27th of Agrahayan.
Which means Poush hasn’t arrived yet. But winter has come. The mother arrives before the daughter. A winter morning at 6:30
means not morning, but dawn. At that hour, tap
water becomes refrigerator water. Air becomes fog. Being awake becomes being awake with drowsy eyes. When you splash water on your face,
your eyelids go numb; you want to bring life back to frozen eyes with a beloved’s warm kiss. Alas! No beloved,
but there are airport flights;
at 8:30. The beloved doesn’t come,
planes do. These planes make me bathe even on this
winter dawn. At 7:00 the car arrived in front of the house.
Coming along the road,
I thought today’s dawn feels a bit different
somehow. Or is today’s version of me a bit
different? Where does this different me
sometimes disappear to, I wonder?
Moody
planes land late on the runway every day. The tar-poured runway waits in anticipation, holding in its chest the fog that refuses to lift, hoping for the touch-pleasure of airplane wheels. Still, dense fog
won’t let them land. Sitting in the car, I thought, perhaps today will be the same.
By the roadside, 5-6
dogs are chatting merrily as they patrol their territory with quite an attitude, tails held high. I noticed
one dog has its tail down.
That one’s probably from another territory. I wonder, don’t these dogs feel cold?
At one place, some
workers have gathered even in this fog. A ‘you must meet our demands’ type rally. Their
banner reads, “Accept the workers’
just demands, you must comply.” I too
support their demands and mentally declared solidarity with their movement. Because
they didn’t misspell ‘just.’ In a country where big shots also give ‘tributes’ with spelling errors, washing away all respect, this spelling success of these little
people is truly admirable. I pray they stay well, keep protesting with correct spelling.
I saw some roosters
openly
flirting with the hens. A couple among them are making suggestive eye gestures. Oh!
No one’s there to see the hens being harassed. They’ll start their own movement too, I’m thinking. I wish the roosters or they themselves would start their campaign before becoming fried chicken.
Working-class people
often curse for no reason at all. On the road, one man is hurling obscenities at 2-3 drivers
in unspeakable language. Hearing all this makes me extremely uncomfortable. I want anyone who curses publicly to be arrested by police. Or fined 20 taka in front of everyone. These people won’t mind being beaten,
they’ll keep grinning even if made to hold their ears and do sit-ups, but if money slips from their pockets, they’ll think ten times before acting next time. My point is, why should they curse on the roads? Have they mistaken the street for parliament? Bizarre!
Some naked
boys are gathering straw and twigs, lighting a fire and dancing around it. They’re ecstatic. All the world’s joyful festivities are organized right here. They have no time to count customs assistant commissioners.
They only count the joy of each moment. I’m thinking something else. Don’t naked people feel cold? All the naked people in the world seem to have smiling faces. What’s the deal? No shame, or no cold?
Some pigeons
are pecking at grain scattered on the road. Just then, a teenager riding his bicycle with both hands free on that same road tumbled over with his bike. The earlier confident hero has fallen flat on the ground. It hurts to see heroes sprawled on the ground. On top of that, the poor fellow has hurt himself in a particular place. He’s holding it with his hand, his face twisted in pain. When you hurt yourself in that particular place,
everyone feels pain. Heroes get no exemption. Nearby, the insensitive cruel pigeons keep cooing away, won’t stop.
Someone’s Agrahayan, someone’s disaster.
The fallen hero is thinking he’ll go home and have lightly spiced pigeon soup. The body’s pain will ease, so will the heart’s burning. Wretched pigeons!
There’s a loudspeaker announcement on the road,
“A sad newwwwws, a
sad newwwwws…” Someone has died. Right next to this, in a CNG, some youngster is bellowing into a mic in a cracked voice, “Love’s name is
sorrow, I didn’t understand that before…”
A mosque is to be built, so a gentle-faced
elderly man sits at a table and chair by the roadside, trying to collect money through a microphone. Strange scene! An unprecedented coexistence of death, joy, and religion.
“I never compromise
on RFL quality.” I saw this written on the side of a covered van. I saw
Mousumi plastered all over it. I really missed cute Mousumi from Koyamat Theke Koyamat. Is this the quality of elephant-Mousumi we wanted?
In the distance I can see
that the back part
of a toilet is missing. Since the back of the toilet is like jungle,
you probably can’t see or understand this from up close. But if you want to look, it’s possible to see from far away with binoculars. So should we assume that only such shame that can be seen face-to-face
is what people hide?
There’s been an
accident on the road. Everyone’s crowding around. This person needs to be sent to the hospital in an ambulance right now. Nobody’s paying attention to that. Everyone’s busy thrashing the car’s driver. While cursing the driver, they’re unearthing his entire lineage, and meanwhile the man is bleeding profusely. Getting out of the car, despite much effort, I couldn’t reach him. A little later he was loaded into a van. The crowd is blocking the van’s way. They’ve blocked the road. Cursing continuously. Overeager, busy mob. Bengalis are an extremely cute, stupid, senseless race.
I wonder, can all drivers named Sagar drive cars extremely fast without accidents? One of my previous drivers was named Sagar. He was missing a screw or two in his head, but as a driver
he was extraordinary! He’d drive very fast while singing Bengali film songs. I had just one fear working on me—that he might suddenly drive into a roadside pond and say, “Sir, what can I do, I just couldn’t take the heat anymore!” The current driver is also Sagar, but not crazy Sagar, sensible Sagar.
The similarity is only in one place—both are excellent
‘never late’ drivers. Seeing the airport road blocked, Sagar turned the car to another route and got near the airport by 8:05. Near our airport is the seashore. Naval Beach. While crossing by it, I asked the driver to stop. I rolled down the car window.
I felt like seeing the peaceful dawn seashore. I don’t believe in ‘life for job’ theory,
I work following ‘job for life.’ What if I never get another chance to see this ice-cold Naval Beach? I thought like a childhood math problem: “Suppose the flight is delayed today too.” I got out of the car. Sending Sagar to the airport, I went to the sea. I took deep breaths of the cold morning air. Ah! Dawn seas and rivers just make you want to love them. After walking around for a while, I walked to the airport on foot. On the way, seeing dew-wet
grass, I took off my shoes and socks and walked on the grass for a few minutes. An exquisite, gentle thrill!
It felt like that soft wet grass
was as soft as a lover’s soft wet lips. I returned to the airport around quarter to nine. Upon arriving,
I learned that today’s flight was delayed too.
One hour; the 8:30 flight
would land at 9:30. What peace! Sometimes work doesn’t send you back empty-handed either.
While walking to
the airport, when I was watching sunlight play hide-and-seek with tree leaves, life kept feeling like something sweet and intimate, like the fragrance of winter sunshine.
Ezra Pound has
a complete poem of just two lines, ‘In a Station of the
Metro’:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
There was no point
in writing this piece. So there was no point in reading it either. If you’ve read it anyway, then I’ll say, like the petals stuck on the black branch in Pound’s poem, let your feelings settle for a moment and think—even just being alive, life really isn’t so bad! What is there in life anyway! I’m telling you, life will give you
nothing! We are all waiting for Godot. Here all the little joys are scattered about.
You have to pick them up bit by bit. Life is precious. How much? Just as much as we think it is.
As I’m writing this,
I can see from my room people returning home, having gotten off the plane,
walking in lines on the runway toward the airport. Denver is playing on my
laptop speakers…
Life is old there, older than the trees,
Younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong…
Coincidence?
Yes, life is really like this!
পৃথিবীর অধিকাংশ মানুষেরই দেখার মতো একজোড়া চোখ আর অনুভূতি নিংড়ে নেওয়ার মতন একটা শুদ্ধ রক্ত প্রবাহিত হৃদয় অদৃশ্য থাকে,যাঁদের থাকে তাঁরা সরল নিষ্পাপ শিশুর মতোই সর্বাঙ্গীন সুন্দর !!
তবে হ্যাঁ স্যার,আমিও এটা মানি যে, জীবন টা সত্যিই কাকতালীয় । অবশ্যই কাকতালীয়।