Reflections
Moon Drops on My Mother's Rooftop
Tonight, Thursday night, the month of August begins. In the zodiac circle of planetary and stellar alignments, this is the month of Leo --of lions and lionesses. Last week, on a clear calm night such as tonight, my own lioness of a mother celebrated her eightieth birthday in her home, in the house she helped my father build brick by brick, hand in hand, through years of struggle filled with work and laughter and success which erased the fleeting dots of pain in the long journey together.
Tonight, as I walk on the rooftop of my mother's house, my home too now, I look up at the grey cloudy shape-shifters gliding silently across the starry sky. My eyes reflect the lunar light and my heart offers praise to the Almighty for bestowing His grace and blessing upon this house. It is almost midnight, and the stars shine like the sheen of rippling mercury. The steady cool breeze ruffles my hair, lifting the loose ends of my sheer cotton kameez. From my wide rooftop oasis, I look across eastward at the neon-lit new modernist structure of the circular tower. I look north , across the tops of buildings on the block, and gaze at the rising monolith which dwarfs me on my dusky third-floor rooftop. The dull thud-thud of hammered rods are followed by sudden sizzling lightning flashes of the welder's craft.
On the west, the neighbour's large mango tree gives me a partial view of more towers rising to give birth to flats to house more crowds in this city's diminishing flatland. I turn to look southward, to feel the full flow of the wind's current on my face, eerie in the half-lit shadow of the two magnificent mango trees, gopalbogh and langra, planted by my mother on the edge of the lawn so many years ago, when she and my father pooled their joint savings and began putting in the plinth and the foundation of the house. Those were days of frugality and hope, never of privation and despondency, years of capital investment and gain in the growth and investiture of their four children.
There was once a third tree in the middle, grown from a sapling brought from Rajshahi by my spouse for his doting green-thumbed mother-in-law. Fate cut it down one ferocious boishaki night, hit by lightning in its infancy. I did not see it happen. I was far away at the time, across oceans and continents , near the Atlantic, soothed by the silent Bay of Fundy, nestling in majestic Nova Scotia, Canada, with my spouse and ten-year-old daughter. My mother comforted me upon my return, when I was stung with the thought of the violent death of the living being. As we walked on the grass in the evening, she softly stroked my right palm, and quietly spoke. “All things happen for a purpose, perhaps a better purpose. Who are we to question divine design? Look at this patch of earth between the two bigger trees where the little one was planted. It would never have had enough light to grow to bear fruit. It would have been stunted and deformed.”
Tonight, in my transcendental solitude on the rooftop, as my skin and molecules soak in heaven's dewdrops, my mother's words ripple through my own shivering skeleton. I look up at the miles of ethereal expanse of visible universe. A lunatic, a lover of the nightlight from my earliest conscious awakening of the soul's quest for purpose and direction for my passionate self, moonlit memory transports me tonight to my kindergarten years in Sialkot, when my mother sang “twinkle, twinkle, little star” to her little ones, sitting in the great lawn of the colonial-style bungalow at night in springtime. I see my mother, an avid reader of the night-sky herself, point up at the constellation and trace for her children the divine design of Orion's Belt, of Cassiopeia, of the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.
Tonight, my eyelids flutter while the retina remains unfocused on any present material object. For a few sacrosanct seconds, my spirit is invigorated with the mind's picture of childhood nights of flashes of swooshing falling stars and meteor showers. As I stand on the luminous rooftop tonight in my homeland, in Dhaka, a year-and- a half from my sixtieth birthday, the weird poetic creature in me sees herself split into two selves. The vivid motion-picture below the concave cornea is transmuted into a moment of complete comprehension of infinity in infinitesimal time . I am floating, time-travelling, travelling on the suspension-bridge of skeins of silky moonbeams .
Amazing miracle of moon drops on my mother's rooftop!
I am happy, smiling, serene in my solitary séance. I am made strong in my faith, in my life's work. I thank my Maker. I give thanks to Nature and the air around me. I inhale two lungs full of the divine presence, and part my lips in prayer in supplication for the health of my own daughter and her family, nestling peacefully in the Southern Hemisphere.
Tomorrow night, and every night this week, I shall softly tread the three-thousand square-feet of my mother's rooftop, and scan the night sky to taste the linear droplets of the new crescent moon.
The writer is Professor, Department of English,
University of Dhaka.
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