“The god of the road flashes a satisfied smile and says — stupid boy, my path does not close with your village’s bamboo grove, banyan tree of lathi-wielding Beeru Roy, the edge of ferry ghat at Dhabalchit.It goes on beyond your field of Sonadanga, along the banks of Ichhamoti, past the lotus-filled stream of Modhukhali, sailing over the river Betroboti; it moves on from native to alien land, from sunrise to sunset, from known to unknown…
Days and nights roll on, births and deaths come and go, months, years, famine, decades left back, your brittle dream of life remains mossed out…still there is no end to my onward journey…it moves on and on and on…
My movement resonates through Time and Space…
I bewitch you with the alluring hope of diversity of experiences of this happy journey and make you homeless!…
Let us move onward.”
• So Apu and Durga run through the surging waves of Kash flowers to see a passing train, running their miserable poverty aside; locomotive’s smouldering smoke contrasts with white kash. So Indirthakrun, foot-note like existence in Sarbojaya’s household, still loves Durga, chewing off Sarbojaya’s insult. So the vagabond Harihar leaves his ancestral village Nishchindipur with wife Sarbojaya and son Apu in tow, in search of “something good may wait for us” in Kashi, after the death of daughter Durga. So Leela is like an oasis in the mind of Apu in the challenging life of Kashi, after his father’s untimely death. So Sarbojaya believes in what Harihar does or makes her to believe about the prospect awaiting them in future, as an illiterate village bohu should.
Yes…the road reaches 2016 with plurality of life; so is Bibhutibhushan, on his hundred twenty second birthday.