# The Magician's Death The old magician lay in the hospital bed—thin as a conjurer's trick, the nurses said. His skin had taken on the texture of ancient silk, yellowed by time and sun. The morphine drip hung beside him like a thin thread tying him to the world, and his breathing came shallow, almost apologetic. Dr. Mazumdar came by at three o'clock, as he did every afternoon. He checked the vitals, made notes on the clipboard, and said nothing. There was nothing left to say. The cancer had written its final chapter, and now they were merely watching the words fade into silence. The magician's daughter sat in the visitor's chair, her fingers braiding and unbraiding the strap of her handbag. She had been doing this for three days now, ever since her father stopped speaking. She waited for him to do something impossible—to vanish from the bed, to reappear whole and young in some other room, to make death itself a mere illusion. But he did not move. He only breathed, and each breath seemed to require a negotiation with the air itself. "Papa," she whispered, though she didn't know if he could hear her anymore. "Tell me the secret. Just one. Tell me how you made the crystal disappear that night at my wedding." The old man's eyes, milky as old glass, shifted slightly. A tremor moved across his lips. For a moment, she thought he might speak. But instead, his fingers—those famous fingers that had built entire worlds in the air—twitched once on the white sheet. She leaned forward, her ear near his mouth. "What is it, Papa? What are you trying to say?" The magician breathed out—a long, deliberate exhalation. And in that breath, she heard not words but something else: the sound of applause from a thousand phantom audiences, the whistle of coins vanishing into empty air, the gasp of children watching pigeons materialize from nothing. She understood then. This was the secret he was giving her. Not the mechanics of illusion, but something deeper—the understanding that magic had never been about fooling the eye. It had always been about reminding people that the world was far stranger, far more wonderful, than they believed. That wonder itself was the real disappearing act: how easily we lose it, how hard we must work to find it again. By evening, the breathing had changed. The rhythm that had sustained him for seventy-three years was becoming irregular, syncopated—like a magician losing his concentration mid-trick. At nine o'clock, his daughter took his hand. It was already growing cold, already becoming something else. "I'll remember," she promised. "I'll remember the way you made people smile when they needed it most." The magician's chest rose one final time—a last, perfect breath that seemed to contain everything he had ever known. Then, with no flourish, no dramatic gesture, he simply let it go. It was the simplest trick of all: the disappearance of breath into silence. The nurses came an hour later and did their professional things—checking for pulse, noting the time. Seven minutes past ten. When they pulled the sheet up over his face, no one gasped. There was no audience here anymore, only the quiet hum of machines and the soft sound of his daughter crying in the chair, her fingers still braiding and unbraiding the leather strap. In the morning, a young boy would read about the magician's death in the newspaper. He would stare at the photograph—the old man with his hand raised, seemingly suspended in mid-gesture—and he would feel something stir in his chest. A longing for wonder. A desire to learn impossible things. And in that moment, the magician's final trick would be complete. He would live on, not in memory, but in the eyes of every person who needed to believe that the world still held mysteries, that some things could never be fully explained, that magic—true magic—was simply the gap between what we see and what we're willing to imagine.

Sir, do you know how to sing?

No.

Do you understand music?

No.

Do you have knowledge of ragas?

No.

Meend, gamak, murcchana—what are these things?

I haven’t the faintest idea.

Then how did you become the first judge of the Little Song King competition?

There’s only one answer to that: “I made a mistake. As a human being, I have the right to be wrong.” The great scientist Einstein once judged a children’s poetry recitation. The novelist Charles Dickens judged a wrestling competition.

~ Humayun Ahmed

We’re thrust into this world without instruction, without so much as a manual on how to get through this brief little life. How much can anyone learn to use anything correctly from the very beginning, without a user’s manual? Can anyone do it? Perhaps some can. I cannot. I have every right to use life as I wish—rightly or wrongly. Before opening a coffee shop, you have to spend thousands of taka experimenting with coffee. That’s not wasteful spending at all.

Sometimes I wonder at the peculiar nature of our psychology. What heavenly pleasure we get from disrespecting great men! I do it too, whenever I get the chance. I’ve noticed that whether or not I can make myself into someone great, somehow the opportunity to insult the great ones always seems to fall into my lap. Quite often. And I never let that chance slip by. I take comfort in thinking of great men as ordinary, just like me. I go about broadcasting their faults while forgetting my own. My own defects feel far safer, far more secure. No one will ever bother worrying about them. Who even knows me, after all?

I rather enjoy remembering how Van Gogh cut off his ear for some beautiful courtesan. There’s a sickly satisfaction in thinking about how Paul Gauguin contracted venereal disease and died from it. Baudelaire’s indiscriminate taste in women gives me what secret delight! As if his creations couldn’t do that on their own. Though I might sit all day thinking and not a single line—forget a whole verse—of Tagore would come to my mind, here I am with such ease dissecting this venerable figure in the manner of the Kallol generation, with the arrogance of the unqualified! I put on Ranjan Bandyopadhyay and raise Rabi up, then drag him down. I send Sarat Chandra to the brothel whenever I please! Unblinking, I have him fall in love with some helpless courtesan on her deathbed. I don’t keep count of how many paintings Picasso made, but I keep count of his lovers on my lips! I curse Humayun relentlessly—the fool, why did he marry Shaon in his old age! Why did those sweet, beautiful simpletons choose Humayun as their first love! Our tragedy is that I’m in the field too, so why don’t they look at me with love in their eyes? And I never once wonder why they should look at me at all.

# The Hedonist

You’re free to judge as a viewer, sure—*Eyes Wide Shut* is nothing but soft pornography, a representative work of hedonist cinema. But the moment you say it in the same breath, “If not Stanley Kubrick, then who would make such a thing?” About this character—yes, he married three times, loved countless women, a twisted pervert who’d make such trash—blah blah blah. But I have an objection. Listen, stop right there! You’ve said quite enough! The things he created—you don’t even have the standing to think about them. I’m not saying you need to make a film yourself to critique Kubrick’s work. What I’m saying is: critique his films, no problem at all. But the moment you start speaking about his personal life in the same breath, you’re simply exposing your own diseased mind. Criticizing the creation is one thing; personal attacks on the creator are quite another, aren’t they? Talk about the work, why drag in the maker? Does every creation of a creator have to please you? An ignorant fool like you—the man’s soul would find more peace if you simply didn’t watch his movies. What doesn’t appeal to you, ignore it. Simple as that!

What has this man of questionable character given to the world? Could a hundred million virtuous people like you, combined, ever give the world even a fraction of what he has? One Stanley Kubrick inspired countless others—Scorsese, Spielberg, Cameron, Woody Allen, Nolan, Lynch, Burton, Noé. And from them, we’ve received the gift of cinema’s greatest works. Every moment, these great creators nourish us with the sustenance of living. What has your superior character ever done for this world, I ask? History is written by the talented, not by the virtuous.

—

The truth is, we have a real gift for cataloguing the sins of others. “The hunger to witness another’s shame is the greatest hunger of all.” How free we are from burden! We create nothing, but we critique everything. A dog swims across a pond, and we say, “The creature doesn’t even know how to swim!” The maturity of mind needed to admire greatness—we simply haven’t found it yet. We can’t humble ourselves before our own weakness, so true strength never falls to our lot. Rudeness and ignorance walk hand in hand. Because we’ve so readily opened the doors of our hearts to the small flaws of great people, the hunger to possess their greatness never quite gnaws at us with full force. And when some longing does spark up now and then, we no longer have the will to bear it. Our inability becomes something we need to keep alive. We look at them and think: *But what are you really? You’re just like me, ordinary.*

In this unfortunate country, small men have never lacked the opportunity to slight the great. Bengali literature has not produced a writer more beloved than Humayun Ahmed. Has any other writer’s work held Bengali readers so utterly spellbound? No television dramatist in Bangladesh has ever matched his gift for making drama matter to the masses. Those works—Day and Night, There Is No One Anywhere, Today Is Sunday, Bahubrihi, Oyomoy, Night of Stars—how they have tended to the inner landscape of our audience, year after year, with such devoted care. Many films have been made about the Liberation War. Yet which has achieved the acceptance of Agni Paroshmoni? Even Sunil Gangopadhyay, in interviews, has said repeatedly that no writer in West Bengal could even entertain the thought of achieving popularity like Humayun Ahmed’s. His short stories too are delicious! Had Humayun Ahmed written nothing but stories, those magnificent tales alone would have immortalized him. Yet we—we who have received so much from him—we wound him day after day, shameless, ungrateful, false, foolish as we are. Is there any nation more meddlesome, more sanctimonious and judgmental about others’ affairs than ours?

Oh, Humayun Ahmed! His pen could make you laugh or cry from the very same substance—sometimes you want to smile, sometimes to weep. A day we think will pass like any other day—if it brings us a small unexpected joy, then surely the magician of that small happiness deserves a little extra love. Life itself is made of these tiny happinesses. Happiness is beautiful! Humayun Ahmed was one of those magicians of the simple and the beautiful. This conjurer of words has now vanished into the silence beyond speech. The magician of the simple and the beautiful is gone. The man who could lift the heart is gone. Dear Humayun, may your creations endure. May you too be well. Death alone is the truth from which there is no exception. Yet some people come into the world who can defy death itself with the courage of John Donne, saying: And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. Those whom immortality does not require to die—Humayun Ahmed was one of those extraordinary souls.

Reading Humayun Ahmed’s books, you’d think every woman in the world is enchanting. In his telling, every woman is impossibly beautiful too. But that isn’t really true. This is the greatest problem with his writing. Ha ha ha! Reading Humayun Ahmed’s soft, tender, love-inducing prose, even an unemployed boy starts dreaming—that his beloved will thumb her nose at livelihood for the sake of love, and hang from his neck crying “Dugga! Dugga!” But reality, more often than not, is the opposite. The unemployed boy never becomes the girl’s husband; in time he becomes the uncle of her children. Women love for passion’s sake, but they marry for the ability to provide. Life is not like imagination; life is like life itself.

Yet Humayun Ahmed takes us by the hand to that realm of comfort where we live, or dream of living. We imagine ourselves as his story’s characters, want to see others that way too. We want to walk the path he showed us, hand in hand with someone beloved. We refuse to acknowledge that Hosen Miyan’s Mainadwip exists only in stories. Who wants to live in harsh reality, who truly wants to?

Therefore, Humayun alone is our first and final refuge!

I don’t usually get confused by young women with sweet voices. Experience has taught me that young women with sweet voices are generally as huge as Mount Maenad. The heavier they are, the more delicate their voice.
~ Humayun Ahmed

So true, boss!

Besides the Airavata breed, there are two other classes of sweet-voiced young women. One: little girls. Two: mature women. Therefore, dear reader, be warned!

Most beautiful women don’t have sweet voices. Most women who can tell amusing stories aren’t beautiful. You think her voice is charming, but behind closed doors, half of Bengal is laughing. Here’s another thing to remember. No woman will agree to talk to you past midnight on the very first day unless she’s had prior experience doing the same with some other fellow.

The same applies to men.

Be practical, friends. Life isn’t suddenly a Brishti film. Come on, the producer has to recover his investment, doesn’t he? But life is a different story. When a mountain meets a mouse, or a beast meets beauty, nobody’s investment is going to pay off.

On one of my birthdays, after receiving the gifts listed below, I wrote down the following thoughts:

Lungi: Rajdoot brand. Price 425 taka (plus VAT not mentioned).

Vest: Parrot brand with a horse design. Price 320 taka + VAT

Gift box: Made in China brand. Price 160 taka + VAT

A pair of cufflinks + tie pin + pen: Monex brand (price not written. But judging by the ridiculous markup on the vest and lungi, I suspect the idiot didn’t pay any less for this either.)

Gamcha: Brand name not mentioned. (I suspect the idiot got this for free and was thrilled about it.)

Yes, these are birthday gifts. They arrived at my place via Sundarbans Courier a week before my birthday. This lungi-bearing (note: lungi-clad) gift, the giver didn’t have the courage to hand to me directly. If someone had given me this face to face, I’d have at least thrown it back at them twice. When I saw the lungi inside the package, my mood got so bad that I didn’t even open the entire package that day. This morning, for some reason, I opened it, saw it, and laughed for a long time. The giver’s explanation was this: “You came up with the brilliant idea on Facebook of gifting men lungis, so I applied it to you.” Tell me, if you have a friend this ridiculously mischievous, what do you need an enemy for?

I have a legendary record of losing friends. Maintaining friendship with me is one of the noblest and most selfless acts in the world. My friendship with this particular friend has endured for several reasons:

1. She copies all my statuses into a Word file for me. That’s not the issue, really. The thing is, after copying them, she sends me the file in my inbox and asks me to collect it, and I’ve been downright rude about it—I’ve told her sharply: Don’t you dare! Don’t give me a headache. You don’t need to copy my statuses. Get lost! (My indifference to these matters is at that level!) But even after all that, she keeps doing it. And not just that—she’s even arranged for some of my writings to be published. (The funny thing is, she’s had to endure plenty of curses and neglect from me to make it happen. I didn’t even give her a proper title for the piece at first, didn’t write a bio for myself. Then here’s what she did—she wrote me up all flowery and grand and threatened me that if I didn’t write something myself, that blown-up version would go out as my author bio. Wouldn’t you feel like hitting her? Since I didn’t even give the writings their titles, she just made up titles herself and sent them to me—the kind of threat where someone keeps asking you to sing a song, and if you refuse, they say fine, I’ll just sing it myself! Something like that. Later I was pretty much forced to write a three-line author bio and titles for the pieces. It’s an anthology. There are many other writers’ works in it too. And I’m the only writer(!) whose work was included without having submitted anything myself—they collected my pieces. The amount of annoyance and insults I’ve given her for publishing my work is downright embarrassing and absurd! Yet she did it anyway, on the logic that she believes even a single dot from me carries real weight! So it needs to be published!)

2. She calls me a hundred times, and I occasionally pick up just to snap at her. (I have a terrible habit of not answering calls.) She doesn’t even get annoyed at that. It’s quite astounding!

3. The fact that I’m only now, so much later, opening this gift and publicly criticizing it to her—she must assume that even in this criticism there’s something artful! (Holy cow!)

4. She writes too. One writer promoting another writer this intensely—I haven’t seen anyone do it since Ahmad Iffat Chowdhury. (Pundits call him Salimullah Khan Chowdhury, the great Chowdhury. You can read his ‘Chowdhury Sanjeevani’ if you’d like.) For those who don’t know, let me explain. Humayun Ahmed became Humayun Ahmed largely because of Chowdhury’s tremendous effort. Chowdhury would literally grab people and rave about Humayun with genuine enthusiasm. The biggest role in getting Humayun Ahmed’s first novel, ‘Nondito Noroke,’ published was played by Ahmad Iffat Chowdhury. During Humayun’s difficult times, Chowdhury was always there beside him. Humayun Ahmed regarded Chowdhury as his mentor.

Phew! A friend’s selfless love is more dangerous than Jalil Uncle’s selfless love!! What is love?

Humayun Ahmed liberated many of us from the tyranny of the traditional novel. Though I myself took much longer to fully break free—caught for years in the snare of failed ideological posturing, turning my back on his work. I only began reading him seriously after his death. At the Amar Ekushey Book Fair that year after he passed, ‘The Wall’ came out. Standing in front of the ‘Onyo Prakash’ stall, I was overwhelmed watching the helpless crowds of the living bowing before the serene and astounding dominion of a great dead man! He was gone, yet the throng before his stall buying his books kept the staff scrambling. There are indeed some of the dead who transcend even envy.

On Facebook I write a series of thoughts called ‘The Plaster of the Wall of Thoughts.’ Thought number 138 in that series is about Humayun Ahmed. For those interested, I’m sharing the piece below—

“Humayun Ahmed went to a skin specialist one day. Let me tell you the story in his own words:

About fifty patients were sitting there. My number was fifty-one. So I sat, and sat. There was a certain embarrassment to it. The doctor’s huge signboard read—’Dermatology and Venereology Specialist.’ I kept thinking everyone must be assuming I was the one with the second kind of ailment.

Tell me, who else but Humayun Ahmed could have written this? Can anyone in our country show me another writer who has? To those who prefer to forget that Humayun was a writer and instead dance around him as Shaon’s husband, I say: if the itching gets too much, apply some Pavesin in the right place, or take that thousand and one Arabian night I’m giving you and try to write something like ‘The Blessed Hell’ that Humayun wrote in one night. Go ahead, write a single line if you can! You cursed scribblers!

There was a time when people in Bangladesh read only West Bengal’s Sunil, Sumresh, and Shirshendu. Humayun brought home readers back home. When someone said Humayun had increased the number of readers in Bangladesh, he joked in response—

Another false thing is said about me. They say I increased the number of book readers. But I didn’t increase readers at all. If I had increased readers, then everyone’s books would sell more. I only increased my own readers. If I had increased readers overall, then all books would sell more.

True enough! Our readers read Humayun Ahmed’s books more than they read books in general. Japanese people read Haruki Murakami more than they read books in general. When a writer called Humayun Ahmed a cheap commercial hack, I heard a publisher respond on a talk show, “Brother, it’s only because I print Humayun Ahmed’s books that I can recover the losses I make printing books by writers like you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have the nerve to publish them at all.” I say the same thing: we’ve watched Sakib play cricket more than we’ve watched Bangladesh play cricket. We’re fortunate—Sakib is our son.

Right now, we desperately need at least one more irreverent writer like Humayun and a few more cocky players like Sakib.

But let me return to the old saying, which I believe with all my heart:

Though my guru may go to the tavern,

Yet my guru
is Nityananda Ray.

These two lines are quite
famous. Many have read Ahmed Shafiq’s “Yet My Guru.” But who actually wrote these lines? The Anandabazar Patrika tells us:

‘Though my guru frequents the tavern / Yet my guru is Nityananda Ray.’ A sacred text was dedicated to the ‘Northern Drunkards’ using these two lines as an epigraph. The author: Gora Ray. This obscure wandering writer has playfully woven profound philosophies about liquor into countless tales from his travels across lands. The remarkable book about bottles is not called a bottle at all—it’s called the Pint Purana (Bibhab). In the preface, the author writes about himself: ‘Gora Ray was born in the Treta Yuga. The purpose of his life is to acquire knowledge on sundry subjects beyond conventional education and distribute it freely…. The geographer Gora wishes to prove that three-quarters of the earth is water.’ And to prove this, Gora has crafted a wondrous aquatic mirror. Finally, there are annotations listing various drinks—from whiskey to scotch—along with facts about chaats. Has Radhaprasad Gupta, alias Shantubabu, that worthy Northern Drunkard, finally been liberated from the bottle this time? Alongside is the book’s cover. Soumayen Paul has designed it using a fresco from a tavern roof in Alicante, Spain, and various beer company labels, advertisements, and beer-related cartoons.

In the twenty-fourth chapter of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa’s teachings, Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita—”The father is dharma; the father is heaven; the father is the supreme”—we find:

[Worshipping the guru as one’s chosen deity—one must not abandon the guru even if he is of immoral character]

Girendra—
Sir! What if one’s father and mother have committed some grave offense, some terrible sin?

Sri Ramakrishna—
So be it. Even if the mother is of loose character, you must not abandon her. Some gentlemen, when their guru’s wife lost her virtue, suggested they take the guru’s son as their teacher instead. I said to them: What? Leave the master and follow the disciple? Does it matter if she has fallen? Know him as your chosen deity. ‘Though my guru frequents the tavern, yet my guru is Nityananda Ray.’

So these two lines are Sri Ramakrishna’s own. Later, they have been quoted in various places. Not to abandon the guru even if he is of immoral character—what a precious teaching! And so we see how the disciple Sunil Gangopadhyay lies day after day at the feet of his drunken guru, the novelist Kamalakumar Majumdar. The company of a learned man of bad character is better than that of an ignorant man of good character.

I’ll end with a quiz: Can anyone tell me the name of that snobbish writer from the talk show?

One cannot leave behind beloved people. Or become beloved to anyone……. It is so terribly wrong…..so terribly……

Dear Humayun,
you are gone today. It is so hard
to accept. How much joy you have left us through your creations!…….May you too be at peace.