Adieu, Zaglul bhai!

It was around nine in the evening of November 29 when a senior colleague NM Harun, called me to tell, "Zaglul is dead". I was instantly in a fix and was about to ask, "Zaglul, who?" It took me a long moment to come to terms with what I heard -- the unreality of a reality that seemed all too sudden to fathom. Minutes later, as though to confirm that the news was indeed real, all the television channels began running it as the breaking news of the evening.
Veteran journalist Zaglul Ahmed Chowdhury died while getting off a minibus at the city's Karwanbazar intersection in the evening of November 29 on his way to a TV channel's studio for a prescheduled Talk Show. Media reports say the mini bus rushed before he was able to land his feet on the road causing his fall and a collision too with it.
My familiarity with Zaglul bhai grew quite fast soon after I joined the editorial section of the Financial Express where he was the Consulting Editor. We shared great time together, often indulging in gossips of all hues, that too in the inevitable Sylheti dialect-both of us being Sylheties. He was an avid listener of music, especially Rabindra Sangeet and would occasionally chant his favourite lyrics while very much at work on his computer. Among the many things he took great fancy to talk about was the endearing personalities he had met in course of his long and colourful career as a journalist.  This, most people who knew him would agree, was a passion he so dearly cherished in his heart. Maybe, it was this fancy that led him to write obituaries of those he knew and admired.
He had written on almost everyone whose departure marked a void in society. He had written dozens of those-on politicians, journalists, artists, teachers. I once asked him to bring out a collection of the obituaries. He smiled adding very humbly that these were pieces written instantly and did not merit to be published in a collection. It is so saddening to recollect an anecdote when in a lighter vein I told him once not to forget to write my obituary. Zaglul bhai laughed and said, "I won't outlive you, no way, older as I am."  Now that I am struggling to write something on him, I visibly remember his face contoured to a calm sadness as he uttered those words. Could he imagine that things would be as they are now -- instead of him writing my obituary, it's me writing on him?
The other day when he came to office, he looked exhausted. He had returned a couple of days back from the USA with his wife after spending nearly a month with their daughter in Washington DC. Every time he spoke about his daughter, I saw his eyes turn moist. He had promised his daughter last time when he visited her that he would give up smoking. So he did, didn't touch a stick -- try as I did to test his will power.  This time, too, he spoke about his daughter and her husband - how caring they were. He spoke about his nephew Risham and his wife Sumaiya who are very close to my daughter and her husband in the small town of Folsom, California. He was worried, as he always was, about his ailing wife.
It's difficult to write on someone like Zaglul Ahmed Chowdhury who made it a passion of his life to love people around him and admire them whenever an opportunity offered. It's difficult to say adieu, Zaglul bhai!
wasiahmed.bd@hotmail.com