'Enjoyed Like Madddd with You . . .'

The older I grow, the younger I feel. The more my hair, whatever remains of it, goes white, the less I feel inclined to retire. The more I age, the higher goes my desire to dance and frolic like a teenager. Sometimes I get this feeling that I do not wish to die, that I just might live to be eighty five. My friend Pearl reminds me that she and I have made a pact that we will not die till we are both ninety five. You can imagine, then, the most wonderful things she and I will be doing till we reach that ripe old age --- both wrinkled and toothless and cantankerous and jittery and skinny and ready to fight, every day, like Kilkenny cats.

Farida Zaman, Couple in a Rickshaw, acrylic on canvas, 2009.

Jokes aside, though, I have been in a pretty good mood these last few days. My friends ask me if I am in love again. That's a silly question to ask, for these friends of mine, puritan as they are, keep forgetting that I am perpetually in love. In our souls, in the innermost recesses of our hearts, there is love that keeps us going, even if it is love that sometimes goes into depression. When I see my friend Motki getting chirpy because I tell her I will take her out for a walk in the rain, when she closes her eyes and lifts her face for me to touch, I know I am young again. We are then both young once more. She sits beside me, to listen to an old romantic Bengali Shahnaz-Mahmudunnabi number, premer naam bashona. Love gathers anew in her eyes and I ask her to turn. Touching her fair shoulders is bliss. She blushes as I tell her that that is precisely what Aeneas used to do to Dido.
Yes, I feel young. Everyone should feel young. The heart does not age, even if the body does. And love blossoms, always, in men and women who have reached their late fifties. And that is precisely when you know you have nothing to lose and everything to gain when you go back to humming the songs you once heard with rapt attention and unending pleasure. As my hands caress Pearl's soft arms, she whispers that it is all wrong, which is when I am reminded of Bashir Ahmed. I sing the scintillating bhuul jodi hoy modhur emon / houk na bhuul song. There are always the innocent mistakes you make, those which can only whet your appetite for a little more romance in your life. I watch the ravishing Mongoose enter the room, in all the glory of a bird in high summer, and aim my camera at her. She protests, a feeble protest that only enhances the glow in her. The afternoon passes in talk of literature, in reminiscing on the past, in memories of a Greek goddess wrapped in a white saree, her cool midriff demanding that you sing a paean to her beauty.
I wait, as twilight descends ever so softly on a city hurtling to nowhere in absolute madness, for the beautiful woman to whom I will read poetry under the stars. She comes, lighting up the place, places her foot on the table, for me to observe the henna flowers illuminating her ankle. We read. Or I read and she listens. Her coffee is too sweet for her, and I down it with pleasure as I order a fresh glass of the drink for her. The nape of her neck sends me spiraling upward in thoughts of the timelessness of poetry. There is a Mediterranean fragrance about her skin, touching me breeze-like. A faraway look in her eyes speaks to me of the quiet turbulence of the sea in a woman in whom passion threatens to implode. Let's go, she says as she takes my hand. We leave the place and find ourselves under the stars. And then she leaves. She departs, for a destination beyond geography, beyond time. I walk back home, a young man who has seen sixty summers in his life, who through sixty winters has known of the many dimensions of love.
Sunlight plays on her sensual face as she goes home. I watch her nose, for it is one of the reasons behind my poetry. May I feel it? I ask her. She lets me, then takes my hand and places it on her cheeks, first one and then the other. She whispers, “I am the pearl in your oyster.”
In the deepening night, she writes to me, “Enjoyed like madddd with you.” I wait patiently, for dawn to break, for me to serenade her again.
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.