Home
+
Published : 05 Oct 2025, 01:07 AM
Veteran Language Movement activist and researcher Ahmed Rafiq had been unable to live a normal life for nearly three of his final years.
With fading eyesight and declining mobility, the 96-year-old had to lean on others for support in his final chapter -- among them was Abul Kalam, who had stood by him for more than three decades.
Like a shadow, Kalam stayed with Rafiq through days and nights, attending to his every need. At times, he even assisted with his writing.
From him, a picture emerges of the twilight years of a man once fiercely active in intellectual and cultural movements, but who spent his last days in solitude.
“I’d been with him for 36 years,” said Kalam. “He wasn’t doing well in the end. For the last three years, he was very ill. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t write. Not being able to write made him restless, deeply frustrated.”
“He’d dictate parts to me, and I’d write. But you can’t match him -- listening and writing doesn’t come out the way he’d have done it. So he wouldn’t be happy with it. The fact that he couldn’t write with his own hand, that really upset him.”
Kalam shared these reflections beside Rafiq’s coffin at the Central Shaheed Minar on Saturday, where people from all walks of life came to pay their respects to the revered thinker, who passed away at BIRDEM hospital on Thursday.
Rafiq, who had lost his wife in 2006 and had no children, was largely alone in his later life. But Kalam, now in his sixties, had never left his side.
Hailing from Shariatpur, Kalam once worked as a driver for Orion Group -- where Rafiq held a senior position. Their professional paths crossed there, forming a bond that lasted beyond the workplace.
“Even after Rafiq left Orion, he didn’t let me go. I kept working for him even while at Orion, and when he moved on, he took me with him,” Kalam said.
“He told me ‘Kalam, stay with me. Whatever you need to support your family, I’ll make sure you get it’. After that, I never left. He cared for me. I couldn’t leave him either. I was bound by affection. He was such a good man.”
Despite Rafiq’s towering stature as a public intellectual, in his final years very few people kept in touch regularly. Even family members rarely visited, Kalam said.
