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02  SHOHIDUR RAHMAN

London
14/7/25

Collage by Henna Khanom / Map lines taken from ‘East Pakistan’ (1962) by A.R. Quraishi, Surveyor General of Pakistan via the European Commission (https://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu/content/east-pakistan)

Shohidur Rahman was born in 1970, in Leeds. Shohidur is a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), helping new migrants in the country. He now lives in London, where he has spent the last two decades.

His father, Halim Ullah (c.1934-1981), migrated from Sylhet to Leeds in 1957. Halim Ullah returned to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1964 to marry Gul Nehar Begum (c.1948-2018). They had five children together, of which Shohidur is the second eldest.

SR: I'm not sure where to begin and beginnings are very important. Maybe I could begin with the history of my father and his father. My grandfather was called Mukbul Ullah. There’s a photograph of him. It’s seen better days. My ancestral village is called Daulatpur. Daulat means wealth and pur is the word for village. My grandfather used to travel between villages on a horse.  

Mukbul Ullah, c.1970s.

I don't really have distinct memories of my grandfather. Apparently, he had a great sense of humour. My mum used to be aghast that I didn't remember him. I was about 9 when he died. I remember getting the telegram. My dad [Halim Ullah] was crying all day. My dad was quite a hard man, but to my young eyes it was amazing to see him cry like that.

I was told once my father was too angry and full of that fervour. They thought it’d be good if he was sent abroad. Send him as far away as possible so he can't cause us trouble.

HK: Make it the English's problem.

SR: Yeah, make it the problem of the English. He came into this country from what is now Bangladesh, but what back then was East Pakistan. He came in 1957 to the UK, so it was well before the Bangladeshi War of Liberation against Pakistan in ‘71. He was definitely an East Pakistani. That's how he would have understood himself.

His uncle had come in 1936, but it was actually his uncle's friend who was a merchant seaman who helped dad get accommodation. He got dad his first job as a box cutter, at Kraft Containers. He's basically somebody who cut out the template to create boxes for packing. That's a box cutter.

In 1964 my dad went back to East Pakistan to get married. My mum [Gul Nehar Begum] came over in 1967. Amongst my earliest memories is seeing my dad leave the house at night, working night shifts. My mum would be packing an Indian style tiffin box. Round, with the handles that came up. And there was a boiled egg in there. I used to like boiled eggs. I was a little jealous. But really, he had to work very hard.

Eventually my father saved enough that he bought a back-to-back on 12th Avenue in Armley, in Leeds. The naming style of the streets was Americanised: 12th Avenue, 1st Avenue, and so on. Back-to-back being one room downstairs and one room upstairs, so the upstairs was the bedroom. There'd be nine people sleeping in a room, people constantly in and out, and my mum would be cooking for them all.


1966 map of Armley and Beeston / Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland CC-BY (NLS) maps.nls.uk/view/197236004

He put down a deposit of £40. The whole cost of the house was £120. The street was generally miners and traveller families. The Jewish owner of Kraft containers, whose name was something like Mr. Bergen – my father was well loved by this man. Mr. Bergen paid for dad’s deposit and then dad paid the loan back. There was no interest. After that, my dad had put together enough money to buy a through terrace and that was at 14 Camberley Street in Leeds 11. I use the postcode because that seemed to be the convention amongst Bangladeshis. Harehills was known as Leeds 8, Chapel Town as Leeds 7.

There was a senior that lived there [14 Camberley Street] that eventually we as a family got to know and call grandad. My dad was quite a distant father and sometimes he'd be angry and there’d be tension in him. I'd fear him in some ways. But grandad, we took to him. He was called William Story. He would sing nursery rhymes to us, rock us on his knee, take us to the park. It’s strange, really, because he couldn’t pronounce our names. He called my sister, Shamshun, Sharon. I used to laugh over that.

We had a piggy bank that was broken open. He [William Story] said it wasn't right the way our mum and dad had taken the coppers that were all in there. That just shows how every penny was counted. I didn't mind. It was for a big cause. For going to Bangladesh, which was like the land of Oz. I had no idea what Bangladesh was. It was just a word.

We never went abroad for holidays. The only kind of traveling that we did was to go to friends of the family or relatives’ homes. Like South Shields, up towards Newcastle, Scunthorpe, Oldham. Places like that. A lot of them were small towns, kind of saturated with the Asian culture, in the north. Or at least the sort of patches that we went to.

I didn't know what Bangladesh was until I landed and the plane door opened and the humidity hit me in the face. What I especially remember was the rainy season and the paddy fields being flooded with water, so much as you could paddle in them. Not that I’d encourage that, because you just get leeches all over your feet. The memories I have are of walking along these muddy sorokhs [paths], under a leaden sky with a flat expanse of water reflecting the sky. It’s an image that is so deeply impactful to me.

But I was in Bangladesh for about six months. Our mum had taken us out of school to do that. I was 7. I was worried. Are we going to go back to school? Maybe this is our life now. I remember finally going back to England, back to Dewsbury Road Primary School, and being reintroduced, just ‘Oh, hello’ and led by the hand back into the class. You just get back in. It was all very natural. People would be up in arms now.

Growing up in Beeston, we did a lot of traipsing around. Especially through the mosque. When I say mosque, it's often just terraced houses. But the mosque, it’s quite a harsh thing to face for a kid. It was two hours every evening, five days a week. I hated it at the time. It was very much parrot learning. We were learning the Kaydah, the Sifarah, the Quran. Disciplining was quite harsh. They would use a bamboo stick and hit us on the hands. That kind of thing was laughed off by us as kids because you wanted to prove how hard you were.

We stayed in the mosque sometimes, which is called Etikaf. You’d stay there to imbibe the Islamic atmosphere. I met a good friend [there]. He was saying afterwards, ‘You should stay, you've got to stay.’ He was in there for two months and we were just there for two weeks. He was desperate for company, I guess. I remember also doing things like the Tabliq, where you go around to people's houses and knock on their door – evangelising basically.

HK: Can you tell me more about the Tabliq?

SR: What would happen is we’d be at the mosque at the Waz, the sermons after the Namaz [prayer]. Then there’d be a group that would go to Bengalis’ and Pakistanis’ houses. You explain to them why, for the good of your soul, you must go to mosque and go to prayer. There was supposed to be a kind of joy in being on the mission. But it just wasn’t that joyful. It’s 9 a.m., it’s a cold morning. You’re talking in the garden or on the street. We’d start it as young as about 8 or 9 years old.

HK: It was for people who weren’t coming to the mosque regularly?  

SR: Yes. They would sometimes go [to the mosque] and then they dropped off.  

HK: What were their reactions like?

SR: If they were in, because otherwise, the wives would come out and say they'd gone to work. But if they were in, a lot of people they'd agree to the face, but you could see they were shying away. You’d have to be a bit sanctimonious to be thinking as a kid you could do that.

I’ve got a memory of once going to the Waz [sermons] with my dad during Ramadan. He wasn’t a particularly prayerful person. He never grew a beard; he was always clean shaven. I go about clean shaven myself and I'm sure it's an act of homage to him. He asked me, ‘Do you want to stay or do you want to go?’ and I just said, ‘No, we'll stay, we'll stay.’ We stayed there all night and it felt good. You watched the sun rise and you’d go home in the early morning.

My father built up and started a restaurant. That was the very first job I ever got. After my dad died [1981], the restaurant was divided with half of it going to my mum, a quarter each to two cousins. But then they were managing the restaurant. They stopped the payments and they said they were going to start a trust fund and put it in the children's names, not our mum’s. I think it's to do with our mum trying to remarry outside of the wider families. They completely shunted my mum out. We were on the breadline. It was tough for years. My mum had a nervous breakdown.  

HK: Could you tell me more about what happened to your sister after your father passed?  

SR: She got married in Bangladesh at the age of 14, which was illegal. It wouldn’t have happened in this country, or at least it would have been in secrecy. In Bangladesh it's a bit more open, where I think the Islamic marital age is 12 or 13. My dad had died when I was 10. As I said, my mum had a nervous breakdown. She was advised to go back to Bangladesh to recover. She went and took the three youngest children with her, including my sister. It must have been touted already by the people of Bangladesh, we're all coming over to Bangladesh and she's going to be the single girl, a khonya, a single unmarried girl in need of a husband. My mum must have been aware of this but had pushed it to the back of her mind.

When we went over to Bangladesh various people were in fact put forward to her as possible suitors that she [Gul Nehar Begum] had poo-pooed. [But] there was a first cousin called Saad, which means “moon”, so his name was Moon Miah. He had been in Saudi Arabia working. He was quite a religious kind of a person; he had a beard already by the age of about 25. He was dressed with a kind of Arabic garb, to show that he was educated in the Islamic line. I don't know how far he'd gone in Islamic education. But my mum was impressed by him. Eventually she began to come round to the idea. She had been through enough trouble that she thought that my sister might have trouble growing up as well.

My older brother Muz [Muzibur Rahman] and I stayed behind in England. We were still doing our A-levels. I was maybe 17 and he was a year older. We decided that we would join them over there in Bangladesh. I think because we were finding it quite hard, living on our own for the first time. Muz came back after a while, because he was studying to go to uni. I stayed on for four and a half months, which played havoc with my A-Levels.

I was there when the decision to have her married was made. I was very angry. I was furious. I was bubbling over, kicked over a few chairs. After months of wrangling to myself that it was wrong and infuriating, a distant relative had said in the end, ‘Oh, just let her go, just let her be married. It'll be okay, everything will be fine.’ Just by weight, by sheer dint of the weight of other people and their decisions and their mindsets, I yielded to that in the end. I knew, whether I liked it or not, it was probably going to happen around me anyway. I wasn't that much a big part of it. I've heard of stories where brothers don't yield and it doesn't go ahead. So it could be that I'm partly to blame. I don't know.

My sister took it very badly, of course, when she understood that the decision had been taken. And yet this Saad Miah, this cousin of mine, was a bit dunder-headed and just couldn't see that. He said, ‘She's a bit thick. It seems like she's quiet all the time and doesn't say anything.’ As if he couldn't understand that she would, of course, be so overwrought and taken badly by this happening around her that she would withdraw into herself.

My older brother was in university. He didn’t find out ‘til I returned. I told him and he was gobsmacked. He gradually formulated a plan in his mind. He was towards the end of his first year at uni, so as many students do, he'd planned to travel. He was going to India. He then made a diversion into Bangladesh. He went into the village home in a way that must have struck people as very weird, because he had no gifts, no bags or trunks full of goods. He was saying to them that he wanted to take my sister to the capital, Dhaka, to see a family friend or have a little holiday. He was trying to engineer [it] so as not to be stopped. He was being furtive. He needed to be; they wouldn't allow him to go.


2011 map of Sylhet and Dhaka / Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, lightly edited for clarity loc.gov/resource/g7645.ct003449/

My brother wouldn't let go of this idea. He wouldn’t let go of my sister so easily. My sister's father-in-law, our uncle, said, ‘If you're going to go, then you need to go with a chaperone.’ So that's what they did. They went off in a taxi and a chaperone went with them. The car broke down somewhere along the way and somehow the taxi driver had understood what was happening. He understood something bad had gone down and that my brother and my sister were Londonis [people from London] and needed to get away. And that the man, who was placed in the middle between them, was an outsider. When the car broke down, the chaperone got out to push and the car started up and the taxi driver turned to my brother and just said, ‘Shall we go? Shall we just set off?’ My brother immediately said, ‘Yes, let's get going.’ He was very eager to get away. Then that's what they did. They left the chaperone biting the dust. They drove off. The chaperone never forgave him for that. In 2018, Muz was in Bangladesh when he came across the chaperone again. [The chaperone] still remembered. He still held it against him that he'd left him behind, kicking and grinding his teeth in the dust. That event all happened probably around 1988 or ‘89.

They made their way towards Dhaka and stayed over at a friend’s. My sister didn't have her passport. All the documents and paperwork had been kept by her father-in-law, the uncle. Unbeknownst to the two of them, my uncle had also made his way down towards the capital. He managed to get to the embassy before my brother and sister and told the embassy guys the whole story. That she was married and that she needed to stay in Bangladesh with her husband.

Muz and my sister went to the embassy man. He was there, very long faced. The British flag was on a standard in the corner. They made up a story about having lost the passport. They thought that if they said that she'd got married, that would introduce complications. As Muz said, they told him a pack of lies. The man listened to everything and said ‘It’s not true what you’re saying. I know the whole story.’ They didn’t know what to say.

But in the end the embassy man was sympathetic to them. I think because they were children and because she was a British citizen. [He] got her a temporary passport and she came back to England and in the end, she succeeded in passing her GCSEs. Eventually the marriage, just through distance, was annulled. My sister managed to get to university. She was given a bursary, in fact, to then do a second degree at Cambridge. She made a success of her life in a way that, had she stayed in Bangladesh, I don't think any of those things would have happened. Her life story would have been very different. I married someone from a village myself. When she went back to Bangladesh for the first time, she said she'd never go again, because the life of girls over there, there's no freedom, there's no latitude to do anything.

HK: How was your sister’s relationship with your mother after that?

SR: Actually, the relation was very good. My sister never blamed my mum. Our mum went through a lot. She was fending for us. We were thrown on the bread line and she couldn't look after us. It was the worst thing that could happen to her, to feel like you can't look after your children. She scraped a living and fought to save up to build a basha, a house in a different part of the country, to get away from Daulatpur and all the backbiting. But our sister was the most sensitive towards her as a person.

HK: You’ve talked to me before about your struggles with mental health. I know it’s been a large part of your life.

MSR: Yeah. When I was 25, I had my first episode of a mental illness – schizophrenia. Earlier on I'd said that my dad, he's never been present in my life as a person. But it’s like I've recreated him in my mind. I worked this [family history] up into kind of a fiction almost. I spent a lot of time thinking on my own sometimes and part of it was to try and write. But part of it might have been as an aftermath of mental illness. It's hard to explain. It's a bit like your mind jumping off and building up a sort of nebulous cloud of thoughts and ideas and re-imaginings. There's reality and then there's the imaginative. The imaginative side at one stage of my life kicked off and recreated things and put things back together that's more alive and colourful than it actually probably was.

Mental illness played a big part of my life in my 30s and 40s. That's personal life rather than history. But it's difficult to distinguish between [them]. I suppose for you, archive and history, it's about the real world, the goings-on and the relations between people. But in a way, for me, I can't easily pull out the reality from the things I've imagined, because it's all woven in together in some ways. It's imagination that catches our attention in a way that reality doesn't always.  

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