BLUE BIRD

Small Expectations

2011-03-08T02:18:00.000-08:00

"This is the oppurtunity cost of education, mosquito bites, compressing temperature and no candles"- I grunted, looking in the direction of my sister who had impressively pulled her salwar to cover her feets from fire-red mosquito bites, almost looking like a ghost with tangled feets in the serenity of darkness. Both of us were waiting in a teacher's place, waiting for the electricity to turn up.

The verandah was enclosed in nets, with square gaps so big that you could almost look at your left and right with one of them, clear and swift. Uncomfortable for me it was, I wasn't habituated with strolling on the verandah so late at night. Even with that, the slippery cold of the floors thrashed against my feet, felt soothing. The babble of hawkers and grocery shop owners from below, enveloped the air. One of them repeatedly counted five ten taka notes. Failing to disrupt his concentration a women who had her grown-up daughters hand crossed the road much to everyone else's indifference. Meanwhile, the jam worsened. Two more men had taken to the street, in distinguished hope that they would be able to reduce the traffic by screaming, standing before cars and knocking at car windows.

My chemistry teacher's younger daughter, Adrita, she was playing a small flute which her parents' bought her, most probably from a mela. Adrita, whose age I couldnot assume, has a sweet face and eyes of spark. Never before did I get the time to chat with her because she is undoubtedly intellegient for her age. Thus, charmed by Adrita, all of us present in that spacious room, took our turns in playing the flute. For some it was only a squeak and few of us actually played mesmerizing, unheard tunes. Next, she made us scribble our names on litmus papers which I later upon enquiry found, that she darkened, all the letters.

When I came back home, I contemplated on how my day had been as a part of the routine that I follow, to grow myself more accountable and concious of the life around me. This thing struck me: childrens' expectations from life is as generous as they are. They only want to be loved and run around people who they find warmth in. However, life is so demanding, either from the materialistic sense of being or the prospect of oppurtunities before us, we fail to find time for our soul's small expectations. Most probably, you can't fulfill it from a soul mate, from a sibling, a job or a success- it's in a green icecream, a swing that you always wanted to hop in, an evening sleep you never get but you can today.

A Cold Walk

2010-12-16T00:48:00.000-08:00

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.

A footprint of love

2010-07-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

In this time of the year when rain water gushes out forcefully down the ash skies, the potholes are cremated with a good coating of grim and leaking drainages, Bangladesh is a country where the economist, philantrophist, social workers and government officials are busy, trying to scribble down a perfect square or cube number of people who would die of poverty in such pouring rain this 2010. A new budget- perfecto allocations for the technological, medicinal, education, children and woman sectors, but even then some budgets, some allocations and inclusions can never do justice to the bereaved, poverty-stricken half of this country. Justice, this seven-letter word was perhaps never entered into their dictionary: their petite lives let alone it's fulfillment.

He was sitting there, cross-legged when for the first time my eyes laid on his. Only in his bottoms, looking like he suffered from jaundice, there was a darkness in the white of his eyes as depressing as almost nothing a person can experience in this one, eternal life. We were stuck in a jam and while commuting this was the one thing that fused a smile on my lips: to look at other people's life through that glass-bottomed window. It's strange how sometimes someone else's life stands up for you, standing there all the while, for years to come, serving as inspiration and decelration of this quickness to get all the work done before you had even enjoyed life. I was delving in deeper to his life, like archaelogist dig for old, buried truths. His life did not make me jovial but only added a fresh jolt of tears. Rubbing off those tears, was one of the hardest thing a human being could do.

I later assumed his name was perhaps Ali. Ali had not, I still assume on my midnight dreams, taken any food the entire day since his shrewd boss only paid him 10 taka for breaking 10 bricks when he was supposed to pay a 15. Things are not like what they used to be: a one taka cannot buy 10 lolipops anymore, neither 5 candies. On this note, maybe he ended up with a burning belly and his family with a thin line of food, ready to digest in their only-a-little-less-burning bellies. Critiques say that every writer has a tone to him\herself while I right now feel that my tone was never like this. I never knew a person could be this rude, bold and atrocious even in words, writing for a cause she believes is always sandwitched in between mustard and lamb, salt and green tea leaves, affluence and poverty. Someone's life is neither a MCDonald's burger, Chinese tea or debaters "It might be a heated argument" motion.

Just because God gave you birth to a well-to-do family, you have a home where you can sleep at night and spend the day, there's money on your pockets, enough food grows on your country and your job is okay- that does not give you any right to look at someone else with arrogance in your eyes. If someone asks for financial help from you, that does not even give you the right to refuse them. This way you surrender to ignorance. Today, while you are sleeping, sipping hot cocoa, a helpless woman is being beaten up by hooligans because she refused to marry this early. Today, while you are typing a threatening letter to your employers, a person has just decided to kill his family and himself because he was just made to resign for his job because of recession. Today you and me are sanctified, to be living in a country where there is not a war of life. We are lucky, in a sense that our concern of worship towards any religion does not draw any conclusion from terrorists who proclaim that they are religious.

In that jerk of black

2010-05-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

For all the times you stood by me,
For all the truth that you made me see,
For all the joy you brought to my life,
For all the wrong that you made right,
For every dream you made come true,
I'll be forever thankful.
You're the one who held me up
Never let me fall
You're the one who saw me through it all.

The air gushed in through the tiny space at the edge of the door. My head was infuriating with pain, soaring like the mouth of a sacred place upon congregated prayer. My heart was a a very heavy one for the ribs to support. For the first time in my life, I played the song, "Because you Loved me", sung by that time's common trend: Celine Dion. Her voice was said to be mesmerizing, her persona enigmatic. For me though, it was beyond the power of her voice, the strangeness of the lyrics, something metaphysical- a substance, fistfull of it, like a whole yellow, furrowing moon on a bowl of skyash.

You were my strength when I was weak, You were my voice when I couldnot speak, You saw my eyes when I could not see, You saw the best there was in me, Lifted me up when I could not reach, You gave me faith cause you believed, I am everything I am, because you loved me.

Even today, a calculated three years after that first encounter with the metaphysical treat, I try delving on the words, on the tone, on the crushed and streched rythm that stirred in me a fervent passion for life. It was the scratch, the zero degree initiative from which I started to try and understand the conditions of expressing yourself through the depth. To provide dimensions to your emotions. To build them into soft and brittle bones. To complete the lacking in their structures or just accept them for their obnoxious selves. It was more than a song a tribute to my emotions. It found me.

You gave me wings and made me fly, You touched my hand and i could touch the sky, I lost my faith you gave it back to me, You said no star was out of reach, You stood by me and I stood tall, I had your love and I had it all....

What can be the most important inspiration of a life? A sudden flicker of hope like burst out toffees from a party pooper. The cajole of a cherished memory on the back of life's shoulder. I found my inspiration, the inspiration to create sculptures: out of words. This passion of my mine as helped me so much to live a life I confront to at the end of the day and utter, "You were challenging, now be soothing!". Every time the meaning of life is loosening it's rope from my grip, I write a wacky piece, I write complains, I scribble unrealistic things, later feeling like I have lost tension on my head. Writing became a part of my identity, by which i mean identity, not my name, namesake or any other whereabous that can exist for a human being in this practically hopelessly hopeful world.

Suddenly, the aura of night made me speculate the first times that really inspired me to find myself. The first times. The first times of hearing this enigmatic song. Nowadays, I am afraid to write. Afraid since I do not want to write if my emotions are not given their individual voices, not even individual voices, but at least a voice. I feel tangled up, my tool to expression all ready to slope down the hill. I just do not want to write, to activate my keypad or to bring down the ink bar of my favourite pen. I want to write, when I can right nothing, but I feel good about it. What is writing then if it cannot move the burden of proud, arrogant mountain over your conciousness? What is writing if it cannot light your darkness even for a few seconds?

You were always there for me, The tender wind that carried me, A light in the dark shining your love into my life, You've been my inspiration, Through the lies you were the truth, My world is a better place because of you.

Tiredness is crippling me. Like the churning pain of blood clots on a paralysed leg. The straw of motivation cannot make me drink more tears. Scarlet ones. Disappointment. Depression. An ointment, providing a slippery play bench for the innocent thoughts. Light down the edge of the cavern, hope between two walls of a war: between oneself and the world. I read this anecdote, where the narrator ended with, "You have two choices in your life today. You can either choose to live or to keep grudging, that life's not fair."

I have two choices.

To live. To grudge.

I choose to live. Because you loved me. Ar-Rahman, Al-Amin. Allah.

Rythm

2010-05-04T10:12:00.001-07:00

It is an approximate 26 minutes past 11 pm at night when I am tapping on my keyboard in a very wrong manner, specially wrong since I just learned of the computer users' carpal syndrome. A news broke in today, that an amiable boy in his late 18s choked to death because of an absent mind as well as an empty glass beside. I feel a lump on my throat. What happens, when tomorrow is a day where there is only fresh or half-fresh tears for me?

Lately I am feeling very depressed. Depressed, in the sense that I wake up in the morning to find my soul lost to vaccum. I take the first, unintentional, vibrating steps, with a mouthful of lesson that today I will see life with the vision of a closet poet, the thrill of a ski diver and the extraordinary faith of an ordinary passerby hunting his way down for a job. I feel all these, but I still can't get myself out of this nutshell. It has webs, puzzles and barricades all around, one or the other lingers my way.

What to do when you don't seem to smile at strangers? Talking, even those few words beat out all the enthusiasm in you. What to do when you feel sad, depressed because of a reason unknown. For me, it has been freestyle dancing today. I danced to Masakali, O Hum Dam Soniyore and Kurbaan Huan- after a time span of two months, i could see my locomoting shadows on the wall next to the mirror. Even it was gigling. I could smell my breath, a relieved one. Like a bench with lilac petals on it. A boulevard with aroma of pastel colours.

Writing- most of the time when I am feeling blue, I either grasp the blue pen to scribble down on my diary or start tapping the buttons on the computer. Writing does the job of a tape recorder for me. It does all my advocacy, all the advising, all the listening. Even when I have just kept a scratch remaining, there's a stride in the way I pace off. Like someone just heard my story, and feels the way I felt when I was storytelling it. Like all the emotions rang in the air, tip-toed on the wind and later sat cross-legged on the mosaic floor.

Insects bites, because of the left-over sweetners on one edge of the table, are settled to give me the permanent stings. Piled books, I can see "The God of Small Things" namely, arranged like a column of clouds on the fifth sky, about to topple over at any instant. Top. Tap. Ssssh. The God of Small things, this book- is a living persona for me. Every time I am lacking inspiration, I simply have to look at the cover. Beaming with life, the descriptions so articulate, every single page is a tribute to the power of storytelling. I am reading tidbits from here all the time, under the bedcovers, standing between the Third and the Fourth stair leading to home. I am reading, reading and reading.

Dear Blue Bird, you know why I am still awake so late at night? I don't feel my bones any more. It's maybe a cliche. I am writing to you, because tomorrow is another day full of pressure and waiting for my a positive nod. I want to be the girl who can take it- I know you understand.

It's me Signing off.

Maybe right now you are sleeping on your nest. We will meet tomorrow in between another busy evening and skycastle-adorned dreams.

Concreteness

2010-05-04T03:32:00.000-07:00

When my age was that of a pin, the window to the left of our home's living room, opened up my speculation to a colossal, happening world. Rickshaw-pullers tink-tonked all the way, the feriwala selling an array of colourful les-fita to the sheer surprise of the more wiling-to-buy-them girls and small, innocent, bubbly street children delving on munchies. Summer was a brooding, hot month of the year. Sleeves rolled up, bottoms bent at the knee, life for men and women was chaotic and monotonous. Straws dipped in coconut, hands held in unison and the smell of biryani over the hot weather, for the first time resistible; this was the world screaming and bumping about.

That window, the shape of an enormous rectangle, four corners of it rust and zinc coated- held me magnetic to a world where happiness flies in sparks. Sparks that you can see when the electricity goes off and only a kerosine lamp is ablazed on a tea stall in the vicinity. And with power cut down, came a chance to mediate on the warm blanket of a flute played by an anonymous, the tune every day changing into something more than magic. There was always a longing that met it's end with the end of the last finger touching the flute's string. Making something artistic, this creativity flourished admist an odd hour, when couples sat sipping lemonade on the verandah and a tired, exhausted Kokil asleep on a circuit board. The music still plays even after it's strings might have made it to some other hand.

From that window, the world looked so passionate and innocent. In every five millimetre area there was either a tea stall or a small shop, selling homemade pancakes, tea, mimibars and cakes. The road was one then, still undivided by the preying eyes of politicians. There in one unspecified corner was an architecture like that of a zebra-crossing. White strips admist the stony black entity, painted the road to a confusion. When it rained, hangings pots from the verandah celing would accumulate water, a bucket full, later used for washing the balcony. On midsummer evenings, I and my sister created pots out of semi-solid mud, courtesy of all the new pots that we found lying still. The caress that gave the pots such different pyschique was also one that bemused us to whose one was the best.

I read alot of Sidney Sheldon, Agatha Christie then. The descriptions of small events, of the keratin of a character's nail- it was made alive and so vivid that there were times when I went off to sleep with the book just below my bed pillow; in order to wake up to read the last lines. Excitement, passion, intrigue and an urge to find out how the life of a character takes the about turn- there was feeling for them, there was healing them, there was residing in them and living for them. With a very high heart, with soaked tears, I found a company, who lend an ear to listen to my fears, to my greivances without even pretending to turn a blind eye: the world of wordsmiths. When I was reading, there was a persistent wish to be in their world, to undo the mistakes they made, to attach clearer footprints to their lives. That when when the inquistive, willing to learn girl in me woke up, acknowledging that she understood how words can crop emotions, seal them or make you feel them.

I always engulfted myself to this question, "Can love be true?" "Can somebody truly love you for what you are, without wanting you to change ever?" "Can love always be by your side, like your shadow in the mirror and your guiding star for the sky?" I knew yes it could. There was overwhelming power in love, to undo all your miseries, to put faith on your heart and then screw your heart with a tight cap. It can give you elasticity, it can give you reliance, security and believe that you are afterall extraordinary no matter how ordinary you are. It is the way you connect, the way you shower love even when you have been betrayed a thousand times- that makes you extraordinarily beautiful. Beautiful. A person who loves you, will never expect you to meet up his arena of beauty. He will just look into your eyes once, and feel a magnitude of beauty from you transferring onto him.

I am still that same girl- the girl whose eyes rain dreams, dream of gold, with tints of silver on them. The girl who never kept her legs raised even on her footrest, thinking it would insult anyone passing by. The girl who walked a road, stopping every few second to touch back and say sorry to every piece of brick that she had unintentionally walked over. I am still me, with very few changes: I have darker hair now, I am taller and I am less talkative. I still find love on the hands of a frail looking woman cooking rice on a stove for her kids. I still find love when a father beats up his child, because the child stole two taka chocolate from the shop. I still feel passion, when a stranger from the maze stands up in between sessions, putting his restlessness out, that someday he will be the President of America. There is still life in me even after so many bruises, knowing that someone I believed in so much no longer desires my presence. It is still me. Me. And me.

The most amazing this is I still crave for a few moments with myself. I still choose to talk with my subconciousness, with the one in my heart, who is a little bit more crazy and innocent. I talk, talk and talk. Our conversations start from complains over electricity cut-down, to family, to dreams, to fears and ending with disagreement. She also talks back. Sometimes we get into a grave tussle, breaking down into tears and then rubbing each other off it. We look at life with a same perspective: sometimes seeing the best in the worst and sometimes the coal in the saffron soil. Any song, with it's verse does not become old to us. It's melody, it's beauty keeps on dancing with it's wind toxicating the lives of others.

Impressively, i still believe in never changing oneself for someone else. It force has mass and acceleration, then it is not only a collective force that has more mass and acceleration. Sometimes a concentrate force's attraction is more than a collective one. Our thoughts, the wisdom in us has an indomitable force. You will see it strike back like a worn off match stick. Like an afraid bat under an elephants unshaky legs. I still believe, at the end of the day, you need to find yourself- the part of you that tells yes this is me and this part of me I want to drink as the reason for my existence.

A tint of Scarlet

2009-12-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

I am unaware of the fact that what name to give to this feeling. A feeling that runs inside your body, but does not rule you. A feeling that makes you do so many crazy things, but when you want it, you can grasp it and enclose it by a paper wrap in one of your closets. The feeling, which looks like vivid footprints on the throat of a shore and smells like the puffy cheeks of a toddler, bringing with him euphoria into your life. The numbness, the bound, the magic and the momentum that this feeling fetches for you, unknowingly cuts through your emotions. In a sanctified midnight sky, with bright hue stars singing from Mozart, this feeling touches your soul.

I do not know of the exact time when I came to realize, a feeling like this actually existed. That it fused a smile in your curvavious lips. It made your dimples even narrower. It moved you. It grew in you. Far away from the confines of my mind, there are people, I know it all, who have felt it differently. A grandfather running his own four wheels, he sits there in a lonely bench of a park thinking about old times. He reckons doing more fight over small things than playing football under the raging sun. His first love, how awesomely pretty she looked in a velvet sari. The first feeling, the strange one, in knowing that his heart was about to burst with someone else's presence. The goosebumps still freshly found in his skin, the eyes that hindered away here and there.

He felt the feeling, it was heaven. It was mesmerizing. It was knowing that from that one moment onwards your life, your dreams, your reality and your fantasy would take a stride. It was also believing it in, faithfully and hopefully. Then she also felt it. She felt it in the form of God. A facade of god that she nurtered within her umbical cords. Hearing the pulse in the arms, the hands and bone marrow. The dhak-dhak, a continous chanting that inspired life. Gossiping nochantly with two fingers touching the edge of her womb, as if he understands. Holding him in her hands, loving him even before he was wished for.

It's the time of a night, when I feel like just sitting in an armchair and conversing with myself. With a part of me, who feels the feeling, who sees the sight and who hears the voice. But is it always possible to tell yourself to walk on a track, even when you know you'll be run over. How many days can be spent, being concious of people, being concious of their happiness, without caring for your one. How many nights shall the bedsheets soak the sorrows, that the people who you felt would understand, don't. The heart is like a thick windchime that sings beautifully, but when you break off one of it's stringe, it's symphony is incomplete.

The essence of love

2009-10-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn Is to love and be loved in return. ~ From "Unforgettable with Love" - Natalie Cole

People are ready to sacrifice there lives for the religion that they follow; a religion that runs as red droplets of life as jihad in their long-sleeved, wacky arms. This religion is love, it is imaan. It is waking up every new morning when then sun breaks in and opening your window pane for that perfecto sight of life that smiles back at you. It is going to sleep every single night, with a tear in your eyelids and a prayer in your lips; that wherever she is, she is happy and untouched by any greif.

When you go down in your knees, and bow down to Allah, you feel more close to him. However, when you remember her speaking to you, chattering constantly, her eyes making looking like glowing fireballs; you aim for her that broken eyelash, it seems that you can see Allah's hand just above her. She's a shadow of His angel, she's a chorus directly cheered of from the heaven. She's not human, she's floating all the time in between innocence and maturity. Every stride in her pace, spreads fragance to the word of living itself.

Someday, sometime, life just seems like a canvas that was painted with the silent hues. Hues that do not speak of themselves much. But, when you open up the drapes and look at that beautiful azure sky, you know it's being baroqued by her presence, all the stars out there are admiring her from heavens. You want to snatch every moment of life, to think of her, to hear her speak, to feel her deep in your skin. That's the religion, that keeps you alive every new day.

Tainted Smiles

2009-08-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

I'd thought that we would stand behind the rainbow; you with violet and I with the reddish red. We'd wait for the world to marvel at them, while we stroke our heads when the cold wind blows.

When the gleam's seen in your eyeballs, we'd had fly. Fly like colourful, flamboyant little butterflies across a sky where the limit has no measure.

As your bones feel the numbness, we'd run across the golden beaches, and make beautiful sandcastles each for the moments which sparked life in

the sand dunes.

Had I really not known that you had never really felt my words, heard my husky feelings, I would have retried. All the while, you were getting a blurred shadow of someone that I was really not. You learned to call me a name but to not sustain the drawn cathedral of faith that was placed in between us. Like two souvenirs on two sides of a rope. Hanged by a thread that advocated only disbelieve.

If I had not been with you today the faith would blow away with the wind and you'd become a block of concrete. Tears dropped in your bones wouldn't influence you to the rate of recreation of sentiments. The blue pen, the letters would invariably act as an analgesic, tiring me to sleep.

That's what you had clumsily kept fastened with yourself all the time, to be able to break the glass of faith, belief for the invisible bond. The tainted smiles to be never replaced with jolly ones.

Photo credit: Neloqua.

Purple Tears

2009-07-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

It's a time of the night when one has no clue of the killing of the cigarette in the ash tray, the fading away of the sodium lights in the busiest roads now settled; I lay down my cozy armchair and at times wriggle myself a bit, once in a while my body shuddering from the freezing numbness. I, an empty figure that depicts hopelessness look back at what life has managed to shape me as, piercing through me jots of lessons, experiences that graphically makes me what I am today and could have ever been at any phase of life.

Life can be splendid, but is the toughness and the boldness with which life treats an already tackled champion is worth all the thoughts, all the mists and the fog that encircles it. It is one who has the courage to fight for a truth, a love to live for is worth being competed with. Otherwise life could be uttering mushy adieus every single day to our beloved ones while sipping down coconut drinks under an umbrella in a beach where you can see the sunset and sunrise. Life could be owning a mansion and having grasped in one hand enough well-established estate to woo away all the money that comes from it for seven life times. Life could be a mother who suffers the pain of child-birth for about nine months and finally disagreeing to give birth to her daughter because she would have to bear added expenses in the households.

Life can or could be any of the aforementioned, but then this small word that we utter with our dried, chapped, colored, scented, odorous lips every single day would have petite meaning that it withholds within itself. Life would be the wink of a farmer's gloomy eyes with the absence of the drops of rain that imparts vitality to the green pastures. Life would be a pale palette of an ardent painter who has an option of either black or white to color the portrait in which he could see many dreams being realized. Life would be a small girl but above all an elder sister of a five year old brother who walks down the pavement, the crossroads, the rail lines enthusiastically in hope that she would make it back to their makeshift with food, gracious food in her hands, but fails to do so. Life would be a carefully scribbled out love letter, in neat handwriting and such neat a gesture that could not be delivered to the person who it was meant to be and not it stays there, in the middle of a road, as a shadow that is divided by lines until the grim from a passerby washes it's essence away.

Life, it's just not a word to me but it's a music that I hear which manages to cripple me in it's enigmatic web. I search for the meaning of this music, sometimes empowering and other times staggering. I want to touch it's tune, I want to feel the words until they don't mum away my pains, undo my heart ache and wash away the numbness down my memory lane. If i can only find it...

The Light

2009-01-02T01:51:00.001-08:00

I woke up with the chill of the morning crashing my bones. I wanted to slumber deep with the warmth of the bedsheets and the double pillows around me. It really feels good on a freezing friday morning. However there is always something rather impulsive that makes me do things that I would not usually do.

So, yes, I rubbed my eyes, took a very warm and comfy shower on the bath tub. Just when I was drying my lusts with a towel, I grabbed the newspaper and started to check through.
Yes, it was 30th June 2007 the day that changed my life like nothing else in this world. While carrying out the screening process, I was both petrified and startled when I saw my name under a write-up on their Thursday magazine. It was something that my eyes and my sentiments did not feel like believing.

Finally I realized about the competition that I've read about and that my sole work was on print. For a petite girl who had little acknowledgment towards her meager talent, it was something out of the world. I was a person, who never knew that she would wake up one morning to adage all those things that were made possible. The dream that she had seen was realized. Right at that moment, when people really appreciated my work on print and calls came in, i felt powerful enough to be heard with a very bold voice and an intention to be what I have admired in people for so elongated a phase.

I was only maybe 13 back then. I might have grown too little by age, but my subconscious and conscious mind is ever more firm and with time it develops me into a more matured, sophisticated and admirable personality. Today, I know that all the dreams, all the fairy tales about life is made possible only by we ourselves since we sustain and create our own lucks. Like John Lock said in Lost, "There is nothing called luck. We make our own lucks". I'm nothing short of a devotee to my religion, but I believe, the small things that shape our life in the longer run is solely on the hands of ourselves only.

While I am writing this piece today, alot of things empowers my already crammed mind. There are so many things which wants me to stop writing this piece and move on to more important things of life. But for me the most pivotal aspect of life is finding myself, finding my voice, finding my belief, finding the reason of my existence in such a complicated world. Some day, some time, writing had been my life. I had written so many pieces at a day, when I was disenchanted, when I was jovial, when no one lend an ear. I had talked about so many things, from life to death, to happiness and fulfillment. What holds me back today?

I myself am holding my inner voice back. I feel afraid to write even two single words now because it seems I no longer have that power in my voice. My problem is that I am no longer devoted towards my work, towards that thing that contends my soul. The time of my leisure I choose to spent it watching The Pirates of the Caribbean or 50 First Dates rather than writing a poem about the tough ride that i'm riding. I'm much to conscious about other factors of life rather than just letting my inner self flow and make something ugly, but it would be flamboyant for at least me.

When I was 12 year old I had read somewhere a few lines said by the greatest English writers of all era, William Shakespeare. He said, "Be not afraid of greatness. Some people are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them". I then had the revelation that I wanted to be somebody great but what did i not reckon what that all of us are great beings. We are great because every time we loose we have that jot of energy called spirit that makes us utter, "Yah I'll try tomorrow". We are great, because every time we come out on the battlefield of life we have dare to face the challenges that come along. We are great because we believe in our potential and our hard work to make it all work.

I have taken the courage to come and write up a piece. I know, I have done a great job and i give my very own self a standing ovation for standing up for something that I have invariably wanted to do. I am not that good, today, but I with my persistent hard work will make the writer in me come out. It's never too late before you realize that sometimes life's tricky challenges may let you fall, but a champion is one who wakes up when he can be better asleep.

This day, this moment, this words and this naive me- is a toast to the beginning of a hard time that I will be having bringing back the post-me, but believe me, there's so much of hope and possible enthusiasm after that.

A New Year, A New Dawn

2008-12-31T05:25:00.000-08:00

I am writing at a time when 2008 will come to a halt, by the countdown of about a more four hour and a fraction of minute. I feel desperate to see another year pass by the calendar and maybe when my instituion reopens i have to be totally irritated writing 08 instead of 09 and feel the pit of embarassment run through the nerves. However, new year also means it is a time for strong and bold resolutions. Every year I make resolutions but two days after the post date I no longer reminsince all the things that I possibly wanted to become when this year comes. There are targets to be accompblished, goals near whose I have a lust to reach. Let this year not take me afar and bring in me amass transformations, for good, but atleast make me realize all those things for which am living. Is it that I want to be a free bird? Able to do whatever comes in my mind, fighting for my rights, fighting for what I most believe. Shall i be an obedient child to my sole gurdian, my mother and make her see all those happy times that might not come 3 years from today when she's no longer living with. Do I fulfill my art better than anyone and take challenges as a part of the world of learning? Do i leave all things of life that secrets boredom and spend this year best bringing enjoyment to my least contented heart and devoure on the realm of the wonderful wordsmiths and scriptwriters? I feel sorry for myself because I will not be doing any of the aforementioned. This time, this year, when it knocks at my door I shall step out with a very determined pace. I must usher it and make it a point to do what makes me a humane. This new year, with a new dawn, a sun being set high across the mountains, like it were a little golden ball of hope I want to look around life in a positive eyesight. People who are afraid to think of a palate of food with egg and vegetable, who are even afraid of watching a dream and fullfilling it is a distant star for them in a sky which they cannot reach. I, as a human, will make them see the light. It won't be a thousand of them, but even if it is one, I will make sure that they realize that they themselves are the difference that is never seen. There is no magic for that "Happiness bird" that comes to remote places and gives them a boon that lets them fulfill all their economic, financial lackings. Happiness is a matter of how you perceive the small things in life, how you tackle predicaments and learn from the failures which lately makes what you are in the big arena of time. Politics is perhaps a bad word in the dictionary of rickshaw-pullers and vendors but this is time that we see it fulfill our demands, our necessities, our dreams. Leaders, both in charge of the government-elect and in the opposition shall use the parliament as a place, as a motive to purpot hope among a nation, the two-third of which live under the poverty line, who survive harsh weather in the makeshift made in the streets that they sleep. It is time the chosen ones work for the people to give them a better, secular utopia. This year could have been wrong through a thousand ways for a thousand people. Along with Taj Mahel another 9 attacks were carried out by terrorists that disturbed the finacial and econmic capital of Bombay. Large insitutes of United States of America suffered from grave financial loss. These losses might be unreperable but we must also take in account all the good that has blessed the planet. On August 8 China hosted the Beijing Olympics which is history in itself and on November 4 Barrack Obama, the first black man, was honoured the accord of the President-elect of U.S.A. So, it is time that we forget the failures of past and see the world of possiblities. Let this new year be a wonderful one.

A Framework- a blessed soul

2007-11-26T05:12:00.000-08:00

"Everybody just want to live their own life. I'm a nobody for them. I'm one of those street strays who hold no value in the factory peoples' lives. They think me like am a 'freak'. I don't really know what this 'freak' concisely holds, but if it is rude, abhorent, than i choose it to over to depict my state now. Never ask me of my dreams, if you are the one to break it. My dad, you are there, you can hear me, i can feel you, in inside in outside, in today and tomorrow, in dairy and calendar, in music and rythm, in snow and mist, in darkness and brightness, in clothes and shoes, in desks and drawers, in life and death. You are all i ever needed".

Fariha

Sanity Remembrance

2007-10-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

There’s something about what I say and how I intend it to be understood that melts my heart and burns it to crisps. In the middle of a rainy night, the shudder, the fierce sky coupled with blackish and whitish mixtures and heavenly odour set my sentiments to run back me. As I walk down my memory lane I realise that perhaps then memories were just black and white spaces without him aching my stomach with sweet and sour reminisces. This guy comes to my mind each time I am personally dignified; or when I simply sink into nostalgia. Like, a BOOK of photographs that speak a thousand words, like the dew drops that meaningfully become the essence of life- this person is someone who has touched my heart in such a way that his touch can never be erased.

Considering my still infant knowledge and more classes to pass, exams to look forward, changes to obtain, obstacles to struggle, I’m in an age smaller than usual to even make captive emotions. Yet I can still say that this MAN is just not a HE, SOMEBODY or ANYBODY for me. He’s been an idol ever since we first exchanged oblique glances, I nourished myself with each word that he uttered- a curing medicine for the hurt and broken heart. My special guy always stood by my shadow, made me realise the 'orange zest' of life in his own, simple way.

After saying so much you might be thinking that I am writing for a boyfriend that maybe I lost; or an old love. No, you people are wrong. This is my teacher Adnan Sir who I talk of- the only person to acknowledge something extraordinary in an ordinary girl and who’s zeal made me be learn to be one of the survivors of 'survival of the fittest'. I worked hard, prayed to God, passed all my exams with great scores, stood high and tall even when I wanted to fall- just for this particular MAN who seemed to talk to me in an ‘epganglish’ language that moved in light waves as our eye contact never seemed to break.

We together had the unsurpassed of the times at school learning from the syllabus, scoring on class tests and he almost impressed the class with his caring attitude towards teaching. I must also not forget that my this special teacher was only 19, he’d mostly wear a blue shirt and sort of a baggy jeans. Now that I come by school roads or just anywhere, my eyes search for him in the crowd.

Someday he left our school, and I don’t remember what that day was. While he hugged me, I cried my heart out and he seemed to understand that what he was leaving aback. Just minutes before he crossed the platform between a dead-end he had promised with a smiling face on the playground huddling around the basketball court saying ‘hey, why are you crying, you want me to come back right? I promise I’ll.’ As I saw him waving goodbyes to the students’ a silent tear escaped my cheeks. It seemed like that day I had lost someone my own, very own. My this special guy, never came back but gave me a bunch of memories to keep him alive forever. I miss him a lot, even today.

Despite his juvenile age, he made teaching such a sacred vocation. I have hardly come across teachers who dedicate their knowledge to their students with so much diligence. I don't know if I will ever meet him or if he remembers me, but I know this much: where memories fade, lives vanish, bulldozers annihilate histories, the heart always connects to the person you love.

Revelation

2007-08-14T01:32:00.000-07:00

As the ink goes off
The pen drops
Thy settled thoughts shudder
As i try to paint
They soak in colours
From the alongside the horizon's a rainbow
And thee heart melts
The lame thin walls almost damn
The melancholy of hurried people
A dew drops in thee soul
Across the sky a light glistens
So sore;
And in snare

My heart listens.

Even the nightfall speaks

Of endless times

And in tragedy,

It's me, fariha.

The Beauty in culture

2007-08-10T05:38:00.000-07:00

Without love for the soil that sprouts you, they say, no culture has any beauty. Our culture, though, teaches you to boast as a patriot. It is the warmth, freedom and lightness of our culture, which carries our country wherever it goes. Our music, literature, traditions, way of life- everything upholds the sacrifice of our war heroes and heroines of 1971, the love we nurture for our language. So, when we celebrate with "panta-illish" on Pahela Baishakh, kids hop in Nagar Dolna, payesh is cooked in every rural household, a farmer gives you his supari-stained smile, when we stick to our "otithiappayon"- it's Bangladesh that we glorify, time and again, on that gleaming, shiny, world map.