मुक्तक
Sometimes people fall in deep darkness of thought. Thereby it connects with the deeper feelings of life. At such moment past, present, future roll back and forth like in movies. My soul flies through the river of time. In those childhood days I watched the flowing river as the Shitalakhya joins the Meghna showing a prehistoric vision of human existence to us. It’s written in a form of a letter to someone or to myself, a personal exploration may be –
Nisa
It was a moonlit night. 8:30pm. Ekrampur Ghat by the Shitalakhaya, Kumudini Welfare Trust so near by. All the trees standing quiet and calm. The whole nature expressing the arrival of winter. Three-four boats standing by the ghat. And few crossing the river. Each had burning light covered by glass chimney. It seemed like mythical lights. I myself felt like somewhere on the sequence of fairy tales.
A ship plying to somewhere having the shower of moonlight on its body. May be an oil tanker, or coaster with wheat or fertilizer loaded. Felt like entering through the dream world.
Could not see the shores of the river or surrounding light from the ship – just get the feel of water of river. Just see the black shadow of disappeared ships and the sound of flowing water and its direction. It feel like I was as a child standing by the shore of Litua by the Pacific. An Island of realm surrounded by water. There was an island here called Yucatan. There lived an ancient tribe named Tlingit. That was seventeenth century. They could not read. They preserved the history orally. They were story tellers. There was evidence of their perserverance of history for centuries. These Tlingit saw the ship of Laperuse as the mythical bird. Anthropologist G.T. Emmons unearthed this incidence,hundred years later, Most amazing facts is that Napoleon himself tried to join the expedition of Laperuse in his ship. But remained disqualified. If he qualified the history could turn in different way. Because that ship never came back. This is also a turn but of history.
Now I am crossing the river in one of the small boat. The surrounding is flooded with moonlight. The boats are floating with their elusive lamps. Nisa, do you know after all these lights stars are so bright! As we saw going to Heron point, our boat crossed the horizons of endless Padma and Meghna. We went to observe the total eclipse of sun. That was 1995. What an excitement and dream surrounded us. In the cold and static time I looked back to an olden day.
There was a breeze coming from the woods to this boat station. Few youth used to come to the river-side, nineteen-twenty years old. They watched the flowing river, talked about their dreams in the windy evenings. They turned themselves to the future cosmic journey. They vowel to sacrifice their lives for knowledge, humanity. They dreamed to be the interplanetary farmrer. But they failed. They stood on the turn of life. The eternal law of evolution didn’t compromise with them. They just followed their own destiny to pay the debts of life.
I just crossed the river and started to confront my own destiny. There were dilipidated ruins of Ispahani Jute Mill at one onside and Jardin Jute Mills on other side. What a tremendous place those were. Now society is cutting down old big trees and levelling all the beauty and making concrete jungle coffins. The canal is flowing by Jardin, parallel like my way standing with the memory of fateful life. Once I spent long time by the Jardin thinking about Poincare’s mathematics. Thought about the spiral path of Non-Euclidean Geometry, struggle of Riemann, Bollyi and Lovachevski. Tried to understand the universe by the curvature of geometry. I could feel the turning of time, thought that I could crack the elusive cosmic code. Those were time long ago.
When returning to my abode everything felt like illusion. I was thinking about the struggle of Hercules and Sinbad. Sinbad – the sailor of Persian fairy tale. He went on adventure all through the East-West seas. He faced all the mythical giants. Those expeditions and experiences earned him a plenty of wealth. But could he gain any human sensitivity – Nisa ?
Why legendary Hercules took the human side being a God himself? Anger make him broken again again. His life spent in error and compensation. So lonely was human God that He traveled all the known worlds and seas. He searched for the meaning life in human way. Life means death. He faced that creeping death to get fulfillment of life. Nisa, did they have the dream about the great circle age.
Now it is afternoon. Suddenly eternal Nemo and Nautilus of Jules Verne seemed so close to me. Nemo left alone searching the fault-line of humanity. What a tidal wave. Feelings flying through the tides of the prehistoric Meghna. Nisa – You just say that all my imagination and the steadiness of stars direct towards the future world – really !
Asif (Dhaka Bangladesh)
Science Orator & Editor, Mahabritta (Science Journal)
[email protected]
