Calcutta, April 8: Every time Ajoy Roy sees the cricket bat in the corner, he is reminded that the player is no more. His son, a young engineer in America, had come home to see his ailing mother. He was murdered.

Roy, 80, is the father of Avijit, the blogger hacked to death by fundamentalists in Dhaka in February.

"The grief is personal. But I have my commitments," Roy, a retired physics teacher of Dhaka University, said in Calcutta today. "I am proud of my son. He has excelled his father in every aspect."

Avijit, 42, used to play cricket in school and continued till the time he enrolled himself for a mechanical engineering course.

When his father bought him his first cricket bat, Avijit called him a great dad. But now, Roy recalled, the bat lies in one corner of their three-room flat in Dhaka's Shantinagar, around 2km from Dhaka University. Roy stays with his wife and younger son Anujit and his family.

Grief and old age have not been able to rein Roy in. He still walks in rallies supporting secularism and human rights. He has travelled alone from Dhaka to Calcutta.

"I continue to attend rallies and human chains against fundamentalism and take part in discussions. The way fundamentalists are growing in Bangladesh and other parts of the subcontinent is alarming. If we don't continue our fight for secularism, I don't know how many Avijits will be killed," he said.

He described how the killers hit his son three times with machetes behind his head.

"I never thought they would kill him. My apprehension was he could at the most be beaten up for writing anti-religious and anti-fundamentalist, free-thinking blogs," said Roy.

The evening Avijit was killed on February 26, Roy had rushed to the hospital where he sat for several hours as doctors tried to save his son. Around 9pm, one of the doctors told him, it was all over.

Around 1am, he had returned home. Soon, he received a call on his mobile.

"There was something in Arabic, almost like a murmur. Then a person asked whether I was Avijit's father," Roy recounted today. He was told by the man to listen to a divine message. He disconnected the phone but the call came again that night.

Avijit, a Bangladeshi-American blogger known for his antipathy to religion, was hacked to death by two assailants wielding machetes while he was leaving a book fair in Dhaka with his wife on February 26.

The attackers had approached him from behind and his wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonnya, suffered head injuries and lost a finger.

Avijit wrote in Mukto-mona (open-minded), a blog that was started by his father.

"I had initially started the blog but asked him to manage it since he was a software engineer," said Roy.

A software professional based in Atlanta, Avijit had returned to Bangladesh after three years.

"He was receiving several threats on social media. So, I had warned him not to come to Bangladesh," said Roy.

But Avijit sent a mail to his father, informing him of his schedule. In the last para, he wrote: " Maa ke onek din dekhi ni. Maa ke dekhte ichche kore (Haven't seen mother for long. I long to see mother)."

His mother Shefali is wheelchair-bound because of ailments.

"He always wanted Bangladesh to be a secular, liberal and democratic country," said Roy, who is known in Bangladesh for his role in human rights activism. Roy had taken part in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 as a mukti joddha and in 2012 received Ekushey Padak (medal), one of the highest civilian awards in the country.

Roy thinks that more social movements are required in Bangladesh to curb the spread of fundamentalists.

"The administration can prevent the fundamentalists but we need a social movement," said Roy.

However, he feels the Sheikh Hasina government should ban fundamentalist parties like Jaamat-i-Islami. "Some feel they'll become stronger going underground. But at least they can't spread their fundamentalist ideas so openly," he said.

Roy follows Mukto-mona blog everyday, which is now managed by Avijit's wife.

In January, about a month before he was killed, Avijit had written a blog: Why religion is like a virus (Context: Peshawar and Charlie Hebdo).

His killing triggered protest rallies across Dhaka for several days. Candlelight vigils were brought out in the streets of Dhaka. However, the assailants are yet to be arrested.

Avijit's father had received a series of mails from Calcutta, supporting his cause. Many of them were friends but most of them were not known to them.

"People now call me Avijit's father. I feel proud but this is not the way I wanted life to be," said Roy.