Hello!  Won’t you come and meet me?  I won’t bite you.  That’s a promise from me.  Sorry, I can’t shake hands with you.  You see I am not a human being like you.  I am an ordinary mutt (Sharomyo in Bengali).  Man’s best friend, you know what I mean.

How are you doin’?  Please do allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Sam.  In Islamic Republic of Banglastan, they even name their pets following the Islamic tradition.  My original name, given at birth, by my owner was an Arabic name.  You can call me ‘Sam the howler,’ that is who I am.  Well, I’m not ashamed to tell you that once I have a Khati Bangalee Muslim name ‘Sams.’  However, I shortened it to be in tune with modernity and for my propinquity to anything that is west and that includes the blues and jazz music of the black folks of America in down south.  Yup you, I dig Black Music!  In all honesty, I like my abbreviated name, which kinda sound like an unadulterated Yankee or Brit name.  So, call me Sam if you will.  It surely brings music to my ear.  So, won’t you call me Sam or dear Sam?  I promise I won’t bark or growl or even howl at you.  I may however lick you!

Just moments ago, I told you so -- that I am a mutt.  It is a slangg word no doubt; therefore, many of you may not be familiar with the meaning of this word.  The term mutt is now used to mean a mongrel dog everywhere in America.  It also means a person who is stupid.  The word mutt has an interesting word history.  According to American heritage dictionary the following is the word history of mutt: “Clipping not of sheep but of a word having to do with sheep has given us our term mutt for a mongrel dog.  Clipping or abbreviating words, a standard process of word formation, sheared mutt from muttonhead, a pejorative term meaning “a stupid person,” based on the notion that sheep are stupid.  Mutt in its first recorded use in 1901 is used in the same senses as muttonhead, but it is soon recorded (1904) as a term of contempt for a horse and then (1906) for a dog.  We can be reasonably certain that the New Yorker critic writing in 1970 that “The cast includes a Sheepdog . . . a Mutt Bitch,” had no awareness that a sheepdog would make the ideal mutt.”
 

Would you mind hearing my pedigree?  It will be a short one, though.  I promise not to bore you with nauseating details.  I was born in a Muslim family some forty plus years ago in Dacca (that was the spelling then).  My parents came from the other side.  When I say the other side, you know what I mean by that.  My parents never talked much about my howling relatives that my parents left behind when they moved south to their Prane’r Pakistan following the tradition of Hizrat.  My parents became a kind of pariah when they abandoned their motherland.  But then, the late 1940s were a difficult time.  Hope you would understand their difficulty.  I was born when Field Marshall Ayub Khan grab the power from another army man by the name Maj. Gen. Iskander Mirza in 1958.  Those were the glory days for my ma and pa.  They loved their Prane’r Pakistan.  They taught us when we used to be squelcher that Jinnah sahib was the greatest man to set foot on earth and that vile gang of Gandhi-Nehru was the worst.  Allah will not give them any space in Habia Dojokh—the worst hell God almighty made for every kind of depraved and reprobates of our world.  Even though Jinnah sahib was not exactly a practicing Muslim by a long shot, but the almighty reserved a special place for him in Zannat-ul Firdous—the best of the best heaven God created only for the overachiever Muslims.

As a pup, I was an ardent disciple of Jinnah sahib even though he was long gone.  We used to swear by Jinnah sahib’s name.  Pakistan was so heavenly to us.  This horrible Sheikh Mujib spoiled all the fun for us.  My ma and pa urged us to speak Urdu at home, even though it was not sahi (correct) thinking that it would help us to land a job in any junkyard or military establishment as a sentry [dogs are only good as sentry].   I was barely a thirteen-year-old pup when the Gondogol (trouble) erupted in East Pakistan.  In my family, we never used the phrase Swadhinotar Sangram.  Too much Hindu smell in it.  However, the Awamis would not use the word Azadi for it.  So blithely, my parents and other like-minded folks would call it the days of Gondogol.  I still kind of like that word Gondogol. That is what it truly was!  Sheikh Mujib and his student bahini started this massive Gondogol over the election result.  My family would not have objected to Z.A. Bhutto becoming the PM of Pakistan.  Sheikh Mujib was not cutout for that coveted position, any way.  My pa used to say that all the time.  He used to growl all the time during 1972 through 1975.  My ma used to bitch about it until they took care of Sheikh Mujib on that momentous day on August 15, 1975.
 

Gen. Zia’s time was heavenly.  We the howlers, growlers, and prowlers were doing less of howling, growling, and prowling.  It was like Nirvana for us.  In the TV nighttime news, we longed to see Gen. Zia give his short speeches here and there in his broken Bangla while our folks used to dig canals to bring prosperity into the village.  Gen. Zia’s detractors used to say that the canals were being dug to bring crocs into villagers’ backyard.  Oh, how evil and cruel those backbiters were!
 

A passion burned day-and-night in my soul.  It took me a long while after I smoked a ton of grass and gulped zillions of uppers and downers before I found that perfect female canine.  Before long, a tied the knot and I plunged into something what you may call connubial mirth making. New pup was born before one could count 12 months.  My musical talent whatever was left went downhill.  I tried new tricks of the trade but without much success.  Then came the idea of electrifying Tagore songs.  I never held that Hindu poet in esteem, any way.  None of my family members did—come to think of it.  So I figured what the heck!  I will take the plunge.  Plunge I did.  But I never did realize that the water was bitter cold.  I caught pneumonia. My howling became even more distuned.  All the notes coming from my voice box were out of tune and my critique, which I have many in Dhaka, say that only sour notes were emanating from my voice.  I did realize that I am getting old.  Not everyone could be a Mick Jagger or Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, you know.  They may have drunk from a fountain of youth.  I am not that lucky to earn a million buck.  So, the deshi drink of todi was good enough for me.  So what?  I am aging a bit. I would like to go down in the annals of Bangladesh’s puppy pop music as the one and only howler!  No one can take that title from me.  Get it man!  Perhaps when I am gone from this mortal world, there will be sighting of ‘Sam the Howler’ a la Elvis sighting in any of the many plaza shopping centers, which are mushrooming these days all over Dhaka.
 
 

So, Dhaka’s modem will only go up to 28.8 Kbytes or even 56 Kbytes speed.  But that could hardly deter my spirit.  I will write furiously day and night and night and day.  I will keep the Internet abuzz twenty-four hours.  I will be a rebel without a cause.  Oh, this Internet is mine.  There will be so much fun in scribbling and I will scribble the night away!  I will invent a cause.  I will howl when someone will say horrible thing about my hero Gen. Zia.  I will even growl when someone will say kind words about India—the 600 lb gorilla sitting out there to devour Zia’s Banglastan.  I will munch on RAW agents, Lintners and Perrys of the western world by shaking hand with ISI agents such as Syed Adeeb of Information Times and Golam Arshad, Bureau Chief of Inquilab in Washington DC who used to keep the tempo alive in NFB masquerading as a lowly Mohiuddin Anwar.  I will take a jab at Jamal, Jaffor, Avijit, Fatemolla and the whole Shebang.  They will be so badly hurt that they will vaporize into the thin air of the cyberspace.  Only then, will all the Rumi’s and Asifs of the cyberworld heave a giant sigh of relief and the cyber newsletter “Howling of the Mutts” (Mutte'r Dak) will spam the entire newsgroup and e-groups creating a backlog that a massive traffic jam will happen in all the T1, T3 lines of the info-highway.  Yes, yes, it will happen sooner than one could think.
 

I hope my one-man vendetta against Paki-haters of Bangladesh will come to fruition.  From today, I will work unrelentingly to decimate those freethinkers because there is not much freethinking to do in Bangladesh or anywhere else.  As a grownup pup, I may become a drone any day now.  My pa and ma’s generation has become vestigial.  No one now likes to talk about the days of Gondogol or its spirit.  This country we lovingly call Banglastan is now on its way to become a Tabligistan where a perpetual Ijtema will go on, on the bank of Holy Turag River notwithstanding what the secularist Bangalees say from the ‘Land of Lincoln.’  I fervently pray that my howling and growling will not become a whimper as the aging process sets in.  My virility is still intact.  My growling sounds gruff these days however; but I still consider myself a puppy at heart.  I am still Sam, the persistent growler, howler, and yes, the prowler.  One of my dreams is the following: When I die, my admirers will write a giant graffiti next to Savar Smriti Soudha.  It will say, “Sam the Howler Lives!”
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A disclaimer by the scribe: This ‘Sam the Howler’ is a fictionalized character.  If it matches the life of anyone that you know, consider it a mere coincidence.

A.H. Jaffor Ullah writes from New Orleans.  His e-mail address is: [email protected]

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