Wherever the lights come and go there are people, and yet somehow there are no people. Everyone is in the grip of some wish of their own, hurrying off somewhere: home, a hotel, somewhere else. The one thing they have in common is that each of them is chasing something. This mechanical city turns colourful at night and takes on the air of a festival, though a short-lived one. And once you have walked into that festival, there is no way back, and no wish to go back either.

A faint light in the distance

Thinking about night and light brings sailors to mind. On a dark, silent night, when a sailor has lost his bearings, one faint, narrow light far away is somehow enough for him. That one small light gives him a fresh, firm resolve that carries him the rest of the way. Such a little light, and yet so many sailors have steered their course by it. He finds a new path himself and shows others a new path along the way.

The stars once gave direction to hundreds of sailors, and perhaps that is slowly dying out now. But finding your way by a distant light is something people still do today.

Where have the rivers gone

Sitting by a river with an unhurried gaze, how much literature poets and writers have drawn from it. Even today, if you stare at a river for a moment, you understand that clearly. But where are the rivers and streams these days? The small ones have all been lost to people’s need to make a living. What is left is a handful of big rivers, and those are close to dead. How long even these few will last, I have my doubts.

Why these pointless thoughts settled in my mind as I sat on a train crossing the Jamuna Bridge, over one of the largest rivers in Bangladesh, I do not know. Though without a window seat to enjoy the beauty of the river, none of this feels quite the same.

how many years it has stood there, nobody knows.

How many people it has served, nobody keeps count;

how much it has witnessed, nobody understands.

Table number eleven in the hospital.

*

It has watched people arrive, one after another,

and watched them leave, one after another,

some walking out well, some carried out as bodies.

Yet it was there then, and it is there still,

and it may yet watch more people’s fates take shape.

*

Table number eleven in the hospital

has heard the poor crying out in pain on the floor,

and heard the rich roaring from their private rooms;

heard the dying beg to come back to life just once more,

and heard the imaginings of those set on ending it all.

*

Table number eleven in the hospital,

witness to everything, and yet it kept only its silence;

in people’s joys and sorrows it served without a sound,

and without their knowing became the companion of all their stories.