Two lunch breaks

There were three of us. We were all in our PhD programme under London University but when we met over lunch, we laughed and giggled like teenagers. One friend was from Zimbabwe, the other from Belgium and as well as myself. We made it a weekly routine to have lunch together in the university cafeteria. After lunch, our conversation lingered as we entered our main university where our bespectacled Professors looked up from their pile of books. We got caught! It was my own supervisor who could hear the ring of our laughter down the corridor. "Well, you sound happy. Do you do this every day?" he asked me.

"No. We only meet up once a week and have lunch," I said with a shaky voice.

"How much does it cost?" asks Andy. "Well, we spend two pounds each." "Two pounds? That's 10 pounds a week, 40 pounds a month and 480 pounds a year! Oh my God! One could do so much with 480 pounds a year!"

Caught red-handed and turning red as a beet at such a comment. I recalled the lone sandwich in his room. Wrapped in a cling film, there was a brown bread and cheese sandwich on one of the shelves, where many of his books, floppy diskettes in many colour, were neatly stacked in a row. The sandwich stood out. It wasn't in its proper place, but it stood there every single day. Sometimes a small portion of lettuce would peep out from the middle of the two slices of brown bread separated by a layer of cheese. Other than that, the look was the same. Andy would often meet me during lunch break. He would assign me sometime between one and one thirty and while munching his frugal sandwich, he would advise me whether to use STATA graphics or Multilevel graphics to represent differences between use of contraception among various areas of Bangladesh.

Many years later, I encountered another lunch interval. I went to the Bangladesh TV station to record a programme on Nazrul. The programme started at 12 pm and after two artistes were recorded, they announced a lunch break. The lunch break started at 1.30 pm and lasted till 3 pm. We were six artistes along with Prof Rafiqul Islam, who waited for the TV crew to come back and resume the programme. We didn't have any food with us and there wasn't any cafeteria where we could even spend the equivalent of two pounds so we talked instead. It was a very learned chatter on use of rag jaijaiwanti, rag hansa malhar, or gour sarang, and various other sarangs in Nazrul's songs. One artist got up from his position to show me a yoga posture which helps in preserving the voice through the range. Another artist criticised his fellow artiste's song. To that, I said, "You should tell HER so that she stands corrected."

Prof Rafiqul Islam spoke at length about Dhiren Mitra and his songs and how he had received a Nazrul award along with Dhiren Mitra in Churulia, India. He spoke about his grandchildren and their love for computers, Facebook, chats and unsocial behaviour. He spoke about his times as a research student in Cornell, Ithaca, what he learned that equipped him for his journey towards a PhD, which he completed on the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam because he was promise-bound to Professor Hye for that and returned from Cornell to obtain his PhD in Dhaka University. Our topics knew no bounds but we were eagerly waiting for the programme to resume. Upon recommencement, it took only half an hour to conclude. We however spent the whole day. It was past 4 pm and by the time we reached home the working day would be gone. Andy would have produced several PhDs in this long a lunch break, I thought.  

The writer is an academic, 
Nazrul exponent and writer.