodernist mantra “Anything goes”. My own view is that such a philosophy would, so to speak, pull the ontological rug from under our feet. I enjoyed Vonnegut’s fiction as much as Manzoor but I pointed out that postmodernism was merely a literary strategy with Vonnegut and that underlying his fiction was a moralist’s vision.
Now that Manzoor has departed this vale of tears I will miss engaging in that argument with him. His students will miss his generous tutelage. His readers will miss the appearance of new works from his pen. All his friends and colleagues will miss his good-humoured jests. His death from a massive heart attack was a bolt from the blue. The initially positive prognosis after stenting was followed by a shockingly rapid decline. We watched the decline in disbelief.
Fortunately, his wife, Sanjida, who had gone on a visit to Boston, could come back with their son, an attorney in that city, just in time to exchange a few last words. I thought it was a small mercy, and would help them achieve a solacing closure. But Sanjida, who had been my classmate at uni, said, using the jocular form of address we habitually used with each other, “Dostoh, closure is just a convenient word; in reality there is no closure.” It was heartbreaking. Now, one can only repeat the formulaic prayer, May his soul rest in peace.
Kaiser Haq is a Bangladeshi translator, critic and academic.