ON the stretch of the road from Pakistan Coast Guards officers’ mess to Masjid-i-Khizra, a small board hangs on the door of a dilapidated building in the Pakistan Secretariat blocks ,which reads: ‘Block 35, Nazrul Academy.’

The door of the building remains locked most of the time. I stepped into the building when a few years ago I found the door opened. There was one low-power electric bulb in a long and dark room. There were a few cabinets with some old books in Bengali. But it was too dark to see clearly what they were about.

I found a lady there at a desk. To my inquiry, she answered that there are no visitors. On another occasion at about midday I entered again; this time to find several men having lunch on the desk at which I had found the lady earlier. They told me that the academy is closed, an obvious fact.

The ‘academy’ is a relic of the days when West Pakistan was trying to infuse communalism in literature and to upstage Rabindranath Tagore by trying to bolster Qazi Nazrul Islam. Therefore, it launched the Nazrul Academy and even named the road from Lasbela Chowk to Guru Mandir after Qazi Nazrul Islam.

The road has been renamed as Business Recorder Road. But there seem to be no takers for the ‘academy.’

To make any suggestions for the Nazrul Academy’s rehabilitation to the government that closed down even its own ‘Pakistan Council’ would be a wasteful exercise. S.G. JILANEE Karachi