: Neel, tell me, what's harder—life, or people?
: Life has no form, but people do. Life belongs to people, doesn't it? People don't belong to life.
: Well said. People are the hardest, the most complicated! Neel, sometimes I think, if I were Jibanananda, what would I have said to Suranjana in private? Maybe I'd have said, come, let's walk the path of clouds today... or simply, farewell, Suranjana!
It's hard to understand you, Neel. Even harder to understand myself. This complexity of not understanding you—it brings me joy! But the failure of not understanding myself, how it torments me! I don't understand happiness, I don't understand sorrow, I don't understand pain... Neel, I can't understand myself at all! Can you understand me? Will you take me into your shadow? You don't have to love me, you don't have to feel tenderness, you don't have to care for me, you don't even have to hold me when I want to cry terribly—will you just try to understand me a little?
Jibanananda Das, Helal Hafez, Krishnajibon, Johann Sebastian Bach, Herschel and Henrietta... these people all seem so sorrowful to me, you know! Reading them, I understand that life doesn't give people sorrow—only people can give each other mountains of grief, possess the infinite power to silently destroy each other with pain, torment, and separation!
Tell me, Neel, is memory like life? Or like people? Can such sorrowful tales hide joy within them? Sometimes, watering the nagchampa tree, I think memory is essentially a departed being, and people are its mailbox! People collect memories one by one on their own whim—happy or sad, never once thinking while collecting whether they're joyful or sorrowful—they just keep hoarding for a lifetime! Yet even the happiest memory, after a while, causes such terrible pain that the person can't even bear to face it anymore!
People don't just flee from other people, they flee from memory too! Sometimes certain memories suck out even the essence from within a person! Blessed is that person who has someone truly their own, whose existence can dim even this intensity of memory.
Neel, are you exactly that person who is truly mine—the one who dips stolen peperomia roots into pink solution in test tubes and stays up all night watching the plant drink water! Who skips school for another peperomia plant, spends the evening in Runu Apa's haunted garden and comes home to a thorough beating! Who plucks the stamens from sonalu flowers to make amaltas garlands!
Oh! It was you who told me, "You know, sonalu flower has another name—amaltas." Thank goodness you didn't become a Bhombol Das! And there I was, trying to outwit the teacher with the teacher's own knowledge!
Neel, why aren't you saying anything at all! When you suddenly go silent like this, you feel so unfamiliar! Oh! How can you speak? You're no longer mine—somewhere in that distant realm beyond even the clouds, your home is nestled in some moonlit waters, who knows! You just forgot and left behind the peperomia plant!