Dhaka, Nov. 6 -- Advocate Tapan Lahiri is not a familiar name in Bangladesh. But he was well-known in Adra, in West Bengal's Purulia district, where he died of Covid in November 2020. This is the sixth anniversary of his passing.

I never met him. I came to know of him several years ago through his daughter Sangbida, three decades my junior at Presidency College, Kolkata. She told me his story.

Tapanbabu's family had migrated from Surulia, lying next to the Kapataksha river in Khulna, to West Bengal in the early 1950s, having found it impossible to survive the demographic pressures of the Partition of Bengal any longer. Even amidst the communal tensions of the time, though, a Muslim family had escorted the majority of the Lahiri clan to...