Destiny

BANKER TO THE POOR by Muhammad Yunus

Standing in front of the TajMahal in Agra, I caught our assistant headmaster, Quazi Sirajul Huq, a man beloved by his students, weeping silently. The tears were not for the monument, nor for the famous lovers who are buried there, nor for the poetry etched on the monument in white marble,no. He said he was weeping for our destiny, the burden of history that we were carrying and not knowing what to do with it.

I was only thirteen, but I was infected by his passionate imagination. Quazi Sahib electrified my imagination. He had a sublime moral influence on all of us in his care. He taught us always to aim high, and he channelled our passions and restlessness. He did not do this through preaching, but through deeds and heart-to-heart communication which had a lifelong effect on me.

In 1973, in the chaotic days following the Bangladesh Liberation war, I visited him with my father and my brother Ibrahim, and we discussed the turmoil and difficulties through which we were living. A month later, Quazi Sahib, then a frail old man, was brutally murdered in his sleep by his servant, just to rob him of a small sum of money. In those turbulent times, they never caught the murderer. Like everyone who knew him, I was devastated. In retrospect, I understood his tears at the Taj Mahal as prophetic of the suffering that fate had in store for him and his people.