Dr Awa Diallo: An Obituary

My grandmother is eighty years old. She lives in a small village. She has a small farm with chickens and goats. She has eight grandchildren. She cooks for many people every Sunday. When I was a small child, she taught me how to tie my shoes. She is patient. She does not get angry. She listens. Many people in our village come to her with problems. She does not always have answers, but she always listens.

Mrs Hadiya Khan, who taught primary school in the village of Bardiya for forty-two years and was loved by three generations of children, died at her home on Tuesday. She was eighty-six.

Mrs Khan was born in the village in 1939, in a small house near the school where she would later teach. She trained as a teacher in the regional capital and returned to Bardiya in 1958, when the school had only one classroom. By the time she retired in 2000, the school had six classrooms and over two hundred pupils.

Mr Salim Park, a farmer and former pupil, said: "She taught my mother. She taught me. She taught my children. We did not always like her — she was strict — but we always trusted her."

Mrs Khan is survived by her husband, three children, and seven grandchildren. The funeral will be held at the village mosque on Friday morning.

Mr Salim Park, who repaired bicycles in the village of Bardiya for forty-five years and refused to charge children for any work that took him less than an hour, died at his home on Tuesday. He was eighty-one. He had been ill for several months but had continued to receive bicycles, in a reduced way, until July of this year.

Mr Park was born in Bardiya in 1944. His father had been a carpenter; his older brother had been a soldier who did not return. Salim trained as a mechanic in the regional capital and returned to the village in 1965, opening a small workshop in a corner of his father's old yard. The workshop had a single tool bench, three crates of parts, and a sign in his own handwriting that read, simply, 'Salim, bicycles.'

For most of his working life, he was the only mechanic for twelve villages. "He fixed my mother's bicycle when she was a girl," Mrs Hadiya Khan, a former primary-school teacher, recalled. "He fixed mine. He fixed my children's. He pretended he was charging us, but he was usually not."

He married Mrs Aishe Park in 1970. They had three children. His son, Mr Tarek Park, has continued the workshop since 2018; the sign has been repainted but reads the same.

Mr Park is survived by his wife, his three children, and eight grandchildren. The funeral will be held at the village mosque on Friday morning. The workshop has been closed since Tuesday and will reopen on Monday. "He did not consider what he did to be remarkable," Mr Tarek Park said. "That, my father would say, was the whole point."

Mrs Hadiya Khan, who taught primary school in the village of Bardiya for forty-two years and who, by the time of her retirement in 2000, had taught at least one child from every household in the village, died at her home on Tuesday. She was eighty-six.

Mrs Khan was born in Bardiya in 1939, in a small house near the school where she would later teach. Her father had been a small-scale farmer; her mother had been a seamstress who, by working through five winters, paid for the school books that allowed Hadiya to finish primary school at a time when very few girls in the region did so. The teacher-training college in the regional capital opened, conveniently for her biography, in 1955; she was admitted in its third year of operation. "My mother used to say that her career was made possible by a college that opened just in time," her son, Mr Tarek Khan, said this week. "She did not consider this a sentimental observation. She considered it accurate."

She returned to Bardiya in 1958, when the school had one classroom, one teacher who was about to retire, and forty-seven pupils. By the time she retired, the school had six classrooms, four teachers, and over two hundred pupils. The growth was not, of course, hers alone — the village population had also grown; a regional government literacy programme of the 1970s had increased enrolment; the road that had been paved in 1981 had made it easier for older pupils to attend. To call the school's growth her achievement would be to misrepresent the work. To call it not hers in any meaningful sense would be to flatter a kind of modesty that, while real in her, had nothing to do with the underlying truth.

Mr Salim Park, a farmer and former pupil, said: "She taught my mother. She taught me. She taught my children. We did not always like her — she was strict — but we always trusted her. She had a way of looking at you when you had not done your homework that I can still feel."

Mrs Khan was made an honorary member of the regional teachers' association in 2010. The certificate, which arrived by post, was placed on the small table next to the door of her house, on top of a pile of receipts; her family says it remained there until she moved into her son's household two years before her death.

Mrs Khan is survived by her husband, three children, and seven grandchildren. The funeral will be held at the village mosque on Friday morning. The school has given the children a half-day off and has set out, in front of the main classroom, the small wooden chair on which she sat for thirty-eight years of her career. The chair will be returned to the classroom on Monday. "It is the right place for it," Mr Tarek Khan said.

Mrs Hadiya Khan, who taught primary school in the village of Bardiya for forty-two years and who, by the time of her retirement in 2000, had taught at least one child from every household in the village, died at her home on Tuesday. She was eighty-six. The obituary that follows is, by the standards of the genre, long. It will spend a substantial portion of its length on the daily texture of a small village school, partly because the school was the central work of her life, and partly because the standard obituary form, which favours public events and dramatic firsts, does not fit a life of the kind she lived without distortion.

Mrs Khan was born in Bardiya in 1939, in a small house near the school where she would later teach. Her father had been a small-scale farmer; her mother had been a seamstress who, by working through five winters, paid for the school books that allowed Hadiya to finish primary school at a time when very few girls in the region did so. The teacher-training college in the regional capital opened, conveniently for her biography, in 1955; she was admitted in its third year of operation. The convenience is worth registering. The figure of the timely institution — opened just in time, with space for one more student — has become a recognisable feature of obituaries of distinguished women of her generation, and this obituary does not, on close inspection, escape the convention. The convention is not entirely wrong; the college did open in 1955, and it did make her career possible. The convention does, however, produce a particular shape of story in which the institution stands in for a wider history of policy, advocacy, and luck.

She returned to Bardiya in 1958, when the school had one classroom, one teacher who was about to retire, and forty-seven pupils. By the time she retired, the school had six classrooms, four teachers, and over two hundred pupils. The growth was not, of course, hers alone. The village population had grown; a regional government literacy programme of the 1970s had increased enrolment; the road that had been paved in 1981 had made it easier for older pupils to attend. To call the school's growth her achievement would be to misrepresent. To call it not hers in any meaningful sense would be to flatter a kind of modesty that, while real in her, had nothing to do with the underlying truth. The growth was the result of a particular set of conditions in which Mrs Khan was at the centre of the daily teaching for four decades.

Mr Salim Park, a farmer and former pupil, said: "She taught my mother. She taught me. She taught my children. We did not always like her — she was strict — but we always trusted her. She had a way of looking at you when you had not done your homework that I can still feel." The remark is, on inspection, the most analytically generous thing in this obituary. It does not pretend she was beloved by all; it admits she was strict; it locates her in the bodies of three generations who learnt under her gaze.

Mrs Khan was made an honorary member of the regional teachers' association in 2010. The certificate, which arrived by post, was placed on the small table next to the door of her house, on top of a pile of receipts; her family says it remained there until she moved into her son's household two years before her death.

The article would prefer to register that there were difficult years; there were pupils she did not, in retrospect, think she had served well; there were colleagues with whom she had disagreements that did not resolve cleanly. The article has, on inspection, mostly excluded these, partly because the form prefers continuity, partly because reporting them would require more access than was available, and partly because some of those colleagues are still living.

Mrs Khan is survived by her husband, three children, and seven grandchildren. The funeral will be held at the village mosque on Friday morning. The school has given the children a half-day off and has set out, in front of the main classroom, the small wooden chair on which she sat for thirty-eight years of her career. The chair will be returned to the classroom on Monday. "It is the right place for it," Mr Tarek Khan said. I am ending the article here, on the chair and its return, partly because the closing image is what the form expects, partly because the chair is genuinely good, and partly because, after some hours of writing, ending elsewhere would feel like a refusal of a closing image that the obituary has earned.

Mr Imran Latif, who looked after the lock and the surrounding stretch of canal at Westwood for forty-six years and who was, by the time of his retirement in 2019, the longest-serving lock-keeper on the regional canal network, died at his home on Sunday morning. He was eighty-one. He had been ill for several months but had continued to walk the towpath, in a reduced way, until July of this year. The obituary that follows is, by the standards of the genre, long. It will spend a substantial portion of its length not on the chronology of his life but on the conditions under which lives such as his come to be written about, partly because those conditions are interesting in their own right and partly because the standard obituary of a long-serving public servant in a small place has been written, very competently, several thousand times in the last forty years, and one further such obituary would not, on the most charitable assessment, contribute much.

It is at this point in any obituary of this kind that the writer encounters a particular pressure that the reader may, with some justice, want named. The pressure is to use, without examining, a set of phrases — 'a quiet steward of our waterways', 'a man whose name was synonymous with the canal he tended', 'his dedication to a vanishing way of life'. Each of these phrases has, in the present moment, become part of how lives such as his are reported, and each has done a particular kind of cumulative work over decades. The work is to convert a slow, structurally conditioned, occasionally bureaucratic life of public service into a sequence of moral parables about lost crafts. I have written paragraphs containing such phrases. I am not going to use them in this obituary. I am also not going to take credit for their absence; it is the minimum a serious obituary of Mr Latif owes him.

Mr Latif was born in Westwood in 1944, in a small house owned by the canal company. His father had been a lock-keeper before him, on a different stretch of canal further south. His mother, who had been a textile worker before her marriage, had taught him to keep accounts. He left school at fifteen to work for the canal company, which was, in 1959, still the only employer of any size in the area. The combination of his father's apprenticeship and the company's training scheme — the latter discontinued in 1981, as part of the wider restructuring of the canal network that has since reduced full-time lock-keeping posts by approximately seventy per cent — was, in retrospect, the structural condition that made the rest possible. The figure of the timely apprenticeship has, in obituaries of long-serving canal workers of this generation, been given a particular curatorial space. This obituary does not, on close inspection, escape the convention.

Mrs Sara Davies, a former regional inspector, said: "He kept the lock running through three different ownership regimes, two automation projects that did not fully take, and one serious flood. He was, on the technical questions, almost always right, and, on a small number of less central matters, sometimes wrong. The capacity to be reliably right on the central things while open to being wrong on small ones is a substantial part of what makes a long-serving public servant useful. Imran had it."

The obituary would prefer to register that there were difficult years; there were arguments with the canal company that did not, in his own account, resolve cleanly; there were colleagues with whom he had professional disagreements that he carried without complaint but did not, on inspection, forget. The article has, on inspection, mostly excluded these. The exclusion is partly because the form prefers continuity, partly because the reporting was time-limited, and partly because the kind of obituary that includes such material has its own conventions and its own readership, and this obituary is not, on the whole, of that kind.

Mr Latif is survived by his wife, two children, and four grandchildren. The funeral will be held at Westwood village church on Friday morning. The lock, which has been operated by an automated system since 2019, was, on the morning of his death, opened manually for one hour by his son and his old apprentice, who walked the towpath in a slow loop and returned home without comment. I am ending the article here, on the manually opened lock, partly because the closing image is what the form expects, partly because the gesture is genuinely good, partly because, after some hours of writing, ending elsewhere would feel like a refusal of a closing image that the obituary has earned, and partly because the writer is aware that ending on a meditation about the form would be the next move in the recursion, and the recursion has to stop somewhere. The lock is now closed. It will be opened by the automated system at eight o'clock tomorrow morning, and at eight o'clock the morning after, for as long as the canal remains in use.