A Student Reminisces

I just couldn't believe it when a reputed columnist called me to say that Professor Khondakar Ashraf Hossain, who taught both of us in the late seventies and in the very early eighties at Dhaka University's Department of English, was dead! I was speechless for a long time. It was Sunday, June 16, 2013.
Ashraf Sir never looked more than forty. In fact we used to tease him that he looked younger than us. How could he die at only sixty three? He was so young and energetic, so full of ideas, so witty and lively! He loved to be called a loner though. And the recent death of his mother and wife completely shattered him. The government appointed him the vice-chancellor of Trishal's Jatiyo Kobi Kazi Nazrul Islam University on May 06, 2013. He was working hard there and keeping in touch with us too. But little did we know that he was planning to leave us so early for 'the undiscovered land from whose bourne' no traveller returns.
A modest man, Khondakar Ashraf Hossain was a valiant freedom fighter. A poet-freedom fighter like Rafiq Azad and Abid Anwar. Abid Bhai called me twice to express his sorrow at this untimely death of a remarkable poet and scholar, essayist and teacher. A secular poet, a brilliant essayist and a popular teacher for nearly forty years. Fellow poets and his students and colleagues will miss him for a long time. His three daughters and son will remember him forever.
Khondakar Ashraf Hossain was a senior Professor and former Chairman of the Department of English, University of Dhaka. He was a well-known poet. He was a poet of the 1980s. In fact he was one of our finest poets, one of the best to have come out of Bangladesh since it became an independent nation in 1971. His admirers included Shamsur Rahman, the finest of all East Bengal modernists, who had great faith in his talent. How I hate using past tense while writing about him!
Khondakar Ashraf Hossain was born in Joynagar of Jamalpur in 1950. He had published eight volumes of poetry and three volumes of essays. He had edited Ekobingsho, a little magazine, for more than twenty five years. It had fetched him the West Bengal Little Magazine Award in 1998. He had also translated Sophocles, Euripides, Paul Celan and Terry Eagleton ('Literary Theory'). His poems had been translated into English, German, French, Telegu and Hindi. He was a popular poet in Bangladesh as well as West Bengal. He was a star in the Bengali literary sky.
Khondakar Ashraf Hossain was a popular teacher at the Department of English, University of Dhaka. He was teaching there for almost four decades. He was my teacher.