Anubrata, are you well? You're thinking, what a foolish question I'm asking—who isn't well on Eid day!
Today is Eid. Yes, our seventh Eid! Lucky seven! My heart aches to wish you Eid greetings; I've been waiting thirty days for this! You know, the memory of our first Eid still lies fresh as dew-kissed bakul flowers in my memory's chest. What a moist green fragrance I catch! When I first received your greetings, that Eid dawn began like a second birth. Before the first bird stirred awake, you and I had already risen! You wrote: Eid's loving salutation. Then it seemed as if Eid had never come to my life before!
Tell me, do you know what it means to laugh to yourself? And what it feels like to experience joy all alone? Have you searched for the meaning of being unable to hide shame's reflection in your own eyes and face, even if you tried?
I would know, I did know...I learned precisely from that moment! You too had found those answers like me; that's why even without saying "I love you," I understood the love perfectly...you understood too! All that day you were present, calling me moment by moment! Because I had no personal cell phone, you couldn't see me!
You said, come to elder aunt's house, I'll watch you from afar in shadow's spell. How small I was then! Just one of those tiny chick-like creatures! But I convinced everyone just fine! When you love, even the shy, timid person learns to extract what they want! Are you surprised I called myself shy and timid?! Oh, don't mistake it—that wasn't studying...call it seizing an unearned opportunity!
See, in trying to love you, keeping Euclid beside me, how much I've learned in this life! No, I haven't forgotten—in trying to love me, you too swam across so many rules! With a sky full of wonder I'd watch: this person of such rigid thoughts swimming endlessly! Sometimes sun, sometimes flowers, rivers, hills, a crying girl on the street, a peddler calling out, a flock of wild yet social vultures' questions, or Euclid on book pages—an untimely lover battling them all!
Just one word it was, barely four letters...love! Yet how much power it holds in its womb! Isn't that so? The only person by my side was me. Sometimes I gave you so much strength that when I think of it, all the tears clump together!
How much love does it take for someone to row with tears alone? Can you imagine? Anubrata, how much touch must be mixed for feelings to grow so dense afterward? How much hiding makes even distance lose patience? How much stored conversation makes resentment evaporate? How mad must one become to search for you in mathematical formulas, in geometry's length and breadth? Wanting to touch you through your handwriting in old notebooks...at what limit of restlessness? At what numbered step of wordlessness does pain melt into water? I don't need answers to these questions, Anubrata; let them remain raised for you.
You know, you're still mixed into everything! The scent of henna flowers in the breeze reminds me of you...that henna plant on the long veranda! How many melodies played on loudspeakers draw you near, In mother's cooking, in various dishes, your taste still lingers. Perfume bottles, punjabi's folds, children's chatter outside, In solitude some lover's gifted earrings, a group of young people's joy seeing the moon on moonlit nights, In village fields the unruly firecracker's explosive joy—they all speak of you! They tell me to love just like that dawn! They say, love until you're bankrupt with loving! What did you accomplish hoarding so much money in one lifetime!
Today I have my own phone, my own room too! I've found some solitary time, bought a few pens, two sweet diaries, a water clock, a compass, several blank pages and oh yes...some scattered words with them! Yet you...! You simply don't want to see anymore! You don't come even once to cast spells standing in shadows! To love, must one endure these unwelcome guests twice daily—time's adversity, circumstance's discord, unequal love, opportunity's inadequacy?
Anubrata, I no longer find that fire-red strength as before! Please don't become my strength again! Even without your wanting, let the lines of my palm wrap around the folds of your furrowed brow! In the depths of your wind-tousled hair, let my fingers make their home! In that small space below your nose and above your lips, as tiny beads of sweat...'so much of me' should gather! Let my gaze be threaded in the loose button's string! In nights busy with notebooks and pens, let my laughter rise as steam from the coffee mug! I am your 'eighteen years of age'...poet Sukanta-babu's! If I must say it, these feelings are my urge to wake in new dawns! Not urge exactly; you are my renewed strength, Nila!
Anubrata, then why do you freeze like that with me? Perhaps I'm not unaware of this answer—I never wanted to know everything, even by mistake! At day's end you once said in conversation, when age announces itself to the sun, when Nila learns to dress with flowers in her bun, right then... Someone will come to be the gardener of that flower garden! Then let me not remain close; I don't want to become a wall in the love between flower and bee! You won't keep this me in your heart's chamber then either!
Daily your eyes' gaze grows deeper bit by bit, and I age bit by bit! No...Nila, this isn't age! This is just fear; an untimely lover's fear! Could this very fear have driven you into that deep womb where shallow feelings can never reach in day's opacity! Anubrata, in whose hands have you pawned the love you built yourself? Or have you donated it away? Only love can make such unconditional donations! In this world, nothing but a heart is needed to love! Yet see, to hold a hand...you must submit accounts before Boishakh arrives, settling all the kingdom's debts and credits!
Love itself is every lover's festering hidden wound! In birds, in water, in dead grass, in the hungry eyes of street children's gangs I see love's sickness! In worm-eaten book covers I hear hundreds of emotions' complaints! In the ascetic's meditation I've breathed the flesh-burning scent of love constantly! In households established with eyes and lips, only renunciation prevails year after year... How can wet laughter bloom on loveless lips—you tell me!
I have seen—with the magpie robin, under the banyan tree, on benches spread in park emptiness, at festival gatherings, in Suhrawardy's field, in Uncle Ramjan's cigarette smoke, in friends' gossip sessions in the helpless gaze of the quiet boy sitting alone, in packet after packet of jhalmuri after school, in the tears of defeated verses at recitation competitions, in summer afternoons' mixing of puffed rice and jackfruit, or autumn's potato roasting in leaf fires—how many lovers' tears carelessly mix, washing away in rain's purified water...
Who says, Anubrata, that rain only falls as love? Does rain pour only to wet lovers' hearts in dizzy warmth? Does unruly love awaken in eyes, lips, hair in rain? Does rain visit poets' minds only to write a few verses? I need to know these things. These are my unexpected questions to you, to love, to poetry's poet, to wild geese and evening skies, to each awaited dawn, to my intimate seven Eids, to feelings and clouds!
I'm terribly tired of brief emotions' lengthy expressions! Will you sing that song of yours once? I haven't heard it in so long... My ears are suffering drought...it would help a little! The pen you gave me still exists as a fragment of your being! Anubrata, does my phoenix bird come to your window? Does it love you like salt on my behalf each day?