On the morning of April 26, the phone came alive with dozens of messages crisscrossing Kolkata, Dhaka, London and Berlin. “Daud da Nei” (Daud da No More). These were followed by hurried phone calls. When, Where, How? Sometimes, there was silence on the other side of the call, as if a bag of memories had burst open. Daud da held together a circle of friends spread across the world. He reminded them of their former selves. And now with his death, that bit of fragile history cannot be recalled on request. The connection is cut. I learnt of Daud Haider’s death from writer Amit Chaudhuri, an old Berlin hand, who, like me and many fortunate others, spent large swathes of time in the poet’s living room in Eisennacher Straße, where Daud da held his famous dinners. I am not wholly comfortable writing continuous prose, thoughts come to me in picto-texual allotments. If I were to write a comic on Daud da, the first panel would consist of a watercolour of an evening 14 years ago — a spacious drawing room in a moody, west Berlin neighbourhood. At the centre would be a large table filled with food. The bookcases would be spilling out well-thumbed volumes and the wide balcony would be spilling out plants onto the carpet. These gatherings differed from the carefully curated dinners that I get invited to nowadays. They were less about strategic friendships (where the guests are meant to get along with each other) and more about the whimsical assortment of characters picked up from Daud da’s multi-hued past and present — old Bengali emigres, writers and academics in asylum, former radio journalists from Deutsche Welle Bengali service, clueless travelling students and an assortment of German sahebs and mems. The drinking and conversation would continue until well after dinner. The animated voices would pour out into the sedate, darkly lit streets of Schöneberg. One peek into Daud da’s kitchen would make it clear the effort the man took to entertain. Daud da was a tidal wave, whether it was literature, politics or his kitchen. Daud da loved feeding people. Every time he made some money, he shifted gears from Daud Haider to Dawaat Haider. He would run to the local fish shop to get frozen pabda or pangash, or occasionally fresh dorade, and spend the entire day scaling, gutting, gilling and cooking them for random people like me. In the following years, I would spend many such evenings in that drawing room. The significance of the place kept changing as I grew more and more accustomed to the city. With Daud da it was never a rudimentary connection. He saw me through various ups and downs of life. I often met him at art and book events. Post-event, we would exchange jokes over a smoke to mitigate the painful earnestness of the Berlin art scene. After my separation, Daud da and I used to go for long walks across Charlottenburg. He transformed into a ‘brown’ Walter Benjamin, guiding me through his personal geography of the city. He also told me stories about his youth in Calcutta, his various dushtumis (escapades) while being a student of comparative literature at Jadavpur University and his relationships with the great women of the city. He also gave me expert advice on the Berlin mems. I didn’t have very much to do then; had it not been for Daud da, I would be languishing in some German integration school, spending a whole year learning einem, meinem, deinem, keinen. Once in a while, I asked him literary questions. “Daud da, why are all middle-aged male Bengali poets obsessed with the breast (Sthon-centric)? His usual response to such things was, “Dhur fajil (You jackanapes)!” *** Through our gossipy relationship, Daud da etched a place for me in Berlin, a city I felt no connection with. Daud da eventually lost his Eisenacher Straße flat. The court case ran for years. Finally, the eviction notice came. This was the first time I saw Daud da look so gloomy. He was shunted away to the outskirts, an hour-and-a-half train ride from the city centre. He called it the Barasat of Berlin. He gave away his plants, and I didn't dare ask him what happened to his books. As time passed, my conversations with Daud da became rarer. An occasional phone call, a promise to meet up came to nothing. Migration is a violent thing — tax, health insurance, residency status, energy bills, livelihood worries, child-rearing, the German system keeps you on your toes and in doing so deadens you. But Daud da kept on coming up in conversations. Earlier this year, in Delhi, at Naeem Mohaiemen’s book launch party, while pouring Japanese whisky into my glass, Naeem suddenly said, “Shunechho? Daud da fell down the stairs. It’s bad.” He was right. Daud da never recovered from that fall. If he did, he would have joked, “I tumbled down the stairs like Emperor Humayun. Except not from the stairs of my library, but rather from my pigeon-nest social-housing flat. The library rots in some storage in Berlin and would be sold as roddi after I am gone.” One of the first people I called after hearing of Daud da’s death was film director Meenu Gaur. “He was my friend since I was seven, and called me mamooni,” she told me. “When I was even younger than (my son) Sarang.” I knew Meenu had grown up in the opposite building in Ballygunge where Daud da lived in exile as the houseguest of the famous Bengali poet Annada Shankar Ray. Daud da had been freshly kicked out of Bangladesh for writing a poem that irked the Jamaat. A natural-born troublemaker, Daud da always managed to ‘finger’ the authority. Calcutta too proved to be temporary, but luckily, Günter Grass was around the corner. Daud da was magic-carpeted to Berlin by the Nobel laureate. Berlin became Daud da’s final address. Pitu (Main Chowdhury), a close friend of Daud da's from back in the day, visited him twice a week at the nursing home until the day he died. The last two months of his life, Daud da was on life support. If he knew I was writing about his life and works, he would have laughed and said, “Tumi abar kobitar ki bojho?” (What do you understand about poetry?) and then added in a stern manner, “Eta kintu book review noi, beshi fajlami korbe na” (This is not a book review, don’t be flippant). Sarnath Banerjee is a comic artist and writer
