Now that April is here

April is the cruellest month, as T S Eliot put it. And then there was Robert Browning who longed to be in England in April. William Shakespeare, in his jocular way, had this to place before his readers: 'Men are April when they woo, December when they wed.' Cyril Tourneur celebrates April thus: 'I shine in tears like the sun in April.'
And now that April is back in our lives, we look to Pahela Baishakh in the middle of the month. If that causes happiness to arise in our souls, there is too the unending sense of tragedy associated with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. There are at the same time memories of the near disaster the astronauts of Apollo-13 came up against in April 1970 when their moon-bound spacecraft was forced to limp back to Earth when it began to malfunction. In April, we remember. It is a season of remembering, of a launch capsize in Bangladesh years ago.
In April, it is the death of powerful men, individuals who once defined the political centre of gravity around the world we recollect in our quiet moments at twilight. It was on 15 April 1865 that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at a theatre in Washington, becoming the first of four American Presidents to be murdered. We travel back to the Second World War, to the last gasp of it, and remember that on 12 April 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at the beginning of his fourth term as United States (US) President. He was succeeded by Harry Truman, who a few months later had tens of thousands of Japanese perish in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the fourth day of April, it is memories of Martin Luther King Jr which assail the soul. On this day in 1968, he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. It was the end of a life dedicated to non-violence. King's death was the silencing of an exceptional orator in our times. On the same day, albeit eleven years later in 1979, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged in Pakistan after a kangaroo court verdict pronounced on the orders of a ruthless military dictator. Pakistan's people are yet paying the price for that judicial murder.
Going back to the Second World War, it is Adolf Hitler we remember for the chaos and conflagration he caused in Europe. It was his fate to be born on an April day and then die, apparently by suicide, on 30 April 1945. He thus escaped being tried in Nuremberg, where most of his close collaborators were marched to the gallows for the crimes they committed between 1939 and 1945.
In our part of the world, the once influential Sher-e-Bangla Abul Kashem Fazlul Huq succumbed to advanced age on 27 April 1962. His role in South Asian politics, especially on both sides of the old, pre-partition Bengal, remains a pivotal aspect of history. In post-1947 conditions, his role as chief minister of East Bengal, as interior minister of Pakistan and as governor of East Pakistan is history which should enlighten the young in Bangladesh.
April is also a season to remember the passing of other individuals who once mattered in diverse regions of the globe. Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, who ruled Pakistan as a dictator between 1958 and 1969, was felled by a heart attack on 19 April 1974. His one-time protégé Bhutto, at the time Pakistan's Prime Minister, avoided going to his funeral but later explained, in his self-serving fashion, that security considerations had precluded his presence on the occasion.
In Afghanistan, the communists seized power in April 1978. Describing their takeover as the Saur Revolution, they proceeded to assassinate President Sardar Mohammad Daoud and his entire family on 28 April 1978, dumping their corpses at locations not known to people. It was thirty years later that Daoud's remains were located. His bones were identified through the presence of a miniature golden copy of the Koran that had been gifted to him by Saudi King Khalid.
Richard Nixon, the first and so far the only US President to resign, as a consequence of the Watergate scandal, died on 22 April 1994. Thus did his colourful political career, as a Congressman, Senator, Vice President, defeated presidential candidate in 1960, defeated gubernatorial candidate in 1962, as President elected in 1968, come to a heart-breaking close. With his keen understanding of foreign policy and geopolitics, Nixon made the opening to China in 1972 and engaged the Soviet Union on détente. None of his successors have been able to match his record in diplomacy.
A consequential politician we will not forget in April is Ahmed Ben Bella. Long a fighter against the French colonial power for Algeria's freedom, Ben Bella took charge of the country at its independence as Prime Minister. He later became President and it was in this capacity that he was overthrown by his defence minister Houari Boumeddiene in 1965. Ben Bella spent a long number of years in prison before he was freed. He tried to be President again, but times had changed. He died on 11 April 2012.
If April is a recalling of sadness descending on the world, there are too the bright moments we recall in Bangladesh. It was in April 1971 that the Mujibnagar government, with Tajuddin Ahmad as the leading light, took form and substance, to lead us to battlefield victory against the Pakistan army. A year later, in April 1972, a special committee of the Bangladesh Constituent Assembly, on the directives of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, got down to the business of drafting a constitution for the republic.
In April 1953, Dag Hammarskjoeld took over as Secretary General of the United Nations. A deeply spiritual man, as his book 'Markings' reveals, he led the global body through some of the more tempestuous of times during the Cold War. He perished on a peace mission to the Congo in September 1961. In April 1974, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan concluded a tripartite treaty aimed at promoting reconciliation in South Asia.
Communist forces freed Vietnam of foreign control through smashing to victory in Saigon on the last day of April 1975. South Vietnam and North Vietnam thus reverted to being a unified country. Only days earlier, the Khmer Rouge had taken control of Cambodia. They would then inaugurate the genocide of their own people, sending as many as two million of them to death.
In April, we sing of the joys of spring. In April, under skies laden with heavy kalbaishakhi clouds, we shed tears in remembrance of the times when the hearts in us cracked, over and over again.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a senior journalist and writer.
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