Category: Reflections

Sometimes I feel very sad when I see that I don’t know my great grandfather, his father, and his father. There is no record of their life and livelihoods and no photos, no sketches from which I can know them, reveal them. I only know from my father and my uncles that they have been travellers in the Indian Subcontinent, but eventually returned home and settled down, buying properties and establishing business, in a remote corner of Noakhali, Bangladesh. Sometimes I learn that during that time, today’s developing village with postcolonial modern facilities was a lush location on the bank of Bay of Bengal: the sea that has moved far far away, was at the door and danced with its ferocity and beauty at the lap of my forefathers.

These snippets create in me a longing: longing to know more, more and more. But no way….I can’t break this no way. I feel sad and write. I starve to write, I run to write, I fly to write. I jump to write. I cry to write. I hide to write. I pray to write. I appeal to write. I look forward to the next two hundred years, I see myself nowhere. A lamp flashed once only to extinguish forever: a feeling so harrowingly destroys my heart and pushes me to write and to publish, a thing of which I am lazy.

So, why I write then? To remember my past, my ancestors, and be remembered as an ancestor. It is not that I am a hero in life, someone extraordinary and rare. No, not that. I am a simple woman with a life with ups and downs, pains and pleasure, success and failure. I want my next generations to know this me. If anyone ever longs to looks back, they need at least to have something to grasp how his/her predecessors lived their life on the Earth. Who they are, who she is. This knowing will bring them to me and bridge the gap of time, space, and civilisation.

Will my writing survive? My amma says, after 1971, she asked my grandfather anxiously, “Abbaji, where is my Baluchor? [a book of poems by the Poet Jasimuddin]. He answered, “darling, no chor survives when wars break out.” Huh, what a pun!

However, sometimes, I go opposite of this sense of loss and urge for remembrance. Unintentionally. I look at myself and ask, are we to abolish forever? An answer profound slides through my soul and plays hide and seek. The beloved Allah knows well that we will long for the past and for the reunion. Allah knows well that we will cry for the unknown, cry for the people whose signs of love we bear. That’s why, Allah has extended our existence from the temporary earth to the eternal afterlife so that we all can be reunited again in the great confluence of life in the Paradise.

Does this eternal consolation stop my desire to write? to create? Not at all. It accelerates my pace. Writing is responsibility, derived from an incurable disease of writing back to the oppressors and the unjust. I carry this disease, so writing comes to me as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” as William Wordsworth says. Whenever a powerful feeling/emotion/event catches my perception, I feel an irresistible urge to write. Writing brings relief. It heals the tired, crying, and rebellious soul. Words are mightier than missiles. Words Wane Stasis and Create Change. So, I write! I pray to write! The moment I will not be able to write, I will die at that moment, metaphorically!

“O Allah, I ask You for beneficial knowledge, goodly provision, and acceptable deeds.”

Toowong, Brisbane.