Humayun Ahmed passed over the lyric of 'Ekta Chilo Sonar Konya' with some shyness, asking the composer Maqsood Jamil Mintu to point out any lameness in the metre. The words had not been meant for a film. Ahmed asked him one day to compose it, and by Mintu's own account the request then slid out of his mind for several days. Nothing about it sounds like a campaign.
A lyric changed hands, a few days went by, and a tune arrived in its own time. Recorded in Dhaka in 1998 and released the following year, it reached the screen in Srabon Megher Din, in Subir Nandi's voice, and one writer reckons it will stand among the best Bengali songs for lyric and melody alike.
A novelist had wandered into a songwriter's workshop and asked, politely, where he might wipe his feet. What he brought in with him was a storyteller's way of beginning. Read the titles aloud. 'Ekta Chilo Sonar Konya' opens the way a grandmother opens a tale, and 'Borshar Prothom Dine' pins a story to one particular day of the monsoon.
'Jodi Mon Kade' sounds like an invitation, and 'O Amar Ural Pankhire' like a shout sent a long way off. His songs tend to start from a situation rather than a bare feeling, with someone already standing in it.
Even the grammar moves like a narrator. The golden girl is spoken of in the third person, a character in a tale, and the rain song fixes itself to a date. 'Jodi Mon Kade' turns to a 'you' and stays there, while the bird is addressed in the vocative and called across open air.
A prose writer shifts his point of view between chapters without thinking, and these songs seem to have done the same. Few of them look interested in showing off the poet. They ask the listener to look at someone.
The words came from the same habit of noticing. Songwriters had traditionally reached for the rose, the beli and the tuberose. Ahmed skirted that bouquet and let a bottle gourd blossom into a song, the pale flower that climbs a village fence. 'Mathay Poreci Sada Cap' stays at that everyday level.
Agun sang it, and young listeners took to it in a big way. A white cap is the sort of thing a prose writer sees and a poet usually leaves out, and the young seemed glad to find it in a song.
Rain keeps returning in these songs, and Ahmed seems to have known exactly which rain he meant. 'Borshar Prothom Dine' belongs to Dui Duari (2000), with Mintu's music, and Sabina Yasmin took the best female playback prize at the 25th National Film Awards for it.
A smaller story shows how closely he listened. Habib Wahid's first version of 'Chalo Brishtite Bhiji' came out cheerful. Habib, who composed and sang it, recalls Ahmed saying he loved the result but sensing a gap between them, because the writer had wanted a melancholy song.
Habib came back with a sadder version, which Ahmed adored, and Ahmed then had him prepare a second one with Sabina Yasmin. He had heard the weather of the song before a note existed, and he asked for another take the way a director would.
Then the songs turned from scenes into messages, and some had a real person at the other end. Ahmed wrote 'Jodi Mon Kade Tumi Choley Esho Ek Borshay' to ease the wounded pride of Meher Afroz Shaon. The song has a listener and it does not plead. It leaves the door open and names the rains as the time to come. Shaon sang it for Krishnopokkho (2016), with S I Tutul's music, and the performance earned her a National Film Award.
She says she first sang it when Nishad was still unborn, that the song never had a music video, and that the warmth of listeners left her stunned. When a second chapter came out for his 73rd birth anniversary, with fresh words from Mohammad Fazal, she confessed she waved the idea away at first. A peace offering, then, that kept collecting replies long after the quarrel it was meant for.
Notice, too, who ended up singing. The woman the song was written for became its voice, so the someone inside the song and the someone singing it were finally the same person. Sabina Yasmin returns as well, first under the opening rains of 'Borshar Prothom Dine' and then in the second, sadder version of 'Chalo Brishtite Bhiji'. Ahmed's songs keep calling the same few voices back, like characters who step onto the stage again in a later scene.
'O Amar Ural Pankhire' stretches the same gesture over a greater distance. It was Subir Nandi again, in Chandrokotha (2003). The voice that once told the golden girl's tale now calls after a bird, and the calling is all there is, with nobody pretending the gap can be closed.
Mintu says the shy hand-over of that first lyric began a long journey. Ahmed went on to write several more songs, nearly all set by Mintu, while other composers took a couple, and Mintu judges every one of them remarkable in lyric and tune, a real enrichment of Bengali song.
Radio and television keep playing them, on listeners' demand. Mintu lost the golden girl for a few days. Listeners have had years to do the same and have not managed it. Play any of the songs on a wet afternoon and the story is already running. Somebody has just said something, or left, or is about to, and the rain hasn't quite made up its mind either.
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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer based in Bangladesh.