[We thank to Mr.Alam Khorshed for sending his excellent article in Mukto-mona. This article is written for "writings of Diaspora", published from Englad by Sanchita Islam (editor) . Readers are encouraged to comment. ]

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An Elegy for New York and Joan Miro

I lived in New York for seven lucky years and loved every bit of it, so much so that I am now scared to revisit her for it's landscape has changed forever!

I shared for sometime a serene household in an island called Staten on the other side of the East River with a die-hard India lover American dropout named Jonathan, we used to fondly call Janardan, and a Japanese girl Umiko with her furry feline Nikuchi we used to make fun of all the time for it's uncanny resemblance with our pet cursing cry in colloquial Bengali.

Each morning I used to take the white laid-back ferry to cross over to the other side for a quarter only, settle down in a window seat with my routine breakfast; a warm, freshly brewed cup of coffee and a big size buttered Bagel with sweet smelling Cinnamon Raisin purchased from my fellow Bangladeshi migrant Bablu's makeshift stall.

Gliding past that famous female statue with a glaring torch in hand I couldn't help remember two witty one-liners juxtaposed against each other and laugh out loud: one from a protagonist of the naughty New Yorker Woody Allen's film confessing that he last entered into a woman when he visited the Statue of Liberty and the other from a Chilean mathematician turned poet called Nicanor Parra claiming that America is a country where liberty is a statue!

Minutes later the majestic Manhattan skyline dominated by the Towering Twins would descend into my senses to drag me out of the inertia of motion into the labyrinthine world of history and humour, dream and dollar, lust and love, chaos and culture clustered around the southern tip of the Big Apple.

I remember climbing up those tantalizingly Tall Towers once to catch the cloud and to get a bird's eye view of the down below from the 'Window of the World'. But the more memorable part of that tourist's ritual occurred during the descent, as on my way out I was pleasantly confronted with a sprawling display of colors radiating from the lobby wall: a breathtakingly beautiful work of Tapestry commissioned by none other than Joan Miro, the famous and fanciful Spaniard master of the canvas.

Now that the terror struck from the sky like a bolt from the blue and the Towers tumbled and turned into a veritable tomb of thousands, I can't stop visualizing in my mind's eye that larger than life art being consumed by roaring fireball, and the dreadful scene continues to haunt me in my dreams and I feel more frightened than ever, to go face my erstwhile city of abode, disfigured, dismembered, devastated and deprived of it's heightened pride and joy.

Alam Khorshed
October 19, 2001

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