The Birthday Cake

The birthday cake has come to Bangladesh

Among the westernised elite consumers:

The majority don’t know their birthdays!

“How old are you?” you ask. “Ten,” she replies.

Next time you ask, she’ll be fifteen, then twenty...

“When were you born?” “During the great flood!” or

“At the time of the war”. They share milestones

With everybody else along the way.

They don’t know when the country was born, or

The last one died. Nationalism means nothing.

Neither does individualism the

Birthday cake celebrates: last year’s accounts

Of failures and achievements yield no thought.

The chocolate-flavoured cake tastes better when not eaten.

The Agora

In a terrain where Man usurps His place,

How welcome and refreshing is this market,

Its uncertainties and awful freedom

The tantalising, terrible, tomorrow

That We create together, separate

In our Imagination, sharing our

Memories, that unite to disunite

As Novelties usurp the Throne of Time.

The tribe is an eternity of shared

Imagination with no memory

I could have called my own; the agony

Of genius, of pure imagination,

Was mine, my non-inheritance

Kept captive in my sure inheritance.

Hartal

‘Politicians are not human,’

Observed the brother of

Salahuddin, a fisherman,

Who was killed in a skirmish

Between two student wings

Of the political parties

In a hartal.

Two rickshawpullers –

One of them unidentified,

The other Badaruddin –

Were bombed while they

Were pulling their rickshaws

During hartal hours.

It took them 24 to

48 hours to die.

An auto-rickshaw was

Burned to ashes, and

When the driver

Tried to put out the flames,

He was sprinkled with petrol,

And burned to death.

It took him more than

Two days to die.

Truck driver Fayez Ahmed

Died when a bomb was

Thrown on his truck.

And Ripon Sikder,

A sixteen-year-old injured

By a bomb, died after struggling

For his life for eleven days.

Why can’t the word hartal

Be translated into English?

The western media call

It a ‘general strike’:

A mistranslation that is

Not an accident.

The hartal is the instrument

Used by parties in opposition

To bring down the government

By forcing traffic off the roads

By means of violence.

A ‘strike’ connotes a right,

A protest, but hartals

Kill and maim -

Deliberately.

The populace acquiesce

Through terror. The idea

Of protest has not travelled

Very well from the west:

Words are deadly, and reflect

A way of life which cannot

Travel, unlike words.

Our western-educated elite

Brought the innocuous word

‘Strike’ to Bangladesh where

It became the sinister hartal.

Several other words travelled

In the luggage to similar

Effect. Now, western

Newspaper readers don’t

Know what’s going on here

During a hartal, and we don’t

Understand what they mean

By a ‘general strike’.

Of two mutually

Incomprehensible

Civilisations, one

Dominates the other

And transmits, like bullets,

Expressions that kill

Salahuddin, the fisherman,

Badaruddin, an unidentified

Rickshaw-puller,

An auto-rickshaw driver,

Truck driver Fayez Ahmed,

And sixteen-year-old

Ripon Sikder...

Deserter

I wanted you to inherit the earth

Not just a piece of it.

They say the rich, because they’re worth

More than men like me, should have

Children and heirs to love.

Yet I felt that when I’m dead the sunset’s wrath

Of colours, my child, will be your treasure trove.

You can’t bequeath a thunder-clap,

So I ran from her -

Your mother deserved a better chap,

Better at breaking bricks and bread

Which she’s doing instead,

To bring you up; our love gave to life a shape

Fancying the earth our tombstone when we’re dead.

At the Village

Here, at the village, where the paddy fields

Used to be, stands my factory today;

A harvest of young men and women, green

With inexperience, pour out at dawn.

The muezzin calls out to prayer, to remind

Me of the early dawns of childish days;

But I have no memory, or, rather,

A sieve where memory ought to have been.

The impotent old men stand by to watch :

They know their sand is sinking, and to them

I am an hourglass, retributive Time,

Who have changed the face of Nature here,

But even more, have taught that Change is Time,

That novelty shocks those who play at God.