Friday | 10 January 2025 | Reg No- 06
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Friday | 10 January 2025 | Epaper

Preamble of a Reverie

Published : Saturday, 7 October, 2023 at 12:00 AM  Count : 808
Moinul Abedin
The day was hot, humid and ruthless. Polash was left edgy, and had been watching the lonely kid for a long time, he told me later. The brat blissfully unaware of being chased or followed by some grownups was relishing a piece of ice cream. They were in a body and in surreptitious silence, boiling in desperation, quite unearthly, yet never dwindling in their resolve. The kid later melted like a candy floss from his sight, it was Belal, who since his adolescence, had been in a habit of reading newspapers in between the lines, revealed to him callously, a headless corpse of a child surfaced on Monday evening under the bridge.

Munia was serving me the chicken curry for the third time during the load shedding, and she muttered to me about her great grandfather, Munshi Tobarak, who died after being horrified on a moonless night coming across the shadow of a huge and headless buffalo. My wife learnt from her mom, shortly after this tragic incident, a pond, namely, 'Boluar dighi' in their village was dug with befitting festivities. But it kept on being dry and dreary for long; six months, one year or no less than two years might be, villagers were exhausted from counting.  On a moonlit autumn night, the imam of the mosque in proximity, during ablutions for 'tahajjud' first heard the burbling of water and the sloshing of waves from within the pond.  Overwhelmed by this epiphany under the full moon, he fainted by the horrific view of a child's headless remains nearby.
Villagers knew it the next day but got suspicious as no trace of the lifeless body or the head became evident, for sure, they dared to deny the fact since the night was shimmering in the moon and the imam was verily truthful.
I shared everything with my childhood buddy Matin, in a quiet dusk on his rooftop, just before he was sipping the glass with another peg. His eyes glistened and he let out in undertone, "How very similar! Yes, that night!"

I gazed at his eyes, his voice dropped further to a dismissive whisper as if from a trance, "Well you know, I loved her before I knew her face or name".

He nestled my hand, "That night! But I just loathe her right now, can money bring happiness ?"
He fell asleep or not, or might be a little awake-I was uncertain, but I heard  the chirping of the homebound birds, not his snoring at least. In this backdrop of twilight and approaching night, he raved swallowing the full glass, "And that night when my wife slapped me for refusing to give a six lac loan to her brother to set up a business, I took my decision."
"Dear me! She is awfully possessive!" I groaned.

He lingered having my support.  "That night, Yes, but before I could raise my voice, I was interrupted by the whine of Nabiha, our next door neighbour."

"Oh really?" I resorted to sycophancy since I borrow a lot from him.
Matin reminisced, "It was rising close to a loud scream so I hurried to knock on their door.  Dejected, her husband informed me, their six year old twin sons got lost on the way home from madrassa. Till then, which was in fact on the verge of midnight, as night guards were patrolling the alleys by bicycling and whistling; the twins remained clueless."
I was staggered, "See, the sequel of mystery is engrossing us!"

Matin struggled to stand but slumped on the chair, "I missed the chance that night�that night � but will teach the bitch a lesson anyway, only waiting�.."

Last weekend, at bedtime, I tried to divulge Matin's dysfunctional family tale to Munia, but she denied overburdening herself as she was already having the stress of our daughter's safety. My daughter's peer Soha, during break time , when was away playing peek-a-boo in the playground,  her mom shared a nightmare under her breath with my wife. She had been having it for the last three or four weeks or maybe months, she was not definite. In the nightmare, as she disclosed, they were visiting their ancestral village. Munia heard from her on another occasion that a long, lone and meandering river had to be crossed to reach there. When Soha and her father, an affluent garment maker, were standing in front of a colossal and centenarian banyan tree to pose for a photograph, stunningly, without the slightest hint of any storm or strong wind, the tree got uprooted and fell off on them.

Soha's mom's apprehension intensified and my wife's as well, when on Tuesday, after the school, Deana, sobbing incessantly, described the plight of her cousin who was about to be abducted but got rescued by the locals on the way home from his karate lesson.

I ceased to send my daughter to school, perhaps Soha and Deana's parents did so likewise or did not, and my wife might be apprised of it over the phone.

 The other day, my wife along with my daughter were away, dozing and basking  under the winter sun;I was partially deaf by a booming sound. As far as my eyes were concerned, from the fifth floor of my balcony, it was quite apparent the sky was not overcast, so there was no provision of rumbling. We were not at war with Myanmar over the Rohinga issue; hence there was no possibility of any drone attack.

My assumption came true when I beheld poet Abu Musa otherwise, in a blink, appearing from a mist of smoke of a probable explosion. In front of or beside him, flabbergasted, I located Soha's mom, yet I could not figure out with any fine precision whether she was Soha's mom or not, as I had the chance of catching a glimpse of her only once, in my daughter's birthday party. I grew significant concern and compassion for her when she got devoured by the crazy mob screaming on the top of her lungs.

Poet Abu Musa, whether he was the part of that seething and sizable crowd, or might be segregated and struggling frantically to look for Soha's mom as to what was happening to her, nothing was discernible. Wielding a machete, I was not fairly sure if it was a real machete or not, whether he was wrestling with the unruly mob or he was executing his unique muse in unison with them, I ended up being utterly perplexed. I only realised his sonorous voice could no longer any way coexist with the rest of the pervading discordance. Most likely it was the exact echo of the recitation of his new poem that he made me appreciate in the nearly deserted cafe on the last hour of a cloudy Thursday. I was in a tether. Nevertheless as the pack of crowd was busy delivering their due or undue euphoria, on what and why, I was ambivalent, poet Abu Musa in his own deliration, once more let him loose in the following manner:

"Sacrifice! Sacrifice!
Get rid of vice! Get rid of vice!"
Next morning, when my wife was venting her frustration for not being able to reach Soha's mom after repeated call to receive my daughter's absent work, Polash phoned me, once more he was informed by Belal, we know, who had been in the habit of poring over the newspapers, he told him, a suspected child lifter, a young or a middle aged woman, was lynched to death on the previous day. As usual he cited the lead news later, the bridge which had been under construction for long, developed a massive but clandestine crack and collapsed with a big boom, locals heard it from far afar.
The writer is a First Language English Teacher at DPS STS Dhaka



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