The Unwanted Child (2)

My formal education began with Nanu. Teaching me wasn't much of a struggle for her—in fact, none of the three of us siblings gave anyone much trouble in that department. Allah had blessed us with good minds. My eldest sister Savera topped the matriculation exam from Holy Cross School and went on to college, while my younger sister Navera was the first girl in the humanities section, with her matriculation exam just ahead! Papa was immensely proud of both of them. When it came to studies, they were absolutely uncompromising!
 
Ma never even had to tell them, "Savera, Navera, go sit down and study!" Whenever you looked, there they were, faces buried in their books at the table!
 
I wasn't quite so desperately studious, but I never gave up on learning either!

Nanu would teach, and I'd repeat after her. That was it—no need for rote memorization afterward! I've always been a sworn enemy of cramming! It's impossible to make me swallow that! Until a subject settles properly in my mind to my satisfaction, my investigation will continue! Yes, that's the purest principle of my half-formed intellect! But that doesn't mean I didn't want to slack off—given the chance, I'd drop my books and run! Sometimes Nanu would come from the kitchen with a ladle in hand and stand there; the moment I sat down to study, I'd need to pee every two minutes, get thirsty, have headaches, throat aches, stomach aches—everything would gang up on me. Simply put, I was a first-rate actor, pulling every trick in the book!
 
I topped the matriculation exam in the science section from Mymensingh with star marks—the first achievement of my life! The entire credit goes to Nanu and my uncles. That was the first time my elder sisters called me close, the first time they felt I was truly their brother! And for the first time, I felt they were my sisters, blood sisters! Papa still didn't budge that day—the word "unwanted" had lodged itself firmly in his mind!

I was still as tasteless to him as curry without salt!

Still, he took me along when he returned to the house in Gazipur. Nanu wanted me to study at a prestigious college in Dhaka. Notre Dame College was the best college of that time, and still remains so. I went to take the admission test; my youngest uncle and youngest sister came along. I did well on the exam and got selected, but I was deeply dismayed to find that no girls studied at Notre Dame!
 
To tell the truth, Nanu says I have the disposition of a daughter!

I don't really have much desire to chat with girls, mind you! But if any girl wants to be friends, that's fine by me!! Anyway, a few days after starting college with a wounded heart, I noticed that Motijheel Ideal School and College was right across from Notre Dame! The camaraderie between the Notre Dame boys and the Motijheel Ideal girls was quite something to behold! After school hours, I'd see them paired off like swarms of bees on the bus seats—when I got on the bus, I felt like an orphaned, helpless, destitute street child!

My condition was rather like an electron-less orbit! Whatever the reaction, no interaction could take place! I decided in my mind that I must test the validity of Nanu's theory—not like Rutherford, not like Niels Bohr, but like Maxwell! Chemistry had been my favorite subject since school—the game of breaking and forming bonds, the boundaries of attraction and repulsion, bringing the most beautiful ones into substitution reactions through oxidation-reduction in the equations of addition and elimination, and initiating coupling reactions through titration—what supreme bliss of ultimate love!

Ah! What wonderful chemistry exists even between atoms and molecules, just like living doves in love! If I, who had been savoring the essence of chemistry in every pore this way, lacked the very electrons needed for bond formation, then where would I hide this shame, you tell me! Membership in the noble gas group doesn't suit me—I hereby resign with immediate effect!
 
There was fierce competition in studies at Notre Dame College, and positions on the merit list would change like the weather! No one could hold their place for very long. The academic pressure became so intense that I never got the chance to build my cherished honeycomb! To maintain my position as second boy at Notre Dame, I began toiling like an ox at the mill! I became a round-the-clock laborer to my studies without pay, carrying a bag weighing three seers with a pile of books, notebooks, and sheets on my shoulder, moving back and forth like a mechanical man!

I was short to begin with, and under the weight of the bag, I felt like I was shrinking by 0.1 centimeters daily. Though through Nanu's efforts and Allah's grace I had managed to stand on my own two feet, my congenital deficiency hadn't been completely filled—I still had to walk with some difficulty. The ten-minute walk from Shapla Square to Notre Dame with that heavy bag would leave me completely drenched in sweat!
 
One morning, rushing frantically with my bag toward the Physics sir's house like a charmed snake, suddenly someone shouted from behind.
- Hey there, Raji saheb, are you listening?
- You dropped a sheet.

I turned to see a girl calling me. Round-faced, probably sixteen or seventeen years old! Slender build, golden-toned skin—what they call golden tone in English, exactly like that.

I went close, took the sheet from the girl's hand without saying anything, and walked away quickly. After going some distance, I remembered—why did the girl address me as "Raji saheb"! And why did I stop so readily at that call! My name is Safrat Shahriyar Rezwan, not Raji! My head started spinning. I ran back to see the girl standing in the same spot in exactly the same way! I was beyond amazed! Seeing me return, the girl flashed a smile and said...
What, Raji saheb! Had to come back again! I knew you would return, that's why I'm still standing here.
With wide eyes, I asked, "Who are you? And why do you keep calling me 'Raji saheb'? My name is Rezwan."

With that same knowing smile, she said, "I know your name is Safrat Shahriyar Rezwan. You're the second boy at Notre Dame, top student in Math and Chemistry. I've seen your name on your college's notice board, read some things written about you too. Your name is rather clumsy, so I thought I'd call you by a nickname, but I couldn't manage that either; I calculated it would cost me 0.2 kilocalories of energy. So I trimmed down Rezwan and made it 'Raji'—that's it!"
 
The girl rattled off all these words at lightning speed!

I felt like she hadn't left anything for me to say. Without saying anything more, I walked into the sir's house like a dazed person. That day, the sir's lecture went three feet over my head!

I felt extremely tired without doing any work, though my brain seemed more exhausted than my body! Today's incident appeared more complex to me than the mechanics of physics and the photosynthesis process in biology. Until now I thought nothing was harder than mechanics problems and explaining the process of producing 38 ATP molecules; today I realized that explaining and analyzing female character is the most difficult thing possible! Physics and biology are mere infants compared to it. It felt like a storm had swept through my poor brain!

Understanding all this isn't my department! My friends often say, "Whatever else you do, you'll never be able to fall in love—you'll think your girlfriend is a student and start lecturing her on chemistry and defaming biology, and as a reward you'll come back with a few slaps! You'd be better off becoming a saint!" Look at our teachers—each one a perfect example of Einstein's time dilation! Though they're not wrong, still Nanu said I have a daughter's disposition, and no argument can override that! I console myself with such talk, what else!

Suddenly I thought the girl must be a student at Motijheel Ideal. Why does she know so much about me? She even knew I would return; how did she figure out that I'd stop if she called me "Raji"! Ugh... I'm so sorry I didn't talk to her properly then! I didn't ask her name, where she studies, what she does, where she lives, how she knows me—nothing at all! If I see her again, I won't make this mistake—after swearing this oath to myself, I fell into a deep sleep!