It was that point, on the cusp of midnight, when memories seize the mind. And for him memories had always been a spur to living, egging him on to the future. There were often the times when he smiled to himself. His future, he often told himself, had always been in the past. And it was the past again which softly fell around him in those snowflakes.
No, it was the snowflakes that were memory. He was once again in the little garrison town he yet called home, for it was a place where he had progressed from infancy to his later teens. A quarter of a century on, he was back on those familiar streets. Nothing had changed, except his understanding of the past and his perceptions of the present. The street he stood on, in that blistering cold, seemed much narrower than it was in his boyhood days. Or was there always a difference in looking out at the world at different stages of one’s life? He did not have any immediate response to his question.
The snowflakes kept coming. In the stillness of the night, his old neighbors did not know that he was back, that he had been walking along the street where they slept in their old, unchanged homes. He stood before a home, as the winds blew around him, wondering if a miracle could shape up in that nocturnal moment. He peered at the closed window, the very window where Farzana once sat, to watch him attempting to impress her with his bicycling prowess. He knew it would be fruitless now to expect that window to open again. Even so, he saw Farzana there, with her dark, large eyes, with her hair that fell well below her knees. A flood of remembrance swept over him. Around him, the winter wind was getting to be a trifle noisier.
He turned away from that door. His imagination, though, refused to let go of him. Years earlier, he had been told that Farzana had married and then had quickly passed into widowhood. She was not in the old town any more but had moved to a larger, definitively cosmopolitan city. The snowflakes were dropping stronger now, blurring his spectacles and forcing him to put them away in the deep pocket of his long coat. He was not ready for his visions of the past to be blurred. He slowly made his way to the head of the street, amazed at how it had resisted the onslaught of change. Before him stood Butt Furniture Mart, shutters closed at midnight. And inches away was the shop where, he remembered with a smile, his mother had sent him on a winter’s day to buy eggs. It delighted him to remember the way he had struggled, in his broken Urdu, to convince the Pathan shopkeeper that he wanted “deem”. In his child’s mind, he had thought that asking for “anda” was obscene. The Pathan did not understand “deem”, whereupon he had framed the shape of an egg in his little hand, accompanying it with the words, “safed safed, gol gol”. A smile dawned on the shopkeeper’s face, who quickly brought out a couple of table tennis balls!
All those winters later, he smiled at the memory of the abashed way in which he had finally whispered to the shopkeeper, “anda hai?” The smile on his face vanishing in a flash, to be replaced by visible irritation, the shopkeeper told him, “Why didn’t you say so before?” The winds blew as they had blown ages ago. On that silent, deserted street he pictured the school bus he followed in his boyish gallantry. On that bus, at the end of it, sat Farzana. And he was there to let her know she mattered. She laughed, from inside the bus, when his bicycle slipped and he came close to falling off it. Now, in all that gathering snowstorm of memories, he suddenly felt lonely. He knew he would never see Farzana again. But worries about her, as unwarranted as they were pointless, assailed him. Did she remarry? Did she become a mother? Were there moments when she remembered him? Would they recognize each other if somewhere in this wide world they bumped into each other?
He shook his head, and smiled to himself. His imagination was once again getting the better of him. On that street she had once dropped her books as she walked briskly to the school bus waiting for her. A few paces behind her, and that was purely by coincidence, he had swiftly come forward, picked up the fallen books and handed them to her. She did not say a word. She did not look him in the eye. But there was that familiar blush, that reddening of the cheeks, as with downcast eyes she took the books from him. He remembered that moment as he looked behind him, trying to figure out the precise spot where she had dropped her books. In those eerie snowfall-defined street lights, his vision was pretty opaque. Besides, his spectacles were in his coat pocket. Rather enthusiastically he fished them out, put them on, and just as swiftly thought he could point to the spot where her books had fallen, where he had picked them up for her, where that blush on her cheeks had spread rainbow colors on his youthful world.
The Koh-i-Murdar mountains in the distance gleamed in the snowfall as they had gleamed in the years he had transited from infancy to boyhood to teenage. It was strange, he thought, that mountains always were perennial. He had passed into his early forties, with streaks of grey beginning to give new touches to his hair. In the looming presence of the Koh-i-Murdar he had once composed poetry, reams of it, for Farzana. Did she remember the poetry, wherever she was now? Had her long tresses begun to reconcile themselves to streaks of grey? He did not expect any answers. He remembered an autumn twilight when the breeze played in her hair. She looked at the mountains as she bit on an apple. He had watched, poetry flooding into his heart, poetry shining in her dusk-sunlight-kissed face.
The winds blew stronger as he walked away from the old street and toward the hotel where he had put up. Time often is a recipe for the making of irony. Here he was, walking away from the street where his old home had survived through the years and to a hotel close by. That garrison town was his home and yet it was no more his home. It carried tales of his schooldays. It was a stranger to his adulthood.
He walked up the stairs to the reception, to be confronted by the Pathan bellboy obviously relieved to see him back. “Where did you go, Saab?” The boy’s Pashto-accented Urdu was unmistakable. He smiled in answer as he made his way to his cold room. “Shall I bring some hot tea for you and the small heater too?” The boy called after him. “Please do,” he answered.
Outside his window, snow was beginning to drape the earth in ethereal white. He was back home. He’d taken a leap across the years.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer. His books include From Rebel to Founding Father: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.