The White Skin

The white skin, puffed with motherly careses
Got rough, now and then
We call it a donkey, dumb career of uncalculated stuffs
He, who climbs, wears black robes
He looks romantic, with a cruel soul though
He whips, he pleases to whip
A dumb donkey into pitch darkness
My white skin has got foolmark
Dotted like Egyptian tigress

taste or detest, you choose

it was so thin drops you can’t hear anything on your umbrella. but the wind was strong, chilled enough, coming through onion-smelled kitchen market, and u bend your umbrella to protect it from blow away. the evening was fading out in damp weather but still there were streams of people around.

i was waiting standing right on the focused corner of the busy square, not alone though, and was scanning the by-passing auto-rickshaws. shivering for sharp half an hour, i got the negative phone-call.

now u have time to go somewhere secluded enough to sip into a cup of red tea. you ponder among things these times, being bewildered by some dashing fiction of film. you see the lights fading away. shutters muttering down and wonderful books, pregnant with dazzling imagination, going into hibernation.

you still have time for second sip, but you ignore. destructed of hope and desire, you fancy escaping from life. your mobile vibrates somehow and you feel imprisoned, in responsibilities and familiar faces. your head bends down and count footsteps as you reluctantly move forth. you move toward a narrower prison, your living den. narrower, darker, dumpy but still peaceful, peaceful enough to die for a night.

The descendant died before his Ancestor was born

I didn’t know when I hastily shut the door no 12 behind me- it was Nazrul’s 108th anniversary today. That didn’t make the difference really as I was sweating being sandwiched in the bilateral conspiracy of uncomfortable clothes and malfunctioning sun. And no rickshawpuller mistakenly took its sudden way into the BDR.

The only difference I noticed was the open gate that kept one of the best epitaphs, ever written, wide open and accessible…

I will never address you again, my friends!/And will never make the noise to disturb your sleep/freeze and silent/ Will I alone be burned within myself…

Just the gate paved a quicker by-pass for me when I was haste to get into the crowd mosque. The loud voiced old Imam was uttering those last words that pulls the prayer closer. After a cooling ablution I met Ashraful, whom I see more often here, but this time I moved deep into the mosque. My bag, pregnant with heavy anthologies, disturbed the youth in his prayer who stood close to it.

I quit before the exit got crowd and took the short-cut way that touched the Nazrul epitaph at its last end. From the adjacent footpath, I picked up a poetry book with a weired name that means “To my unsuccessful Ancestors”. In the preface, the son, perhaps the only, of the poet tells how the name came to his mind when his father told him take responsibility for publishing the book.

Standing in front of Fine Arts Institute, when I mobiled Saikat for fourth time, his answered negative. Somebody inside me thought of the Bokultola premise and the people sat around there but I asked the rickshawpuller… who dropped me at Katabon crossing, where I met a gang of married people who was busy discussing their family stuffs. I felt alienated and somehow managed to leave the shadowy place.

The article on recently past Nazrul critic Shahabuddin Ahmed was just at the middle of the magazine that I opened to tray my cut-off nails. I enjoyed all of his speeches on literature specially those on Nazrul. This strange man had remarkable similarity in appearance with Nazrul. More strangely, he breathed his last when people was preparing to celebrate his favourite poet’s birth anniversary.

The descendant died before his ancestor was born.