All of 31, it was barely days after he was promoted as a senior photographer with the daily ‘Dainik Bangla’. Life could not have been smoother for Babu Ansari.
It was August 15, 1975, and monsoon was in the air in Dhaka. Ansari had just kicked his motorcycle to head for the day’s first assignment -- Dhaka University, where Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was to be present.
It was that split second before a motorcycle guns to a start that Ansari got the shell-shocking news: the Father of the Nation had been assassinated. He did not know what to do. His wife rushed out, and when told about the killings at the house on Dhamondi road number 32, asked in naivete: “So Begum Mujib is widowed now?”
Ansari told her about the news of the assassination and the coup.
Like others in the still-nascent nation-state of Bangladesh, the news took time to sink in.
Ansari, meanwhile, gunned his bike towards his office.
Cut ahead to 2010, he told The Independent on the eve of the National Mourning Day: “I heard in office that our chief photographer, Golam Mowlah, had gone to Bangabandhu’s house after the assassination and got the photos. He came in, soon, and narrated the scene: bullet-ridden body of Bangabandhu; his wife and son Russell lay close to each other; Sheikh Mujib’s brother was shot halfway into the bathroom; Sheikh Jamal’s bullet-ridden body lay close to a car -- he must have been about to head out somewhere…”
Now 66, Ansari’s voice cracks just that slightly over the phone, recalling the horror of August of 1975. But the seasoned photo-journalist in him soon gets the focus back. “Mowlah had taken all these photographs; there were two or three frames at least of each. From different angles.”
Soon, he said, two Armymen came to the daily’s office. “They were armed; their eyes were bloodshot -- they did not look human from any angle,” he recalled. “They wanted the photographs. Mowlah said he was too devastated and exhausted and asked me to go up to our third-floor dark room to develop the prints.”
Neither Mowlah nor Ansari could fathom what the Armymen were after.
“I was a little surprised when they followed me into the darkroom, but I did not say anything. They jumped up when I closed the door. But I had to explain patiently that we could not let light enter the room.
“As I readied the chemicals for the film, I switched off the light, and they flinched again. They wanted the light switched back on -- this time I realised the feeling off the barrel of a gun on my back.
His pulse racing ahead, Ansari told them as patiently as he could that I could not work with the lights on. “It took time to develop films those days -- and they wanted to switch on the light even before I was done. After I switched on the red light in the darkroom, they counted the films. I showed them the exposed copies and then gave them some prints.”
Intuition told him not everything was going all right. “I tried to hide a few films; I didn’t want to hand everything over to them. But they counted the exposed copies and the prints and asked me about the mismatch. I felt the gun barrel again.
“There was little I could do but hand them everything. They counted everything several times and took away everything with them -- negatives, positives, wastage… everything.”
Thirty-five years on, it still rankles Ansari that he could not save the films for posterity. “I regret till this day that I wasn’t able to preserve even one photograph. I have not talked about these issues, about the films of Bangabandhu’s assassination, because I do not want to sound supercilious about what I did -- I did what any photographer, any journalist, any nationalist, any humanist would have done. And I want people to know how the fate of those films.”
Asked about Golam Mowlah’s reaction when told that his films were taken away, he said “He was too shocked, disheartened and exhausted to react.”
He died three years later.
What survives is a colleague’s version of truth; one that no bullet can expose hollow.
(PUBLISHED IN 'THE INDEPENDENT', DHAKA: AUGUST 15, 2010
