Nothing
If Not Serious
Montreal
Blues
Shawkat
Hussain
I
am trying desperately to meet a deadline in response to a
desperate plea from the editor of this magazine. She made
several frantic calls to me on both my regular and mobile
phones and couldn't get me. She finally heard from another
friend in the newspaper that I was in Montreal. She wrote
to my son in Montreal requesting him to forward an email to
me. How is it possible not to respond to this desperate long-distance
request even if the deadline time is impossibly tight for
an habitual procrastinator like me? How can I not respond
when the current editor has so generously reminded me that
I was the magazine's first editor? Yes, in June 1996 I was
the magazine editor when the momentous transition from broadsheet
to its current format occurred. Only a month later in July,
I went Down Under and Aasha Mehreen Amin has been at the helm
of affairs ever since. And what a great job she has been doing
for the last eight years.
In any
case, I have missed my regular column for over a month, and
it's only the editor breathing down my neck that can get me
back into the groove again. There you are, I have written
over a 100 words about nothing, and if I can just keep on
shooting the bull from the hip I might just be able to meet
the desperate deadline.
I am here
in Montreal for my son's graduation from McGill University.
The first two days were bright, crisp, and sunny. The third
day, the day of the convocation, was wet and cold, and the
next three days (including today) the weather has been gorgeous.
However, I am not complaining. The exhilaration of the occasion
and the reception after the ceremony made up for the ceaseless
drizzle outside. Furthermore, I am experiencing strange feelings
of deja vu walking along familiar streets, some of whose names
I still remember from my last visit here almost exactly 28
years ago in 1976. I was then a graduate student at Dalhousie
University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and I had come to Montreal
with my wife to visit my friend Selim and his wife, and also
to see the Montreal Olympics. I remembered that there used
to be a second-hand bookstore--The Word--just minutes away
from Selim's flat on Rue Aylmer. When I asked my son about
the bookstore he told me that it was less than a minute away
from our flat on Rue Milton, very close to the McGill University
campus.
Going
to The Word on the first morning was like a pilgrimage, a
return to my youth, a return to a time when my son, now a
strapping lad of 24 and an engineer, was not even an idea.
The bookstore looked exactly the same: the look of second-hand
bookstores never change; the fiction section and the section
on literary criticism were exactly where they were over a
quarter century back. The only difference was that I couldn't
read the titles on the top shelves because now I had bifocals;
in 1976 I didn't even have glasses. A genial man, fifty something,
brought me a step-ladder; as I stepped up to look at the books
on the higher shelves, I mentioned that I had first come to
the bookstore 28 years back. I told him about the circumstances
of my first visit and why I was in Montreal and his bookstore
the second time. He said that he had been running the store
for 29 years! I now go to the bookstore almost every day and
I will keep on doing it till the end of the month. Adrian,
the owner, does not give me any special discounts but he treats
me a little differently. It is not likely that I will revisit
the bookstore a third time, but who knows. I did not know
that I would come back to the bookstore a second time either.
It was
also kind of serendipitous (and a bit strange as well) that
the first email I got in Montreal was from Selim S, my old
Montreal host now teaching in a private university in Dhaka.
He thought he was writing to me in Dhaka; I wrote back to
him saying that I was now in Montreal living in a flat close
to his old haunts, close to The Word, close to McGill, close
to a place where he spent some of the best years of his youth
and life. He has not responded to my email yet.
On our
second day in Montreal, we went to a Sylheti grocery, and
I kept looking at a guy who looked very familiar, and he kept
looking at me as well. Finally he walked up to me and said,
"Sir, how are you? I am your student Iqbal." And
I immediately recognised both his name and his face. Last
night I heard the story of his life when he treated us to
an excellent buffet dinner in an Indian restaurant--predictably
called Maharajah. Such are the pleasures of meeting students
in strange places in foreign lands. He also filled me in with
news about Bangladesh that he had read in The Daily Star.
I have one major regret though: being away from Dhaka when
Rumsfeld was visiting. But I have just bought a copy of Ben
Bradlee's A Good Life for only a dollar and I am
happy. Bradlee, by the way, was The Washington Post's great
editor for thirty years.
Copyright (R)
thedailystar.net 2004
|