Zia’s Voice and the Empty Chair of Leadership

1 September 2025

“I first wrote this short story in 1994, when it was published in my college journal. Today, I have reimagined it for our present moment — not as nostalgia, but as a challenge. My hope is that it stirs voters to question themselves, and in doing so, sparks the debate our nation desperately needs.”

The night was heavy, his cell rattling like a cage in the belly of a storm-tossed ship. Outside, the nation itself was in turmoil, waves of uncertainty crashing from every side. Zia lay awake on the hard floor, bracing as though lashed to the deck, unsure if dawn would bring freedom or death. And then, at last, sleep pulled him under, and the dream began.

He was back in 1971, on the run, ragged and hollow-eyed, his men starving, rifles empty, the enemy closing in. It felt like an endless voyage without sail or compass, no land in sight. Through the night he stumbled until he came upon a pond glimmering like moonlit water. A boy sat there, dipping his legs into the ripples.

At first the child startled, eyes wide with fear at the sound of boots approaching. But then the soldier spoke, softly, and the voice was familiar. The boy had heard it before, carried through the crackle of a radio in Chittagong: “Ami Major Zia bolchhi…” Fear melted into recognition, and the boy smiled.

Zia unlaced his boots, the worn leather heavy with mud, and for the first time set them aside. Barefoot, he lowered his feet into the cool pond beside the child. Soldier and boy, past and future, their reflections shimmered together. Above the water, a shapla swayed in the warm summer wind — rising pure above the mud, fragile yet uncorrupted. The boy leaned against him, as if to say: your voice carried us once; it must carry us again.

A clang of iron — a surge of noise. He woke to the gray of his cell, the dream spilling into waking. Locks breaking. Boots pounding. The door burst open and sepoys stormed in. For a breath he thought the execution had come. But instead, they shouted his name, lifted him high upon their shoulders, rifles raised like masts against the sky. He realized then: he had not woken from the dream. He had woken into it.

The dream carried him further still. Into the presidency, where he lived simply, incorruptibly. No riches, no empire of theft. His entire life could be packed into a single battered suitcase — a soldier’s modest load. And yet with that suitcase, with that voice, he gave the nation something priceless: pride, nationalism, the mending of a country torn apart by BAKSAL’s wreckage. For a few brief years, Bangladesh believed again.

But like Achilles at Troy, his blaze could not last long. On May 30, 1981, in Chittagong — the very city where his voice once gave birth to independence — bullets came. The circle closed. His belongings were gathered: one suitcase, a few clothes, a torn vest. That was all. He left the world as he had walked through it: incorruptible, unburdened, a soldier until the end.

Yet his voice remains. The same voice that soothed a frightened boy at the pond, that steadied a nation at birth. A voice that rose like the shapla above the mud, fragile yet untainted, swaying in the wind.

Today, once again, Bangladesh is in the storm. Professor Muhammad Yunus has steered the ship through rough waves, steadying the vessel when the seas threatened to split it apart. His chapter nears its end. The horizon darkens again. Elections loom like clouds on the edge of the sea. And the nation must ask: whose voice now will carry us home?

We have had enough usurpers, enough thieves who seized the wheel and plundered the cargo. Bangladesh does not need another pirate captain. It needs a voice. A voice that soothes. A voice that heals. A voice that lifts us from our knees and steadies us through the storm.

The boots, the shapla, the suitcase — they remain as compass points. But the ship cannot sail without a captain.

Who will be that voice? Who will be the next Zia of Bangladesh?

And once more, the cell rattles like a cage in the belly of a storm-tossed ship.