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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Complaint for your sudden leaving

To leave like this, is not fun, you understand? My whisper on father's day:
"Will I ever come back to this earth
Once my being leave this mortal body?
If I ever come back,
May I comeback in some solitary winter night
Beside the death bed of a beloved
Carrying gifts of love in my hand." -(Jibonanando Das)
See, everyone, people of literature wishes to come back! Its you, only you, who never wish to come back.
Is it fair? He is slow poisoning himself in the excuse of becoming a trash writer. Your child is spoiling his life in smoking day and night. Shouldn't you come and drag me by my ear lobe. Where are you? Aren't you a man!
Today I am reminded of a giant bodhi tree. Today I realize the absence of a elder who even if bed ridded wouldn't feel the lack of home here. When I wish to leave everything like a surrendered soldier, at that very how point in my life, how much I miss you. You will never understand that. You don’t have that capacity.
I learned to walk holding your fingers. But before long you let go off my finger. What kind of judgment of yours is this? But believe me, I loved your way of teaching. I remember you as my teacher than as father. Your showed me the life as a friend. How beautiful were your actions!
You asked me sit and study with the cobbler’s son. Trust me, at first I hated it. Why me! But you had a noble purpose behind it. See today I can boast in saying that my childhood friend was the son of a cobbler. A lot of my sweet childhood memories I owe to him. How can I repay those loans. Actually I don’t have the capacity to payback.
These days I constantly have to fight with the bad and good within, the animal and the innocent child inside me. See, the way I can sometime defeat the animal, that credit goes to you! But until today I haven't become a robot, perhaps it was necessary. Isn't that a huge loss? Anyways.
You left, fine! But I never liked how you bade goodbye. That was such an injustice. I was only 16 or 17 when you admitted into Hospital (Midford). I was beside your bed that day as you felt a little better. Around 2 in the night you couldn't breathe! Ah, the world is full of oxygen, yet your grasped your son's hand out of the pain to breath a drop. You whispered, "Son, such pain! Please get some oxygen!"
I ran from this end to other end of the hospital. This rotten country. Nowhere to be found anyone in need. This small town kid had no authority. At one point I felt like if I could jump from the 4th level. Even these days I think, why I didn't. Ah! useless attachments.
Some says during our life and death- doctors touch us. At one point the doctor touched you and announced that you are nothing but a corpse from then on. After that the rituals.
I am alone. Holding the cold hand of my father's dead body, sitting, awaiting for the morning to arrive. From every direction of Dhaka, from every mosque the call for prayer was arriving. The feeling of a totally another world. How bloodless white your face looked. Your eyes that could touch infinity were frozen. How stupid I was. Weren't you laughing seeing my stupidity? I tried to warm up your hand, if I could transfer some heat to your body...
What an endless night. The night of waiting with the corpse of a beloved one. As if the morning was never to come. Actually morning comes, nobody can stop it. Yet some start their return journey without waiting for the morning. (মূল লেখা, বাংলায়)

Translated by Sadiq Alam (http://mysticsaint.blogspot.com)
... ... ...
"On the floor beneath the window of a small, dusky room lay my father, remarkably long and all dressed in white; the toes of his bare feet were strangely widespread, and the fingers of his gentle hands, now quietly crossed on his breast, were likewise distorted. the dark discs of copper coins closed his laughing eyes, his kind face had become livid, and I was terrified by the glint of his set teeth."
-M. Gorky, Childhood

Translated by Margaret Wettlin

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a remarkable work. There is a hardly a work which has had such a vast readership and such powerful impact. Thanks-Abromowitz

Unknown said...

I could say nothing, but can clearly visualize my mother coffin, beside that, me reciting the verses of the holy Quran, ash hadualla ilaha illallahu...........................

Thank you for making me cry after four years, I am still human in this mechanical era.