Only for now. Both feel an impulse and are surprised! An urge to gently hold a hand or wrap an arm around the shoulder to walk each other home. One step at a time. As if they are a toddler, picking up something interesting from the ground while strolling with a guardian! In that instant, a twisted route through mysteries and toward where they both must travel begins. The journey begins without a grand plan, or the warmth of a quilt stitched with great hopes and dreams. It starts.
The crescent moon does not hope for a miracle, does not wait for angels to visit for its transformation into a full moon. A predictive path it travels always. The Santa Ana winds do not care about what it tosses around to a pristine landscape. Its nature is to take an unrehearsed trajectory without repentance. White light bends towards the red wavelength when it travels past by a massive mass among the stars. As if the light bleeds from the influence of external pressure!
Once I was young and a stranger to myself because of my disability - I was born with it and surprisingly, no one in my family has acknowledged it yet. Many moons have passed since I began, in silence, to accept it unconditionally, but not reluctantly a bit. So I had learned to pray before I could coo, babble, or make any short sound. Nature’s guide to instill an extra dose of hope in making these categories of life sustainable to some extent.
Two of my emotions buried many moons ago hundreds of feet from visible light showed up - unannounced!
One: Everything about our existence is heartbreakingly fleeting, temporary and downright convoluted! Undeniably, in a blink, our appointment on earth will end. There was never an “if” about this verdict, it had always been “when.” This truth, however, is useless to navigate our complicated lives; so we helplessly resort to a delusion - that we may evade the inevitable, somehow, for a little longer. Perhaps self-deception might be the ultimate elixir to stay alive longer!
Two: Time destroys everything at the end. Add a hundred years more to our count of things, and there will only be a memory of us in faded paper or if we are fortunate, on stones. When moving between points, moving towards our rendezvous with destiny we notice the change in time. Laws of science conflicts with reality and obscure uncertainty principles make perception opaque, plagues us, makes us desperate for assurance. We frantically look for ways to make sense of it all because what we perceive to be true is far from it. Our existence seems mute, yet we still want to make an imprint to remain alive - only if in the memory of our loved ones - little longer than this pathetically small space-time continuum.
Perhaps there are no answers to our quest; we are only to ask questions as magnificent and vast as the universe itself. We started off our life to achieve a fixed outcome and choreographed a target. A target that changes its color like chameleons or shapes like an octopus or outright keeps moving away like a mirage because our meager understanding of the world was insufficient. Instead, we should have been floating like melting ice on a stream just being awestruck at every turn! Even when eyelids become heavy with the burden of age, it would be a comfort to acknowledge this concept. Realize we must that a stretch of life turns Payne’s grey only to announce the darkness of nothingness to arrive. Could we settle for it? Could we resolve it thankfully?
More than our pursuit of happiness, we want to know what the future holds for us. Of course, we don’t want to spoil all the surprises. We do want the jolt of apprehension. But our millennium-old experiences made us accept, grudgingly, that we can never quite figure out this dilemma: to know about the unseen episodes of our life and be surprised at the same time when we reach there. With this assumption, we begin a process to create our so-called prosperous future, one that exists only in our minds. During this tenure, we strike forcefully at the things we perceive – sometimes mistakenly – as a threat. The reaction is our “fight or flight” instinct.
As we age, our hair falls out and typically regrows up to a certain age.We shed skin, but it too regrows. We cut nails only to see them reappear within weeks. Our taste buds change about every ten days. Spine takes the longest time to change. By the end of seven years, we don’t have a single cell in our body that we had seven years ago. They are all new, reborn but older in some way - we are not who we were. Still, it would be naive for us to believe that there is a complete do-over in life; mostly, we settle for what little we have.
If you have already inhaled two decades of air into your lungs, then you would hope that by now we must be getting better at dealing with change. Sometimes we are, but often we condition ourselves to ignore. We put pressure on our minds to forget, and we cunningly develop elaborate, fabricated stories to tell others and to keep the influence of change at bay. Unknowingly, we merge into an impulsive herd of directionless motion. We become captives of conformity. We stop noticing the perfume we are wearing because of our adaptation to the smell. And long before Alzheimer’s kicks in, many of us, we almost all simulate some amnesia. All these actions demonstrate how our biology adapts to cope with change, allowing us to feel alive during the remaking of our anatomy by the sheer force of change.
Then there is the wall of insulation we build with self-proclaimed lies and impurity. We act this way not only to deceive others but also to declare that we are moving, floating with the tides of life. We do these for ourselves. Amidst all the absurdity in our environment, we don’t want to lose the only cohort we have. We don’t want to lose ourselves.
This terrain is well known to me, where a miasma from despair makes the visible world opaque. Everything seems cynical. I never got used to this drudgery, just like nobody ever gets used to poverty or sickness. Sometimes I scream, sometimes I cry, sometimes I scream and cry to find a way out of this ordeal. I am left to do, as long as I am breathing, is this: summon the absurd courage to live. This “choosing” is not spontaneous! But my brain is hard-wired not to annihilate the self. It tricks and coerces me to create various scenarios—often absurd—to prevent the destruction of my self. The Almighty also knew very well that he must build an obscene amount of sorcery into the brain. Otherwise, he would have witnessed millions more self-destructions.
Whether we like it or not we are bestowed with a life. It’s a journey we all have to make. Some go gladly; some go recklessly; some attempt drudgingly; some move on automatic pilot. It includes death, grief – obscene loads of it – not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. Nobody, however, gets an accurate map. Everybody just has a hunch. So this journey is the oldest trip in any manuscript - from birth to death, from self to world, from known to unknown - but each of us travels it anew, and totally alone. \
If it is of any consolation, I too have an ache to go back to “those good old days"—even only to correct my mistakes. You know, the satchels of our mistakes are full of their ridge! But if we were able to, miraculously, snatch back our bygone years and restart life—of course not the way we actually did, but any young heart may want to live—then it sure would feel like a Mobius strip. We simply would end up where we started from with our naïve wishes. It is indeed cruel if you think it is part of a grand scheme. If it is part of randomness like Charles Darwin portrayed, then we are in a merciless puddle of quicksand! The more we try to escape, the more trapped we become.
If no one told you yet then let me tell you. Life at your age is as good as it gets. If you heard similar cliché before then let me say it again - you are living one of the most bountiful periods of your life. It was true for me; it is true for any twenty something.
\
Twenty something dream about a prince charming, a house with white picket fence decorated with Victorian furniture, traveling to exotic places around the world, etc. you get the point. Some dreams are outlandish. Some are a little too impractical. Some are just a dream just because of your REM sleep. The point is that you the “twenty something” have fantasy, you float on anticipation, you move with faith and hope without a sympathy towards reality. It is not bad.
Every year our clocks whiz by 12 AM and finish the last day of December to rush off in hunting just like a Cheetah! It’s a hunt for a new year - for better days, perhaps. Time snatch us from our natural inertia only to shove into a marching towards the New Year - ignoring that we all, always have an inherent thirst to know where we are heading. Nonetheless, a fresh start awaits us! Thanks to the calendar – any calendar – it happens every year. It is a gift for surviving the past year and a chance to bring in the tradition of New Year’s resolutions of all kinds. All kinds of media and mental care professionals encourage to bury our past problems behind us and start over. Indeed the intoxicating lure of a new beginning becomes very hard to resist!
How can we be so certain about the moment when the old ends in our life? Can it be a single day, say a birthday or a New Year’s day on a calendar when we impose so much significance on those particular days? I feel this moment must implant: a hope, a new perspective to look at life differently, a new appreciation to reveal that there is an abundance of surprises in nature, a strength to let go of old habits and hideous memories. It must become an aide-mémoire* of hard work for a new beginning that sometimes appears to be impossible.
So. Before you realize what has actually happened, you will be celebrating the holidays again. As if, you blinked an eye and you were there! Does this sound like a marvel to you? What I hope most is: you will take a vacation, feel the dew on a winter morning and the warmth of the sun on a spring day, laugh your heart out, have a bite in a café with a friend, laugh again, take a stroll aimlessly, smile at your little victories and may just stand still to notice life as it goes by. Please keep a souvenir though, anything. One day it will remind you not all that you felt was a dream – just felt like one. “It’s also important to remember that amid all the absurdity there are a few things really worth holding on to.”
(* An aide-memoire is something such as a list that you use to remind you of something. Noun: A memorandum summarizing the items of an agreement)
Note:
(*The Möbius strip or Möbius band (pronounced /ˈmeɪbiəs) is a surface with only one side. The German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict discovered it independently in 1858. It is easy to make. Take a paper strip and give it a half‐twist, and then join the ends of the strip together to form a single strip.)
In my head, I have these tiny bead-like rudiments that constitute what I believe in. I don’t know how they melted inside me and created an elaborate pile of blocks. I can feel they have existed for ages, and some have even been neglected!
Our clocks whiz by 12 AM on December 31 and rush off in predation like a hungry Cheetah! The tide of time yanks us from our inertia and shove into a marching towards the New Year - ignoring we have an inherent thirst to know where we are heading. We, however, acknowledge not to spoil the finale by ruining the surprise of course, but we want to ensure that when the ending comes – and you may define “end” in many ways - it will not be trivial.
When Baba (your grand father) was sick, we tossed around many hypotheses. We wanted to figure out how his liver cirrhosis did not get detected sooner, we debated over how effective the treatment would be in Bangladesh, and we anticipated how the nursing would be better in Calcutta. One thing was common - every body were simply baffled, taken aback, and were heart broken to say the list. Before anyone could do anything meaningful for him he passed away within 3 months from his diagnosis. We blamed a lot to the medical system for poor treatments.
At that same period I came to know that Peter Jennings was diagnosed with lungs cancer. It was an awful shock. One evening he showed up on the TV briefly and announced in a broken voice about his illness. I told your mom about Peter while you two were in Dhaka. Among the three anchormen in our time, I liked him the best. I remained a passionate viewer of his program “World news” for 15 years. At one point I even started imitating some of his styles in spoken English. However, four and a half months later he too lost the battle. I could not blame any thing this time since the best medical treatments were at his disposal.
One day I became interested to know a little bit more of Lance Armstrong since he is a cancer survivor. I purchased one of his books. He was diagnosed in 1996 with testicular cancer that spread to his brain and lungs. Interestingly enough he has been cancer free since his chemotherapy in December 1996. He then became the first human being to win the tour de France 7 straight time after he had recovered! Your mom also read the same book on him.
We can never know for sure if Baba could have done anything differently in his prognosis. We can never know why Peter’s disease did not get detected sooner. We can never comprehend why all those cancerous cells stopped mutating in Lance’s body. Usually they stay aggressive until the host body becomes a total pandemonium and there is no room for their recklessness!
I know for sure that many of the events in our life do not give us an option to steer them in any other direction – they have their mind of their own. This year many such events snatched our sanity to an isolated island. Nothing, especially your mom seems familiar to me anymore. She appears to be quite a different person - constantly fighting off the dreadful feeling of losing the most important person in her life. Often she redefines in her mind the religion once she knew. She become numb about many things that otherwise would have made her agitated.
I on the other hand keep hoping that some how your mom becomes an agile, vibrant and spirited butterfly that once she was.
I want to start two chronicles “My era” and “Silent tune” for my daughter. I do not expect them to become elaborate pile of expressions - but just enough to amuse her inquisitive mind!
I want to tell about my environment in “My era” because I believe surroundings play an immense role on us. It shapes how we think, live and hope. In the other texts - I want to capture some of the convictions that brought me where I am today, some of the beliefs that got rooted in me without much ado, some of the notions that puzzles me and some of the dreams that remained far reached!
This is the best way I could communicate and leave trails of the untold side of me. Until now, for some reason or the other I never got around opening up this container of contemplation to anyone. However, I do not want to be the one who left the stage “with his music in his heart”!
Dear Little Princess,
We usually pray silently. In a peaceful quite environment we feel comfortably connected to the Almighty. We express our submission to Him in silence and it is sacred. So is the expression “I love you” - we should treat this sacredly! Our insipid use has made us callous about it. But the authenticity and emotions that are associated with this expression can and should only be felt by heart. Our hearts somehow figure out a lot of things where the logical part of the brain fails and it is odd not to feel ecstatic when we experience love. I wish when you are reading my letters, you would feel the warmth resonance of my love for you.
The religious books that I read or browse always talk about big palace, lush green meadows, clear fountains that runs beneath the feet, alcohol free wine, etc. to describe paradise. I guess these are common things that many people want in order to be happy and heaven is the ultimate place for happiness. An important item is missing from this description, it is a place where time and decay does not affect a dad child relationship. They stay the same for each other for the eternity!
You got to know something else. Not all parents are as fortunate as we are. No amount of gratitude is enough towards the Almighty for granting us such blessings! We are blessed with numerous hours, evenings, afternoons and mornings just to see you play, walk, stumble, jump, laugh, make faces, give hugs, eat grapes and so many other things! We are blessed to have Shaffat Cha-cha as your youngest uncle. He took many great pictures of yours and created a superb web site for all of us to share. We are blessed that all your grand parents at least had a chance to see you. I hope you treasure their love when you grow up.
July is upon us once again - you will turn 2 this year. I am not gifted enough to spell out how much of your love-aura encircled me for the past year. Your mom and I have been through a lot of rough time during this period - you are too young to remember all these. But your gaudy spirit of essence stayed with me at all times. No matter where I am physically when you are reading this, just believe that I am wraped around in your being. You know we can see very little because of the limitation of our retina but we are able to feel the infinity with our heart. My spirit will always stay connected with you because I outpaced the change by freezing moments in photographs, sculpting words to express affections and creating timbre of love that will last for eons.
One last word (a dad always preaches), you will have about 20 thousand or more opportunities in your lifetime to see the sun rise on the eastern sky. Make an effort to watch one of these heavenly events while sipping a hot cup of Masala tea. Drape your life with these simple and inexpensive things. Don’t chase happiness - it’s like your shadow. The more you want to get close to it, the more it runs away. Bath in the sea of silence; feel connected to the infinity. You will be surprised!
Baba (July, 05)
Babu (Dear Baby):
Yesterday was July 15, 2004. Your mom asked me to write letters to you starting from your first birthday. I immediately liked the idea – it is rather simple for me yet elegant. However, I am not sure at what age you are going to read this! Age makes a whole lot of difference in everything of our life. What appears to be vibrant at one stage can easily turn out to be dull in another part of our life. But I came to realize that life feels a tad more enjoyable when it is simple. I wish that I get to spend a lot of time to tell you about this simplicity when you are grown up!
We all rushed to grow old and to become an individual adult. But it is always heartbreaking for the parents to see their offspring break away from their arm and love! I think heaven is a place where you can have your little baby for the eternity. When you grow as old as I have, you would know exactly what I mean.
It has been about a week since I started this letter and tomorrow is the July 22, 2004. There is a school of thought that we impose an emotion to a particular day – say first or the last day of the year. However, birthday is different from those days and celebrating this day is quite OK – even in my opinion. How you would be celebrating this day is unknown to me and I do not want to hope for something when I will have very little control over a moment. Let it be your choice.
At the end, I do want to say that we have taken an ambitious plan to write to you on your birthdays till you are sixteen. My anxiety is with what I write! It could turn out that my values (which I often refer as simplicity) do not fascinate you (like most around me) in any way. After all, you will have your own perspectives in life. I do hope that somehow I will find enough charisma to ride the tide that awaits me - I will be travelling with you! A simple hope is certainly a graceful part of any celebration.
Signed: Happy Birthday – Abbu (Dad).
In my head, I have this tiny bead like rudiments that constitute what I believe in. I don’t know how did they melted inside me and created an elaborate pile of blocks. I can feel they have been there for eons and some of them have been even neglected!
When I need to justify my act or intention, I use them to make a garland that wraps around me and define my existence. At times some of them appear rusty and their tarnished facade confronts me. When it happens, I hurriedly grab a brush made with my current reasoning about life and self then start painting them. I may choose a bright shining color of vogue contemplation or a somewhat cool tone down verdict of my self-realization. I start a mental dance with my minute me, exchange some dialogue silently and keep painting until I am happy to use them. It all depends what I want at that moment!
Sometime I feel these beads are accumulating, like fat cells a lot of unwanted, unfounded theories or ideas around them. I might have tossed at them what ever I thought prudent at one point during my hyper charged life. They start to grow bulky and I suddenly find them a bit tiring to carry with me. I then start to use dissent or my new experiences as a chisel and curve out a new shape out of them. I keep hammering them until I am pleased with the sexier contemporary look.
Sometime I grind, tint and reshape them with impulses to make a skull full of mush. By the time I am done, very little of the original structure remains intact.
It boils down to this; I believe what I want to believe. And the ‘want’ part of this equation evolves as I live a life. I always carry my heart to paint, reshape, and dismantle my minute me - and I am having lot of fun doing just that.
I met my father-in-law first time in March 13 1995. I was in Dhaka for about 15 days to get married with my lovely wife. Within that brief stay in Dhaka, I probably saw him less than ten times. He cooked one delicious meal just for me on the night I got married. My stomach is awfully sensitive to rich “Mogul Food” that is a customary menu for the weddings. So, my wedding dinner was home made meal - an unforgettable taste of master chef. I came back to the US at the end of March and kept our communication via telephone and snail mails. Nevertheless, we built a strong mental and emotional connection that was truly heavenly - it is rare, I know it for sure.
I never got the opportunity to go back – even when he was in his deathbed. I had a legal matter to attend! In March 15 2005, ten years after I had met him in person - I came to know that he has Liver cirrhosis. A twisted shock undid our serenity and derailed us completely. Somehow I had to prepare my wife and eighteen months old daughter to go back to see him, to be with him. While my family was preparing to leave for Dhaka, I started to pen a letter to him. He adored my letters.
At the end, I kept the letter to myself. Deep in my heart, I was scared – fear of the inevitable and confusion about the unknown paralyzed my consciousness. I read it several times while he was alive and struggled alone in a hospital far away from me. Then one day suddenly he had to throw the white towel – surely not by his own choice. An immense pain rattled our hearts and there was no comfort in sight from anywhere. Truly, we did not want any comfort – we just wanted to be with him, to lessen his pain somehow!
Now I hope to go to Dhaka someday, see his house at least from outside (I heard it’s up for sale), visit the cemetery, breathe the same air. I guess we did not need to see each other in person –some things are not meant to be. He and I knew it – we were so connected with our soul.
Copy of the letter:
Baba, I hope you would find some time to read my observation of this world.
One day Holbrook - a TV artist who looks just like Mark Twain and imitates his monologues on stages - sails out in a 40 feet boat all by himself. He traveled 2400 (twenty four hundred) miles across the pacific ocean- alone. In an interview, he was asked: What do you think about when you’re out there on a long trip like that and you’re alone? What do you think about night in and night out, day in and day out?
Holbrook: You think about getting somewhere. Getting…. hoping you get to where you are going. You think about that a lot. You question is the boat okay? Is everything working right? Could there be a leak somewhere I do not know about? You double check, you triple check. Basically, you are out there in the embrace, and not tender either, of this great world. You will find a huge but not empty great silence force all around you. Even though you are in that embrace, you still have to survive in it. You have to know how to keep yourself from going down. And you cannot fight it. You have to learn not to fight nature. You have to learn to give to nature just enough to stay alive and stay upright.
Now hold that thought of being lonely! Religious books tricked us by giving an impression that we have choices to make. I believe we don’t. Think of a twin sister scenario. One was born being pretty and the other being not so pretty. It happens more often than you expect. But if you think about the moment of conception in their mother’s womb, you would realize that a lot of misery was actually encoded in the not so pretty girl’s “Karma” without her consent. Later in her life, she would struggle to prove to the rest of the world that she is not any less of a person than her pretty sibling. You know she did not choose to be the way nature made her. Another example: “You can not will unless Allah wills.” That means HE has a strapping string and HE is and will play with it the way HE likes. There is absolutely nothing we can do about it!
We are indeed lonely most of the time in our life span and we really do not have many independent choices to make. There is a dangling carrot in front of us and we pretend to drive our destiny. If you think about it - no one with a bit of right senses would end up in a situation where he or she would have to regret for anything in a life. All of our intentions are always to do the right thing at the right time for the right person. Yet, we do regret for many things in our life because that carrot was a mirage and a lot of “Karma” was handed to us without our consent. If you embrace this truth then rest would be the details of HIS game that you tag along without much ado. Also, you have learnt not to fight the nature - you are giving just enough to stay alive and stay upright.