My parents . . . through October memories

For me, for my siblings, for our clan, it is the week when we remember my parents. We remember them, indeed, every day. There are all those moments when we forget that they do not live any more, that in their graves they have now been reduced to dust. Their voices, their laughter, their emotions are realities we have grown up with. The simple, humble lives they led, the long struggle they had to go through in order to provide a decent education for their children, the silence in which they suffered even as they tried to ensure comforts, however tenuous or tentative, for their children, for us, is what we remember.
In October, the remembrance takes on a poignancy that tears through the soul and pierces the heart. There is something, there are many things, about October that call forth the images of my parents, that speak once again to us of the essence of life they embodied for us. My father and my mother married on 21 October 1951 in a little village named Demra, a few hundred feet away from Taraganj on the banks of the Sitalakhya. It was one of those traditional weddings when my father took my mother home to his village Noagaon, in Araihazar upazila of today's Narayanganj district. The journey was by boat down the Sitalakhya from Demra to Ghorashal, from where they took a bus, one of those old-fashioned ones which operated in the 1950s, to Purinda. From Purinda, where they were welcomed by my father's many cousins, my mother the new bride was put in a palki. My father and his cousins walked behind the palki, through the fields of rice and jute (no roads existed between Purinda and Noagaon) to our ancestral village. My aged grandparents, in the severe austerity of their lives, welcomed their daughter-in-law home.
That was a long time ago. America still had Harry Truman in the White House. Winston Churchill was at 10 Downing Street. And Liaquat Ali Khan had been assassinated only days earlier. My parents did not stay long in Noagaon. Within a fortnight they were on their way to Quetta, through a long circuitous route that took them by train from Dacca (as it was spelt then) to Delhi and then to the border between India and Pakistan. From Lahore it was again a long journey to my mother's new home in Baluchistan --- my father had already been in Quetta since the day Pakistan came into being --- a land that was as alien to her as the lunar landscape. She who had never been away from her village, except for occasional trips to the little town of Narayanganj, now found herself setting up home a thousand miles away amidst the mountains that ringed Quetta.
And then their children were born. There were to be five of us, four boys and a girl. My father and my mother, having developed friendships in Quetta that were to last long, made sure that their social life would not be undermined through unwise planning. As a government servant, my father earned a decent enough salary but that came under enormous strain when he and my mother decided that we children had to go to the best schools in town. And off we went to the missionary schools which, it must be made clear, were to serve as a strong base for the careers we were to have later. The youngest child in the family, the baby of the family, was an exception in terms of education: he went to school in Dhaka. So here was the conundrum: my parents went through excruciating suffering as they gave us the best in terms of academic life, but they also had those bills that needed to be cleared. Winter was a beautiful time in Quetta, but I remember the struggle my parents put up when the need for fresh new sacks of coal for the fireplace came up. There were the new textbooks, which cost a fortune, that they had to provide for their children every March when new classes commenced. School uniforms were another priority.
My parents should have lived a more comfortable life, like so many others of their friends. I have seen my father worry incessantly about money, especially in Bangladesh, where we moved from Pakistan on a rain-drenched evening in July 1971. I remember my mother keeping a cheerful countenance as she prepared frugal meals for the family. I remember this wonderful couple and I often wish they did not have to close their eyes on the world so soon. If a miracle happened, if they could arise from their graves, we would take them on a beautiful journey around the world and beyond.
There was romance in the lives of my parents. My father had a strong sense of humour but at the same time was not ready to take nonsense from anyone. He was a stickler for discipline, a proper martinet. He loved music and movies. He once sat through three consecutive shows of the Dilip Kumar-Nadira-Nimmi starrer Aan. He loved humming the songs of Talat Mahmood. My mother, like her siblings, was always in a mood for singing. She was named Suraiya. She was beautiful. And she was absolutely in love with the songs of that other beautiful woman, the other Suraiya whose melody and screen presence created waves all across the subcontinent.
My father died on the night of 25 October 1992. As we went into preparations for his burial, my mother sat down on her prayer mat, where she broke into tears. It broke our hearts to see the heartbreak in her. Suddenly the man in her life was gone, he who had been with her through springtime and summer, he who had shared happiness and sorrow with her in the fall of the leaves in autumn, in the coming of cold winds and snow in winter. She cried. We did not stop her.
And then she, my mother, had the life going out of her fourteen years later on the night of 28 October 2006.
The music stopped that night. The stars hung low in the stillness of the nocturnal moments.
Today, the breeze wafting through the foliage around our parents' graves in Noagaon are resplendent with the scent of flowers. We stand before their graves, at twilight and in the light of the moon and in monsoon rain, speaking to them in the silence that comes of undying love.
My nieces and my nephew wonder if their grandfather and grandmother are two of the brightest stars hanging over the placidity of the cemetery in the night.r
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor, 
The Daily Observer