By the beauty of the Nature
On a sandy coral shore
My lil girl dances
With the music
Of the ocean.
The waves from the nymph
In a flow rhythmic
Keep splashing
On the beach
In the magical fusion.
The rhymes of the lore
With the tuning alight
Keep whispering
To the winds
In a dangling delusion.
She was
All alone among
The petals of white shadows.
The destiny
Tied her to a Life
By the blank of gray meadows.
With familiar faces
So unknown to her
With no home or
Memories to garner
She left quiet, unnoticed
In a journey alone,
Across two separate worlds.
And she cruised along
Leaving the marshlands,
The muddy roads behind
To the dark forest line
At the far end of horizon;
Deep and high enough to define
The untrodden border of her prison.
She walked past the horizon
Breaking away the sphere
Of the insidious block of her prison.
She kept trekking along
The hilly tracks with rocks strewn
After walking for a hundred miles
Smelling the flute of a low lying lawn.
A new world ushered in
With newer faces and shades
And a new life of her own.
As she reached
Under the foothills of
The Himalayan tune
With a light of her soul
From her open crown chakra
Under the Full Moon.
A small village in Bogura, a northern city in Bangladesh. It resembled any other villages in a South Asian country with lots of trees, many colored crop fields, small rivers, marshlands, class discriminations, poverty and dependence on nature: sometimes for rain and some other times for unrainy outfields.
And her
name was Amena. It was in the 40s of the last century under the British
rule in the Indian subcontinent. She was unlike any other naturally learned
girl without proper academic education in a remote village with hardly any
schooling facility. And as a common fate, she was to meet the destiny of the
early marriage with which all the girls, in the time and context she belonged
to, were born in.
Years
passed. She got married off to a carpenter living in the adjacent village. From a
poor family to another poverty-riddled one to carry the burden of running a
family in meager income of her husband, the only earning member in a joint
family consisting of 6 members. And soon there were four more to join them,
when family planning things were unimaginable dreams like making a voyage to
the Moon.
Years
passed. She kept on carrying the burden of running a poverty-stricken family
with four growing kids and her husband and the wages her husband could manage
to earn. And then her husband passed away, leaving her in a living hell full of
unfed or half-fed mouths. No choice left except working as house–maids and even
that job too was scarcer in the time and place she belonged to. Spinach and
other green vegetables grown on the marshlands were the main source of their
meals. But managing rice or flour as the main dish had always been a problem.
Luckily enough there were plenty of fishes in the rivers and other water
bodies, but they had to depend on the dry season for the water to be vaporized
in the low lying lands and it was the time of the year when they could add
protein to their menus.
Winters, one after another, passed by with new struggles with the growing kids, now a
little older. No more schooling left for the sons and the oldest one left with
shouldering the partial responsibility of maintaining the family expense. Enduring
the struggles destiny tied her to, she went a bit mentally imbalanced with a
light amnesia.
Her second son, in a desperate attempt to change the destiny managed to make a move to Malaysia, a country which her mother never heard of. Only thing she knew was that it was a foreign country. He was very fond of this son.
Partly because of the
mental illness, negligence from her eldest son and partly because of the suppressed anger
against her fate she left home unnoticed. And a new life began to unfold in newer course
with the newer people. And she was already at her later 40s by the time.
She
boarded on a train compartment with many other jobless people, where the ticket
checkers hardly pay any visit. And it took her from her village district to
Jessore, and then to Sitakund, Chattogram, another city in Bangladesh, about
500 kilometers away off her village. And she got down in search of abroad which
she think her second son would be living in.
A
mysterious allegorical journey like that of The
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan began in the real sense, once she met a
group of worshippers on a pilgrimage to a temple above the Sitakund Hill, the
Bangladeshi part of the 50-kilometer long Chandranath Hills.
She
was from a village full of green crop fields, narrow roads in-between, small
rivers flowing across and marshlands which usually remain dried during the
winter and summer seasons. And now an entirely new world was opening up before
her eyes with a series of hills and forest lines. She trekked through the hilly
tracks with the group on foot to enter India without any passport or visa.
Her
journey continued through months of pilgrimage on foot, from one temple to
another one, from one city to another one and her search for her son, who never
left her mind even in her amnesia, was being continued too. She was just
letting herself entirely lost in the flow like a straw in the current of a
river cruising on to meet the ocean. And eventually she met the Himalayas which
was where her long travel on foot, covering nearly an unbelievable distance of
1000 kilometers came to an end.
A new life panned out for her, who was all alone in a foreign country, and for whom the
idea of the world map is limited to two parts; one being her own country
centering on her village and the other is a foreign country. So, it appeared to
her that her son would be anywhere around the foreign soil she landed in. And
which is why she settled down in a city in Nepal, a popular tourist destination
with people from all over the world with so many colors and shades.
She
used to do odd jobs in the restaurants at the tourist hub of the beautiful
country at the foothills of the Majestic Himalayas. Apart from her jobs in the
hotels and restaurants and sometimes as the domestic helps, she kept looking
for her second son in a foreign country without knowing the foreign languages that
she could verbally communicate to with people other than the language of a
mother braving the destiny.
She
was lost in a new world she was completely unaware of. But she was finally
managed to live on her own. She could at least work to earn her livelihood. She
was living a life not as a refugee to the society of her own or to her own
family.
Winters
kept passing by followed by the springs. And she kept living alone in the
foreign country completely unknown to her with regards to the living styles,
customs, behaviors, weather, colors, visuals and languages. But there was
freedom and probably which was why she never thought of coming back home to be
living with the uncertainty in the availability of the next meal.
She
was the Nora of Ibsen. Both of them just moved on to the point of no return in
search of new meanings to life with new hopes to continue living on: one in the
real life and the other one in a play not less real than the real world. And
from a middle aged woman, Amena turned old enough to be a senior citizen in the
passage of long 23 years.
Again
she turned to be a helpless woman with the burden of old age, but not
undefeated. Standing at 80 with no more strength left to work in a restaurant
she ended up being on the street again and then to an asylum. And in the long
run she was finally discovered by someone who identified her to be a
Bangladeshi and let the consulate know about her condition.
And
finally Bangladeshi embassy in Nepal, with the help of social media and a local
investigating agency, found the home she left 23 years ago.
All
her children are alive with their respective families, leaving behind the curse
of poverty and the nightmarish memories of the past. Even her second son, in
search of whom Amena kept walking on to reach the foreign country, returned
home a long ago to live a stable life running a small business. But, it was
beyond their imagination that their mother was still alive. After searching
every possible place she could be in, they thought her to be dead a long time
ago.
With the help of the government, Amena came back home after twenty three long years in the aura of a dreamy atmosphere; in an outburst of emotions filled in with tears of love and affection.
But, did she really come back Home or just make a wonderful family reunion?
The woods are dark and deep
With the autumn taking over
In a blast of coloring flip.
With the maddening music alight
Under the shades of shimmering light
I am falling asleep
After counting two and a half sheep
And the number of promises to keep
Losing my soul into the fall
In a passion green and Deep,
Letting the sinking heart loose
All that promises to keep,
I’m the new free guy
With yellow hopes creeping in
Like a new Moon in the sky
Twinkling on in a shy.
And
I walked
Out
of the forest
Colored
in Autumn fest,
With
new love
Springing
in to the
Empty
heart in raining rest.
A little lovely plant
In a tiny balcony
Blooming little reds
In a color symphony
A dying golden Sun
In the red Western sky
Beaming dreamy glows
In the bidding Goodbye
It's the only single turn
The plant meets the Sun
As its only company
In the lonely balcony
In the dreamy dune of rays
The Sun greets the plant
With the petals of colors
The plant lures the fays.
How I love with passion!
To begin a dawn
With a cheerful jolt
In a Saturday morn
Morning chill must bring in the night
Night in turn will usher in the morrow
Time to tune the tiring soul right
And a glass of Moon to borrow.
In a cherished Saturday night
With a flow of dreamy light
I pick up some drops of Moon
To wake up Moon drunk
In a new lovely dawn.
In a poetic flight
My wings of clouds
Will glide me right
To the land I dreamt
In a moon blanched night.
It was the beautiful chamber of the parapsychology specialist, Sophie June. A soothingly calm and quiet atmosphere all around with an aura of peace and
tranquility in the downtown of the small and thinly populated county at the
foothills of a densely forested mountain. An indoor plant with beautiful
and colorful leaves was placed at the top of a shelf of a corner window. Ray hadn’t seen
the kind of plant before. But, the wall painting hanging in the wall facing him
was something really special. Purely magical note in a very common imagery. A
green seashore and a calm blue ocean with gentle waves painted beautifully with
an irresistible invitation of the nature. A gentle warm light was peeping in
inside the rectangular shaped chamber through a light colored curtain. A
bookshelf full of books featuring mainly the travelogues, thrillers, romances
and poetry collections- all together can easily trigger the wings of
imagination letting your soul fly along the waves of the winds into an another
world.
‘So,
Mr. Ray Burn, you always see the vision of an island with your twin babies
playing around you, and you are sure that those visual effects settling in deep
down your heart are not just the other dreams?’
‘No.
Not always. Twice in the last two weeks. And I feel them as real as I am
sitting inside this room; as real as I am taking breathes while giving a look
at the collections of your books one with an adventurous mind would love to be
locked in with. As real as the logical conclusion that I have construed from the photo
frames over the desk, from the coffee machine, from the KFC packet in the bin
and from the air in the room that you are single, living alone in the
back room with a door carefully concealed behind the book shelf. And you are a
little worried right now and I have nothing to do with it.’
Sophie
got startled with a quick look at the wall-height bookshelf. She was a little baffled
figuring out the problem of her new client who seems to be an absolutely okay
person with a sound mental health in a visibly muscular and well-shaped
physique. With the height of a couple of inches above six, blue eyes with a
calm and killer look, chiseled noose with a high cheekbone, he could be easily
taken as a handsome young man in his early thirties, if you can just keep aside
the noticeable scar in the neck, sign of a deep cut above the wrist of the left
hand and the bruises a little above the right eye. A little longer than the
crew-cut hair style and a face remained unshaved for one long day made him look
a little weird in his personality.
‘So,
you were in the army and probably in the military intelligence’, she asked to
his strange client while giving an anxious look through the front window
unconsciously.
The
strange client by far has talked about his name and the problem without any
details about his identity. A man in action always prefer to get things
straight and simple without wasting any time to talk about things seem
unnecessary.
Ray
could smell the freshly brewed coffee from the percolator machine, a
good-looking old one, visibly well maintained by its user. It appears to him
that the parapsychologist was a coffee person too like him. He never talks too
much and never tries to resist himself from giving a careful look over the
things happening around him. An age old habit.
‘Yes,
I was in the military police. Two years seem to be a long time ago for me.
After two terms in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, investigating lots of allegations,
crimes, murders in the army bases, I stepped out as a voluntary retirement.
Last rank was Major. Nothing much to tell about,’ Ray said.
‘Okay, nice to meet you Mr. Ray Burn. But to deal with the kind of problems like that of yours, I really need to dig it down. Could you please tell me about the details of the cat part from your vision? Why do you possibly think that the cat has got something to do with your vision?’ Sophie asked him while placing a mug of coffee before him.
Ray felt good with the look and the smell of the coffee. He always like to have it raw; thick and strong, without milk, sugar or cream.
‘You
didn’t follow me well, I think. It was never a vision. Well, I have never been
a pet loving guy. Never had one in my entire life. It is a big cat. Seems to be
a well-bred one. Mainly black and brown and a little yellowish. It never jumps
onto my lap or in my bed and always stays careful to maintain a respectable
distance. I share my meals with it and it seems to be okay with it as long as
it stays.’
‘So,
it doesn’t always stay with you. Where do you think it stays?’
‘No
idea. It suddenly disappears, mainly at night. I don’t see any trace of it in
the morning other than the bones left in its plate in the kitchen. But I was
wondering why you are looking scared of the guys on the street? You anxious
look keeps following them through the window blinder. It’s the fifth time your
attention derailed since I entered this chamber.’
‘Oh,
sorry. I am a little worried actually to deal with something personal. It’s just
nothing. I think you are here to discuss about your problem; not mine.’
‘I
have never been fond of mysteries. And I love to know whatever stories
happening around me. I will talk to you some other time. Thanks for the coffee.
It was good,’ Ray said in a friendly tone.
Ray
stood up to a surprised and a little puzzled Sophie and went straight out of
the door. It took him long thirty seconds to decide his next course of action.
He looked onto the one-way street from the main town to the forest line: a dead
end with a few sawmills and a couple of residential zones both for people on a
low budget and the people seeking tranquility along the greenish forests. And
he gave a short but carelessly careful look at two bikers opposite to the
street window of Sophie’s chamber. He didn’t like the look of them and remembered
the anxious look of a beautiful pair of blue eyes. Decision taken. He has got
some business to do. Once he settled his mind to trigger an action, his
instinct doesn’t allow him to waste a single second. His strenuous training on
and off the job and the lot of moments he stared into the eyes of death gets it
embedded to his blood that how terribly a fraction of a second can matter.
There
was a little coffee shop just about hundred yards away off Sophie’s office
building, and probably her current residential address too. A man in his late
fifties was the only one inside the shop. The owner-run street shop. Ray went
straight to him in his habitual mood of an investigator. With his long
practiced authoritative tone he asked the guy, “Tell me about the long-haired
junkies on the bikes over there.”
With the attitude that of a federal agent and the well-built physic with full of brawny muscles visible through the half sleeve shirt and the eyes cooler than death enforced an immediate response. And a long one in just one long breathe.
‘They
are from the main town of the county. As far as I know they are the members of
a bikers club in the mainstream business area of the county. The club allegedly
runs an illegal casino business and probably involved with drug dealings
too. And all these are under the nose of
the authority. And as things are turning around some five or six members from
the club want to set up one such club here in the downtown. And they want this single-storey building to run their illegal drug business and gambling as a new
cult staying out of the eyes from the sheriff and the city council. The owner
of the building lives alone in half of the building and gave the other
half to the psychiatrist girl on a lease. Apparently she doesn’t have enough
money to rent a chamber in the mainstream zone of the county and invested
enough to not give the place away to the pressure of the bikers.’
‘Okay.
Now I would like to place an order for an early lunch. A cheese burger and jug
full of coffee. No creamer, no sugar. Please, make my lunch ready and in the
meantime I need to have a talk with those two guys,' Ray said.
Ray
walked up to the back of the building, a place he found good enough to avoid
the attention of people from the street which was near to a secluded one with
not too many cars passing by. With his back against a long tree, he made a
quick but confident gesture with his fingers to beckon the bikers to come close
to him. He knew that such a challenge in their age and mood and the possibility
to prove their ability could be hardly ignored.
One
among the bikers was the one to take seriously with his 6.5 inches height
weighing over 280 pounds with lots of flesh and fat and energy. The other one
was little shorter and slimmer with long curl hairs and lots of tattoos inked
probably all over his body. Worn out jeans and long black tea-shirts, chains in
the neck and bracelets in wrists were the visible characteristics of their
rowdy appearance and Ray liked none of them.
They,
as expected, approached Ray with a damn care attitude, in raised and annoyed
eyebrows, and in slow but determined steps carelessly sizing up the guy they
are planning to make a prey to scare off the inhabitants of the house. Job
done.
Two
on one has never been a problem for Ray. Just a fraction of a second can make
all the difference. And there will be just one left. With an expressionless
look eying on the guys, Ray take no moment at all hitting the first guy. No
need of heroism; no warning, or preaching. No time to waste in getting a job
done; not as per the plan; as per the desired consequences. He kicked at the
knee with his heavy boot he always feels comfortable with. His mouth slung open
with the force of yelling and the blurring pain with the cracking sound of the
displaced bones. The second hit came from the elbow of Ray in another fraction
of the first second in the right ear of the first guy. And then it was all
about felling a large tree down in jaw drop silence; no more screaming; no more
gulping back the tears. Game over. He
will be out for two weeks with the well calculated hits.
‘I
am not going to warn you. Sparing you to take this body out anywhere you like,
but out of my sight, and I don’t like to see you or anyone accompanying you
ever in my life. I just don’t like the face of you and I don’t care about
whatever business you are up to within law or against the law. But, I don’t
like you here pissing off someone else’s business here. If, I ever see you guys
again or if I ever hear about you sneaking around, I will find you all and
crash your bones one after another in my bare hands,’ Ray said to the open
mouthed guy still standing and trembling in utter shock, fear, and surprise
with an exhibition of brutal power.
Adrenaline-release
before or after the execution of actions demands calories; a lot of calories
and which was what Ray was consuming at the coffee shop just in three and a
half minutes after he left the shop for the first time. And his order was
served as he was speculating. A real big double petty cheese burger with free
potato wedges. And a full jug of coffee; no sugar, no creamer, no milk. Raw,
freshly brewed streaming French roast coffee; thick and strong. At twelve at
noon, with the Sun rising high.
Ray
could have taken down the second guy too, making him out of any sort of
business for the next couple of weeks. But, that wouldn’t help. He knew that there
are four more members including the leader were moving free. They would
eventually come to hunt him down and create more troubles to the old owner and Sophie
June. He was going slow both with the burger and the coffee. Fifteen minutes to
the main town they were based on, five minutes to man someone take their
wounded fellow down to the hospital and fifteen more minutes to come back,
regrouped and probably armed with the handy weapons like baseball bat, knife
and chains and with a war plan. Fire arms might not be a possibility at a very
short notice to take down a person with five to one ratio. So, thirty five
minutes at hand excluding the five already gone with the burger.
Dealing with the art of waiting while staying calm and keeping patience has never been a problem
for Ray. And he kept waiting.
