A week or 10 back, it was Belal Bhai's birthday on 12th November and I wonder today how much he would have laughed knowing that I was writing on him so formally. Over time he has become more of a legend for the way he led his life. He was a poet that gave him a kind of license to live life as he wished but was it so? Or was his life a ceaseless effort to run away from a culture he was never comfortable with?

In all the years that I knew him - from the time I first met him at Hasan Hafizur Rahman bhai's History Writing project office in 1977 till he passed away in 2018- what I remember most is his authenticity. He never pretended, he never showed off, he never wanted to vendor his image to gain cheap or expensive thrills.

He just wanted to go on, having lived in different places and different spaces, never in economic plentitude but being able to move on, go on till it made no point to do so. Perhaps within all that Bengali poetic kurta that he like so many others wore, he was some sort of an ancient Chinese wisdom hoarder who without saying anything at all has already stated the final words through the way he led his life.

I guess he would be fine with it because he would understand the demands of time and profession and the heart of it all at the same time. His own life was in so many ways a clash of time and space, caught in the wrong space and time, in an era that respected respectability which he never did but he had to accept. And in the end, he had to surrender to it.

The urban sensibility in a peasant land

Belal bhai didn't like villages and its denizens. He was born in one but had moved on and his sensibilities were not very rural friendly. He may have remembered the holiday villages but when Belal bhai had to live for a few months in the villages after his mother's burial, it really came out. He told me he hated that life. They were his first time after many years and what many happily, considering it part of "sonar Bangla" embrace, didn't move Belal bhai.

"These people like jhogra. They are always suspicious of any move you make and at the slightest provocation sue you. It doesn't matter what you do or don't do but jhogra is critical to Bengali rural life. If you are sitting doing little at home, they become suspicious and if you work very hard it's even worse. You can't escape scrutiny, suspicion followed by the rest. This is very deep in the Bengali mind."

Belal bhai didn't last long in the villages and ran away to Dhaka and began a career of sorts quite late in life but somehow managed to survive. It was in the writing, journalist world but I don't think his views of the ways of the world took a dramatic upswing as he mixed with a different crowd.

Was he therefore running away from that mental construction of a sylvan paradisiacal muddy Bengal that so many people worship? Deification and demonizing is essential to the Bengali mind which deals with the world where only the Black and the White can survive.

He was not into worshipping anything much, cultural or otherwise. His accepting the entirely illegal invitation and getting into a vessel of sorts in Khulna followed by a totally unplanned jumping ship at Kolkata, was perhaps a not so unconscious flight from the rustic village world he didn't feel tied to and wanted to flee. He was not in a tranced embrace with rural Bengal.

Kolkata and Dhaka days and the rest

I had once seen him as a perpetual traveller, one who doesn't know when and how to stop. After he passed away in 2018, I had written about him, like leaving the work office without telling anyone, accompanying a person who had come to meet him.

"The next day he explained that the visitor had asked him to accompany him somewhere else, and he left from the door. No goodbyes ever mattered to him. He had just walked away. This anecdote describes him best, the perpetual, almost chronic, traveller who was always on the way to somewhere else."

Why did he need to move on? Perhaps it was a form of denial of what pinned him down to the soil much against his will. He worked in at least eight different jobs, each a painful compromise for him in so many ways, till he reached the Editorship of a Bangla magazine sponsored by the Indian embassy. It was in many ways a sanctuary if not in a foreign land but in a foreign entity. Finally he in so many ways, was not dependent on the soil of the local variety to make a living. Finally, he no longer had to share peasant suspicions about what did and when and to whom the entire day.

He could go anywhere, sleep anywhere, enter any space in life and literature and walk away as easily as he had arrived. It's the sign of the eternal traveller. But he never walked away from his sangsar, his family and till the end, that's where he set down his horse, lit a fire and stared at the fire he had lit and asked, what it was all about.

He had seen so much, left behind so much, walked away from so much, that he didn't need a passport to depart. He never needed one, and though it's ironic that he spent much of his middle life helping people get Indian visas -metaphorically departing the land- as an embassy staff respected by all, he embraced his double life and found peace or as much as he could afford to.

This green verdant land is not just for placid pasturing cows but some do stand up and ask what's going on. Belal bhai did and kept asking with his entire way of life.