# The Veranda Was Beloved! I loved that veranda. God, how I loved it. It wasn't much to look at—a narrow strip of concrete, perhaps twelve feet by six, bordered on three sides by a wrought-iron railing that had rusted to the color of dried blood. The fourth side opened into the flat, into the living room where my mother spent her afternoons pretending the world outside didn't exist. But to me, at seven, at ten, at fifteen, that veranda was an entire continent. From there, I could see the street. The real street—not the sanitized version that appeared in my schoolbooks, but the actual, breathing, chaotic street with its vendors and beggars and lovers and thieves. I could see old Mister Gupta from 4B taking his evening constitutional in the same gray suit he'd worn for twenty years. I could see the flower seller's daughter waiting by the gate on Thursdays—always Thursdays—for the boy on the motorcycle who never once looked at her the way she looked at him. I could see the monsoon arrive, feel the first drops like a benediction on my face. I could watch the sun disappear behind the buildings across the way, turning the sky colors that had no names. I could sit there in the dark, after everyone had gone to bed, and feel like the only real thing in a world of ghosts. My mother never understood. "Why do you sit out there for hours?" she'd ask, as if the veranda were a affliction rather than a cure. "You'll catch cold. Your eyes will strain. Come inside. Come inside." But I couldn't. Because inside was suffocation. Inside was the weight of expectation, the smell of yesterday's cooking, the sound of my father coughing in the next room, slowly, methodically, the way a man coughs who knows he's running out of time. Outside, on that veranda, I could be anyone. I could be free.

The ones I care for—
even sometimes love, I mean, those who are dear to me—
I’ve noticed a few things happen in their case. For instance, I simply cannot bring myself to approach them. I don’t want to step out of the enchantment of watching from a distance.
In childhood, when you’d crack the spine of a textbook with that lovely smell, it would suddenly seem utterly ruined! Big people are like textbooks that way. Break the spine and everything’s finished! You could spend a whole life in the rapture of revering grown-ups, couldn’t you? So why spoil it?
Besides, there’s a kind of happiness in loving from afar. Maybe you’ll say it’s a madman’s happiness, all in the mind. So be it! I’m willing to go mad for the sake of that joy. Do you have a problem with it? When a beloved person happens to come into view, I adopt such studied indifference, as if I hadn’t seen them at all, or I just look away with such acute self-consciousness that our eyes might never meet by accident. Sometimes it happens that I know they won’t recognize me even if they see me, yet I feel this compulsion from within—I must hide, I will hide. Perhaps they don’t know me, but I speak to them almost constantly inside my own mind, bringing them before the mirror of my heart! What if I’m discovered? What if I do something terribly wrong then? I know big people forgive. But even when they forgive me, I feel such profound shame! Why do such things that require forgiveness, or make someone embarrassed having to forgive me? What’s the point of troubling and discomforting them? No, this is better. I won’t look at them, but I’ll always wish in my heart that they might glance my way, even by mistake, even if it’s just a slip of their mind, even if they didn’t really notice me at all—still, I’ll convince myself that they saw me and thought, “What a fine boy!” I like thinking I’m fine. Sometimes I walk right past them saying nothing, with just a shy glance and no smile at all! If such a person and I happen to meet in a bookshop, and they’re a writer, then I’ll walk alongside them browsing through books, where their own book will be too, and I’ll imagine that they’re looking at me, or that they’re looking at me, which makes me happy to think, even though I won’t dare imagine that they actually know who I am! I love their writing very much, but I can’t break through this stiffness to tell them even that much—let’s put that aside for now; I’ll suppress the fierce urge to speak a few words, to offer a greeting, and after they’ve gone I’ll feel and keep feeling
……….. I can’t quite bring that feeling to mind. I’ve realized this: it’s not just love—sometimes reverence too keeps people at a distance.

My parents were heading to Chennai for medical treatment. Seeing them off at the airport, I wandered about, lost in various errands, when suddenly I spotted Kumar Sanu standing a few paces away. How much I love Kumar Sanu—I could write about it all day and still not exhaust the feeling. Love itself, after all, resists neat arrangement on the page. His voice has kept me company through my brightest hours, and with such tenderness has he stood beside me in my darkest sorrows. The debt I owe him! I listen to his songs and think, “I love him so much, so much.” How can one not hold such a person in one’s heart? Those who sing their way into our souls will never know the depth of our love for them. When someone speaks ill of my mother, my blood boils; the same fire rises when I hear an unkind word about Lata. For me, artists occupy a place in the very current of my blood. Yet that day at the airport, standing before Kumar Sanu, it never once crossed my mind to approach him and say, “Sir, I love you dearly. May God keep you well”—or even, “Could I take a selfie with you, sir?” I said nothing at all. (I don’t recall ever taking a selfie with a great person.) I simply stood there, staring blankly, while others rushed forward, eagerly snapping pictures to post on Facebook, on their profiles or covers. All my joy lay in standing at a distance, just watching.

When Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay visited Bangladesh and spoke at Batikhana to everyone gathered there, I stood right beside him the whole time. I could have sat down, but I didn’t—afraid that if I sat, laziness might creep in and I might miss even the smallest word he spoke, that it might not sink deep into my soul. Yet I didn’t get a single autograph that day, didn’t take a single photograph on my mobile, couldn’t tell him, “Dear Shirshendu, beloved! I love you so much!”—or, “You’ll never know how much peace it brings me that we share the same birthday! I’ve thanked God several times for it!” Again and again, I felt the urge to touch his feet in reverence. Yet at the same time, doubt consumed me: what right did I have to touch the feet of such a man? I watched Somersh Majumdar with all the power my eyes and heart could muster; I listened to every word he spoke, pouring into it all the strength of my ears and my heart. I gazed in wonder—how great can one human being be! Such a gentle, simple man. He truly loves the people of Bangladesh. I saw many come forward and touch his feet, heard people ask him thoughtful questions, watched them stand beside him for photographs. I could do none of these things. It was my failing. I am one who cannot offer anything even before the divine! All my tribute must remain in the yearning of my heart.

Someone once did something extraordinary, yet it wasn’t part of their routine at all. There are people who do remarkable things that inspire awe, but alongside such work, they possess a gift for doing things without compulsion—things that reveal them in an entirely different light. If you merely do what you’re supposed to do, there’s hardly anything to take pride in. You were meant to do it; you’ve done it. The feedback amounts to: “Fine, okay, that’s done.” But when you have an extra gift, something that sets you apart entirely from your professional sphere—something widely admired—then you become truly special, and people say, “My God, that’s brilliant!” I hold in particular regard those who are not writers by profession, yet write anyway—the kind whose absence from literature would hardly impoverish readers. They cannot simply coast through life. They work almost twice as hard as their colleagues. When I think of them, I bow my head in respect. Shall I speak of a few?

Shahidur Zohir’s play with magical realism in his writing—I haven’t encountered it even in the work of many fine Calcutta writers. In Bangladesh, no one else has engaged with this particular strain of Spanish literary tradition as he did. He was a member of the civil administration. Yet consider this: after his death, how much space does he occupy in our hearts compared to any bureaucrat of his time—could they claim even a hundredth of it? Will anyone remember any secretary besides Abdus Shakoor? No, because none of them did anything memorable enough to be singled out and remembered. Kingdoms pass, rulers fall, kings are slain. Such is the fate of most.

It would be foolish to speak of Humayun Ahmed and Zafar Iqbal and introduce them through their other aspects alone. That two brothers—teaching chemistry and computer science, subjects as they are—could explain complex life philosophies in language so simple that even the barely educated could grasp them: this is a gift unique to them. Many have become university teachers. But how many among them have become universities unto themselves, as these two have? Some teachers tower above the universities they inhabit. Alas, there are also those who sit in chairs they’re unworthy of.

Annada Shankar Roy topped the Indian Civil Service examination. Ashok Mitra was also an ICS officer. Both, to be precise, were members of the Indian Administrative Service. There are many others on that list, aren’t there? But how many ICS officers do we know? Whose names do people still remember after death? And why should they? They merely did their salaried work. There’s nothing memorable in work done only for a salary.

I love Buddhadeb Guha for his writing. Just as Mujtaba and Shiuram are masters of humor in Bengali literature, and Bibhuti and Buddhadeb are masters of nature-writing, so too do I revere Buddhadeb—for this reason: that in his profession he was one of the busiest chartered accountants of his time, yet in his passion he was a writer. That he picked up the pen—what fortune for us. Of his contemporaries who were chartered accountants, there’s no cause to say that if any of them hadn’t passed the CA exam, some great loss would have befallen the world. For none of them were indispensable to their clients. There’s never a shortage of chartered accountancy firms anywhere. But Buddhadeb Guha was indispensable to us. Being “one among many” and being “the only one” are not the same thing. Had he not written, we would never have known the yellow spring, could not have read Solemn Offering, would have spent our reading lives without ever knowing the joy of understanding Madhukari.

Let me speak of another. By profession a doctor, a student of Chittagong Medical College, and yet when you read his work, you hardly think to recall that professional identity. My beloved writer is Shahaduzzaman; though I haven’t read all his books printed in black letters, I’ve made sure to obtain them. He has a collection of translations: Bhashantarssamagra—superbly rendered translations. The Colonel on Crutches is an enduring treasure of Bangladeshi literature. Among those few whom God has blessed with both form and substance, he is one.

I have a habit: writers of this kind—those for whom literature is a second home—when they write well, I buy everything that comes out in print. The busier you are, the better you can give yourself to meaningful work. I read their writings and wonder: would they have written like this if they weren’t so occupied? Who knows!

I can love someone deeply, yet find myself utterly unable to say it—or if I can, the words won’t come out. I love, but I cannot say it. Often I think: Good Lord, is “I love you” even something you’re allowed to say? It would be easier, by comparison, to get diarrhea and sit in the bathroom for hours on end. Even when I think of saying “I love you,” my tongue grows heavy, my whole body burns as if with fever! I don’t tell anyone “I love you”; I love them dearly, but I cannot say it. Let my heart drown in the flood of love, its banks overflow and wash away—still I cannot say it! Just like this: I cannot tell my mother, cannot tell my father. Once I told my younger brother Pappu, and he stared at me with such astonishment, as if for the first time in his life he’d seen a chimpanzee in pants and a shirt. Then he started laughing—what fierce laughter it was, an absolute roaring guffaw! I understood then that I’d made a mistake putting a garland of love around a monkey’s neck. Younger brothers and sisters are nothing but primate creatures, after all.

After that, in a fit of wounded pride, I resolved: I will say it, I will declare my love — the moment I meet someone like that, someone fit to hear it. I will make a proper confession of my devotion, genuine and complete. But alas! Never mind speaking — I could never even look at her properly, not once. Who knows what one must do when in love? They say you must at least look at someone the right way if you love them, but from what I’ve seen, this rule doesn’t always hold. How people manage to gaze lovingly at the ones they love — who can say? Whenever I tried to look at the person I loved, my eyes would go crossed! Terribly awkward. Someone even said to me once, “Why are you staring like such an idiot?” What was that? I wanted her to call me a lover, and instead she called me an idiot. So is an idiot the same as a lover, and a lover the same as an idiot? There was another person once, someone I began to know, who claimed to love me more than I loved them — and I loved them deeply, still do, if I’m being honest — but since there’s no measuring stick for love, I measured it my own way, or didn’t measure it at all, and simply decided they truly loved me. The truth is this: only in a parent’s love does that taken-for-granted quality truly live. Other loves, when left to their own rhythm, don’t merely pause — sometimes they stop altogether. I could never say “I love you, I love you,” in that easy, gushing way, so I never said it. Alas! They never understood. I don’t know how much those people who blurt it out so easily truly love — perhaps they say it to many — but I like to think of love as unconditional and assured, as something given. Yet I met someone wonderful who, after much deliberation, decided it was better not to love me at all. This realization came to them just as I, growing accustomed to their love, was slowly forgetting how to live alone.

Three things would be wise:

To love a complete stranger.

If you must love, do it in a distant land or somewhere unknown.

A love where rejection is assured — divinely, utterly certain — keep it hidden, unexpressed, silent within yourself.