Tribute to Poet Suraiya Khanum

On May 25, 2006, the world lost one of its most courageous, spiritual, wise, regal, dignified, exquisite, loving, soulful, and gracious women with the passing of my large-hearted and open-minded mother, Suraiya Khanum. Her soul passed from this world to the next as the result of a severe stroke suffered just a few days before she was to come on a Mother's Day visit to Washington, D.C. to see me and my husband and celebrate our respective professional and graduate school graduations from Yale Law School and Johns Hopkins University. Despite the shock and grief caused by her sudden departure from this world, her strong and unyielding spirit and passion for life and learning live on in the vivid and vibrant memories of all of her friends, admirers, and family members who span the world from Australia to Asia to Europe to North America. No one who has received the news of her passing can yet comprehend the loss of a heart, mind, and soul that was so eternally youthful yet wise b! eyond eternity. May my beautiful a nd glorious mother rest in peace and may we find peace knowing that a person such as her traversed this earth.

Of Turko-Afghani and Bengali heritage, my mother was born in Calcutta shortly before the departure of the British from the Indian subcontinent. Emerging from a long lineage of high-achievers known to produce scholars and artists, my precocious and gifted mother won accolades for her skills in art, dance, language, and writing from the time she was first able to paint, choreograph, speak, and create. Lest you think her talents were found only in the classroom, my mother's skills at mischief and exasperating rulemakers were also legendary, and the high-energy tomboy within her would often lead her and her brothers to sneak out after bedtime to pick flowers or fruit from the gardens of neighbors. Indeed, even in her adult life, my mother, ever the compulsive homeopath, could never walk by a blooming bush without plucking a flower to lift her spirits or tugging at the leaves of a medicinal plant to examine its healing properties. Other passions included books, music, cinema, and! colorful couture - wherever my mo ther was there was always a library, a concert, a film, or a lovely accoutrement to appreciate.

Whether in her capacity as a studious student or ever-inquisitive knowledge-seeker, my mother was a natural born narrator of life, and her skill at storytelling could enrapture even the most cynical heart. Her creative energy combined with high academic performance resulted in her being appointed one of the youngest professors ever to the English faculty at the University of Karachi. The brilliance of her mind constantly competed with her stunning beauty, which was perhaps the reason why a profile of her life along with a photograph of her lovely and hopeful face was the cover feature in an issue of a national Pakistani magazine portraying "the" face of an intelligent, devout, and successful Muslim woman living in the post-partition subcontinent. A role model for women's education and equality at all levels of society, my mother was named one of the first Commonwealth Scholars from the subcontinent to Cambridge University, where she graduated with honors with a tripos in Eng! lish literature and a certificate in European History from New Hall College and went on to work for the BBC, among other employers. Her years in England were among the happiest of her life, and her nearest and dearest friends included everyone from princes to pagans, and her young and curious mind invited fascination by all of those who knew her. Indeed, as a child listening to stories of her Cambridge years and looking through black and white photos in her much-weathered album, I took it for granted that all mothers would be glamorous and eloquent and have stories to share of happy times spent with E.M. Forster or the Duke of Gloucester, among others.

My idealistic mother was a fierce believer in freedom and justice in both an abstract and real sense, and was instrumental in the revolutionary movement to establish Bangladesh as an independent country. Using her talents of eloquence and persuasion, she unceasingly lobbied political sectors in England to help see the dream of the country's creation become a reality. My mother was in fact selected as the first person to raise the green and red flag of Bangladesh in Trafalgar Square upon the news that the country had been established in 1971. After her time in England, my mother returned to Bangladesh to be close to her most beloved father and to teach as a professor of English at the University of Dhaka and establish herself in the highest ranks of the country's intelligentsia. As a professor, she was beloved by her students, and would teach courses on the Victorians and the Romantics to auditoriums overflowing with students eager both to learn from her and glimpse her legen! dary beauty. A firebrand as a spea ker and writer trained in the language of Sanskrit and classical Bengali, yet proudly articulate in the language of the common man and woman, my mother courageously held on to her public identity as a poet and scholar and champion of the underprivileged in society. Her book of poems in Bengali, Nacher Shobtho (The Sound of Dance), was a revolutionary piece of writing that continues to be regarded as one of the best Bengali works in the poetic genre. Though a writer herself, her life was the source of inspiration for many other writers, and the esteemed Bengali poet, Abul Hasan, dedicated his last book of poems before his death to my mother. Another novel that was inspired by and loosely based on my mother's life, Amlokir Mou, has been hailed as the first novel in modern Bengali literature coming out of Bangladesh to have a truly feminist protagonist. Larger than life in her deeds as well as words, my mother's stature as a poet was so great that even years after emigrating to! America, she continued to be invi ted to write articles, stories, and poems in immigrant publications and receive conference invitations and awards for her contributions to Bengali literature. Indeed, just a few months before her death, a selection of her newest poems was featured in Aakashleena, a 2006 Bengali anthology of Bengali diaspora/immigrant writers published from the Muktadhara Publishers in New York.

Having achieved the coveted status of a highly-regarded public intellectual in Bangladesh, my mother emigrated to the United States with my father, Syed Salahuddin, in further pursuit of education some twenty-five years ago, and completed her doctorate at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, where she had initially arrived from Dhaka as a Fulbright Scholar. Her doctoral thesis is a remarkable comparative literature analysis in which she examines the differences and connections in gender, race, and class in the short stories of Rabindranath Tagore (an Indian Bengali who was the first Nobel Laureate from India) and Rudyard Kipling (the famed mouthpiece for the British Empire), and illustrates the breadth and depth of knowledge that was to be found in my mother's expansive mind, which was always able to see associations where other people saw only disconnections.

A teacher of English for many years, her students loved her and many remained connected to her no matter wh! ere they were geographically locat ed. Whether it was politics or prose, my mother could engage in a lively and interactive discourse on any topic and in any format and was never hesitant to explore a new field of study if it interested her. It was for this reason that she could converse with equal measure on topics as diverse as neurobiology, metaphysics, high fashion, and world literature without batting an eyelash.

While they were both graduate students in Tucson, my mother and father fell in love with Arizona and the spiritual beauty they found in the Sonoran Desert. Perhaps they did not know that the desert would be their final home when they first moved there, but the two of them loved to converse and debate in the white adobe house that they together called home, an old structure built in 1884 that came to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places thanks to the loving dedication they put towards renovating it for the modern age. Sipping clove-infused tea during the sunset hours, they would appreciate the quiet grace of the desert found within their garden and rejoice in the inner peace they found in their surroundings and one another.

After my father passed away suddenly in 2003, my mother was not one to wither away quietly of a broken heart, but instead concentrated fully on meeting the challenges that lay ahead of her as well as preparing herself spiritually for her final journey. Though her primary training and experience was in writing and teaching, my mother did not shy away from single-handedly and ably managing a family real estate business, and despite the perniciousness of the occasional unruly tenant or unscrupulous contractor, my mother had the sense of purpose to maintain full occupancy of her properties and the artistic vision to renovate her adobe houses in such a way that the random passerby would comment on the beauty of the work she was overseeing. While taking care of such worldly matters, my mother also took care of her spiritual self, completing in 2004 the strenuous and life-altering undertaking of the Hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca that constitutes one of the five pillars of Isla! m, only one year after the death o f my father. During this time, she also counseled me and my husband as we worked hard to complete our studies.

It is thanks to her steadfast love and guidance that I graduated from Yale Law School with a clerkship in hand even though I was still grieving the loss of my father, who passed on after my first semester of law school, and that my husband completed his masters in computer science with a 4.0 from Johns Hopkins University while managing a full time work schedule as a computer engineer for one of the world's largest companies. Though my mother had always been an innately spiritual person by virtue of her unique sixth sense, her clarity of perception, and her piercing assessment of the character of others, the level of her divine consciousness in the period following her Hajj was a force to be reckoned with, and the guidance and wisdom we received from her are testament to her incredible strength.

My mother, until the last moment she was alive on this earth, was a person who lived every single day without artifice or pretense or hypocrisy, her only goal to find peace and patience. She embraced living with a happy innocence and kept everything that was associated with her simple and honest. When she loved, she loved deeply and unconditionally with full loyalty and dedication. In the final days of her life, when she was slipping away as a result of the stroke, I held her hand and called out to her, hoping that the sound of my voice might keep her with me. In the very last moment that she was acutely conscious, she looked at me for a moment and then smiled and squeezed my hand. That even in the most trying hour of her life my mother was exuding love and grace is testament to her beautiful heart and soul. On the day of her burial, when she was laid to rest with my father in the mountainous desert landscape of All Faiths Memorial Park in Tucson, Arizona, people from all et! hnicities and backgrounds came for ward during her Janazah, the funeral prayer, to offer testimony to her strength of character and devotion to the divine. These countless testimonials, coming from mouths young and old, rich and poor, black, white, red, brown, and yellow are evidence that my dearest mother, though physically tiny and unassuming, had an intellectual and spiritual stature that rose above much of mankind.

In the Islamic tradition, we believe that in the forty days following death, the soul slowly departs from the body into the universe and any good deed done in the name of the departed will make the process of corporeal farewell easier. If you would like to think of a way to remember and honor my mother, Suraiya Khanum, any form of kindness or charity or prayer in her name would be most fitting.

My mother's name, Suraiya, is a Persian name for the stellar constellation Pleiades, and as we mourn the absence of her presence in this world, I ask you to look to the heavens in the coming days to find her spirit soaring among the stars.