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LIFE histories project

 

02  SHOHIDUR RAHMAN

London
14/7/25

Collage by Henna Khanom / Map lines rotated and 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 in Sylhet, July 1975.

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: 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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