When night falls on the city, it feels as if some magician has used his powers to redraw the whole outline of the place. Red and blue lights mixed with yellow, and a feeling of a different kind altogether. The city at night is another world. Sometimes I think there is no comparing the city by day with the city by night.
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.
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