# About Humayun Ahmed He arrives like someone who has misplaced an appointment. There's no hurry in his movements, no urgency in his glance. The world around him seems to operate at a different speed—faster, louder, more insistent—but he moves through it with the calm of a man who knows a secret no one else does. Humayun Ahmed. The name sits on the tongue like a familiar melody, one you've hummed without thinking, then suddenly recognize as something profound. He writes as though confessing to an old friend. There's an intimacy in his prose that disarms you. You are not reading; you are overhearing. The boundaries between the writer and the reader dissolve somewhere in the middle of a sentence, and you find yourself nodding as though you've known this all along. His Dhaka is not the Dhaka of maps and statistics. It is a Dhaka of narrow lanes and unspoken longings, of tea stalls where men discuss philosophy and loss, of rooms where light falls in particular ways and changes everything. His characters are not heroes or villains—they are neighbors, relatives, the person sitting across from you on a bus, harboring small rebellions and secret joys. There is something deeply Bengali in his work, yet strangely universal. A mother's worry transcends geography. A young man's confusion belongs to all times. A moment of beauty—a monsoon afternoon, a child's laughter, the smell of old paper—these are the currencies of his writing, and they are valid everywhere. He built a world so convincing that readers entered it not as visitors but as residents. They knew its corners. They could navigate its darkness and find their way to its gentle light. This is the peculiar magic of a true storyteller: he makes you forget you are reading. He makes you believe you are living.

One.
If you love someone, if being with them is where your heart wants to stay, then they are not wrong in any sense—not truly. All that talk about wrongness is society's invention. Our only real mistake is treating society as God. We might call this a kind of helplessness too, because most of us have no real way out of it. From our families we inherit these very same ideas and teachings. Whatever society thinks, our parents think, and they force us to think the same way—which is why, in a manner of speaking, none of us ever truly see God.

Everyone who has stepped outside society's rules, we have boycotted them. The clearest example before our very eyes is Humayun Ahmed. We cannot seem to get enough of discussing his second marriage. And yet, my personal feeling—which may well be wrong—is that toward the end he wrote some 'drivel,' perhaps; (I mean his capacity for writing was so, so much greater) yes, fine, which is why he's been called a 'commercial writer' many times over.

But think about it for a moment: if Humayun Ahmed had not married Shaon, he might have surrendered to loneliness much earlier, and as a result, much of what he wrote after 2003 we would never have received at all. Whether the man himself would have even survived properly, whether he would have lived at all—that too is worth considering! We criticize freely enough, but have any of us ever truly cared about or even known about the well-being of Humayun Ahmed's heart and mind? We cannot take responsibility for anyone's emotional health, and yet when someone does whatever they must to preserve their own mind, we reserve the right to dissect their every action!

Shaon himself must have understood all this, or else her own accomplishments are endless—she hardly needed to become the wife of some famous man! Yes, what I'm saying is, Shaon genuinely loved Humayun Ahmed, and so she saved him from the grip of loneliness. There are other opinions on this, of course. Let me be clear: if you harbor the absurd notion that a married person is by definition freed from loneliness, then abandon that idea at once, if you have any mental maturity at all.

It's possible too that Humayun Ahmed took Shaon's hand in order to save his gift for writing—which is to say, to save himself. He could have done anything—a secret live-in arrangement, an affair, anything at all—but he didn't. He married her publicly, openly. The reason is simple: he was Humayun Ahmed. To reach his level, you cannot treat society as God, you simply cannot, cannot, cannot! No genius in history has ever been recognized by the society of their own time. Society will tolerate secret infidelity, but it cannot bear public love! Ah, the height of society's hypocrisy!

Many of those who profess to treat society as God, to its face, secretly believe in their hearts that Humayun Ahmed was a man of the greatest stature for his writings and for the courage to marry Shaon—but they will not admit this aloud, out of 'fear of society.' Here was such an extraordinary writer setting such a profound example, and yet we continue to misunderstand it entirely!

Geniuses must be allowed to thrive by their own grammar, their own rules. If this does not happen, history will certainly be robbed of several of its brightest passages. Our way of thinking will not align with theirs, and that is exactly as it should be. Society's grammar is, after all, the grammar of the ordinary, not the grammar of genius. History bears witness: lawlessness is the only law that geniuses know!

Two.

After Humayun Ahmed’s death, there was an enormous amount of fuss and bother over Shaon. Enormous—I mean truly enormous! And rather ugly, at that. Many people said many things, though I never heard Gultekdin publicly discuss Shaon much or make unflattering remarks about her. But the perpetually curious types have always gabbed away with all manner of absurd talk, most of it pure speculation.

When Humayun Ahmed approached Shaon, she hadn’t even passed her SSC yet. The way he went about it—a girl that age receiving a proposal of love in such a style from someone like Humayun Ahmed? Any girl would have fallen in love. And Shaon was just a child then!

Yet Humayun Ahmed loved Gultekdin too. A person can love more than one person at the same time—that’s my verdict as someone who has read and observed human nature closely. Gultekdin was one of his finest readers. Their connection was essentially rooted in his writing. Gultekdin played a huge role in his work. What happened with Shaon was something altogether different. You can see from reading many of his stories just how deeply Humayun Ahmed understood Shaon. Perhaps Shaon never understood herself the way he understood her.

Shaon is an extraordinarily talented person. She let Humayun Ahmed be himself. She tried to understand her writer-husband. You have to let a writer be the way he is—something most writers’ wives don’t quite grasp. To do otherwise is to murder the talent of a gifted human being. That’s a grave sin. In nurturing Humayun Ahmed’s inner world, Shaon made every kind of sacrifice, and with a smile on her face. There’s something peculiar about her that stirs beautiful thoughts in all of us.

Gultekdin, meanwhile, was a terribly prideful woman. Even after Humayun Ahmed’s death, she couldn’t bring herself to come see him. Such pride, such hurt—you don’t find it without tremendous wounds. But when Shaon entered Humayun Ahmed’s life, he was alone; he wasn’t with Gultekdin. They weren’t officially separated, but they lived apart. Yes, Humayun Ahmed spent four years living alone before he married Shaon.

Humayun Ahmed was a wonderful father. All his children love him dearly. The whole thing is like a complex equation. To comment on it without understanding would be foolish. Yet how easily people speak in oversimplifications without knowing the facts! It’s easy to carp at geniuses, after all—they simply don’t have the time or the temperament to deal with that sort of thing!

In a state of profound mental distress, Humayun Ahmed wanted to hold Shaon’s hand. That was a strange thing. That someone could want another person beside them in such a peculiar, beautiful way—only Humayun Ahmed knew that. It was impossible not to love him.

My cousin’s husband doesn’t care for Humayun Ahmed for some bizarre reason. When my cousin was crying like a madwoman after Humayun’s death, my brother-in-law pointed to my aunt and said, “Look at your foolish, useless sister! Imagine crying like this over someone like Humayun Ahmed! And look at that imbecile Shaon!” My aunt flew into such a rage she shouted, “You forced my family to marry me off to you because of your job. Otherwise, I’d never have married an ordinary fellow like you. Besides a job, what accomplishments or qualities do you even have to speak of?”

“If in this life I ever got the chance to be Humayun Ahmed’s eighth wife, I wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving a man like you.” Dulabhai had stormed out of the house, stung and furious, after hearing Apu say that. I’d told her that day, “Dulabhai is an engineer, Apu. He doesn’t read literature, doesn’t understand it. How can he possibly understand Humayun Ahmed? Tell me. Dulabhai may be brilliant, but he’s no genius. Why were you expecting an ordinary man—someone who’s never even read Humayun Ahmed—to understand him? Besides, established men, as a rule, can’t stomach genius-types. Don’t be upset. Let it go.”

Gultekin settled down with someone else, as far as I know. She’s doing well. Seeing her do well makes us genuinely happy. We want everyone to be fine in their own way, to have the courage to be fine. Society won’t keep anyone happy—it doesn’t have that power. What’s churning in someone’s heart, only they know it; often, no one else can even guess. Yet almost everyone fancies themselves an expert at judging others!

To me, the whole thing seems terribly complicated. Humayun Ahmed and Gultekin. Or Humayun Ahmed and Shaon. Two wonderful relationships, each in their own right. But the moment it became a triangle, the moment all these people had to be tied together by a single thread, complexity crept in. We did more damage than they ever did. Was any of it necessary?

I’ve never heard Gultekin disrespect Shaon in front of anyone. She always sidestepped it with great finesse. We ordinary people can’t sidestep—we can’t resist the temptation to judge. We lack that smartness, that grace of leaving other people’s personal affairs alone. We feel uneasy whether someone is doing well or doing poorly. The truth is, we don’t really know who’s doing well and who isn’t. Funny, isn’t it?