Old man in death country

Death fascinates me. There is a beauty about it that draws me to old graveyards and ancient cemeteries. And on the plains and in the valleys and mountain passes of the world, I walk in search of the spirits of those who have died in battle or have perished, parched for want of water, in the cruelty of burning deserts. Millions, tens of millions, have lived and died on earth. Where are their bones buried? On the old expansive fields outside Athens, soldiers in frenzy murdered one another in wars that were to turn out pointless. Most wars are without point. Life is without point. A time comes when every war cry fades into silence, when kings out on missions to vanquish other kings recede into time. They live, only in the pages of textbooks. No one knows where their remains lie.
And so I, an old man approximating the prehistoric, walk, wondering where Alexander's bones, reduced to powdery dust, have lain all these centuries. He once beat Poros, then gave the dignified loser his kingdom back. Whatever happened to Poros after that? How did the man who looked the world's greatest monarch of the time in the eye meet his twilight? I walk, through the timeless deserts of Mongolia and into the old Middle Kingdom, and hear the deafening, frightening roar of the hordes Genghiz Khan once led into other lands, to sack and pillage and then destroy. As the shadows of a gathering late afternoon come over the mountain ranges, a wind passes by, the same wind that blew through the cavalry that Genghis Khan led. Where is the great Khan today? Where, O where, has the grandeur of Kublai Khan gone missing?
In the valley of death, I keep stumbling on the futility of life. Across the hamlets of Bangladesh, the old voices of protest penetrate the silence of winter, to remind me of the wrongs done by men to other men. I, senility of a man inhabiting an aging earth, have lived beyond my time, beyond the years allotted to me by nature. In my eighties, my near nineties, I long to speak to my dead comrades, my friends who passed on into the Great Beyond before their time? Did Chandan know leukaemia was creeping up on him? He laughed a lot, he taught children brilliantly in school. On his final night in the world of the living, his eyes lost their vision. He wanted to have a bowl of soup, took a few spoonfuls of it. The life seeped out of him at dawn.
Did my friend Akhtar, poet and raconteur and lover of sweets, know he was dying? In these months and years since he was placed in his grave, the same that held his father's bones, I have longed to hear his voice, for a miracle to bring him back to life, for us to take a stroll, to ponder on the burdens we carry in our pursuit of banalities. Sirajul Islam kept us all rolling in humour and rolling over in laughter. We have not laughed these thirty years; and he has stayed quiet in his pastoral grave in all this time.
On cold evenings battered by the loud autumn winds, I trek through ancient cemeteries in distant Wales. Voices rise out of the weeds and the grass in silent churchyards, resplendent in their fallen and broken and faded tombstones. My grandson, strapping young man of twenty plus years, steadies me as I bend to read the history of the man sleeping beneath the earth on the edge of which I stand. I read. And I read again, my bony fingers passing over the faded letters of the epitaph once, twice, and then over and over again. The truth eventually comes across: he whose tombstone stands, at an incline, before me bade farewell to life in 1485. Shakespeare had not yet been born, the French Revolution was centuries away; the innocent Japanese who would be smashed to black dust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far removed in historical time.
Everything palls. Everything pales. Everything falls. On monsoon nights, in the light of a cloud-screened moon, in the endless croaking of frogs in the silent waters, I call out to my ancestors in their wet graves. They do not speak. They will not speak to one who carries their blood in his veins, who needs to link up with the elements that gave him shape and form and substance. The silence is eerie, the sound of silence bizarre. What if God made all those ancestors come alive on that rain-dappled night? What if they spoke of life beyond death, to me? A sudden breeze sends the bamboo grove swaying, the leaves on the mahogany trees dancing. Lantern in hand, a neighbour walks by, casting a nervous glance at me. Nervously he asks if I am all right. Reassured, he walks on. His pace, I note, has picked up speed. Was it me he has just seen in that cemetery? Or am I the ghost of who I was, for him, perhaps until a little while ago? The living do not always think of death. And they are petrified at the sight of the living strolling through a monsoon-laden graveyard.
It snows badly as my old, tired bones push me up the path towards the elegantly placed graves at Arlington. The wind howls. The heavens tell me it is a bad day about to be made worse. I make my way to the resting place of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The eternal flame burns on, as it has burned since his widow lighted it on the day of his burial half a century ago. She now rests beside her husband. All glory, the restless wind whispers in my ears, is fleeting. The wind moves on. And I see beyond Arlington. I see the dead leaves making a heap on the unkempt grave of the Shahinshah in Cairo. I peer, through the snow, at the quiet tomb of Anwar Sadat in Mit Abu el-Kom. I turn, to go back. The cold is in a murderous mood. I turn; and flashes of the rough-hewn coffin that once carried the bullet-riddled remains of my country's father, our beloved friend of Bengal, our own Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to the eternity of his pastoral village rise in the vision, in the heart. I see a dead Dag Hammarskjoeld clutching a blade of grass somewhere in a burning Congo.
Ah, death! She who loved me with an intensity no one has known died aeons ago. We met in the rain. We debated on life's monstrosities in the heat of summer. Our love, volcano-like, made of her a Dido, of me an Aeneas. Why revive Dido and Aeneas? She asked on a night of poetic grandeur, as I played with her salt-and-pepper hair. And then she whispered, “You have kept me alive, your love has kept me going.” Our love child, born on a mist-filled dawn, does not know I am her father.
A thousand nights into our epic romance, Shonabou died quietly. In her lifeless hand was a sheet of faded, yellowing paper. On it was etched a poem, mine, recalling that first sight of her --- in white saree draped across honey-daubed skin, a woman in expectation of love's sublimity.
Tonight I sit at her grave, humming the songs we once sang together. Perhaps she will join me when the night begins to deepen in ardour?

Syed Badrul Ahsan is with The Daily Star