A renaissance man with a beautiful mind

Leopold Sulerzhitsky, one of Leo Tolstoy's friends and followers, claimed in a letter that there were two Tolstoys. He mentioned that while the great Tolstoy remained forever, the real Tolstoy - kind, friendly, tender and patient, full of humility - was gone. That bifurcation works for those, who combine substantial success with sufficient recognition to become significantly famous. Most other people live a laminated life, rolled into one thin layer of tin foil.

Ever since I met Syed Ali Kabir in 1987, I have tried to figure out exactly how many layers was that man. The real him could be compared to the real Tolstoy, because he too was kind, friendly, tender, patient and full of humility. The greatness issue, however, is a different story. He was no Tolstoy, but had the persistent craving for becoming one.

Mr. Kabir struck me as a phenomenon waiting to happen. He read voraciously and wrote copiously, his mind endlessly fermenting ideas to bring order in chaos. He was also a consistent contradiction unto himself, a highborn man who cherished the ideals of egalitarian dreams with the devotion of a believer upholding his faith. His family swarmed with politicians, lawyers, diplomats, writers, actors, high officials, teachers and businessmen, having perhaps the highest per capita concentration of national prominence compared to any other family in this nation.

He also had many powerful friends including chief justices, ministers, intellectuals, bankers, and diplomats. In the six years that I worked with him, he mentioned his connections not even half as many times. He had the aura of an exclusive collections store about him, not that of a departmental store. He wanted people to judge him not by labels but by worth.

My understanding of this man was gradual, much like a film in the developer where the image slowly emerges from a blank piece of paper. He was a former deputy governor of Bangladesh Bank, heading a philanthropic organisation where I worked. He was also a noted columnist of the country, quirky forever if interrupted when absorbed in writing. He was notorious for his explosive temper. His daughter Bula assures me it was nothing compared to his outbursts at home.

As mentioned earlier, he was a man riddled with contradictions. He had a plebian mind with patrician manners. He wrote in Bangla but his conversations were heavily spiked with English words. He was a tall and handsome man, but dressed inattentively except for a few occasions when he donned perhaps his one and only pinstripe suit.

But his contradictions were like fog rolling through a mountain. And that mountain was a large landform of conscience stretching above others around him. Not a devout man, his conscience was his God, truthfulness, honesty, simplicity and compassion being the rituals of his religion. Syed Ali Kabir treated this life like double entry accounting, inexorably balancing the debits and credits entry by entry leaving nothing for the next.

He was comparable to an ocean, living in his deepest layer below the thermocline and above the seabed. In that layer the clock had stopped for him many years ago, where his happy abode with his first wife Nurunnahar was submerged intact. This is where there were two Syed Ali Kabirs. One loved his life on the surface. Another lived for the love of his life with the tenacity of salvage divers looking for sunken shipwrecks. He shuffled between his two lives until his last breath.

Nurunnahar had done two Masters degrees from Dhaka University, a fiery woman who led female students to write posters during the Language Movement. She was also the first of five women to publicly act on stage in one of Munier Chowdhury's plays. Mr. Kabir started courting her in 1948, until they eloped in 1952. After marriage, they waited 12 years to have a child so that they could have the means, as their only child Bula writes from Sweden, "to afford an ice cream for a third person."

Two days after Bula's birth in 1964, Nurunnahar passed away. Mr. Kabir never recovered from the shock, blaming his wife's untimely death on himself. In his own mind, he was convinced that Nurunnahar would have lived if she hadn't married him. And that was the epicentre of an earthquake that had shattered him, and its aftershocks continued to roil him forever. He spent many hours of his life pacing up and down the balcony, his hands, clasped on his back, dangling like a loosely shaped quotation box waiting to be filled with an eloquent answer. 

Mr. Kabir died on this day fifteen years ago. His second wife Siddiqua Kabir, who was the foremost culinary expert in the country, told me he had asked for a copy of the Constitution of Israel before his death, and muttered the word "Hebron" in his deathbed in a trance-like state. The body was giving up, but the mind was engaged. He must have wanted to solve one last problem of this world before he left.

In the Oscar-winning movie, A Beautiful Mind, based on the life of Nobel laureate John Nash, Nash tells his future wife Alicia his most important discovery was the realisation that any logic or reason could be found only in the mysterious equation of love. Syed Ali Kabir had found and lost that logic, spending the rest of his life haunted by the ghost of that loss. Those who met him saw a renaissance man with a beautiful mind, but not everybody could tell this haunted life was also a powerful exercise to tap into greatness.  

The writer is the Editor of weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. 
Email: badrul151@yahoo.com