THE long discussion that I last had with SMI, as Syed Manzoorul Islam was known in the department of English at the University of Dhaka, was some day in October 1995. By then, I just left the Independent newspaper that had come out in March that year and ceased to appear in print in April 2020 because of the Covid outbreak before being closed in January 2022.
I, along with three others who are all my seniors, had been employed there to bring out the newspaper鈥檚 weekend supplement. We left the newspaper over a dispute that came up centring on the publication of a few pieces on the University of Dhaka. The week鈥檚 issue did not reach the stands and it was republished with 鈥榩roper鈥� editing the next week.
He asked someone to tell me that he wanted to see me. We also requested him to write an article for the issue. He did write and I had to collect the piece from him in the department. After he had handed over the article, he asked me to edit it carefully for any mistakes in his writing. He noticed that I smiled and told me that he had meant what he said. I found two errors and one of which that I can remember was a conditional sentence that might have somehow crept in, perhaps for having been unmindful for moments. I wrote an article on the history of the university in 6,000 words for the issue.
After pleasantries, he wanted to know how I could get to lay my hands on so many bits of information on the university. I told him that I had a habit of taking notes from newspapers that I had done since my school days. He, then, wanted to know what had prompted us to leave the newspaper. I told him in detail. He seemed to be trying to grasp everything and then said, 鈥榊ou will make a good editor some day.鈥� I was then old enough to know, not for certain though, the best that I could make out of myself. I may have, I am afraid, already proved him wrong.
In a tutorial class in my third year in the university, when SMI was my tutor, I had to write a paper on 脝schylus鈥� Agamemnon, included in course E 308. I worked hard, spent hours in the central library and wrote the essay. A friend of mine, who was a computer science and engineering student in the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, when I was staying with another of my friends in Shahid Smriti Hall, suggested that we should have it typed in a computer and printed. I wanted to have it typewritten at a shop at Nilkhet. We spent almost the whole night awake in the house of another friend, senior to us, typing in the paper and having it printed. The text insertion macro feature of the WordPerfect 5.1 wordprocessor came handy, especially for the names of 脝schylus, Agamemnon and some long words that appeared repeatedly.
When I handed it, 13 pages printed in a dot-matrix printer and stapled, to SMI the next day, he looked at it and told my mates in the group if all had been so considerate like me as to have the paper typed that would make his reading comfortable. The next week, he handed back the paper with his evaluation, an A- (minus). He remarked on the last page that I had stopped writing the moment I began to form my arguments. I sought to express my unhappiness about the grade. I mustered up courage and asked him whether he believed that I could write that long an answer to a single question in the exams hall. He took back my script and changed the paper鈥檚 grade to an A. That was the highest grade that I could earn in any tutorial paper. My entire university education was mired in a series of Bs, many with a minus appended.
On another occasion, he helped me to write an answer to a question on Gulliver鈥檚 Travels, included in course E 302. One day after his class, he asked me to follow him into his office room. He gave me a sleek book, barely two printing formats, preprint of a sort, on the work of Jonathan Swift. He asked me to have it photocopied at Nilkhet and give it back to him the next day. I did. It immensely helped me to write the tutorial paper. I later saw one of my fellows in an MA class being talked to standing for having a book of a teacher photocopied, which broke the spine, of the book and partly of my fellow.
Whatever camaraderie that brewed started breaking apart, mostly because of my not attending classes regularly. I took up a full-time editing job on the sports desk at the Daily Star three months before my BA exams. Yet, SMI came to my aid in the viva voce for the second-year exams. I vividly remember SMI telling SH, Shawkat Hussain, that I was a good student but had strayed a bit for a while for personal reasons when SH asked to know why he had not seen me in his classes. Out of the room, I then thought that it was a close shave.
One day in our second year after a day I had missed the classes, everybody that I met in the corridor told me to see SMI. SMI had then anchored a programme on world literature on Bangladesh Television for quite some time. He wanted to have a short session of intimate play reading in the programme based on a short story by Nadine Gordimer, who had won the Nobel prize in literature a few days before.
He chose, on open recommendations of our fellows, Rumana Siddique, who became a teacher at the department and retired a couple of years ago, and me. We read Gordimer鈥檚 鈥楥omrades鈥�, which SMI modified into a script, in November 1991. As I was reading, inside the television studio, I faltered once and misread once. As we were coming out of the station, I told SMI that I had misread once and he assuringly told me that no one would notice it. No one, in fact, did.
While preparing for the performance, I had a small, sweet fight with SMI. In 鈥楥omrades鈥�, Gordimer describes Mrs Hattie Telford鈥檚 dining-room, having an African wooden sculpture representing 鈥榓 lion marvellously released from its matrix鈥� in the grain of a tree-trunk. I kept pronouncing the word 鈥榤atrix鈥� with the 鈥榤ate鈥� diphthong in the first syllable whilst SMI kept pronouncing with the 鈥榤at鈥� vowel in the hope that I would catch on that I, willingly, did not.
After a few instances, he asked me why I was so doing. I told him that it was that way it was. Having gone through Daniel Jones鈥檚 English Pronouncing Dictionary, which I had handy for more than a year in my poor efforts to perfect my phonemes, allophones and primary and secondary stresses, I knew that the pronunciation that SMI made was a less used variant. But he, instead, took up the OALDCE, which had my variant as the only pronunciation.
I was vary bad at maths, often failing to add up. I used to tell my fellows that there are more than six hundred thousand words in the English language; I knew two hundred thousand of them and did not know the remaining two hundred thousand, letting loose a laughter. As our first year began in August 1989, SMI was lecturing on the English literature, an introductory course, one Tuesday, with a number of students standing against the back wall in Room 2066 in the arts faculty building. We all were sheepish.
SMI at one point asked us, the bunch yet to be properly attuned, what 鈥榓lliteration鈥� meant. The room fell silent. I stood up and answered. He then asked for the meaning of 鈥榓ssonance.鈥� I answered again. On the first occasion, it was taking on him. On the second, it was a brazen display of words at my disposal. As he uttered the word 鈥榗onsonance,鈥� in an interrogatory tone, waiting for an answer, I was unwilling to stand up again.
A fellow of ours, from Holy Cross who died in a traffic accident in Dhaka about a decade ago. stood up and tried to say something. SMI smiled at her, told her to sit down, looked at me and said, 鈥業 am looking at the dictionary.鈥� It became a compulsion. I stood up and gave the answer. He was double my age then. I was nineteen, old enough to know myself. But, the episode caught on with my fellows.
There are numerous stories with him to tell. But not all needs to be told. SMI, who we read Shakespeare with in our third year, used to tell that class that whilst Hamlet is a text, every reading of it, even by the same person, creates a new text of Hamlet, each one fragmented, fractured and incomplete. I believe that if all such texts had been merged together, which is impossible, understanding Hamlet could have been a bit easier. This is a fractured reflection of my reading of SMI.
SMI died at the age of 74 in a hospital in the afternoon on October 10 after being in and out of life support over the week after a heart attack on October 3. A popular teacher died with his legacy that will be sorely missed. Rest in peace, Professor!
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Abu Jar M Akkas is deputy editor at 抖阴精品.