Humayun Ahmed died on a July night in 2012, in a New York hospital room, with pancreatic cancer having done what illness usually does — slowly, then all at once. Dhaka shut down for him in a way it rarely does for anyone who isn't a politician or a cricketer. Thousands walked behind the coffin to Nuhash Polli, the small patch of land in Gazipur he'd built as a private paradise, all lychee trees and a pond he'd insisted on digging himself, more or less, by pointing at labourers and changing his mind repeatedly about where the water should go.
It's odd writing about a man this famous, because everyone in Bangladesh already has an opinion. Ask someone over forty, and they'll mention Bohubrihi or Ei Shob Din Ratri, the television serials that apparently emptied streets on broadcast nights in the eighties, back when the state channel was the only channel. Humayun Ahmed was, for a stretch of years, more or less the only entertainment option going. Ask someone under thirty, and they'll talk about Himu — the yellow-panjabi-wearing vagabond who walks barefoot through Dhaka refusing logic, refusing employment, refusing more or less everything except his own peculiar clarity. Misir Ali, the other recurring character, sits at the opposite end: a rationalist who investigates the supernatural and always, eventually, finds the mundane explanation underneath. Between those two figures — one embracing irrationality, one dismantling it — you get something like the shape of the writer himself.
He trained as a chemist, taught at Dhaka University, wrote a doctoral thesis on polymers. Then he wrote Nondito Noroke while still a student, a novel about a family fracturing quietly around an act of violence, and something shifted. He gave up the lab, more or less, though not the discipline of it — his prose has a chemist's efficiency, short sentences, no ornament wasted. Critics who wanted denser, more "literary" Bengali sometimes held this against him. Commercial, they said. Too readable. Which is a strange complaint to level at someone who was, by most estimates, moving more books than any other Bengali writer alive, across something like two hundred titles.
What gets lost in the popularity discussion is how much grief runs underneath the comedy. Shonkhonil Karagar. Aguner Poroshmoni, his own Liberation War novel, later a film — he moved into directing in the nineties, largely because he'd grown frustrated watching other people botch adaptations of his work, and the films he made himself, Shrabon Megher Din, Duratta, carry that same unhurried, almost domestic sadness. Rural Bangladesh, muddy courtyards, families arranged around long tables — his camera loved sitting still and watching people eat, argue, wait for rain.
There's a theory, unproven and probably unprovable, that Himu's refusal of rationality was Humayun Ahmed working something out about his own scientific training — a man who'd spent years measuring polymers deciding, in fiction at least, that some things shouldn't be measured. Misir Ali, published under a different narrative register entirely, might have been the counterweight, the part of him unwilling to let the mystical go entirely unchallenged. He kept writing both characters for over two decades, never resolving the argument between them, which suggests he didn't especially want it resolved.
Nuhash Polli is now open to visitors. People go to see the pond, the tree he was buried beneath, a small museum of his belongings — reading glasses, an old typewriter, notebooks with margins full of crossed-out sentences. What strikes most visitors, apparently, isn't the scale of any of it. It's how modest the actual desk is. A man who reshaped how an entire country read fiction, and the desk where he did it wouldn't look out of place in anyone's spare room.
