The wind blew straight through my left ear, making the long thread of the ear-ring hiss. Winter had spread like butter on Kamlapur railstation and you could tell this by the dancing bricks summoned on the rail track. An over-powering moment. Exhilerating speculation. While two blocks apart, a circle of people sat on their knees, sorrounding a fireplace: timber burning, generating warmth for their age-wrinkled hands and collagen-withdrawn faces. A tea stall, emitted ginger smell of tea, tormenting others who had not the chance of a preparing breakfast.
I was engrossed by the sleep of the moment. Families, mothers with children resting on their chests, muajjins praying on a slim piece of gamcha near the ticket counter- all awaited the moment when their loved ones would step out of the train. An express train. An accelerating, sometimes green and at other times red flag-waving train. It strucks the chord of many stories. Of families, invididuals. Of hope and determination.
A flap in the shoulder broke me off the lineage of momentary thoughts. Billows of fumes appeared from the approching train. So full of people. There were those above the trains and smiling at the oddity of the risk they took. Smiling, because life excused them then. I smiled back, too. By then ma and baba were chanting prayers and shouting wishes, the paranoid lip movements portrayed so as my only brother who stayed a decade of his life studying in Dhaka, protruded his head from an almost enormous, never-ending line of passengers. I simply wished he would not be an arrogant nut-cracker.
He was far away from childhood. Further away from memories and wrongly-interpreted dreams. Swapon bhaiya had clean features, the ones with cucumber after it has been efficiently peeled for gajorer salad. Maybe in Dhaka the sun hardly peeked, that's why he's was not tanned like us. Then, his hands were full of bracelets, which I later came to found was a fashion signaiture of a metal band in Dhaka. Meanwhile, he still reckoned his manners, the one I was sure to forget after staying away from home so long. He easily touched ma and baba's feet, taking me into a reliable, I-am-here-things-will-be-fine gusto hug. Bhaiya afterwards grasped my hand, in our special five-fingers-take-five-fingers way, and we walked off to a new beginning.
He remembers thing too well.
It was the second day of his arrival, and he woke up in the morning to ma's tears in his toracchonno features. Delicious breakfast awaited him in the table like sweet meat for insects. All of them bhaiya's favourite: chaal er ruti, sujir haluwa, kolija bhuna. The Dhaka-resident ate it like he was starving for decades. In an impulse, I thought of asking him if he ate like this regularly, specially ma's such kind of greasy food. However, I reminded myself of realization before action.
We went walking down a narrow trail in the park. His feets looked muscular and excercise, to my sometimes trembling of falling-over ones. I could tell from his face that he wanted to talk. About things. People. Life. Maybe about how I was coping with all. Even if he wanted to know, I would tell him I am fine, that life is hard for everyone and am not an exception. I have great parents to help me through, or that I have him. Sssssh. Uhhhh. He was writing things on my palm, his eyes gluing me, eyelids flapping once in a while. I know, he asked, "Are you happy, Saira?"
I battled my left-eyelash. It meant "yes, happy".
He battled both his eyelashes. He reassures me that he'll consistently be there for me.
I smirk my nose red. Bhaiya bites the end of his lips.
"I am sorry for being late."
A smile streches across my cheek.
"Never mind for that."
Love maybe never really needs a language to comprehend. For the last 15 years of my life, I have known only these three people who understood my thoughts, detected my fears and engulfed my sorrows even before they aroused. It was not because they are good with reading face or body language, but because they knew the language of heart. And, God, always creates some people who can communicate with you, love you even with your disabilities. That's how far his knowledge goes.
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