She walks in beauty
In the darkening night,
With a shimmering glow.
The Moon sets high,
While beaming its light
In a maddening flow...
She walks in beauty
On the foaming sandy shore
Of the deep blue bay.
The gentle gray waves
Cradling on her ways
Keep twinkling on the cay..
She walks in beauty,
My little lovely girl
In her toddle and wobble.
In a heaven drop of tear
With a blissful blow of cheer
I cuddle her in my bubble...
I can walk a 1000 mile
Along the Nile
And long forest line
To reach a dream
To the farthest isle;
For a deep blue lotus,
Bathed in Moon
And bloomed in tune
To the dew drop glows
After a long hiatus.
I can chase
The twinkling stars
To fetch one Blue
With a tinge of crimson hue
From the land of Mars.
For a pair of eyes
In 50 shades of blue
And the sign of tears,
I can travel across lives
For a 1000 years.
The deafening sounds
And the chaotic running
To chase the life
Under the open sky.
The blue and the bronze
Braving the darkening foray
Keep winging on
In the symphony of birds' fly.
The black turns gray
In the piles of dreams,
Burying a thousand truth
Against a splendid lie.
Love flying high
With a trail of sighs
Comes down in pours
In a hope-melting cry.
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.
