Timeless skies (Monga Caravan)

বেশ কয়েকজন সচলের বই এবারের বইমেলা মাতাবে, এ ব্যাপারে আমি নিশ্চিত। অন্য অনেক সুহৃদ সচলের মতো আমার Monga Caravan- বইটিও ইতোমধ্যেই মেলায় চলে এসেছে। পাওয়া যাচ্ছে জনান্তিকের স্টলে। যাঁদের বই এসেছে তাদেরকে প্রাণ থেকে অভিনন্দন। পাশাপাশি আপনাদের সবাইকে আমন্ত্রণ জানাই আমার ইংরেজী বইটিতে একটু চোখ বুলিয়ে নেয়ার। আপনাদের সকলের গঠনমূলক সমালোচনাই আমার পরবর্তী বইটির পাথেয় হবে বলে আশা রাখি।

আগেই বলেছি, প্রচলিত প্রথার শেকল ভেঙে বের হওয়া খুব সহজ নয়। সব সময়েই চেষ্টা করেছি একুশে বইমেলায় একটি করে বই যেন উপহার দিতে পারি আমার পাঠকদের। সেই ধারাবাহিকতায় গতবছর 'পরাজিত মেঘদল' প্রকাশিত হয়েছে জনান্তিক থেকে। এবার শেকল ভাঙার ক্ষুদ্র চেষ্টা। আমার বাংলাভাষী পাঠক-বন্ধুদের তালিকার সঙ্গে এবার কতোগুলো ভিন্নভাষা বলা মুখ জুড়ে দিলাম।

শেকল ভাঙার এই প্রয়াসেই এবার বইমেলায় জনান্তিক থেকে বের হচ্ছে আমার ইংরেজী বই Monga Caravan। নিচের গল্পটি Monga Caravan থেকেই উদ্বৃত করলাম আমার সচল বন্ধুদের জন্য। প্রথা কেটে বেরিয়ে আসার এই চেষ্টায় আপনাদের মূল্যবান উদ্বৃতি / সমালোচনা আমার একান্ত পাথেয়।

সবাইকে আগাম আন্তরিক ধন্যবাদ।

Timeless skies

His whole life pivots around those 30 seconds. How can that be? Does it mean that he was only alive for 30 seconds? Yes, indeed. He was way past my teens, yet one look at those gorgeous green eyes and the huge waves of Queen Mary in them capsized his little boat. He went down and down the ocean, lungs gasping for air but his heart knew that he wanted to follow those green lights into the tunnel of death. Unbelievably, he was happy to enter the dark tunnel as long as he could cherish those silky 30 seconds between life and death.

You knocked the door of Room No. 49, the way an olive-dressed soldier knocks at the door of a lazy cadet for the morning parade. True enough, lazy bone was lying down with a velvet folk blanket covering him. He had come to Europe with this blanket stitched by his mother. Every morning he got up with the feel of his mother's fingers on his forehead. Half asleep, half awake, keeping the 14 inch TV running on some music channel running a collage of hip-hop, jazz, blues, heavy metal and Herbert Grunemeyer's Mensch whispering into his ears: someone is waiting outside. He was angry at this hasty knock; such morning-parade door-punching was the reason he had left military school. Through the eye glass he could see two hazel eyes behind spectacles with trifocal lenses, a round face drawn with a compass by the geometry god, Margaret Thatcher like nose but with a light blue nose-pin and wheatish complexion complemented by the insufficient corridor light.

"Are you up for coffee," she used the trendy coinage meant for such occasions.

"Would you like to come in for a cup?" For him going out for coffee was nothing but an innocent open air theatre.

She refused to come in and he refused to go out. Opening the door to a mere 30 degree angle he craned his neck out till only his Adam's apple was visible and politely refused to go out with a platonic coffee-mate. You returned, unmoved by his uncouth behavior; perhaps it's for the best. He could be a fishy character typically interested in going out with an occidental fair lady. Back in your Room No. 52, kicking off your shoes you picked up Michael Moore's 'Down Size This' and enjoyed the writer's hilarious lampoon against the statue of capitalism. But much as you wanted you could not help wondering about the occupant of No. 49. A few hours later you hit his room again with the anguish of a parade commander. This time he did come out in a chocolate colored shirt, black trousers and careless pair of summer sandals ready to go out with you.

At McDonald's -- Ich liebe es – he sat at a corner table with all his laziness and chauvinism waiting for his cappuccino as any South Asian man would do. You were ok with that. In the spectrum of silence that followed, a man and a woman sat face to face playing an invisible game of chess.

"Do you have nothing to say?" she broke the barrier.

"What is there to say!"

"Anything. We can discuss the weather if you like."

"Actually I am sitting in front of my enemy."

"What!"

"In 1971 Pakistani soldiers killed five of my uncles during our freedom struggle."

"I apologize for that."

"Should that be enough for me?"

"My father was in the Air Force at that time. He was asked to bomb Dhaka, but he went on sick leave to disobey that order."

Another spell of silence overtook the cubic table: green eyes staring at the busy street through the glass window and black eyes concentrating on the glass pyramid above. This attempt at distraction could not last for long. You started talking about garbage management. He was not interested in listening to this ecological discourse. You raised the issue of urban planning which he again found dry. You proposed joining a German language course but that too was wasted on him. Finally, weather was rolled out, but by that time he had retreated into his own world. Does it mean there was no area of commonness between you both? You had studied International Affairs, while he was an English Lit major. You hated fiction, he loved it. Reading was your all-time preference, whereas he opted to sleep out his time. You were a confident woman, he a careless man. Slowly walking back to your rooms he couldn't even get through his door lock. After helping him out with that you entered your room right opposite his. The green carpeted corridor became an equator of melancholy.

Dateline Rendezvous

Neither one of you will ever accept it as a rendezvous. It was a restaurant at Clodwigsplatz covered with full-size portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Gregory Peck, a crowded joint full of nicotine emissions. You preferred to sit outside expecting to be interrupted by the cracking noises of U-bahn No 16. He still remembers you wearing an off-white jacket, your long hair falling across the back of the chair. The discussion never reached a rendezvous point as you were busy Bush-bashing with conspiracy theories abound. On top of your height of imagination you were all praises for General Pervez Musharraf for driving away Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif into much-deserved exile. In your opinion, ruling under the garb of democracy both of them failed to provide any to the people of Pakistan.

How you could burden the light wind with your weird political theories was beyond him, especially when the chance to rush towards the Metropolis Cinema at Ebertplatz to catch A Beautiful mind was more tantalizing. You found him to be as autistic as that beautiful mind; alas he took it to be a compliment. Sitting next to him with salty popcorns and a diet coke you stopped him from making a sweeping comment on your weight. "Kate Winslet, Monica Lewinsky and Sushmita Sen all look more beautiful because of their more than accepted weight," you casually mentioned. As you had the rarest habit of freezing a light topic into a heavy one, he could never win his teasing match. Certainly you can recall him telling you: "that's a four and that' one's six."

He is not even forty now, yet recollects your memories like a 70-plus retired hunter. Amazing, isn't it? It was a wide windy concrete garden overlooking the U-bahn station where you held a huge Doner Kebap and the usual diet cola, and he a normal one. A Doner Kebap requires a broad mouth to be able to bite into it. With every bite you defied aesthetics. He tried to mention this fact once but you ignored the point of order. It was a clouded night. The place was filled with the howling of drunken hobos; the welfare state had not been able to stop them from withdrawing from life. He was scared of those drunken dandies but you couldn't care less, referring to your reckless cantonment courage. You took him to your haunts; Galetaria Cafeteria for your favorite strawberry ice-cream, needless to mention a diet one, and Ital Ice for Wiener Melange.
As I risk turning this story into an obvious food-chart, let me philosophize it to attract the post-modernists.

Revisiting Karl Marx

It was not at all a lucrative proposal for you to revisit Karl Marx, whose order has failed miserably. But you reluctantly agreed to go with him to Trier, Marx's birthplace, and were surprised to know that Karl Marx was not born in the once-communist and part of Germany. But yes, he had opened his eyes in an affluent family that was favored by history. Marx wanted to deconstruct that history in favor of the have-nots.
The tour of Trier was his way of paying tribute to Marx, Cuba his only place of pilgrimage. You made fun of him. He was tolerant:

"How would you feel that pain? You, the offspring of feudal lords and military bureaucracy, whose father acquired a new piece of land with every posting, have been deprived of understanding the pain of the have-nots."

"Don't try to be unnecessarily reactionary, as if you represent the suppressed class. You have never even poured a glass of water for yourself. Left-leaning is a fashion, to show off that you are intellectually different from others."

Anyway, you didn't really want to break his heart so you offered to collect tickets for Trier. Too lazy to go with you, he believed that paying for them was enough. But you had had enough of male chauvinism, you payed for both.

It was really difficult for him to get up early to catch the Trier-bound train. Getting the promised wakeup call from you he started dilly dallying.
"Can't we go some other day? How about tomorrow morning? It's too cold today; Karl Marx museum could be closed for the day."

You knew how to handle an unwilling, lazy cadet; decided to shout like an army commander:

"I was not the one to plan this trip and I am least interested in visiting Karl Marx. But since everything has been planned so just get up and splash water on your face. You are so scared of the cold, how will you and others like you bring about revolution against capitalism."

Reluctantly, he pushed himself out of bed and within 30 minutes knocked at your door. Repeatedly criticized for not even getting a glass of water for himself, he started clumsily making tea for two. You tried to stop him but he got stubborn and while sipping discovered it to be quite a salty cup of tea.

On the inter-city express he was unusually quiet, looking through his side of the window at the hills passing by, winter forests devoid of leaves, smoking chimneys of the countryside, and wide fields covered with blue or white plastic sheets to save baby corns from icy dew. You were sleeping like a practiced commuter not wasting time in sight-seeing, reddish sunlight reflecting in your long, brown hair and the tiny shadow of your nose-pin resting on your cheeks. He wanted to discuss over Karl Marx, a befitting prologue to the visit but you were sleeping like a capitalist and the dream tycoon had no one to share the romanticism of revisiting the man who had ruled over him since his teenage.

While sleeping you head was slipping over and again. You wanted to offer your shoulder; a communist to a capitalist; no doubt a gesture of great symbolic value. "If it's not a problem you can rest your head on my shoulder…..."
He was overwhelmed and speechless at the sight of Trier railway station. You broke his spell: "First Porta Nigara, the oldest Roman gate made from black stone, and then your museum."

"It's not my museum."

"Whatever. It's the same. Yours or Karl's. Don't get too emotional about it. I have been generous in coming here with you. Try to reciprocate."

You collected the city tour guide, tickets for the tram tour and of course croissants with coffee. Lost in his own world, he walked the grounds of Marx, the old park bench where perhaps Marx used to sit and think about economic equality.

"How long will you remain lost? At least take my picture at this Porta entrance and I'll take yours."

You excitedly bought an ancient Roman coin that was part of the collection excavated at the Porta Nigara site.
"Tourists are the usual victims of such historical gimmickry," he said.
"Let it be a fake. Just don't tell me, I want to believe it's real."

You also bought a postcard, and sitting for diet strawberry pastry and more coffee, wrote animatedly like a school girl to your father:

Dear Dad,

I am in Trier, sitting in front of a Roman gate that is on UNESCO's world heritage list, and a heart-broken communist is hurrying me up into revisiting Karl Marx. I mean his museum…..

The manuscript of Das Kapital in a glass case at the museum stunned him. He wanted to feel it, more than he had ever wanted to touch a beautiful woman. The place was thrilling, mesmerizing. Even the pretty and stubborn capitalist was moved into exclaiming: "Look at the traces of fire that burnt down this place. I am sure an angry bourgeois did that, but the place has been renovated quite impressively."

You bought a poster of Karl Marx to appease his emotions, also to heal the wounds of communism lost. The museum tour had softened your voice: "Maybe Marx ought to be rethought. I think his followers didn't have the head to reshape his philosophy. Have you read that Russian short story in which a woman of fishermen's commune cooks fish for an equal society but is not allowed to give a tiny piece of fish fat to her baby crying with hunger. Extremism in every ism is its ultimate downfall."

The day scrolled into evening; talking, walking, smiling, sitting on a bench in front of the pink palace, neither of you got tired. But there was a train to catch. Glancing at the running sky from your window seat, you smiled and thanked him for taking you to Marx. By the way, journeying back you left the Karl Marx poster somewhere in the train; a train that suddenly lost its destination. He will never forgive you for that….

(end)