<i>A daughter remembers</i>
The leaves have started falling here in London and dawn has a different hue these days. I have always been attached to dawn since my childhood because it has had a special meaning for me. I am the youngest of ten children and as a child I always remember being an early riser in Kolkata. I can recall as early as when I was three, when I would awake at dawn and stand beside the red and green wrought iron railings of the long verandah overlooking the quiet road that ran by the house where I grew up. I would watch the Kolkata corporation people wash the roads. I would then skip inside to see my father, Syed Badrudduja, rosary in hand, sitting in his study and praying, a little tray in front of him. The tray contained his morning tea. Soon a maid would appear and pester me to drink a cup of milk sweetened with ovaltine. I would resist and then my father would intervene and get me halwa puree form the halwaais nearby.
My father was to me a figure of love and compassion, although I saw little of him as I grew up. Politics was his consuming passion. He was forever a public figure. And yet he was like a Druid to whom people came in droves for help and advice. He sat in a cavernous room downstairs and people gathered around him, listening mesmerised to him for hours without interruption.
Even when we had sat down for supper, my father talked of contemporary global events and personalities. It was from him we heard of men like Hitler and Mussolini and the Shah of Iran. He dwelt at great length on our Holy Prophet (peace be upon him). I wondered and thought that perhaps my father's role in life was that of a teacher. Or was he a holy man sent down from heaven to tell people to do the right things in life?
As I grew up I realised that he was my dear father and that his focus in life was to give to others all that he had --- his knowledge, his compassion, his generosity and his love. He was the giving kind. Not for a moment did he think of the good things of life for himself or for his family. Politics claimed increasingly higher chunks of his attention; and though I did not see him much, I did get to know more of his intrinsic qualities.
My father spent long periods in jail for the political convictions he held fast to. I recall that when I was in year seven, I visited him in Presidency Jail with my mother. We carried food for him but we also carried very heavy books that he read there. Most of the books in my father's library have been stamped and passed by the jail authorities. They are a reminder to me of how he considered books to be his constant companions in seclusion.
I had once the wonderful experience of getting help from him when I had to speak on a subject in school. The subject was, 'Poets and not politicians should rule the world.' He helped me with some points and when I delivered my speech at school the nuns said that it was like a piece of literature. At home we had a number of little girls who were orphans but were cared for by our family. To me, however, it did not seem that they were really orphans but were more like ornamental messengers in the huge household. Since I had no siblings close to me in age, I spent time playing with them. My father always told me to be kind to them; that we were all equal and that I must think of them as my siblings. Such advice has given me the values that I have with me now, that I have always cherished and nurtured and that have helped me to develop very deep and lasting relationships with people in life. He imbued in us ideas of simple living and high thinking. He taught us empathy and compassion and honesty in thought, action and feeling. And he instilled in us the idea that we had to have complete faith in the Almighty and in our religion. The rites of passage were what mattered to him. He was a profound Muslim and yet he brought within himself elements of thought and behaviour that spoke of his innate secularism. He was an orator. He had mastery over Bengali, Urdu and English. He loved music and he was fond of poetry. In his youth, he once had the opportunity to meet Rabindranath Tagore and recite a poem before him. The Bard complimented him on his exquisite delivery.
In these past many years I have had occasion to come across some noted Indian personalities who knew my father well. Hashim Abdul Halim, speaker of the West Bengal assembly, remembers my father for the great orator he was. A few years ago I was in Kolkata, where I had gone to attend a conference. Suddenly I began to suffer from severe dehydration. When heard about it and when he came to know that I was Syed Badrudduja's daughter, he had his son, a doctor, visit me and prescribe medicine for me. Pranab Mukherjee, whom I met in Dhaka a few years ago, was happily surprised to know whose daughter I was. He talked long about my father on that evening.
The feeling today is special as I sit and recollect the past in London, thousands of miles away from my home in Kolkata. I can picture his burial, hundreds of oil lit lamps diffusing light in the cold November night in a long-ago 1974. Thousands of people pushed and shoved to get a last glimpse of the man who had dedicated his life to the struggle for the well-being of the have-nots in India. I can picture the waters of the pond before his grave and the muallims doing their ablutions for the morning prayers.
I have aged now and dusk has come quicker than I thought it would. And yet the fragrance of my father's teachings remains for me the light that makes of life an endless dawn for me.
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