Only weeks into his death, Waheedul Haque continues to cast a lengthening light on the land of which he was once such an integral part. The tributes being paid to him is proof of the powerful hold he has on our collective aesthetic imagination. Those who knew him in life, had cause to associate with him, knew all along of the expansive nature of his knowledge. He was one who seemed at ease with nearly every facet of life --- from music to trees to physics and almost everything else.

Jogote Anondojogge is not a reassessment of Waheedul Haque. It is a reassertion of all the ideals he lived and, one might add, died for. As Zillur Rahman Siddiqui remarks in his tribute, Haque's patriotism was the underpinning of all that he stood for. There were the times when he disappeared into the hamlets and villages of Bangladesh, in search of young people ready and willing to uphold Rabindranath Tagore. It was Tagore that energized Waheedul Haque. And yet there was a varied side to his character. Kamruzzaman brings out that side in his discourse on the young cricketer that Haque was in the early 1950s. Waheedul Haque, like all good proponents of theory, turned out to be a middling practitioner of it in the field, whether cricket or football.

The essays in the anthology cover, basically, the years 2003, when Waheedul Haque reached his seventieth year, and 2007, when he succumbed to mortality. Shamsur Rahman, however, is one of the few whose reflections on Haque predate the two years in question. Bandhob Tomar Jonno is a moving tribute to the genius in Waheedul Haque. And moving too is KG Mustafa's poignant Tomar Joi Hok Ustad. The sheer variety of interests he pursued comes through as mind-boggling in this collection. Mita Haque's tribute to the man who was her relative and mentor is brief but touches the heart. Iffat Ara Dewan travels back in time to relate the story of her forays into Rabindrasangeet along a trail set by Waheedul Haque. He was her Waheed Bhai, indeed everyone's Waheed Bhai. For many, he was the one who played the flute and led mesmerised listeners of his melody to the banks of the primordial river. Nazim Mahmud calls him the pied piper of Hamelin. Syed Shamsul Haq spots the monsoon in him even as Baishakh goes by. Mustafa Nurul Islam's prayer on the sangeet guru's seventieth birthday centres on a wish for more years for Haque to journey through his world. Islam had no way of knowing that four years down the road the object of his tribute would walk those rustic paths of poetry no more.

In this collage of images, a composite of Waheedul Haque emerges through the essays. Mahboob ul Alam Chowdhury's amazement at the quick achievement of mastery the founder of Chhayanaut registered in classical music is as great as ours. It is little wonder, therefore, that Waheedul Haque would, with Sanjida Khatun, in time undertake the gigantic enterprise that Chhayanaut was destined to be. Nurul Quader, in his 1996 tribute to Waheedul Haque, Shongeetangone Balyobondhu Waheedul, lets the lamp shine on a teenager whose craving for music surpasses anything one may have known in life. The tribute leaves painful scratches on the soul.

And then there is more pain in store for the Waheedul Haque admirer. The commemorative issue of Kali O Kolom on the baul, for that is what Waheedul Haque essentially was, is once again a panorama of recollections on the contributions he made to culture in Bangladesh. Many of the essays in the collection could well mesh in with those in the Chhayanaut work and yet they throw some new light on Haque's chequered existence. Every inch a troubadour in search of beauty and poetry, he is here celebrated by what is truly a galaxy of Bangladesh's eminent men and women of letters.

There are the reminiscences and then there are the reflections on aesthetics as Waheedul Haque shaped it, or added newer dimensions to. Kali O Kolom is an eloquent exposition of the tragedy that was the death of the man.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.