Banker to the Poor (3 page)

Although Father did not mind spending money on our education and travels, he kept an extremely simple household and gave us little pocket money. In high school, the monthly stipend I received by winning the Competitive Scholarship Examination in the Chittagong District provided me with some pocket money, but not enough. I acquired the balance from Father's drawer of loose change. Father never detected this. In addition to our interest in books and magazines, Salam and I had developed a weakness for movies and eating out. Our palates were not sophisticated. My favorite dish was "potato chop," a roast potato filled with fried onion and sprinkled with vinegar. Salam and I ate these with a cup of jasmine tea at the simple tea stall around the corner from our house. Father was not privy to these outings.

The first camera that Salam and I bought was a simple box camera. It accompanied us everywhere. We researched and planned our subjects like experts: portraits, street scenes, houses, still lifes. Our accomplice in photography was the owner of a neighboring photo shop named the Mystery House Studio. He allowed us to use his darkroom to develop and print our black-and-white film. We tried special effects and even retouched our photos in color.

I became interested in painting and drawing and apprenticed with a commercial artist, whom I called
Ustad,
or "Guru." At home I arranged my easel, canvas, and pastels so that I could hide them from Father at a moment's notice. As a devout Muslim, Father did not believe in reproducing the human figure. Some art-loving uncles and aunts in the family became my coconspirators, helping and encouraging me.

As a by-product of these hobbies, Salam and I developed an interest in graphics and design. We also started a stamp collection and convinced a neighboring shopkeeper to display our stamp box in the front of his shop. With two uncles we frequented theaters to see Hindi and Hollywood films and to sing the romantic folk songs that were popular at that time.

Chittagong Collegiate School was much more cosmopolitan than my primary school had been. My classmates were mostly sons of government officials on transfer from various districts and the school offered one of the best educations in the country. But its particular attraction for me was the Boy Scout program. The scout den became my hangout. Along with boys from other schools, I engaged in drills, games, artistic pursuits, discussions, hikes in the countryside, variety shows, and rallies. During "earnings week" we would raise money by hawking goods, polishing boots, and working as tea stall boys. Aside from the fun, scouting taught me to be compassionate, to develop an inner spirituality, and to cherish my fellow human beings.

I particularly recall a train trip across India to the First Pakistan National Boy Scout Jamboree in 1953. Along the way, we stopped and visited various historical sites. Most of the time, we sang and played, but standing in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra, I caught our assistant headmaster, Quazi Sirajul Huq, weeping silently. His tears were not for the monument or for the famous lovers who are buried there or for the poetry etched on the white marble walls. Quazi Sahib said he cried for our destiny and for the burden of history that we were carrying. Though I was only thirteen, I was struck by his passionate explanation. With his encouragement, scouting began to infiltrate all my other activities. I had always been a natural leader, but Quazi Sahib's moral influence taught me to think high and to channel my passions.

In 1973, in the chaotic months following the Bangladesh War of Liberation, I visited Quazi Sahib with my father and brother Ibrahim. We drank tea and discussed the political turmoil around us. A month later, Quazi Sahib, then a frail old man, was brutally murdered in his sleep by his servant, who robbed him of a small sum of money. The police never caught the murderer. I was devastated. In retrospect, I came to understand his tears at the Taj Mahal as prophetic of both his own suffering and the suffering in store for the Bengali people.

I have always thought of myself as a teacher. Even as a child, I loved instructing my younger brothers and insisted that they get only top grades in school. Immediately out of college, at the age of twenty-one, I was offered a post as a teacher of economics in my old college at Chittagong. The college, established by the British in 1836, was one of the most highly respected in the subcontinent. I taught there from 1961 until 1965.

During this time I also tried my hand at private business. I had noticed that packaging materials tended to be imported from western Pakistan and that we in the eastern half of the country had no facilities to produce boxes or wrapping material. I persuaded my father to allow me to set up a packaging and printing plant. I prepared a project proposal and applied for a loan from the government-owned Industrial Bank. At that time very few Bengali entrepreneurs wanted to set up industrial units. Our loan was immediately approved. I quickly set up a packaging and printing plant, which employed 100 workers. Over time it turned out to be a successful project making a healthy yearly profit.

My father, who was the chairman of the board, was extremely reluctant to have the company borrow from a bank. The whole notion of commercial credit made him so nervous that he made me pay the loan back early. We were probably one of the only start-up businesses in Bangladesh at that time that repaid a loan before it was due. The bank immediately offered us an additional 10 million taka loan to set up a paper plant, but my father would not hear of it.

The center of the packaging industry was in Lahore, West Pakistan. But as a nationalist Bengali, I knew we could manufacture our products cheaper in East Pakistan. Our products included cigarette packages, boxes, cartons, cosmetics boxes, cards, calendars, and books. Earning money had never been a worry of mine, but the success of the packaging factory convinced my family and me that I could excel in business if I wanted to.

Despite my success, I still wanted to study and teach. So when I was offered a Fulbright scholarship in 1965, I jumped at the chance to get a Ph.D. in the United States. This would be my third trip abroad. As a Boy Scout I had gone to the World Jamboree in Niagara Falls, Canada, in 1955 and to Japan and the Philippines in 1959. But this time I was on my own and I was in for some surprises. At first the University of Colorado campus in Boulder was quite a shock. In Bangladesh, students would never dare to call professors by their first names. If one spoke to "sir," it was only after being invited by "sir" to speak, and then one spoke in enormously respectful terms. But in Boulder, teachers seemed to consider themselves friends of the students. I often saw faculty and students sprawled out on the lawn barefoot, sharing food, joking, and chatting. Such familiarity was totally unthinkable in Bangladesh. And as for the young coeds in Colorado, well, I was so shy and embarrassed I did not know where to look. At Chittagong College, female students were distinctly in the minority. Of a student body of 800, no more than 150 were women. Women were also segregated. They were usually confined to the Women's Common Room, which was off-limits to male students. Their participation in the student politics and in other activities was limited. When we staged plays, for example, women were not allowed to participate, so men wearing women's dress and makeup would take on female roles.

My female students at Chittagong University were extremely shy. When it was time for class, they would huddle in a group just outside the Teachers' Common Room and then follow me to class, clutching their books and looking down at their feet so as to avoid the stares of the boys. Inside the classroom they sat apart from the boys, and I learned to avoid asking them questions that could possibly embarrass them in front of their classmates. I never talked to them outside the classroom.

In fact, I myself was so shy about women that I tried to ignore them entirely. Imagine my dismay when I arrived in the United States in the summer of 1965! The campus was alive with rock music. Girls would sit on the lawn with their shoes off, sunning themselves and laughing. I was so nervous, I tried to not even look at them. But I still loved to sit in the Student Center, watching the students come and go, chatting, flirting, eating, wearing their crazy clothes. The youth of the United States looked so strong and healthy and full of vitality. It was an age of drug experimentation. Alcohol was rife. But my shy personality led me away from the raucous parties. I preferred to study in my room or watch TV.

Television had appeared in Dhaka only in 1964, and before arriving in the United States I was quite unfamiliar with it. At Boulder, I soon became addicted. My favorite show was
60 Minutes,
but I also watched every silly sitcom there was:
I Love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, Hogan's Heroes
. I found I could talk and think more clearly when the TV was on. That is still true today.

This was also the height of the Vietnam War, and along with other foreign students I joined antiwar rallies and protest marches. Though I voiced my opposition to the Vietnam War, I tried to keep an open mind and not merely to spout what was fashionable or veer into groupthink. My leftist Bengali friends could not understand my positive opinions about the United States. Back in Dhaka, there was a lot of anti-American sentiment. Students on every campus called the United States dirty capitalists, shouting, "Yankee, Go Home!"

Quickly, I learned to enjoy the personal freedom of the United States. I started having fun. My studies were going well and I even found time to learn square dancing. I got quite used to seeing people drinking wine, beer, and strong alcohol. Little everyday incidents made a great impression on me. I will never forget the first time I entered a restaurant in Boulder to have the waitress say, "Hi, my name is Cheryl," and offer me a big smile and a glass of water with lots of ice in it. No one in my country or in South Asia would ever treat a stranger so openly and forthrightly.

As for American food, I missed my mother's spicy cooking. As much as I liked French fries, hamburgers, potato chips, and ketchup, I was heartily bored with American food, and I would have given anything in the world to eat rice and dal, or Bengali sweetmeats.

My summer in Boulder, surrounded by students from many different countries and a beautiful sunlit campus, passed all too quickly. In the fall, my scholarship required me to attend Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where I had a completely different experience. Nashville was depressing and unattractive after the wide-open vistas of Colorado. Also, Vanderbilt had only recently been desegregated. Even the tiny restaurant I frequented, the Campus Grill, had been "For Whites Only" six months earlier. There were few foreign students and no Bengalis. I felt lonely and homesick. The winter was cold and my dormitory, Wesley Hall, was so smelly that we quickly renamed it "Wesley Hell." The heating pipes banged and knocked all night long. The showers had old-fashioned open stalls and I was so shy and prudish that I took to showering in a
lungi,
a full-length skirt worn by people in Bangladesh.

I was the only Fulbright scholar at Vanderbilt that year. At first, my classes bored me. My graduate program in economic development was a "light master's," superficial compared to the far more advanced work I had already done in Bangladesh. Luckily, however, I was soon placed on a Ph.D. track and fell under the wing of a famous Romanian professor by the name of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.

Professor Georgescu-Roegen was known as a terror on campus. He flunked many students and it was rumored that he ruined many students' academic careers. But I thought he was wonderful. He taught me simple lessons that I never forgot and precise economic models that would eventually help me build up Grameen. Through him I realized there was little need for memorizing economic formulas. Far more important was to understand the underlying concepts that drive them to work. He also taught me that things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

When I left for my Fulbright scholarship in the United States, I certainly had no intention of finding an American wife. I assumed that if and when the issue of marriage arose I would marry the way everybody around me had, by arranged marriage. I also had no experience of women and was terribly shy around them. Bengalis are quite prudish and conservative in general and even more so in the religious Chittagong District where I grew up. In my family we never discussed such intimate things openly.

So in 1967, when a beautiful girl with shoulder-length red hair and blue eyes approached me in the Vanderbilt library, I was completely unprepared. She asked me where I was from.

"Pakistan," I replied, rather nervously.

This girl was friendly, spontaneous, and particularly curious about me and my background. Her name was Vera Forostenko, and she was doing her master's work in Russian literature. Vera was born in the USSR, but she and her family came to the United States soon after the Second World War. They settled in Trenton, New Jersey. I liked her immediately.

Two years after we met, in 1969, Vera left Tennessee and moved back to New Jersey. I was already making plans to return to Bangladesh.

"I want to come live with you there," Vera said.

"You can't," I replied. I was extremely stubborn. "It's a tropical country. A different culture. Women there are not treated as they are here."

"But I will adapt," she insisted.

She kept writing to me and calling to discuss this issue. Every time I found a reason why such a move would not work, she would find a counterreason.

Finally, I changed my mind.

We were married in 1970 and moved to Murfreesboro, a town fifty miles south of Nashville, where I was teaching at Middle Tennessee State University. Life was calm and peaceful, and then, on March 25, 1971, I came back to my apartment to have lunch and turned on the radio for the latest news from Dhaka. There was a brief item stating that the Pakistani army had moved in to block all political opposition against the government of Pakistan, and that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the independence movement, had fled.

I was changing my clothes. I stopped, rushed to the phone, and dialed Dr. Zillur Rahman Athar in Nashville. I asked him to turn on the radio and contact all the other Bengalis he knew in the area. Within an hour I was at Zillur's house. At that time there were six Bengalis from East Pakistan in greater Nashville. We began collecting news from all sources. There was no obvious consensus on the situation, but one thing was clear: The Pakistani army wanted to crush Bengalis once and for all. One of us, a supporter of the conservative pro-Islamic Jamaat party, kept saying, "We really don't know what has happened. Let us wait for more details."

I did not agree. "We have all the details we need," I said. "Bangladesh has declared its independence. Now we have to decide whether we consider ourselves citizens of this new country or not. Everybody has the right to choose. I declare my choice. My choice is Bangladesh. I declare my allegiance to Bangladesh. If there is any one else who would like to join me in this, he is free to do so. Those who do not join Bangladesh, I will consider Pakistani and an enemy of my country."

There was silence. Everyone was taken aback by the way I posed the question of allegiance. I suggested that we form the Bangladesh Citizens' Committee and immediately issue a press release for the Nashville print and electronic media.

We decided three things:

 

1. We would try to meet all the news reporters of the local TV stations and the editors of the local dailies to explain our decision and to seek support for the Bangladesh cause.
   
 

2. We would each immediately donate $1,000 to create a fund for the struggle.
   
 

3. We would give 10 percent of our monthly salary to the fund until Bangladesh became independent. If needed, we would increase the percentage.
   

Everybody pulled out his checkbook or borrowed from others to make the first deposit.

The next day, March 27, we made appointments with local TV stations and newspapers. I was elected secretary of the Bangladesh Citizens' Committee and spokesperson for the group. The local TV stations were thrilled. They rarely got a chance to scoop international news stories, and for them we represented a red-hot international news break with a local angle. I was a teacher in a local university, the other five were medical doctors in city hospitals, and here we were—declaring ourselves citizens of a country not yet born.

That afternoon we reassembled at Zillur's house to watch the local evening news. My interview was telecast in full. The interviewer asked, "Do you have a message for the Tennesseans?"

"Yes, I do," I replied. "Please write to your congressional representatives and senators immediately to stop military aid to Pakistan. Your arms and ammunitions are being used to kill innocent unarmed civilians of Bangladesh. Please ask your president to put pressure on Pakistan to stop genocide in Bangladesh."

I was pleased that all six of us, from differing political tendencies and socioeconomic backgrounds, had cooperated with immediate action. We now wanted to know what other Bengalis around the United States were doing. We decided to contact Mr. Enayet Karim, a Bengali official in the Pakistan embassy. He gave me some important news: There would be a demonstration against the Pakistani army's crackdown on civilians on March 29 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. The biggest group of Bengalis would come from New York. He urged us to join.

Though my doctor friends could not go because of their responsibilities at the hospitals, I announced that I would leave the next day. It was decided that I would go at my own expense. I could also use the $6,000 we had already raised if there was need for it in Washington.

Where would I stay in Washington? I did not know anybody. Though I had never met Enayet Karim, he sounded like a friendly person. Why not try him? I called him again. I proposed to be his guest the next day—would he mind? He immediately told me to come right over. His hospitality surprised me. I suppose the crisis had brought all us Bengalis together.