The death of a news sub

THE news that Humayun Zaman died came as a shock on Sunday evening — not because something unexpected happened but because something unwarranted took place. We all knew, in the back of mind, that anything serious, the worst, could happen any time, as it did, but we all expected, in the front of our mind, that he would get back amidst us, toiling away copies sitting on computer, which he had never been comfortable with, in his cubicle between entertaining enactments of anecdotes, imaginary or real.

He had met with an accident — a taxi ran over the bridge of the left leg when he was walking down the road home, causing a fracture in the heel bone — more than three months ago. Tests run on him then said that he had been suffering from cancer in the lung. While he was getting ready, or being readied, for the treatment of the lung cancer, which we came to know was in stage 3, he developed pleurisy and was then taken to hospital, in the morning on September 20, when he felt further ill; he had a minor surgery. Long before, in 2008, he had stenting in the heart after he had fallen ill one morning.

We knew it could happen and it was evidently not the death — the inevitable, premature, perhaps, even at the ripe age of 61 — that saddened us; it was a life already lived, seen from close-up, only partially, and from long-shot, without details, that did. An acquaintance and fellow newspaperman for me for more than two decades and a colleague for about a decade, Humayun Zaman had his first taste of journalism with Sangbad, for a brief period, a year and a half or so, when he, in his early twenties, was a student of what has now (since 2008) come to be known as the fine arts faculty of the University of Dhaka. The present-day university faculty, which earlier was an institute, had then been known as the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts.

Before moving to New Age, where he had been an associate editor until his death, he had worked with different newspapers that include the now-defunct Bangladesh Times and Morning News, the New Nation and the Independent, first beginning as a sports sub and then moving into the central desk, as print journalists call the one that is manned by people dealing with main-page news.

He had also worked, towards the close of the 1990s, with the Associated Press of Bangladesh, a news agency that he had outlived in less than a year. He also worked with the film magazine Chitrali, as a contributor, understandably out of his passion for films and film-making; he had in his mind even a year before his death that someday he would make a film, rich in techniques with an equal richness of the plot, perhaps having the sequence of a train whistling along the railway through a village — an image that he had talked about on many occasions, especially in late-night chat sessions as we waited well past the midnight establishing if we would need to run a further (city) edition of the day’s newspaper.

His other passion that he left behind long ago, with a tinge of pain that would become evident from the gleam flashing and dying on his face, was painting and drawing portraits. We have never seen any of his drawings but he seemed to be having a good understanding of such matters. He would always think that he could have excelled in it if he had put in some efforts; whenever he would talk about painting, he so did with a sigh, carefully hidden behind his mischievous smile.

He loved collecting books, reading them too. He frequented markets of books, old and new, at Shahbagh, Nilkhet and, occasionally, Paltan, at times, when he did not have the required money to buy the books, paying the seller a portion of the bill in advance for the books to be stashed away for later collection. He would spend any amount on any titles that he thought he would need later in his life. But he stopped dying for titles a year before his death; he still continued buying books though.

It was as a regular at the book market at Shahbagh that I met Humayun Zaman for the first time in the early 1990s. I had to sell books, for a very brief period, and maintain cash at a shop at the market. Since then, we chanced on each other, at the book market, both being buyers, and elsewhere, as acquaintances. Then I became his fellow newspaperman by taking up a subbing job on the sports desk at the Daily Star. He too began his career with the sports desk. Then we became colleagues, first at the Associated Press of Bangladesh in 1998 for a few months, then at New Age, for about a decade.

We, all in the newsroom, came close and drifted away, off and on, in these years. We, many of us, continued returning home from office and returning to office from home, as Humanyun Zaman did, but for his evening-time ambling about book shops when he had his day off, daylong outings in Old Town of Dhaka, not on every holiday, spending time with his childhood friends, some of whom he had always helped financially, delving into the dolour of the kind of I-don’t-know-why. A bachelor that he was, Humayun Zaman would often say that he had no one to turn back to. But he had been tied to places — and had places to turn to — such as Old Town of Dhaka, and Kolkata, perhaps, where he spent his early days of childhood but could hardly remember those days. He often talked of visiting Kolkata. His father, who was a journalist, worked there, as here in Dhaka; his grand-father, also a journalist, was editor of two newspapers there.

He was a man to warily reckon with and all that we know of him was from what he talked about in the late-night, newsroom chats, sometimes with Youtube playing in the background oldies, in Hindustani, from the pre-independence and the pre-partition era that he had loved so much. In his death, New Age lost an experienced hand — subs are but hands on the desk, but his desk colleagues lost much of the fun.

Akkas, Abu Jar M (2015 Nov. 30) The death of a news sub. New Age 9

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