Thought: Twenty-two.
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I don’t know if
I love you or not………. I never had experience with love before.
All I know is that
I have never felt anything for anyone else………the way I feel for you.
I’ve had countless crushes in my life! Having crushes isn’t a big deal.
But the way you
affect me…….is weird…….because no one else’s words or behavior has ever influenced me this much before. You’re like some terrible addiction. I want to be free from this. Is this what they call love? I can’t even figure that out. I feel completely stupid. How do people manage all this love-shove business? Ugh! I’m so irritated with myself!!
Someday you, my epic first love, will become just someone I used to know… Writing you as my “just someone” brings tears to my eyes, but alas! This is reality. And I know you’re not to blame for this; yet I feel like saying, you are to blame. You will never be able to forget me, you’ll see! I’m not cursing you, and it’s not like you’ll have feelings for me… just that I will always be there somewhere at the back of your mind. Yes, I will be! You might ask, why? Because while you were so conflicted about your unlove (I don’t think hatred is the flip side of love), I was just as certain about my love—was, am, and will be. I can bet you can never say it this way! But I still wonder how people who play with vulnerable hearts talk about true love, and with SUCH depth. It’s funny, na?! You yourself don’t even know what a great favor you’re doing me! That shock was exactly what my life needed. I was raised with too much affection, never heard a ‘no.’ I lived in a fairy tale. Do you think I would hate you? No. At that time I was so engaged with my own pain that I didn’t even have time to hate you. You can’t imagine how much more powerful it is to be unable to hate! Now I am strong enough to face ANYTHING. I can take a rejection and slap it back on the rejector’s face… Didn’t you tell me to listen to Kelly Clarkson’s “What Doesn’t Kill You”? Now I wonder, why did you tell me that? There’s tremendous strength hidden in that song. How did that girl manage to say those words, who knows! Is that song really your favorite? I’ve listened to it at least a thousand times. And I’ve wondered whether you master-planned to fool me—God only knows! Hahaha… Yes, I’ve learnt to laugh at myself now! Life is all about making fun of yourself! Can you believe it? Do you know what I did? I saw a cat and thought, why does it meow? Why doesn’t it bark a little! Silly girl that I am, whatever came to mind, I got obsessed with it! I started teaching it how to bark. I devoted my entire life to teaching it to bark. And my achievement? The poor thing looks at me cutely, fluffs up its little whiskers around its eyes, and says in an adorable voice, “Meow!!” Hahahaha…
Disclaimer: If you have decided to decide what to decide or not to decide from a writing apparently, you have to decide first not to decide to hold the writer responsible for whatever you are likely to be deceived by what you are likely to derive from it, for sometimes writers are liars even only for the sake of bagging some silly Facebook likes.
Reflection: Twenty-three.
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I could call you brother if I wanted to. I don’t want to. I am nobody—please accept this—and it’s from this belief that I’m knocking at your door. I’m curious to know: eight years ago, 466 birthday wishes enchanted you… and this time? I’d be pleased to know the number. I didn’t wish you on your birthday. I never do. On birthdays, I only feel like cursing time. Why does time carry along even those for whom walking itself is painful? Time walks on with life on its back… and we go along too. I don’t know if your journey is beautiful, but from a distance it certainly appears so. I’m interested in that. You’re under no obligation to pay attention to my interest. Still, don’t drive me away. And even if you do, I won’t leave. Somehow I’ll find my way back. I came here having decided this much.
So, what prompted this first knock. The other day, seeing one of your likes didn’t sit well with me. They say selfless love gives birth to a sense of ownership—it’s from that place I’m speaking… would it really hurt you not to like such pictures? I know she’s your friend, but it still felt bad to see. Being a woman myself, perhaps it’s embarrassing when someone looks at women that way. Though women don’t exactly exercise restraint either. If they did, they wouldn’t take such pictures, and even if they did, they wouldn’t post them publicly. I know your single like or non-like doesn’t change much. But think about it—if even one person heard one good word, wouldn’t that be a lot? Does ‘1’ have no value at all? If you’re short by just one rupee, can anyone call ten million ten million, tell me? For want of just one rupee, someone might miss the fortune of becoming a millionaire. Some people are like dogs eating garbage from dustbins—to them there’s no difference between garbage and food from the Sheraton. The most tasteless occupy the most refined places. How does one escape such people? Those who aren’t like that—I can’t keep them close anymore either. They’ve moved away, as they must! With growing up comes growing distance. Alongside busyness grows disconnection. The desire to keep in touch with everyone remains, but time has escaped. What’s more elusive than time? May everyone’s living be blessed, each in their own way. May death too be blessed. That’s the one certainty in life. Who says death is far away? Is there anything truly closer than death? It comes when called, though not always reliable, but its coming is terribly certain—it will come, it will come, sooner or later!
Thought: Twenty-four.
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Love…..people weep when they have it—they weep when they don’t. “I’m so thirsty—there’s a glass of water right here….I don’t feel like drinking…” Life is sometimes exactly like this…..I’m doing well….not for myself—but for my dear ones who are wrapped around my existence, entwined with my very being—but alas—they want me to be well for my own sake. I wonder, is this even possible? Who ever feels like being well simply for themselves? How anyone lives, no one can really know. No one can see inside another person, unless they choose to reveal it themselves. Human goodness and badness—both are like human virginity: unless you can clearly grasp the real matter, it’s hard to understand. People want to grow, to advance, to announce to the world that they exist, that they are something, that they must be taken seriously—there’s nothing wrong with that. But often through all this, humanity and character melt away. In the end, a group of inhumane and characterless people strut about freely in society’s high seats. Who will tell them that the vast visible body has no value whatsoever—without an invisible soul? People want to transcend themselves, by any means necessary, they must climb that mountain. This, they say, is what life means. Caught in this game, sometimes people change life—sometimes life changes people. In this vast visible world that changes moment by moment, what truly reigns is an invisible world of feelings. From creation until today, however much has been spoken on this earth, its sum is surely no greater than what remains unspoken. We all carry, more or less, the burden of what has been said. Those who have the strength to bear the burden of what has not been said fall completely silent. The world sways in a kingdom of needlessly spoken words. Let me say one thing, in case I forget to say it later! Do you know how to swim? If not, please learn. No matter how much you wander about, if you fall into water, you’ll just stay there. Actually, you won’t stay there—if you can’t swim, you’ll drown. After traveling the world, a person dies stumbling at their own doorstep. You know, wherever you go in Bangladesh, the most beautiful things are by the water, or you have to cross water to reach them. Anyway! Let me return to what I was saying before. No, I don’t feel like saying that anymore. Let me share something deeply personal. So many terrible women are doing such filthy things and nothing happens to them—why must such a good person lose parts of their body? Why is the Creator like this? My father died of cancer fourteen years ago. My grandfather also had cancer. I watched my father die in agony from very close. For many years now, there’s been a terror within me that I too will get cancer—breast cancer. May God forgive me. I’ve already decided that if something like that happens, I’ll run away from home. I won’t let them become destitute for no reason because of me. I’ll flee far away and do something for children. For those children whom no one cares about because they don’t get enough to eat. Children whose mothers are happier when they don’t feel hungry. When my father was dying, except for me, no one else—mother, brother, sister—was by his side. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be. Father died somehow suddenly, the way people leave abruptly when they’re hurt, just like that. They were always there, only they weren’t there at the moment father departed—this too is a kind of sign from the Creator. He alone decides whose face a person will see for the last time at the moment of death.
I have an uncle who, at the time of his death, drank his last water from the hands of the very person he had despised his entire life. How does one explain such a thing? I was speaking of my father. I was very young then, but I still remember—I wasn’t crying at all because father was leaving us. I wept bitterly, but not in front of father, in secret—thinking of how much pain he must be feeling, having to leave us so young, in such uncertainty. The pain is overwhelming. I won’t write about this anymore. May the Creator keep everyone in good health.
Laughter…..(I mean, I’m laughing..) Inauspicious afternoon. My nose itches.
Thought: Twenty-five.
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You wanted to see a picture. I sent one. An instant selfie without a trace of makeup! The moment you saw it, you vanished—instantly! Why, dear man? Is there formaldehyde in loving a dark-skinned girl that you must flee at first sight? And I’m not even dark. Other girls call me a luminous dusky beauty! Or is it that whoever doesn’t appeal to you appears dark? Listen, mister, I don’t come knocking to make love with you. Why I do this, I won’t say—you’ll understand. And if you don’t understand now, you’ll gradually come to understand anyway. I don’t believe you have no curiosity about women. I know you to be healthy and normal.
It doesn’t take you even a nanosecond to send a message! Yet…..alas! I’m not worthy of even one nanosecond of your time! You could reply with just a dot, couldn’t you? Which would mean, “I’m annoyed. Get lost!” Even that would make me happy! If the person I’m bothering doesn’t get bothered at all, what’s the point of bothering them? There’s infinite pleasure hidden in annoying someone you care for. It’s an art—not everyone can do it. Doesn’t it pain you to write? Some people—how delightful it is to annoy them! The one who isn’t mine, who never will be, I have every right to annoy them! Life’s subjects often become predicates—predicates become subjects. In this game of musical chairs, whose hand is where, no one knows. You’re in neither of these. Yet you’re in both. Where to place you—I mean, where in my personal world of thoughts—I don’t want to resolve this inner conflict of mine and put an end to it. Let pain come, let sorrow come, or let happiness come by mistake. I don’t care. I reached the age of walking without caring for happiness long ago; age meaning mental age. But what I don’t want, yet comes anyway—effortlessly, freely—I can tolerate that less. Like tears, for instance. I truly think, if tears were a person, I’d have killed them and made planks long ago!…..Then again I think, no, let it be, I won’t kill them; that’s the one thing that keeps me company in sorrow. Everyone is a companion in joy, but only tears companion sorrow. How can I push them away? In this world, one needs someone even to cry with. If they left, with whom would I weep? When I cry, I often want to pick myself up and dash myself against something. If others knew all the reasons I cry for, they’d be so afraid of laughing that I’d never be able to cry again.
Thought: Twenty-six.
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You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you? Never mind then. What must be said is better left unsaid. What gets said without being said is also better left unsaid. But which words must be spoken? Those that make us weep? Ourselves, or others? Or those that make us laugh? Or those that give birth to no feeling at all? There are such words. Like this: ‘I’m going to the bathroom.’—this one. No, I was joking. There’s nothing to announce about going to the bathroom. The joy of creation in that act touches no one but the doer himself. Using the bathroom isn’t such a noble thing that one must announce it with pride. Besides, it’s impossible to open the bathroom door and walk into a prayer room. So, for those who don’t understand where one is going, it’s better not to explain. Yet people say even this—I’m going to the bathroom. ………Oh my! Someone is going to the bathroom as the first human being on earth! Rarest of moments! What will happen next? What will happen next? Everyone waits with breathless anticipation to know! Great achievement! Quite like conquering a kingdom! Congrats!! —Rubbish! All sorts of people and their all sorts of wretched antics! …… Which words need not be spoken? There are many kinds. Let me tell you one. If I truly love someone very much—but if it’s such that I must tell them to make them understand, otherwise they can’t even sense it—then such love is better left unspoken. Again, when someone will understand my love anyway—I needn’t tell them that I love them. In this world, the power of unspoken words is the greatest. What cannot be said has the most enduring existence, hence the most vivid presence. This nature, so beautiful, so shrouded in mystery, which we think about in our own ways, discover, explain and find joy in—it never says anything. It’s precisely because it doesn’t speak that we rush to its embrace—to touch, to receive. What is revealed, what doesn’t need to be adorned by the heart, how long does its appeal last? In how many moments does its lifespan end? And what is its attraction? Whom does it draw like a madman?
How much do you agree with me? 0%? Or haven’t you even read what I’ve written all this time?……I keep talking. I keep rambling. I know no reply will come, yet….I sit here with hands outstretched to receive neglect—I am that shameless and foolish! Messaging you is rather like submitting SSC and HSC practical notebooks—staying up nights, working so hard, with correct spelling, perfect diagrams, writing and preparing those notebooks with such care—and the teachers would just glance or not even look before tossing them onto the veranda! The school gatekeeper and scrap dealers would benefit! Our education had more value to scrap dealers than to teachers. Our efforts were sold as spiced puffed rice. Sometimes in the sorrow of my heart I wanted to write whatever I pleased! Once I actually did it! I cleverly inserted Ayub Bachchu into the frog’s reproductive system. I couldn’t sleep many nights worrying whether the teachers would notice. I wasn’t caught, of course. I was a trickster, after all! Tricksters don’t get caught, the sincere ones do—whether in childhood or adulthood. At home, outside. Everywhere in life—even in love!
Thought: Twenty-seven.
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Ufff…….Humayun Ahmed!! Whose writing could make you laugh and cry with the same material……sometimes I want to laugh, sometimes to weep. Shibram’s writing makes you laugh; Shibram’s life makes you cry. Laughter and tears, two sides of the same coin of life—I visit both, return from both, and find it beautiful. I don’t do only good deeds, fearing that if I truly end up in heaven! Heaven is such a terribly boring place; all the boring people end up in heaven. You can get along with them at best, but you can’t stay for long. How can I live this life without seeing hell? There’s such joy in chatting with the people of hell. So I deliberately mix bad with good as I please, so that He, even in confusion, makes me wander between both places. How do I mix them? Like this: when caressing some little child, when no one’s looking, I give a sharp pinch in such a way that no mark is left. When the child is about to cry, I take them in my arms again and caress them so tenderly that seeing this, even the mother says, “You naughty boy, auntie is loving you so much, and you’re crying? Shame! What a rotten child!” The same person, yet I carry so many different kinds of hearts. Too much happiness, too much laughter, too much joy—I can’t bear it for long. So I cry, find some peace. To find peace, one must know how to cry. Nothing but happiness brings unhappiness. And that unhappiness has no remedy. I don’t let myself float too much in joy, I keep it all pressed inside, forcibly—fearing that the sorrows too might not find it convenient; when we laugh too much, the sorrows rejoice, they wait and watch for when we laugh. When we laugh, they try with tremendous energy to make us cry very quickly. In life, when I receive even a little bit of love (certainly selfless) from the many loving (certainly selfless) people around my heart, how wonderfully good it feels! The Creator has created us with such love—when we remember Him, He surely becomes much happier, yet even in this we are endlessly miserly. We are truly far too ungrateful. Ah! How helpless it feels when one’s own mind won’t listen to oneself. I understand everything, my mind neither eats my words nor wears them—why should it listen to me?—yet still. One’s own mind not following one’s own wishes—this too is a punishment: for what I have done wrong, and for what I will do.
Thought: Twenty-eight.
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I sometimes go to watch movies alone at Basundhara’s Star Cineplex. A girl who has no one, whom no one takes to see movies—she too feels like watching films at the cinema. I don’t have anyone, I mean that kind of someone whom everyone collectively calls a ‘boyfriend’—whose pocket is such a joy to drain, around whose neck hanging and going “dugga-dugga” is the fashion of the day, with whom there may or may not be real love but selfie-love is essential, where there may be no demands of the heart but the demand for drumbeat publicity is extraordinarily high (because, after all, publicity breeds popularity!), who can be made to fetch even a packet of tissues, whose touch may or may not awaken the soul but certainly awakens the body, into whose belly goes seventy percent of his girlfriend’s (or girlfriends’) lipstick—someone like that. When girls fall in love, they all turn their boyfriends into night guards, or perhaps the boy himself joyfully takes up the unpaid job of night guard. Night guards sometimes slack off and fall asleep, but BF-night guards are excessively sincere about staying awake on duty! Modern love steals both pocket money and sleep from your eyes. For killing endless idle time, there’s nothing like love. There was a time when people would give their lives for love, and now they won’t even give their Facebook password. Love’s name is no longer pain—love’s new name is breakup-rehearsal. Breakup is a play, and the rehearsal for that play is called love. When entangled in romantic relationships, no one says anymore, “I am in love”—perhaps their heart trembles to tell such a lie; instead they say, “I am in a relationship,” or “I am in an affair,” something like that. Earlier there were package dramas, now there are package affairs, package breakups. Earlier love happened with the intention of staying together for life, now love happens with the intention of staying together until the next love. Earlier, even the gentle touch of each other’s fingers would make both shiver with intense excitement, their hair standing on end; now even embracing each other raises nothing. Well, I’m not from that line, yet I’ve practiced much unauthorized commentary. But back to what I was saying. Just because I don’t have a BF—meaning boyfriend—doesn’t mean I don’t have a desire to watch movies. But who would understand this? At the counter, just hearing “one ticket please,” the two people would exchange strange looks with each other and then look at me with such a helpless(!) expression that I’d think, let me just take one of them along, at least save myself from such bizarre reactions! A girl coming alone to watch a movie at the cineplex is the work of some ‘helpless’ alien from another planet.
Today I’m going to see a movie. After so long, I’ll see those helpless faces again. I’ve decided—I’ll show up at the ticket counter wearing bright red lipstick and deep green sunglasses. ……… Hey man! Won’t you take on the responsibility of making this alien human someday? Do I have to pay for the ticket? Okay; but the coffee bill is yours. Deal? Hehehe… you’re quite the wicked alien yourself! (Special note: Please substitute ‘you’ with the formal ‘you’ at your own discretion. What? Getting annoyed? Feel like grabbing me and throwing me down if you could get close? Where am I getting close? I’m far away… I’ll stay far away… You’re terrifying—if I came close, I’d never be able to return; the fear isn’t of you, but of myself! Even if the whole world went reckless, it wouldn’t matter to me, but if I myself became reckless, then what would I do? Apart from this one ‘I,’ I can handle the entire world. If necessary, I’d swallow any terrible poison in the world with a smile, but wrapping myself in love? No, no, never!)