A day as blue as a very foggy mystery. The tall evening lamp at the end of the day is spreading its incorporeal light on a small scale without being able to spread naturally and the townspeople who consider the short day as big are busy celebrating the birthday of a great child born in the city of Bethlehem about two thousand years ago. They don’t even think that Bethlehem is burning now – along with all mankind.
Meanwhile, without a vehicle, I watch the mechanized life in the public forest carelessly busy and think – on such an evening, eighteen years ago, on such a depressingly mysterious afternoon, my downfall began. And since then I have been reading.
At times it seems that the back has hit a solid granite stone, the vertebrae of the spine groaned with a crunching sound. This means the end of everything – the end of suffering. But soon I felt that the spine might have become a little stronger. Now the fall continues through the solid slate of granite. The experience of so many falls may be hardening the spine or the egg. The backbone is also hard due to eating eggs for years. (Write down a drop of dew.)
If you think, how insignificant this planet of ours called Earth is compared to this infinite universe. However, for each of us, this world is a symbol of greatness. Our life on earth is like a moment compared to the infinite time of the Universe. Maybe our generation vanishes in the blink of an eye of a cosmic being. But how many things we have to do in one life. Some work like previous routine – eat – sleep – supplement – family – society etc. We wander through the whirlwind of ages and come close to some people whom we call father, mother, dear and beloved. But all are mortal, all have a story with an ending.
But the highly irrational mind of the puny human body cannot accept this end of man. Foolish minds cry with or without tears. Many people don’t cry but spend their whole life crying. They are undead – walking around with a void between their bodies, never to be filled. When a loved one passes away, we can get used to that death.
I go to Niagara Falls every year on this day in an effort to get used to it. Why should we find him in the midst of a great stream of water, as we find in Nazrul’s poems and songs. He was a strange man. Nazrulcharcha was started in the harmonium after the prayer every morning at five o’clock.
After 12 o’clock for everyone else in the house, when I went forward and prepared for the famous Barishailla quarrel with my hands on my hips, then the innocent man, cautious in the forecast of the storm, would lovingly pull him by the hand and sit next to him and say – “Take the tune a little to me vitu-mana” it was vitu-mana. He gave me my name. And my elder brother Ranati’s name was Tapa. My two younger sisters are pew-sona and twenty-two grams respectively. The mystery of this strange nomenclature will always remain unknown. I searched the whole world and couldn’t find the answer.
Life doesn’t stop for anyone, nor should it. But this blue pain of not having a loved one always carries. I still read his story of the tailed fox, his Alauddin’s amazing lamp and Alibaba’s forty thieves. Even today I listen to Nazrul Sangit most of the time, even today I eat a lot of jhal – even today I envy every girl who is immersed in her father’s love.
In just fifty-three years of life, he had a perfect wife, a good son, beautiful twin daughters and a stepchild with question marks. This man, the source of innumerable stories, seems to have gone to another world of Hasan Hossain while telling the story of Bishadsindu. He took all his stories with him. The stories died with him.
