The Tale of a Hero

2006. The admission exam for Chittagong University’s Law Faculty was underway.

: Young man, why are you coming here?

: Madam, I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m just taking the exam.

: No, no, that’s not what I mean. Don’t you know we have two disability quotas here? No one even applied this year. If you had just applied, you could have gone straight to the interview.

: I know, Madam. But I don’t think I have any problem. I have the ability to fight. That’s why I didn’t apply under the quota.

This story belongs to someone who, at the age of four, was burned in an accident. Let me tell you what happened. Deep in the night. A village home in a remote part of Sylhet. He was sleeping beside his grandmother, along with two other siblings. In the adjoining birthing room, their mother slept with the youngest brother, only nine days old. Their father, a primary school teacher, lived in another sub-district with another sister for his job. The sister attended school there. As usual, grandmother got up to go outside with the three siblings. The other two got up. She called him too. For some reason that day, with sleep-heavy eyes, he said, “I won’t go.” A kerosene lamp flickered on a low stool beside the bed. The grandmother, over eighty and with poor eyesight, didn’t see well. As she got down from the bed, the bottom of the mosquito net fell onto the lamp. Without noticing, grandmother latched the door and went outside. The net caught fire and within moments flames spread wildly around the entire room. The leaping flames seemed to want to burst through the roof! In an instant, the scorching smoke filled everything with suffocating density. That day grandmother had mistakenly secured the outer latch of the birthing room door, which had bolts on both sides. After the fire started, mother struck the door again and again with all the strength in her weak, ailing body, but could do nothing except wail loudly. The frightened four-year-old child, awakened from deep sleep, was so terrified that day he even forgot to cry. The fire didn’t touch him directly, but the blazing heat in that small room seared his little hands and face. Later, due to wrong treatment or lack of proper care, his fingers bent permanently. All the fingers on both hands shifted to one corner; where our fingers normally are, he has none—they somehow dangle from the side of his hands. (I don’t know what this is called; I think it’s called nerve contracture. My doctor friends could explain it better.)

That child learned to write again through countless hardships. The dangling, motionless fingers slowly became functional in the company of the pen. Enduring the cruel world’s twisted stares, ugly mockery, contempt, and ridicule, he too grew up one day. On that day, driven by fierce self-respect, he took the Law Faculty entrance exam like any other student, without seeking any special advantage. Because he was a bit weak in English, he didn’t get in. Yet by applying under the quota, he could have easily studied law at the university. From childhood, he had never lost to himself, and not that day either.

He desperately wanted to become a doctor; to give proper treatment to burn victims. But he couldn’t get into medical school. Failing biology in the entrance exam meant he couldn’t get into Dhaka University’s A unit. He had gotten into Chemistry at Chittagong University, but his family wouldn’t send him so far from home to study. That freshly HSC-passed teenager was determined never to apply anywhere using quota benefits as long as he lived. Do you know the story of the bumblebee? Given a bumblebee’s physical structure, it shouldn’t be able to fly. No law of biology or physics can explain the mystery of its flight. But bumblebees fly just fine. A scientist gave a wonderful explanation for this. He said, “The bumblebee doesn’t know it shouldn’t be able to fly. If it knew, it never could.” The hero of my story was like that too. He never considered himself sick. He would break before he would bend; his willpower was that strong. Later he took the exam at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet. It seemed to him that SUST was Bangladesh’s best university, because at that time there were no quota benefits there. Everyone had to fight for their place. At SUST he got into three departments. He enrolled in Economics. Why? Not many people wanted to get close to him. Everyone seemed to avoid him somehow. The only two friends who would spend time with him, who loved him, who at least gave him some time, had enrolled in Economics; so he enrolled there too, so someone would be with him, beside him, who wouldn’t pity him, who would speak with a smile, the way Tom Hanks in Cast Away, unable to bear the helpless loneliness of that deserted blue island, bloodied his hand and put handprints on a ball, named it Wilson, and talked to it. You need someone to talk to! How does someone whom no one loves survive in this world? Studying is far from the question!

The greatest advantage of being physically disabled was this: ordinary people considered him very close, shared everything with him, told him about their joys and sorrows. He had far more opportunities to mix with everyone than many others. This way, he learned to understand the world around him much better. Someone whom no one wants in the family, whose presence or absence makes no difference to anyone, is very fortunate; he has the greatest opportunity to know and understand life. For those whose very existence is a bonus, there’s nothing to lose; expectations are low, so gains are much greater; like the water nymph in Shirshendu’s “The Swimmer and the Water Nymph.”

One day in a doctor’s waiting room. Some medical representatives sat nearby.

: Why are you in this condition, brother? Your life is over!

: Where is it over, brother? I’m still alive!

: Living with such struggle and not living are the same thing! There’s nothing left in life.

: Brother, what does having something in life mean to you?

: Well, a good job, marrying a beautiful girl, fun and enjoyment. That’s all!

: But brother, that’s not what it means to me. Does life mean the same thing to everyone? To me, life means infinity. You know what infinity means, right? Endless. Add a 1 to it, or subtract it. What difference does it make? Will there be any change? There won’t be. It will remain exactly as it was. At least I have fingers on my hands—many people don’t even have those. They live too, don’t they? How do they live? Who are you to determine the meaning of someone’s life?

: Sorry brother, I never thought about it this way. Please don’t mind.

: Oh no, brother! What are you saying! I’m used to hearing all this. Whatever you say about me, it won’t affect me. Because I know what I am. You didn’t say anything particularly harsh—even if you had said something worse, I could have digested it. But I have an earnest request: never speak this way to anyone else like me. Not everyone can handle being spoken to this way. Not everyone has the strength to enjoy such bitter words. What do you gain by breaking someone?

When he was at university, he was involved in student politics. He practiced healthy politics. His picture appeared on the front pages of some national dailies due to some internal SUST incidents. In his thinking, “If politics can be done properly, you can learn many things. You can understand life. It becomes easier to know yourself.” ……. Near the end of fourth year. Then suddenly one day he realized that in this politics, many people become career students, staying at the university for years, wallowing in the greed for various senior positions. This is not life. Like Milan Kundera, he too thought, life is not here; life is elsewhere!

Honors finished. The BCS circular came out. Under pressure and requests from parents, siblings, relatives, and friends at home, despite his strong reluctance, he applied to BCS under the preference quota. From then on, a kind of intense guilt and remorse grew within him. He almost stopped eating and drinking and began trying hard. He believed that if you sincerely ask the Creator for something good, and try with all your heart and soul to get it, He never sends you away empty-handed. He desperately wanted that instead of getting Foreign or Admin cadre through the preference quota, he should get Education cadre through merit quota. He would do the job. Like Azhar Khan in Humayun Ahmed’s story ‘Sourav,’ he would lead a simple, happy life. Poverty is far better than regret. Then he decided that since the mistake had already been made, if he got the job through quota he wouldn’t join, he would take the exam again next time. Having never taken favors or advantages from anyone in 25 years of life, how could he work the remaining 34 years with this self-torment of favoritism? He took the exam. Results came out. He got the job on merit; in Admin cadre. The Creator gives everyone their due honor. The world saw this once again.

The person who inspired him to first dream of becoming a BCS cadre was from his same village, the neighboring house; a member of BCS Police cadre. That ever-smiling, gentle man contracted an incurable disease and passed away a year after joining service. His body was brought from Thailand. The next day his funeral prayer was scheduled for 11 AM. To see his hero of inspiration one last time, he went to Sylhet. Getting up at 5 AM, bathing and setting off, crossing the Surma river and riding a motorcycle, when he reached the funeral site, the body had just been laid in the grave. He didn’t know the religious rituals after death very well. He told someone beside the grave, “Brother, I want to see his face. I came all this way just for this. I want to see him one last time.” The cloth was removed from the corpse’s face. The man who had shown him dreams was asleep. Dreams had become dreams forever. Perhaps R.K. Narayan’s profound words echoed in his mind: What is the use of the lamp when all its oil is gone? The graveyard soil, wet with tears, became wet once more in thousand-year-old familiarity; nothing more.

I’m ending this piece by changing some of his words somewhat to my own style. “Brother, you’re 5’11”. If you tried, you could at most become 6 feet. I can become a little fairer than I am now. If you wanted, you could perhaps increase your wealth a bit more. Nothing more than that. You can never become the owner of the entire world. You can never become the most handsome man in the world. Because all these things are relative. The Creator has set their limits. Only one treasure of yours can you increase or decrease at will. That is your mind. You can control your mind. Think a little—what could you do so that your friends would love you more, people around you would respect you more, your parents and relatives would be proud of you, you could proudly tell everyone about your achievements, and all of this would be in a way that you yourself would love. In short, at the end of the day, everyone would call you good, would wish you well, would think about you even a little. This is inspiration. This is worth risking your life for. You can walk the path of dreams while being sincere to your decisions. With this emotion of ours, we can make our minds work to our advantage.”

P.S. Let me give you another fact. Throughout SUST, he was one of the 2-3 people everyone knew for beautiful handwriting.