Lost Dawns And Rainbow Mornings

Lost Dawns And Rainbow Mornings

- Syed Badrul Ahsan

“You seem to have obtained the highest marks in English at this year’s HSC examinations,” he told me. And he was a teacher, young and formidable-looking, on the viva board for the English Department admission test. It was September 1975 and his comment made me happy. But then came the assault. “How do you spell the word ‘minutiae’?” That was his question. I had a blank look. I could not spell the word, did not know there was such a word and felt properly embarrassed.

That was the beginning of life in the English Department. My failure to answer that minutiae question did not prevent my entry into the department. I was on my way to being a scholar, a young man who would soon have on his fingertips all that there was to know about English literature, perhaps even teach in the department someday. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Austen, Eliot --- they were all friends I knew or thought I knew too well. Little did I realize that the path to a substantive knowledge of English literature would be littered with impediments of varied hues and dimensions.

Here is an instance. The brilliant Imtiaz Habib, a proper scholar who has been the repository of my abiding respect, gave me a lesson in the classroom that I have never forgotten. He was initiating us into Metaphysical Poetry, with particular emphasis on John Donne. As he went on explaining the idea, I went on nodding. That movement of the head at one point irritated him. “Don’t nod without understanding anything”, he said loudly. I felt sad, for he said that before my classmates. Soon, though, I got over it and today I am glad I got that reprimand from him, though the nodding has not quite subsided.