It may be raining outside. An old clip from a BTV drama may suddenly appear on my YouTube. Perhaps my eyes have simply fallen upon a familiar book resting quietly on a shelf. Sometimes, all it takes is a remembered dialogue, a moonlit night or the sight of the Ekushey Book Fair to bring everything back.
And then, for a few moments, I am no longer standing in the present. I am a child again.
I do not remember exactly when Humayun Ahmed entered my life, because it feels as though he had always been there. His stories were present in the rooms where I grew up, in the books I discovered, in the weekly dramas my family watched together and in the anticipation that surrounded every new book. Long before I understood what literature meant, I understood that his world felt strangely familiar. It was imaginative yet believable, humorous yet melancholic, ordinary yet full of wonder.
Humayun Ahmed: The Builder of a Generation
My first encounter with a Humayun Ahmed book came when I was only ten years old and studying in Class Five. The book was Hotel Graver Inn. I found it at the home of my youngest aunt.
At that age, I could not have explained why the book attracted me. Perhaps it was the title, the mystery surrounding it or simply the feeling of discovering something that belonged to the world of adults. Whatever the reason, I bought the book. Looking back now, it was more than a childhood purchase. It was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with a writer whose words would later shape the way I understood people, loneliness, humor, mystery and life itself.
Soon after, one of our neighbor uncles gifted me three more Humayun Ahmed books: Amar Chelebela, Ei Shob Din Ratri and May Flower. I still remember the excitement of receiving them. Books were not endlessly available at our fingertips then. There were no digital libraries, online reading platforms or instant deliveries. A book arriving in your hands felt like an event. A gifted book carried the affection of the person who gave it and the promise of an unknown world waiting inside it.
Those three books did not feel like ordinary presents. They felt like doors.
Once I entered through those doors, I kept moving from one Humayun Ahmed book to another. His writing never made me feel that literature was distant or intimidating. He wrote in a language that seemed effortless, but the feelings beneath that simplicity were often profound. His sentences could make me laugh and, without warning, leave me silent. He could turn an ordinary meal, a family argument, an eccentric relative, an evening of rain or a lonely person sitting quietly into something unforgettable.
Humayun Ahmed and the Childhood We Can Never Return
My childhood memories of Humayun Ahmed, however, are not limited to books. They are inseparable from the black-and-white television in our home.
At that time, we had no cable connection. BTV was the only television channel available to us. A weekly drama was therefore not simply another programme among hundreds of choices. It was something we waited for. It gave the evening a sense of occasion.
I watched Humayun Ahmed’s dramas with my parents. Sometimes my uncles and aunts joined us. On other evenings, I watched them with neighbours. We sat together in front of that black-and-white television, following the same story, laughing at the same moments and becoming quiet at the same scenes.
There was no second screen in anyone’s hand. Nobody paused the programme or watched it later at a more convenient time. We had to be there when it was broadcast. That limitation created something precious: presence.
We enjoyed Kothao Keu Nei, Aaj Robibar, Nokkhotrer Raat, Ayomoy, Urey Jai Bok Pokkhi, Kala Koitor and many of his single-episode and Eid-special dramas. The characters did not feel like distant television creations. They became part of our conversations. We discussed them, laughed about them and worried about them as though they were people we knew.
Baker Bhai was not merely a character from Kothao Keu Nei. He became an emotion shared by an entire generation. His story demonstrated the rare power Humayun Ahmed possessed: the ability to make fictional people enter real households and become part of public memory.
When I think about those evenings now, I do not remember only the stories. I remember the room. I remember the television. I remember the people sitting around me. I remember the feeling of waiting.
Many of those moments can never be recreated.
Today, we have countless channels, streaming platforms, smartphones and unlimited content. We can watch almost anything at any time, yet we rarely watch together in the same way. One person watches a drama on a phone, another scrolls through social media and someone else sits in a different room. We gained convenience, but somewhere along the way, we lost the collective warmth of those evenings.
This is why remembering Humayun Ahmed also means remembering my parents, relatives, neighbors, and the childhood home in which his stories were received. His dramas were not only entertainment. They were occasions that gathered us together.
My Favorite Characters of Humayun Ahmed Creations
Among all his characters, Misir Ali has always been closest to me.
Perhaps I was drawn to his intelligence. Misir Ali approaches mysteries through reason and observation. He does not easily accept paranormal explanations. He examines details, asks questions and searches for logical answers. He does not solve mysteries for money, and he carries a quiet sense of intellectual honesty.
What fascinates me most is his personal diary, UNSOLVED, where he records the mysteries he cannot explain. That detail reveals something important about him. Misir Ali is intelligent, but he is not arrogant enough to pretend that every question has an answer. He accepts that some things may remain beyond his understanding.
That quality has stayed with me.
Life is also filled with an UNSOLVED diary. We try to understand people, relationships, loss and destiny. We apply logic, experience and judgment, yet some questions remain unanswered. Misir Ali taught me that accepting an unanswered question is not a defeat. Sometimes, it is a form of honesty.
Humayun Ahmed created other unforgettable figures too. Himu walked beyond society’s conventional expectations, carrying freedom, unpredictability and an almost mystical indifference to material life. Shubhro represented innocence and moral clarity. Baker Bhai showed how deeply an apparently rough person could be loved. Each character opened a different window into human nature.
Yet Humayun Ahmed himself was greater than the sum of his characters.
Without Humayun Ahmed: A Silence Among Thousands of Stories
To me, he was hope. He was a dreamer. He was an architect of life and of the courage to think beyond every apparent possibility. He taught us that the world did not end at what could be immediately seen or explained. There was always another layer—a hidden sorrow behind laughter, tenderness inside an eccentric person, beauty inside an ordinary afternoon and wonder inside the familiar.
Had we not read him, many of us might have become lost in life’s contradictions. We might not have learned to recognize beauty in such simple things. He taught us to look at rain differently. He made moonlight feel personal. He showed us that silence could carry a conversation and that an apparently insignificant person could contain an entire universe.
He did not offer life as a neat equation. He showed its paradoxes.
People could be kind and cruel, rational and emotional, joyful and lonely at the same time. The supernatural could appear in a story without defeating reason. Humor could exist beside death. A family could remain loving even while carrying pain and resentment. His fictional world reflected life because it allowed contradictions to remain contradictions.
Then there was the book fair.
For readers of my generation, the Ekushey Book Fair was not merely an annual event. It was connected to anticipation. A new Humayun Ahmed book could become one of the most exciting parts of the fair. Finding a new title, holding it for the first time and returning home eager to read it created a feeling that is difficult to explain to someone who did not experience that era.
Every year, there was curiosity. What had he written this time? Which characters would return? What strange, funny or heartbreaking world waited behind the new cover?
The fair still takes place. Readers still arrive, publishers still release books and the grounds are still crowded. Yet without Humayun Ahmed, its aura is not the same for me anymore.
Something is missing.
Perhaps it is the expectation that he might surprise us once again. Perhaps it is the knowledge that there will be no completely new journey from his imagination. We can return to his old books—and I often do—but we can no longer wait for a new one.
That absence becomes especially visible at the book fair. Among thousands of books and countless people, I feel the silence left by one writer.
Remembering Humayun Ahmed
Fourteen years have passed since Humayun Ahmed left us. Time has changed the country, our homes and the ways in which we read and watch stories. Children now grow up with technology that we could not have imagined while sitting before our black-and-white television.
But some memories resist change.
I can still see the ten-year-old child who found Hotel Graver Inn at his aunt’s home. I can still feel the happiness of receiving Amar Chelebela, Ei Shob Din Ratri and May Flower from a neighbor uncle. I can still imagine my parents, uncles, aunts and neighbors sitting together as a BTV drama began. I can still feel the anticipation of discovering a new title at the book fair.
These memories belong to Humayun Ahmed, but they also belong to the people and places of my childhood.
Perhaps that is why his absence feels so personal. When a beloved writer dies, we do not lose only the books he might have written. We lose a future that once seemed certain—the next novel, the next Eid drama, the next unforgettable character and the next moment when an ordinary sentence would unexpectedly explain something about our own lives.
Final Words
Still, I do not believe Humayun Ahmed has entirely left us.
He returns whenever it rains. He returns in the stillness of a moonlit night, in an old television clip, in a familiar dialogue and in the pages of a book taken from the shelf after many years. He returns through Misir Ali’s questions, Himu’s wandering, Shubhro’s innocence and Baker Bhai’s enduring place in our hearts.
Most importantly, he returns whenever I remember the child I once was.
Remembering Humayun Ahmed is therefore not only remembering a writer. It is briefly returning to a home filled with familiar voices, a black-and-white television surrounded by family, a newly purchased book held with excitement and an annual book fair that once seemed incomplete without his latest work.
It is returning to a childhood that can never fully return.
And perhaps that is the lasting wonder of Humayun Ahmed: even after all these years, he can still open a door in our minds and allow us to walk, for a few precious moments, into a world we thought time had taken away.
