April in our courtyards . . .

There is a spring in our steps. There is April once again in our courtyards. And there is sadness too, with remembrance.

There is much that we recall about April. Let us begin through recalling T.S. Eliot's view of April being the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory with desire. 

In April 1912, the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, leaving between 1,490 and 1,635 people dead at the bottom of the sea. 

Now, think of Baishakh, for it falls in mid-April, and ask yourself if in all that flow of colour, desire does not take over your soul. In April, therefore, our dreams and our desires take newer forms. 

Then again, there are all the moments when a load of nostalgia as also sadness arises in our sensibilities, associated as it is with April. 

It was in April 1968 that Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. Those of us old enough to recall the tragedy, who lived through those times, will know the depth of gloom that swept across the world on that long ago day. 

Eleven years later, on another April day, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto went to the gallows. His tormentors were not brave enough to hang him at dawn. They killed him deep in the night, hours away from dawn. 

You may have every grievance against Bhutto, but you will surely agree that his was a miserable death. He deserved better.

In April 1961, the Kennedy administration thought that it could help anti-Castro Cuban exiles in America mount an assault on the Havana government and remove the communist leadership. That did not happen. What did happen was that Castro's soldiers, prepared to handle the invasion, simply waited on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. 

When the exiles came in, in so many different boats, they were cut down ruthlessly. President Kennedy, who had earlier promised air cover for the invaders, backed out in panic. Three months in office, the president was badly shaken. And out of the crisis Fidel Castro emerged a stronger leader.

With April you associate one of the more glorious moments in Bangladesh's history. It was in this month that a government formed and run by Bengalis was formed under the leadership of that man of wisdom Tajuddin Ahmad. 

What if that government, today known as the Mujibnagar government, had not been given shape? What if resistance had not been organised? One does know, surely, the answers to those questions. 

Or does one? Let us just tell ourselves that because of Mujibnagar, the reality of a free Bangladesh became a more substantive proposition than before. Mujibnagar was the transformation of a cherished dream into well-grounded reality.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in April 1945 and thus was the little known, not very experienced Harry Truman catapulted to the presidency of the United States. 

Eighty years earlier, in April 1865, Abraham Lincoln's assassination at a Washington theatre sent shock waves through America and placed Andrew Johnson in the presidency. Johnson was a luckless man. He faced impeachment and would indeed have been shown the door had a single vote in the Senate not saved him.

Richard Nixon died in April 1994. American and British forces, thanks to the sinister Bush-Blair team, between March and May 2003 invaded Iraq in a brazen demonstration of firepower and thereafter helped to ruin the country. Iraq today is no more the land of piety and secularism and learning these days. 

In April 1994 began the genocide that would leave as many as 800,000 people dead in a matter of days. Hutus killed Tutsis in a macabre display of violence that shamed millions of us into realising the nature of the horrors visited on the world through acts of desperate tribalism. 

It was in April 1564 that William Shakespeare was born. In April 1616 he passed on. He remains one of the most powerful voices in global literature through the sheer nature and variety of themes in his plays, which are altogether thirty seven in number. 

In April 1978, the Saur Revolution brought about a dynamic change in Afghanistan's politics when the country's communists took power. Over the next few years, the revolution would go awry and Afghanistan would turn into a vast field of endless conflict.

Field Marshal Ayub Khan, Pakistan's first military dictator, died in April 1974. His former protégé and subsequent nemesis Zulfikar Ali Bhutto did not think it necessary to pay his respects to the dead man by his presence at the funeral. Sher-e-Bangla A,K, Fazlul Huq died in April 1962.

So there we are. April resonates in the soul with its fragrance, with its history. And what did Shakespeare famously say about the month? Ah! 'Men are April when they woo, December when they wed'.