aaji boshonto jaagroto dwaare 
tobo obogunthito kunthito jibone
 korona birombito taare .. 

 aaji khuliyo hridoyodol khuliyo
 aaji bhuliyo aapon por bhuliyo
   ei shongeet mukhorito gogone
tobo gondho torongiyaa tuliyo,
   ei baahir-bhubone dishaa haaraaye
 diyo choraaye maadhuri bhaare bhaare... 

 aaji boshonto jaagroto dwaare...

In a few days, the first day of Falgoon will arrive.

When I was in Dhaka, starting from my boyhood, I used
to wait the entire year in expectation of this day.
Rather, more correctly, in expectation of the first
breeze of the Spring to suddenly caress my body in a
solitary evening street. 

During the winter months, one of the saddest things
for me was the fact that all the windows of our house
would be shut permanently.  I used to feel limited and
curtailed by that, with the constraining feeling that
the connection to the greater world was severed. Every
evening, I would go out in the cold, deserted streets
of the night and eagerly await the Spring.

Then it would come.  Suddenly, wildly, in the depth of
one night, dispelling the lifeless chill and the
colorless gloom, the warm, soothing, boundless breeze
of the King of Seasons would come.  It was pure joy.
The world that has always remained distantly unknown
in light but shimmeringly shining in the sublime of
the heart, it seemed that the wind came forgetting his
way from there.  That night, it would seem that I was
reborn.  The coming evening, I would open wide all the
windows with an exhilarating feeling of being
redeemed. 

I was always a city dweller, with very little
acquaintance with Nature.  But in mind, I knew it
intimately. I have never known a Polash tree, but I
knew well how blazing the conflagration of its crimson
flowers were.  The dense, mysterious Bokul that I once
saw in my childhood in my ancestral home would unleash
its endless waves of almond-maroon flowers of deep,
wild, intoxicating fragrance.  And, fortunately, an
occasional Kokil used to sing its honeysweet songs in
Dhaka even then, like in the university campus, in the
Eucalyptuses overlooking the Teachers' Training
College, on the canopy of the giant trees that used to
form a glorious vista over the length of the Asad
Avenue. 

I knew that beyond the periphery of the long known
city, there was an undiscovered, unbounded green
country where the breeze blew over dancing waters
under a silver moon.  Where the succulent sour smell
of the purple-green tender mango leaves scented the
wind. Where indigo-saffron butterflies flew over
emerald green fields trembling in the wind. I knew
that at the end of the endless open fields, tall green
trees murmuring in the winds were crowned with flowers
as red as the dying sun. 

I had intimate connection with this world then.
Indeed, I was a part of it.  I knew the sorrow of the
petals that had fallen on the way, and  the bliss of
those that were still fluttering on the branches.
There was hope. 

That hope seems to have been dispelled.  Reality seems
to have won over dream.  Duty over thought, fear over
enterprise, caution over instinctive joy, gravity over
flippancy.  The city of memory conjures up images of
maimed mendicants, constricted streets, obstructed
views, suffocating smog, and small men of smaller
minds.  There is so little space.

Yet, dreams never die, for they are the supreme of
goodness. They live, immortal, in the mysterious
layers of the unfathomable mind, keeping flickering
the light of eternal hope.  From there, they inspire,
to rise above the petty, the ugly, the selfish, the
greedy, the joyless.  They dare the spirit to go
beyond the immediate and the mundane, the obvious and
the limiting, to fly into the horizons of the mind
where the tyranny of the real world can not tread.
Where the past comes to join hands with the present.
They give invincible hope to the mind that what is
worthy will not all be trampled by the cravings and
exigencies of the world of facts. They give vigor to
keep the vision of beauty untrammeled, and the courage
to withstand all the dishonor that comes with it.

This little one has.  These few dreams, withered in
the remorseless turbulence of the world of wants and
needs, duties and obligations.  When the wayfarer
becomes weary of the way, these few remain, glittering
as does the North Star in the sky of the dawn.
Distant, yet so near.