BANGLADESH

Humayun Ahmed wanted to turn his favourite retreat Nuhash Palli into a trust, but he could not do it in his lifetime, second wife Meher Afroz Shaon said on Tuesday.

"He wanted to build a trust from Nuhash Palli. I'll make his dream come true if I get the opportunity," she told reporters after Humayun Ahmed's burial there.

The famous virtuoso writer was laid to rest on Tuesday noon at his favourite spot Lichu Tola in his self-nurtured sanctuary Nuhash Palli at Pirujali village in Gazipur.

Shaon told reporters that she would do her utmost to realise Humayun's dream to make a trust of Nuhash Palli, which he built personally only for his own.

The celebrated writer-playwright-filmmaker raised Nuhash Palli in 1997 over a sprawling 40-bigha piece of land. This isolated sanctuary had meant 'more than his life' to him which boasts of hundreds of fruit, medicinal and other plants.

On May 12, a day after returning from New York after undergoing treatment, Humayun had told bdnews24.com at Nuhash Palli that he would prefer to be buried elsewhere so that his sanctuary did not turn into a regular graveyard.

"I had wanted to be buried here. But then I thought, maybe not. Then this place would turn into a typical graveyard. People would crowd the place…on Feb 21, on Nov 13, they would come here to lay wreaths," said the writer in his interview. "Now, that can't be allowed to happen."

He had said, "If, after my death, someone wants to research on medicinal plants, they would be most welcome. There could be a laboratory here, too."

His wife Shaon on Tuesday said that Humayun also wanted to build an institute there. "He had so many dreams centering Nuhash Palli."

She also asked for everyone's support to fulfil Humayun's dream.

Humayun died on July 19 at a New York hospital after battling with Cancer for about 10 months.

His first janaza was held in the United States followed by another one at the National Eidgah Maidan in Dhaka on Monday as his remains reached his homeland.

There was a rift in his family over the selection of burial site.

Shaon claimed Humayun's last wish was to be buried at Nuhash Palli, while the writer's three elder children from his first wife wanted their father to be buried at a place in Dhaka which was easily accessible for all.

Humayun's younger brother Muhammad Zafar Iqbal informed the media about the decision to bury his brother at Nuhash Palli in the wee hours of Tuesday following insistence from Shaon.

The seed of last month's violent RMG protests in Ashulia was arguably sown in late May when a storekeeper was beaten up for using his cell-phone on factory premises.

Salman Shameem Khan, from the neighbouring That's It Packaging was severely beaten for being on the phone at sister company Architect Design Ltd after visiting the factory's medical centre.

Both factories, set close to each other about an hour outside Dhaka, are part of the Ha-Meem group, a large conglomerate owned by FBCCI President Abul Kalam Azad.

Workers say that usually Ha-Meem Group employees get treated at the medical centre on Architect Design premises. Salman had come for treating his tuberculosis.

Refusing to be quoted by their names, workers allege that cell-phone use is strictly prohibited for them while on the factory compound. The executives, however, are allowed the privilege.

At one point, Salman could not take it anymore and slapped the angry executive, who the workers say was a director of the factory.

Soon, police were called in and Salman was turned in to them. He ended up at Ashulia Police Station only to be implicated in a false case, workers also allege.

The incident enraged the workers who were apparently already aggrieved by their low pay and an increasingly hard life. They started to become organised demanding Salman's release, forcing factory authorities to bring the sick man back and produce him in front of them in a couple of days.

Salman had been severely injured, beyond recognition, according to eyewitnesses. This only added to the wild speculations that someone else had been produced instead of Salman, who had actually been killed and fallen victim to another 'forced disappearance'.

According to news reports, the unrest had first broken out at Architect Design. The agitation began spreading on Jun 11 and raged through 300 factories in the area like a wildfire with thousands of poorly-paid workers, many of whom are often manhandled by supervisors, spilling out onto the streets, demonstrating.

Apparently refusing to address and resolve the situation, owners decided to go on a strike of their own. They decided to shut down their factories as the demonstrations and police violence ran into the fifth consecutive day on Jun 16.

Insiders say grievance was already there over meagre payment and disgruntled workers let out their pent-up emotions in waves of protests.

"I can't explain how it turned into such a big agitation, but it all began centring the apparently trivial incident," said Azhar Ali, Production Manager at That's It Packaging.

"You cannot control a mob of 11,000 workers when you have a capacity to handle only 2000. The group (Ha-Meem) failed to control its workers," said Babul Akhter, President of Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation.

Workers say they were fed up with tough factory rules. The monthly 'attendance bonus' of Tk 250 is off even if they show up seconds late for a single day.

"Even if it was due to illness and you produce medical certificate to support the claim, you won't get the attendance bonus," said garment worker Hamidul Islam who finds Tk 250 quite a sum.

When a factory has a lot of orders, overtime is mandatory for all the workers. It does not matter whether someone is sick or not, workers told bdnews24.com.

"Otherwise, you miss the annual increment of Tk 300-400," said Asma Khatun, another RMG worker.

Sometimes the labourers lose their jobs for such trivial reasons as failing to meet their daily production requirements. That is what happened to Mahtab and his wife Rokeya Begum, who had come from Gaibandha.

Mahtab's daily production meant checking 1,200 items in eight hours, or 150 per hour or, to be more precise five items every two minutes.

"If you cannot meet the daily rate in eight hours, you won't be allowed to come out of the factory until you complete your work, no matter how long it takes," said Mahtab.

Even the time spent in the toilet is measured and if it takes longer than what the senior officials think reasonable, the worker will certainly be given a dressing down.

"I understand our late attendance may hamper production, but there are ways to deal with it," said Jahanara Begum, who had to quit out of fear after a fire broke out in her factory.

Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers & Exporters Association President AKM Salim Osman admitted that mid-level factory management has not matured or developed as have workers and factory owners. "Our mid-level management is not good at all."

Strict factory rules for the sake of what they said maintaining standards do not quite match what the factories provide for workers.

Working conditions are said to fall far short of international standards that the owners are keen about as regards their products. The 9-storey Spectrum Sweater Industries collapsed to kill 61 workers in 2005. The following year a fire at KTS Textiles and Garments factory in Chittagong killed 54. These are just a couple of examples out of dozens.

Allegations have it despite clear neglect of owners, they have been acquitted each time.

"People would have taken to the streets in droves to support us if they knew what happens inside a factory," said Mahtab.

Babul Akhter admitted it was not at all unlikely that someday aggrieved garment workers would fall prey to the machinations of political parties out to secure their narrow self interest.

Amid rains and flower petals, writer Humayun Ahmed was laid to eternal rest at his favourite retreat at Nuhash Palli in Gazipur on Tuesday.

Thousands of people including his fans, relatives and friends thronged Nuhash Palli to say goodbye to the popular writer who captivated them for nearly four decades.

Rain, which had fascinated the writer most in his lifetime, poured down incessantly during the burial.

"Humayun Ahmed liked rain. His janaza and burial took place in the rain. In New York it also rained during his janaza," brother Muhammad Zafar Iqbal told reporters.

Humayun's elder son Nuhash led the pallbearers who gave shoulder and placed Humayun in the grave. Nuhash was wearing a Panjabi of blue colour, the colour his father related with rainy season in many of his fictions.

Humayun's daughters Sheela and Nova, second wife Meher Afroz Shaon and her sons Nishad and Ninit along with the writer's two brothers, Zafar Iqbal and Ahsan Habib, and two sisters attended the burial.

Following the family's decision in the early hours of Tuesday to bury Humayun at Nuhash Palli, the ambulance carrying his remains left BIRDEM mortuary and reached Nuhash Palli at 12:05pm. Police restricted traffic at various points of the Highway.

A sculptor at Nuhash Palli, Asaduzzaman Khan, told bdnews24.com they had been taking preparations for the burial since morning.

The local administration remained alert to avoid any unpleasant incidents at the burial. Police provided tight security to the ambulance once it entered Gazipur.

Thousands of fans lined the streets from Uttara to Gazipur to get a last glimpse of Humayun. They waved to him as the coffin passed and some threw flowers at the convoy.

People began gathering at Nuhash Palli from morning, ignoring the intermittent showers. At one point people filled the road up to one-kilometre outside Pirujali village. Gazipur's Deputy Commissioner, acting Superintendent of Police and local MPs were also present.

Thousands attended Humayun's third funeral, held at 1:30pm at Nuhash Palli. Immediately afterwards, he was laid to rest at Lichu Tola.

Zafar Iqbal thanked the local administration for their help with the burial.

On choosing the burial spot Ahsan Habib told bdnews24.com: "He often used to make fun of death. Once he went to the Litchi orchard [at Nuhash Palli] and said he would like the place to be his grave. Again he went near a tamarind tree and said 'please bury me here, I have liked it too."

In the last few days, family members were divided on the issue of Humayun's burial site. Shaon claimed Humayun's last wish was to be buried at Nuhash Palli while the writer's children with his first wife wanted their father to be buried at a place in Dhaka easily accessible to all.

At at 2:30 am Tuesday, after long negotiations, Zafar Iqbal told the media they had decided to bury his brother at Nuhash Palli, adding that they did not want to get the burial delayed anymore.

Ahsan Habib said Humayun's first wife Gultekin Ahmed and her younger daughter Bipasha Ahmed were supposed come to Bangladesh from the United States on Tuesday.

Humayun died on July 19 at a New York hospital after battling with cancer for about nine months. His first janaza was held there.

Thousands of people, fans, colleagues, political leaders, top government officials descended on the Central Shaheed Minar to pay their last respects to Humayun after a flight carrying the remains landed at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport on Monday morning.

Humayun's body was taken to the BIRDEM Hospital mortuary after the second namaz-e-janaza at the the National Eidgah ground.

Nuhash, Sheela and Nova reached Nuhash Palli before the ambulance came.

Fans started to converge there as soon as the first light of the day appeared and about a kilometre of road stretching from Nuhash Palli to Pirujali village was filled with people.

All of them took part in the writer's last funeral.

Humayun Ahmed almost knew where the killer disease called cancer was going to take him finally, or at least so it seems.

And being a writer, he picked up his pen-n-paper yet again to narrate how it would be like to be dead – his premonition of death.

Perhaps, he had sensed the disease even before the formal diagnosis of cancer in September last year, and authored his experiences in "Megher Upor Bari" (house over the clouds), which he published in the National Book Fair he attended in February this year.

Surprisingly, Humayun died exactly the way described in the book, which can be at best termed a mere coincidence or through the writer's preferred theory of Extrasensory Perception (ESP).

With a dateline of Jamacia, New York, where the writer had fought the fatal disease for close to 10 months, Humayun in a two-paragraph preface to the book writes, "I wrote this novel…when a complex disease named cancer has made my body its abode. I did not know about it until then… Is it true that my sub-conscious mind had the news for a strange reason?"

"I assume it is true. That's why I have written this novel in the words of a dead man… Why did I write all these? The universe is mysterious."

Then begins the novel: "I am dead, or am I going to die, I still cannot decide. It seems I am dead."

The agonist, who has just died, begins telling the story reminding repeatedly, "I am dead."

Humayun, a charismatic writer, who is often identified affectionately by his fans as 'a man moonstruck' for his romanticism for moonlit-night and rain, could not keep up with being dead for long.

His protagonist looked for a console and said, "I now understand, telepathy is a power that comes after death."

"Living people do not have any telepathic power, dead do have. Don't know if everyone of the dead has it ... at least I have."

Within a few pages the power, which made many of his fiction characters so influential like Himu, who has strong influence on the younger generation, soon appeared frail confronting another problem of being dead: "Maybe, dead cannot feel by touching. The matter is not clear to me. (Page 18)"

The dead protagonist then wonders why his dead relatives are not coming to give him a lift.

"I knew, relatives crowd around a man dying. They mainly try to make the man's journey into the unknown world easier. (Page 23)"

Humayun, who wrote over 322 books topping the list of bestsellers for over two decades in Bangladesh due to lucid narratives peppered with humour, takes an absurd break, "How will my hell look like? There will be some of my students .... they will ask me questions I will not be able to answer. (Page 25)"

Coincidentally, the dead protagonist has strange resemblance to the writer, a Ph.D in Polymer Chemistry who taught Chemistry at the Dhaka University. The protagonist is Dr Iftekharul Islam, an Associate Prof of Applied Physics.

"It will definitely make news for newspapers. Media person await such news. A follow-up is published every day. But it stops the 5th or 6th days. Everyone will forget everything" thinks the protagonist as the story develops.

But, how the protagonist is going to keep up the suspense when the writer is distracted by the thought of death?

Well, Humayun Ahmed had his ways.

"There are lot many things to enjoy for the people on earth. Drama-cinema-book-music-arts… Is there any such arrangement in afterlife?" the dead protagonist wonders.

Giving every possible detail centering death, Humayun writes: "We are parts of an entertainment game designed by a master programmer."

At certain stages, the dead feels the urge to read and sometimes to write, but finds neither pen nor paper. He decides to continue writing in his thoughts. He thinks about the God and finds himself in the ocean of paradox.

He imagines going through the roads in Shalban as his relatives take his remains for burial. He wonders about his wife and her child who cannot get through the stages of video games without his father.

"I have become an observer," the dead realises sometimes.

The strange thing about the novel is that the writer virtually describes his own death the way it actually came by. The agonist's aunty dies of colon cancer, which after setting off from colon affected her liver and lungs before rendering her unconscious.

On July 18, a day before the writer died, the Bangladesh's Permanent Representative at the UN in New York said an unknown virus had attacked the writer, affecting his lungs and liver and that the writer was unconscious.

At the end of Page 95 of the 96-page book, Humayun writes, "I understand, I have to leave. Where will I go? I don't know. Man does not know from where he comes. Then how is he expected to know where he will go!"

Suddenly the dead protagonist sees lights having abnormal magnetic power pulling him to its centre.

He begins to rush towards the light. He turns for a moment to say, "Men of the earth! Be good. Be happy. I am running towards the light. I know I have to travel an infinite distance. Infinite never finishes. Then how the journey will end? Who will tell me that?"

Bangladesh on Tuesday told India that if New Delhi failed to sign the 1974 land boundary agreement and its additional protocol that the two countries signed in September 2011, it would send out "a very wrong signal".

Foreign Secretary Mohamed Mirajul Quayes is understood to have conveyed to his Indian counterpart Ranjan Mathai Dhaka's concern over implementation of the agreement and the protocol signed during Indian Prime Minister's visit to Dhaka last year.

Quayes and Mathai on Tuesday led the Bangladesh and Indian delegations respectively in the annual bilateral Foreign Office Consultation.

Sources with knowledge of the matter said that Quayes stressed early implementation of the land boundary deal and the protocol during his talks with Mathai.

A spokesman for the India's Ministry of External Affairs said the two sides had "cordial, constructive and comprehensive" talks on the entire gamut of bilateral relations, including cooperation in political and security related matters, border management, counter-terrorism, trade and investment, water resources, power cooperation, including in renewable energy, connectivity, development cooperation and increasing people-to-people ties.

He said the issue of the stalled negotiation for the agreement on sharing of water of river Teesta was also raised during the Foreign Office Consultation.

The Indian Foreign Secretary is understood to have reiterated to his counterpart that New Delhi was committed to continuing negotiations for an agreement to share the water of Teesta, but at present it was engaged in internal discussions with the State Governments of West Bengal and Sikkim.