Bangladesh Diary: Freedom Fighter

An evening in the company of a bitter man isn't an easy prospect. And make no mistake, our old colleague T is both bitter and angry. But his eyes shine with a fierce intelligence and his stance is shot through with a defiant pride, so on such an evening at least you're never bored.

We find ourselves in his little house on the campus of a provincial teacher training college. The walls have been painted police-light blue - a forbidding shade which somehow makes them close in. A glimpse into other rooms offers a marginally less gloomy vista: there the walls are moss green, with dark patches of damp. A light bulb hanging from the ceiling stutters weakly. The furniture is basic, a few scattered cane chairs and a simple table, and the only decorations on the wall are family pictures, just slightly askew, and a calendar. You will always find a calendar, it seems, in a Bangladeshi living room. Are we all counting the days here?

T speaks fluent English, crisp and clear, which is just as well, as he speaks a great deal. This evening, in this time of huge political uncertainty and popular discontent, he unburdens himself of a lecture on exactly where the country has gone wrong. Now and again he reaches for the sort of quaint English phrase you might normally hear on the lips of a retired Colonel, (or perhaps that thought is planted in my mind by his deep-set eyes, the way he wears his clipped moustache, and the slightly tinted glasses reminiscent of a South American dictator). The country, he opines, is quite plainly "going to the dogs. Standards are slipping, I tell you. It is getting worse day by day. Everyone is after money, no-one will do any work."

It's a grim picture he paints: one in which all are out to exploit each other, where "if you ask a man to do a day's labour for you, the bloody doesn't turn up." All politicians are criminals, shysters, with their own wallets the sole focus of their thoughts. Students, he maintains, are no longer interested in learning - only in getting their hands easily on a job or making political mischief. He pauses occasionally to take a sip of his dark brown tea, made with enough sugar to start a small shop, and then takes up where he left off.

The tone of his words reveals a man wearied by life, whose hopes and aspirations have all been filed away in the bottom of a dusty drawer. His solutions don't offer much of a way out either. When I ask him what he would do to address the country's problems, he offers to "take the main culprits, line them up and shoot them. That would soon show the rest." I gulp suddenly on my tea, foreseeing an awful lot of shooting in T's world.

T also speaks fluent Russian, having spent seven years as a student in Siberia. When he speaks of those times, there among the grey Soviet-style tenement blocks and the freezing open squares, a rare mellowness enters his voice and his otherwise rigid mask slips. Towards the end of the evening, he offers up the well-worn sentiment "they were the best years of my life." But in the context, these words take on extra pathos: T returned over twenty years ago.
When I tentatively suggest that his considerable skills and knowledge as an educator have perhaps been underutilised since his return (he subsequently travelled on study tours to several other countries in the region), he throws back his head and guffaws. It is the only time he laughs. He applied for several jobs on his return, he says, but was not prepared to pay the bribes to get them. "I will not do it. I won't bend the rules. Even though it's kept me stuck in this job and I've been denied promotion." He may go to his grave still railing against the injustice, but he'll do so with the righteousness of an Old Testament prophet.

Now, as the night seeps into the room around us, he tires, and suddenly decides it is time for the audience to come to a close. As we walk to the gate together, he offers a terse final verdict. "I was once a freedom fighter, active in the war of Independence, full of dreams for this newborn country. But this is not the Bangladesh I fought for." And with that, he bids us good night, turns on his heel, and disappears into the gloom.