Short Story: Not Just a Photographer

Dr. Niaz Zaman narrates a tender story of love and loss impacted due to situations beyond one’s control, and as we grow older, our perspective changes.

Just as he was about to give up hope and resort to begging for forgiveness and appealing for mercy, someone who was passing by on a Vespa scooter stopped and asked what was happening.  The person happened to be someone Hasan knew of as a photographer for one of the English newspapers.  He whispered to Hasan, his voice urgent, “Quick, jump on the back.” Hasan did not need to be told twice.  Before anyone could move, his saviour was speeding away with Hasan holding on tight behind him.  He realized that he had been in grave danger and shuddered to think what might have happened if he had not been rescued so providentially.

It was not till fifty years later that his sister learned that the man she had rejected because he was “just a photographer” had rescued her brother during the turbulent times before the war. When he told her he had written a story and asked her to read Kitaab – where the story was available for free reading for a week – she first learned about the incident. She was surprised that her brother had not said anything to her about his experience, about his narrow escape from what could have proved fatal. True, she had been in Chittagong at the time with her husband, but he had visited her before leaving for the States. Nor had he said anything about the incident in all the years in between, years during which the world they had known as children, then as young people just starting out, had shattered. The larger part of their family were in Pakistan – what used to be West Pakistan before the country split into Pakistan and Bangladesh – and he was in America until he completed his PhD, married, and left for Canada. She alone had remained behind with her Bengali husband and two children in the new land that had reclaimed its own name after gaining independence.