Where Do We Go from Here?

February is the month of Boi Mela and the absence of a master storyteller was acutely felt by his readers. This is our humble attempt at a homage to a wizard of words whose iconic characters live among us.

HIMU
He looks up suddenly to the sound of a door closing. The tall building in front of him seems oddly familiar, the colour of the paint brighter than the others around it, the scent lingering on the gateway felt like home. Himu knew this place in a past not so far away, but more importantly, he knew someone who lived here. He remembers ringing a doorbell and being greeted by a fairy wearing a towel over her head. He'd wondered why all women don't wear towels on their heads as a fashion statement.
He shakes himself. That wasn't important now. He needed to walk on, the streets called to him. He didn't know why and for what he walked the twisting, dead alleys of Dhaka at night, but it had something to do with his father. Yes, now Himu remembers. He was destined to be a great man, a wise man, or something of that sort, and to accomplish that he must wander the streets. Endlessly. He must feel the stones through the soles of his feet, recognise the place where he stopped to take in the smell of the air, he must live life the way only great men could -- one breath a time.
He sighs deeply, takes a step forward and abruptly walks into a very, very white wall. Disoriented from the collision, he turns around quickly to take heed of his surroundings only to find more white walls, so white they melt into one pale barrier between him and the rest of the world. A bed, also white and slightly unclean, lies in a corner while the rest is shrouded in darkness. He starts to weep.
A blue saree flickers through his mind's eye.

RUPA

The window curtains rustle faintly as Rupa takes in her reflection in the mirror and notices, for the umpteenth time, that something is not right. The blue of the saree is not quite as blue as she remembers it to be, the smile she wears looks strained, painful, almost as if her lips resent it. Earlier in the evening, when she brushed the kohl beneath the eyelashes it left no lines, the teep refused to centre on her forehead and the hair-bun all but fell apart.
“And if you'll believe it, Baba, it's all Himu's fault,” she says to the empty room.
Her father had tried to get her to consider marriage, to go out at the very least and had faced Rupa's unwavering glare. To his credit, he did not back down easily.
“He'll never come back, you know. He hasn't been around for years,” Baba reminds her softly.
“It's not about him. It has never been,” she says each time.
And it wasn't. Himu's life -- his irrational, day-dreaming, listless life was never a part of her own practical one. He was very important once and yet, his memory was like the dwindling taste of afternoon tea -- alive and warm, but too far away for comfort.
This is about her and her struggle for independence. No matter what people say, not all women have to marry, not all of them have to suffer the brunt of co-habitation.
She adjusts the anchol ever so slightly and closes the door on her way to the living room where the soon-to-be groom awaits.

MISIR ALI
Misir Ali wipes his glasses with a yellow handkerchief as he watches the class over the vapours of a steaming cup of tea, three spoonfuls of sugar, stirred. They are supposed to be giving a quiz of fifteen minutes; it has been twenty, but the professor hasn't made a move to retrieve the papers. He's lost in thought, as he often is these days, and it seems unlikely that he'll return soon.
Something nags him when he sits down to take a class; when he wakes up in the morning; when he's stuck in traffic; when his wandering eye falls on the first bench, on a psychology student named Nilufa. For one, his mind keeps telling him that she has another name, a more powerful name, one he knew a long time ago. She looks up from her script and smiles knowingly; his eye twitches and he looks away from the Debi.
Back to the problem he faces every day. It isn't a problem as much as the lack of problems that puzzles him. No one approaches him with impossible questions, there are no new mysteries that keep him up at night. The ones people bring are easily discernible and take less time to solve than it takes to explain them. The world is known, the supernatural is dead, and logic prevails.
Misir Ali feels lonely.

MUNA

 Somewhere far off, an aged lady sits beside a window a lot like Rupa's and turns on the radio to a familiar tune: “Hawa me urta jaye, mera laal dupatta mal-mal…”
Her grandchildren scrunch up their noses and drown out the song in a chorus of protests, but Muna only smiles, a little sadly perhaps. It's a beautiful spring day, the chill of winter has begun to fade from the ache in her knees and she's almost certain that she could board a rickshaw without help. She wants to take the radio along, play the song loud and clear, ignore the passers-by and visit a neighbourhood she had long left behind and planned to return to. But as usual, she doesn't. She just plays the song and nods along to the tune, and slowly, the clear hum of the lead singer is replaced by the uneven baritone of a man who lives only in her memory.
She shuts off the radio.
Nowadays, her grief seems to have doubled. Sometimes, it feels as if she's not merely mourning the loss of one man or one life, but that of a thousand more. As if the possibilities of her world have begun to fade, as if there has been an end to all her sorrows and all her happiness. The horizons do not broaden any more, and sunsets have no rosy hue -- that colour that made the fair maidens fairer yet. Those thoughts, those dreams have passed away along with a man she never knew but is sure was tied to her very existence.
She mourns for the well-meaning goon she had loved and lost, but at the back of her mind, she is really mourning for a bespectacled writer who had given him life.

ILLUSTRATION: ZOHEB MASHIUR