So January is on its way out. First New Year, then Kite Fair and Makar Sankranti and the last in the list of festivals scheduled for this month, Saraswati puja, too, are gone. Two national events of the observance of birthday of Netaji Subhas and Republic Day have gone away in between. Blank and bland February is staring with its eerie reputation of exam month. In March there will be a coloured interregnum of Holi amidst stress and strain of series of exams.
My friend Bappa has told me not to expect him for some months because of the busy exam schedule of his son. Goutam has warned me of the same. His son and daughter, Rup and Saji, will be going to write class eleven final exam. Purobee has sounded a bugle of warning: exam is round the corner and I’ll be busy with Nonee.
So getting busy is the order of the day. When I wake up in the morning with remnants of sleep in my eyes, I see a house wife is already into her act in the next lane. She takes a long pink winding plastic pipe and waters the newly plastered walls of her house under construction. She parks her scooty in front of a damp dim-yellow pile of sand. After crazy watering, she busily rides her scooty back home at Khoshbagan. I then hardly have a first sip at garom cha!
A swarm of bees engineers a hive in a stalky branch of debdaru beside my window. Their drone is enough to doze me off. A pacy horn off 8.40 am local jerks me to the reality that I have an onerous task at hand to get my local in less than an hour. Watering potted plants, giving directions to both the domestic and the cook on day’s duty and taking a bath and lunch are the things to be cramped within that time.
Most of the days I have a vague complaint about 9.58 local because I miss it narrowly. So I do what is only left to be done: scootering to Memari, a thirty kilometer ride at a hurtling pace to accommodate wastage of time at two rail gates. If luck goes your way, you will find the gates open. If luck eludes you, gates are found locked. I see my local passing by the Rosulpur gate when I stand behind the inert gate with beads of sweat coming up in great number over my lined forehead. I find a part of my mind is going after another for being so late in rising and then doing jobs so lazily. The other part tries to defend by reminding that there is no use in fulminating. As the gate opens I am embattled and try hard to bring the warring sides to peace. My sole aim is to reach school in fifteen minutes to avoid red inking under my arrival time.
As we all busy our way through life, time meanwhile gives us a slip. Suddenly when are alive to it, time has come for another journey. This time, a journey across the barrier of time. To the other side. A timeless world.