As a child, many called me Tapa, some called me Potka; and if anyone got into the slightest tiff with me, they'd immediately try to tickle my belly. Anyway, people with enlarged spleens have misshapen bellies, and at such a tender age I already wore a lungi. I'd wrap the lungi somehow, all disheveled, creating a little mound over my stomach. My arms and legs were so terribly thin that this misshapen belly with its mound became the very essence of my existence.
Father believed that without proper air and light, the brain couldn't develop properly. So I often had to have my head shaved, keeping my scalp exposed. Looking at myself in the mirror from time to time, I never seemed like anything other than a firecracker.
Though the Creator had made me a firecracker physically, He hadn't been stingy in supplying my brain with something substantial, so my intelligence was rather sharp. I always came first in class, but the other children wouldn't come near me; because that single lungi of mine constantly gave off a rank smell. I often sat alone on an empty bench at the back.
The schoolmaster, however, didn't dismiss me like the others. He used to say that intelligence was supposedly teeming and buzzing inside my brain. He had real hopes for me. And banking on that hope, when this firecracker got star marks and graduated from school, the twentieth century was 91 years old.
Now it's 2009, and 18 years have vanished without a trace in between. That childhood patient with the enlarged spleen has suddenly risen to the front ranks of society!
The doors of my fortune opened in the late nineties of the last century. After that I climbed up the stairs so rapidly that I'm afraid to look back, lest I slip and tumble down again. Though I crossed the secondary threshold with star marks, that path couldn't hold me for long. After failing intermediate twice and losing two years, when I was suffering from utter despair inside and out, one day I crossed the lane at Nawabpur Road and showed up at a pir saheb's sanctuary.
In no time I became an ardent devotee of Pir Baba, though I found it quite difficult to control my greed for Pir Baba's paunch and his monthly income. He took a thousand taka offering from each patient and sent off an average of a hundred or two patients daily. It took quite some time to receive proper training from Pir Baba.
When I took leave from Pir Baba's sanctuary after a couple of years, I was no longer that patient with the enlarged spleen, but a full-fledged pir saheb. The tips of my beard nearly touched my belly, my kurta reached down to my ankles. A hint of paunch showed beneath the kurta, a couple of bunches of prayer beads in my hands, and on my head, over my ancestral hair, a round cap with "Allah" written in large Arabic letters for all time. My pir life began at the foot of a neem tree atop a small hill-like mound at Mirpur Kalapani.
When I was sitting aimlessly under that tree, taking a moment's rest, the doors of my fortune opened to my amazement. I saw water dripping from the neem tree. (When neem trees get a certain disease, water drips from their trunks.) I closed my eyes and remembered Pir Baba once; his enormous paunch floated before my eyes and I felt as if Pir Baba was saying, "Sit! Don't move anymore, put down roots right there!"
Then began the spiritual practice. Various exercises of shaking my head and occasionally crying out "Haq Maula!" In just a few days I gathered quite a number of devotees! The devotees spread word all around that a pir baba had come to Kalapani, and the tree under which this pir baba sat was dripping water through Allah's miraculous power. There was no accomplished pir like him—his miraculous water could cure any disease—he could even bring dead people back to life!
My blind devotees spread such various tales far and wide, creating quite a stir. Since then, I've treated countless patients. People come from distant places to take away water, oil, and such things after I've blessed them.
My paunch has grown somewhat lately, though my facial radiance has diminished considerably. He who has money also has a paunch; he who has no money but has a paunch—understand that he lacks wisdom. Though my facial radiance has dimmed, my devotees haven't decreased; but I no longer enjoy all this. I'm thinking, once the swimming pool at the Gulshan house is complete, I'll abandon this life. Then a marriage and a family—these intervening years will remain only as sweet memories.