The Hounds of Hell

It is with a heavy heart that I will be leaving my home of eight years tomorrow. It is with a heavy heart because I'm being hounded out of my residence.

The hounds are the local committe, who suddenly objected to my teaching students English on the premises. That I have been doing the same for eight years was an argument that had no importance to them.

And when, after the first illegal interview (illegal because it is not the committee that can speak to me; they must speak only to my landlord, as my lawyer later informed me), I filed a general diary, fearing violence.

When they found out that I had filed a GD, they were furious: how dare I excercise my rights as a citizen? In this building, only the committee had rights, and I was a mere individual.

Then, after browbeating my landlord, they came en masse into my apartment where only my wife and I reside. There they used minatory langauge and said that if I did not stop all activity in one week, they would bar the gates. This was illegal: they had no right to talk to me, for I had leased the house from my landlord, not from them. They could complain to my landlord: in fact, we had already decided to leave the flat rather than live with such hoodlums. But they paid no attention to what I had to say. This is the behaviour of moneyd 'gentlemen' in Bangladesh.

Through brute force and intimidation, they forced a law-abiding, harmless individual and his wife to leave. After all, there's a limit to the harassment and intimidation that a gentleman can endure.

And to think that they achieved all this, not through a court order, but by sheer bullying and coercion.

I hope the Supreme Court will take these matters under cognisance, and uphold the rights of tenants against a tyrannical majority.