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# Career Adda @ Chittagong

January 16, 2020 1 min read By Sushanta Paul

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Sushanta Paul

Writer & Thinker

Writing on literature, psychology, and the human condition.

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# Life's Encore: Four আমরা যখন কোনো মানুষকে প্রথম দেখি তখন তার বাহ্যিক রূপ দিয়ে শুরু করি। কিন্তু সত্যিকারের পরিচয় আসে তার কণ্ঠস্বর থেকে। কণ্ঠস্বর হলো মানুষের প্রকৃত পরিচয়পত্র। একটি কণ্ঠস্বর সবকিছু বলে দেয়। তার ভেতরের সত্যতা, তার লুকানো দুঃখ, তার আলোকিত মুহূর্ত—সবই প্রবাহিত হয় তার মুখ থেকে বেরিয়ে আসা প্রতিটি শব্দে। আমরা মানুষের চেহারা পরিবর্তন করতে পারি, তাদের পোশাক বদলাতে পারি, কিন্তু তাদের কণ্ঠস্বর? সেটা অপরিবর্তনীয়, অলঙ্ঘনীয়। আমাদের প্রথম শ্রুতি হলো মায়ের কণ্ঠ। সেই কণ্ঠ আমাদের জীবনের প্রথম সুর। সেই সুরে আছে সমস্ত শান্তি, সমস্ত নিরাপত্তা। এমনকি অসংখ্য বছর পরেও, জীবনের সবচেয়ে কঠিন মুহূর্তে, আমরা কল্পনায় আমাদের মায়ের কণ্ঠ খুঁজি। প্রেমিকের কণ্ঠ ভিন্ন। তাতে আছে ইচ্ছে, আকাঙ্ক্ষা, আশা। প্রেমিকের কণ্ঠ শোনার সময় আমরা যুবক থাকি, আমাদের হৃদয় দ্রুত স্পন্দিত হয়, আমাদের ভবিষ্যৎ অসীম মনে হয়। শিক্ষকের কণ্ঠ আবার অন্যরকম। তাতে আছে দায়িত্ব, আছে অনুপ্রেরণা। তাদের কণ্ঠ আমাদের মনের দরজা খুলে দেয় এবং নতুন জগতের পথ দেখায়। বন্ধুর কণ্ঠ? সেটা আমাদের নিজের মতো। বন্ধু হলো সেই মানুষ যার কণ্ঠে আমরা নিজেদের প্রতিধ্বনি শুনি। কিন্তু সবচেয়ে দুঃখজনক হলো যখন মানুষ তার নিজের কণ্ঠ হারিয়ে ফেলে। যখন সে অন্যদের কণ্ঠ অনুকরণ করে কথা বলে। যখন সামাজিক প্রত্যাশা, পারিবারিক চাপ বা ভয় তাকে তার আসল কণ্ঠকে গলা দিতে বাধ্য করে। তখন সে জীবন্ত থাকলেও মৃত। কারণ কণ্ঠ ছাড়া মানুষ শুধু একটি পুতুল, একটি ছায়া মাত্র। আমি বিশ্বাস করি যে প্রতিটি মানুষের নিজস্ব কণ্ঠ আছে। অনন্য, অতুলনীয়। সেই কণ্ঠ খুঁজে বের করা, লালন করা এবং তা ব্যবহার করা—এটাই মানুষের প্রকৃত সাধনা। এটাই জীবনের প্রকৃত শিল্প। একজন মানুষ তখনই সার্থক যখন তার কণ্ঠ নিরব থাকে না। যখন সে তার প্রকৃত কণ্ঠে কথা বলে, গান গায়, প্রশ্ন করে। যখন সে নিজের অভিজ্ঞতা, অনুভূতি এবং সত্যতা প্রকাশ করে। এই জীবনে আমাদের কাছে আর অনেক কিছু না থাকতে পারে। সম্পদ থাকতে পারে না, খ্যাতি থাকতে পারে না, কিন্তু যদি আমাদের নিজস্ব কণ্ঠ থাকে—যদি আমরা নিজেরা নিজেদের কথা বলতে পারি—তাহলে আমরা সবকিছু পেয়েছি। সুতরাং শুনুন। শুধু অন্যদের কথা নয়, নিজের কণ্ঠও শুনুন। এবং সাহস করুন সেই কণ্ঠকে উচ্চরণ করতে।

# Life, Over Again: Five There's something unsettling about the spaces between things. Not the things themselves—we know what to do with those. But the gap, the pause, the silence that stretches between one moment and the next: that's where uneasiness lives. I was thinking about this the other day while watching a man wait for a bus that hadn't yet arrived. He stood at the designated stop, hands in his pockets, eyes fixed on the turn in the road where the bus would appear—or wouldn't. The waiting itself was the whole of his existence in that moment. Not the destination. Not the journey either. Just the in-between, the suspended state where nothing was finished and nothing had properly begun. We spend more of our lives in these gaps than we like to admit. Between childhood and adulthood, between one love and another, between who we were and who we're becoming. The gaps feel like nothing—empty time, wasted hours. But perhaps they're everything. Perhaps life isn't what happens in the solid moments, but in the spaces where we're unformed, where we might still become something different. The Bengalis have a word for this kind of emptiness—*শূন্য*. It doesn't mean mere absence. It means something closer to potential, to the womb-like darkness from which form emerges. Our mathematics discovered zero there. Our philosophy found infinity. Our songs found longing. We're always eager to fill these spaces. With noise, distraction, purpose. We can't bear to simply stand and wait, like that man at the bus stop. We fidget. We check our phones. We manufacture urgency where none exists. Anything but the naked fact of waiting, of being incomplete. But what if the spaces are not failures? What if they're the only honest parts of living? I think of a sentence left unfinished mid-breath. The reader feels the rupture, the sudden silence. It unsettles because it's true to something in us—the way life keeps stopping before we're ready, before we've said what we meant to say. The incomplete sentence doesn't diminish meaning; it deepens it. What isn't said becomes as present as what is. There's a story I half-remember from childhood, something my grandmother told me. A king had everything—palaces, treasures, armies—but he was still searching for something. A sage told him the answer lay in a locked room that had been sealed since the kingdom's founding. The king had the doors broken open, and inside he found... nothing. An empty room. The sage smiled and said, "That emptiness is what you've been searching for all along. Everything else was just furniture." I'm older now, and that story troubles me more than it comforts. I'm no longer sure there's wisdom in empty rooms. But I'm certain they exist, and that we're meant to stand in them sometimes, confused and uncertain, waiting for something we can't name. This is what I understand about life now, in these later years: we're not moving toward completion. We're not characters in a story building toward resolution. We're waiting. Perpetually waiting. And the waiting is the substance, not what comes after. The man at the bus stop—I wonder if he knows this. I wonder if that's why he was so still, so patient. Perhaps he'd already learned that the bus would come and go, and he'd board or he wouldn't, and none of it would matter nearly as much as the fact of having stood there, suspended between here and elsewhere, fully alive in the unbearable present. The spaces between things. That's where we live. That's always been the truest part.

# The Burning of Eternal Light: 3 The morning sun filtered through the hospital window in thin, trembling lines. Ravi sat on the edge of his bed, his spine curved like a question mark, watching the light scatter across the linoleum floor. Three weeks now—three weeks of corridors that smelled of disinfectant and despair, of nurses whose footsteps echoed purpose he could no longer fathom, of visitors who brought flowers that wilted faster than his own certainties. The doctor had said something about "treatment options" during yesterday's rounds. Ravi hadn't listened properly. Words had become like water—they flowed over him, left no mark. Outside, the city was indifferent. Traffic honked. Vendors called out their wares. The world spun on, unconcerned with the small, brittle man in room 407 who was slowly learning the grammar of surrender. His daughter Priya was coming today. He dreaded it—not her presence, but the effort required to seem less broken than he was. She had her own life to live, her own children who needed their mother unafraid. He would not burden them with the full weight of what was happening inside his chest, inside his cells, inside the strange darkness that had taken up residence behind his eyes. He picked up the newspaper from his bedside table. The headlines seemed to belong to another planet. Elections. Scandals. A film star's wedding. How trivial it all looked now, filtered through the lens of his own erasure. The morning deepened. A nurse came to take his temperature—a young woman whose name he'd already forgotten, whose competence was both comforting and coldly impersonal. After she left, Ravi returned to the window. The light had shifted. It always did. In that small movement, he found something approaching peace.

# The Refugee's God: One The old man sat by the window of his makeshift shelter—a corrugated iron roof propped up by wooden poles—and watched the dust settle over the camp. Outside, the light was dying into shades of amber and rust. Children's voices had begun to thin out, drifting like smoke toward the cooking fires. Soon it would be dark. Soon the night would come, as it always did, with its particular coldness. His name was Jamal. Or it had been, once. Now, even that seemed to belong to a different world—one where names meant something, where a man was known by his family, his work, his place in the order of things. Here, in this sprawl of tents and temporary structures on the outskirts of a city that had no use for him, he was simply another number. Another face at the ration distribution. Another shadow moving between the rows of shelters. He had been a schoolteacher for forty-two years. He had taught children to read and write, to think, to ask questions. He had lived in a house with four rooms and a small garden where his wife grew jasmine. The jasmine had bloomed in the evenings, and the scent would drift through the windows. His daughter had played there. His son had climbed the guava tree. That was before. Now there was only the before and the after, separated by a line so sharp and clean you could cut your finger on it. The light had nearly gone. Jamal rose slowly—his knees protesting with small, familiar griefs—and reached for the kerosene lamp that hung from a wire overhead. The flame caught, and the shelter filled with a soft, amber glow. Long shadows stretched across the walls. They looked like the shadows of people who were no longer there. He sat again. From his pocket, he drew out a small notebook. Its pages were yellowed and worn at the edges, the binding nearly torn through. This was the thing he had saved. Of all the things he had owned—the furniture, the photographs, the letters, the books—this was the one thing he had managed to bring with him when he ran. He opened it carefully, as if it were something holy. Inside, the pages were filled with handwriting—neat, deliberate, the script of someone who had spent a lifetime with chalk and pen. Quotations, mostly. Lines from poems and stories and thinkers he had taught to his students over the decades. *There is no exile that is permanent.* *The soul carries its home within it.* *Where there is darkness, we must kindle the light ourselves.* He had written these things because he needed to believe them. Or perhaps he had written them because he needed to remember that once, he had believed them. Outside, the camp was settling into evening. He could hear the murmur of voices, the clink of cooking pots, the cry of an infant. The ordinary sounds of survival. The small, quiet music of people enduring. Jamal turned another page of his notebook. And then another. He read the words he had written in a different time, when he had been a different man. Or had he? Was he different now, or was he simply the same man, worn thinner, hollowed out, like stone worn smooth by water? The lamp flickered. For a moment, it cast everything into shadow. He did not look away.

# The Refugee's God: Two The new tenant arrived on a Tuesday morning, bringing with him three suitcases and the smell of rain. Abir noticed him from the kitchen window — a man of indeterminate age, moving with the deliberateness of someone who had learned to own as little as possible. His clothes hung loose, as though tailored for a larger version of himself, or perhaps for the person he had once been. Nasreen was making tea. She paused mid-pour, the kettle suspended in air. "Someone's come," she said, not as an observation but as a fact requiring acknowledgment. Abir said nothing. In this house, arrivals were catalogued like entries in a ledger — names, faces, the length of their stay, the sound they made climbing the stairs. The third floor had been empty for six weeks. They had grown accustomed to the silence up there, the way it pressed down through the ceiling like a benediction. By evening, the tenant had introduced himself. His name was Karim. He was from Sylhet originally, though the years had scattered him across several cities and two countries. He worked nights at a printing press near the railway station. He had no family in the city. He kept his door locked, and the neighbors — there were four families in the house — took this as a sign not to pry. But Abir's daughter, Asha, was eight years old and not bound by such discretion. She discovered that Karim kept books. Stacked on a shelf above his bed, crowded into cardboard boxes in the corner of his room — Bengali novels, poetry collections, a few volumes in English with broken spines. One afternoon, when he had left for work and the door stood ajar, she climbed the stairs and looked in. She did not enter. She stood in the doorway like a visitor at a shrine, taking inventory: a narrow bed with a faded quilt, a table with a typewriter, a window that overlooked the lane. "What did you see?" Abir asked when she returned, breathless with the thrill of transgression. "Books," she said. "So many books. And a typewriter. Like yours, but older." "Did you go inside?" She shook her head. She was a good child, or at least obedient enough. But her eyes held something else — a hunger, perhaps, or recognition. She had seen in that room something she could not yet name. Karim emerged from his solitude gradually, in small gestures. He began to take his morning tea in the downstairs kitchen, a privilege extended to long-term tenants. He ate little — a piece of bread, sometimes an egg. He read the newspaper with the concentration of someone deciphering an ancient text, his lips moving silently over the words. When Nasreen asked him his tea preference, he said, "Strong. Like a memory you can't shake." Abir recognized something in him — the careful distance, the way he moved through the world as though it might disappear if he held it too tightly. He had seen this before in men who had lost something irrecoverable. He did not ask questions. In this city, silence was a form of respect. But on the fourth morning, Asha was waiting at the top of the stairs, a book in her hands. "He left it," she said. "On the kitchen table. I think for me." It was a slim volume of Tagore's poems, the pages yellowed and marked with pencil annotations. In the front cover, in a careful hand: *For a reader — K.* Nasreen frowned. "You shouldn't—" "He left it," Asha repeated, and there was something in her voice — certainty, perhaps — that made them both pause. That evening, Abir found Karim sitting alone in the small courtyard behind the house. It was the place where the landlady's cat slept and the jasmine grew in defiant profusion. Karim was smoking, which Abir had never seen him do before. "Your daughter came to see my books," Karim said without preamble. "I hope you don't mind." "She's curious," Abir said. It was not an apology. "Children are." "Yes." Karim drew on the cigarette. "I was once too. I remember being that curious. About everything — stories, words, the way light fell on a page." He paused. "I'm not sure what I'm curious about anymore." Abir sat beside him, the weight of the conversation settling between them like dust. "Do you still write?" Karim asked. "Nasreen mentioned you do." "Sometimes. Less than I used to." "Why?" The question was blunt, without the politeness of circumlocution. Abir appreciated it. "Life gets in the way," he said. "Or maybe that's not true. Maybe you just lose faith that anyone needs what you have to say." Karim nodded slowly, as though this confirmed something he had long suspected. "I had faith once," he said. "I wrote things — stories, articles, a few poems. I thought words could change things. That if you said something true enough, loud enough, it would matter." He extinguished the cigarette on the stone beside him. "I was wrong." "What happened?" Karim looked up at the sky, where the first stars were appearing through the dust and smoke. "Life," he said, and smiled without humor. "Or history. I'm not sure there's a difference." After that, a rhythm established itself. Karim would sit in the courtyard in the early evenings, when the heat had begun its slow retreat. Abir would often join him, and they would talk — about books mostly, about the city, about the weight of being a stranger in places you had lived in for years. Karim began to leave books outside Asha's door — carefully selected volumes, always with a note in his slanting hand. Nasreen watched this with the wary eye of someone who had learned to be suspicious of kindness. "What does he want?" she asked one night, after Asha had gone to bed. "Nothing," Abir said. "He's just... he recognizes something in her." "What?" Abir couldn't answer. But he understood what Karim saw: the hunger, yes, but also the wholeness of not yet having been broken by the world. There was a generosity in Karim's gestures toward Asha, but also something else — something like an attempt to salvage something from his own past, to hand it forward before it disappeared entirely. Winter came early that year. The city's temperature dropped in a way it rarely did, and the poor huddled in doorways and under bridges. Abir's house had drafts that no amount of newspaper could quite seal. But Karim's room was warm — he kept a small heater running, and in the evenings, light spilled from his window like an offering. One night, Abir found Asha on the stairs, dressed in her nightgown, tears streaming down her face. "What is it? What's wrong?" "Karim Uncle," she said. "I heard him. He was crying." Abir went upstairs. Karim's door was closed, but he could hear it too — the sound of someone weeping with the kind of desperation that comes from holding grief in for too long. Abir stood outside for a long moment, his hand raised to knock, then lowered it. Some doors, he understood, should not be opened. But the next morning, Karim was not at the kitchen table. His door remained closed through the day and into the evening. By the following morning, Nasreen had begun to worry. "Should we check?" she asked. "What if something's happened?" Abir climbed the stairs. He knocked, and after a long silence, Karim opened the door. He had lost weight, or perhaps it was just the way grief sits on a person — it makes them seem hollowed out, transparent. His eyes were red-rimmed but clear. "I'm fine," he said before Abir could speak. "I just... I had a bad night." "Everyone has bad nights," Abir said. "Yes." Karim looked at him. "Do you ever feel like you're being punished? For something you did, or didn't do, or didn't know you were doing?" "Every day," Abir said simply. Karim nodded, as though this answer had confirmed something necessary. "Then you understand," he said. "You understand that some people carry a weight that never gets lighter. It just becomes familiar. You wake up with it, and you go to sleep with it, and you think maybe eventually you won't notice it anymore. But you do. You always do." Abir did not speak. In the hallway behind him, Asha appeared, still in her school uniform. She walked past them both and entered Karim's room. Nasreen would have protested, but Abir held up his hand. The child walked to the bookshelf, reached up, and pulled down a volume of poetry. She held it out to Karim. "Read to me," she said. "Read the sad ones." Something in Karim's face shifted. He took the book slowly, as though it might burn him. "Your father should say—" he began. "Read," Asha said again, and this time there was no question in her voice, only command. They sat together — Karim and Asha — on the edge of his narrow bed, and he read. His voice moved through the poems like water through a broken vessel, carrying them away and transforming them as they fell. Nasreen came to the doorway and stood there, her hand over her mouth. Abir stood in the threshold, watching. Outside, the city continued its indifferent turning. Buses rattled past. Vendors called out their wares. The poor slept in doorways, and the rich slept in houses much like this one. But in that small room, something else was happening — something like grace, or at least the memory of what grace might have felt like before the world had taken it away. When Karim finished, his voice was steady. "Thank you," he said to Asha. "Thank you for reminding me." "Reminding you of what?" she asked. "That there are still reasons to read the sad ones. That sadness is worth something. That — " He paused, searching for words. "That being broken doesn't mean you're useless." That winter, the house filled with the sound of Karim reading aloud to Asha. Other children began to gather outside his door. Nasreen brought him extra food. Abir started writing again, filling notebooks with words that came from a place he had thought was sealed off. The weight did not lift — none of them expected it would. But they learned to move through it differently, together. And on the coldest nights, when the wind howled through the lanes and the city seemed nothing but stone and shadow, there was warmth in that small room on the third floor. There was light. There were stories. There was a man who had lost nearly everything, learning to distribute what remained like seeds in winter, trusting that something might still grow.

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Sushanta Paul

Writing on literature, psychology, and the quiet corners of the human mind.

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