✖

Shafiqul Alam : In the prison where he was the country’s most famous hangman, Shahjahan Bouya loved to read books. He would complete at least three books a week. And when he was about to leave the jail after hanging 60 death row convicts including some of the big names in our country, he visited the jail library one last time and realised he had read almost all the fictions in Dhaka Central jail library. He told me he read more than 4,000 books in the library and or maybe more in his 44 years long stay in the jail. He is a big fan of Imdadul Haq Milon’s works but he does not want to meet him. He read quite a few fictions, especially the Himu series, of Humayun Ahmed, perhaps the most read novelist in Bangladesh, but he thought Humayun essentially wrote the same story again and again. These days at a small one room Keraniganj apartment he shares with a grandson of one of his sisters, he reads newspapers and watches TV including almost all cricket matches of Bangladesh team broadcast live by local TV stations.

He was a follower of Sarbahara chief Siraj Shikder, the country’s first and perhaps the most famous victim of extrajudicial murders. And he was an itinerant Marxist rebel in the 1970s until he was detained in 1979 over the murder of a truck driver caught in a gunfight between police and revolutionaries in Manikganj. These days he is a devout Muslim whose last wish is to perform Umrah. He said he won’t be able to afford hajj as it is very costly. But Umrah will cost a fourth of a Hajj pilgrimage. ‘I hope Allah will fulfill my wish,’ he told me. In the pictures he shows us a part of a golden Manila Rope he used to hang dozens of people at Dhaka jail. He has kept it as a souvenir at his cupboard. Strangely, he said, many believe this rope has a magical power. They come to him for a tiny thread of the hanging noose. ‘Some have alreadz used it as an amulet. They believe it has an amazing healing power. It can solve their problems and all kinds of medical and genie-related issues,’ he said. DhakaDiary