Due Diligence

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.. In the recent wake in a perusal of mine to find the best ever opening lines of a book, my semi functioning brain kept landing on this one sentence, again and again, I vaguely kept remembering! And the words followed Winston Smith who then with his feisty feet had attempted to enter through a door while trying his best to keep the outside whirl of dust where it belonged and had failed miserably! It foreshadows how it is futile and almost near impossible to stand firm against the specter of fate and retaliate! As because for Winston, too, that gust of wind had chased him till the very end of the book!

It is quite funny how this metaphoric specter of fate is firmly neutral, and every one of us knows it! Yet when something terrible happens, in it, we seek solace, only to be turned down repeatedly! For me, whenever my senses start picking up signs of danger, I immediately start praying! Make false promises to god, saying if I could have my redemption for one last time, I would redeem myself to be as straight as a pine tree and never sin ever again! And then, when the waves of chaos pass, that last redemption of mine only gets added to a list of many!

For a long time, the clock of my life, too, was stuck at thirteen! And the opening lines were never as strong as Orwell's! Misfortunes always have followed everywhere I went! But that is only the burden of being a human, is it not! Then again, I can only understand mine! The events, the catalysts, and those ominous signs I fail to recognize always end in mishaps! The repetitive nature of it gets depressing! And then when I manage to grab the silver threads of the rainbows and, with hasty swings, get out of the mess, the sheer beauty of life makes me forget all of it! Uroborus in its supreme form!

As a kid, the most challenging question I had to face was what would I become when I grow up! My uncles, aunts, and the lots kept asking Babu Shona, boro hoye ki hoba? and my brain would start to malfunction and the sanctimonious tone oozing out of their voice seldom helped! As if I was a rogue AI who was getting diagnosed with a Turing test! Then, all of a sudden, my mum and dad would whisper in my ears telling me to divulge in how I would become a doctor or an engineer and like that AI who indeed had failed and was reprogrammed to shout out loud all these utter nonsensical make-believe words, I did the same! As if there was no other alternative! At times I stare deep and take a good look at my brother's faces. In there, too, I always find that deep wounds of failure! They, also, were once that failed AI whose reprogramming had never worked!

Unfortunately, my aphrodite, in whom I used to confide the most, was every bit as dystopian as the rest! But the blames are not hers to bear! Every girl dreams of happiness, endless peaceful possibilities, and in this capitalist paradise of ours, that is only possible with nothing but green chirkuts! Even in the most intimate moments, I would look in her hazel nut eyes only to see the disappointment! Out of love, she always tried hard to cover it with veils of romance! But it had seldom worked! Then one morning, it all had ended with a very elegantly put honest text! And, as for me, I didn't do anything! In spite, I did not turn into a vengeful monster! Nor did I let go of my sanity, my clingy tendencies to get the best of me!

The first time I have had a conversation with the head of my department that consisted of more than two sentences was five years ago, on this very day! I was heavily requested to write something for the upcoming February 21st, International Mother language Day! It had taken me 6 days to push out those 800 hundred words I was so proud of, but to ruin my sense of being a self entitled dilettante, it had taken him only a minute! Literature is not for you, my son! Men should only try to become what he is excellent at, and you don't have it in you! harsh but outspoken truth isn't it! Always be the fastest horse on the track, and if you are not, do not even participate! Since then, I have never ever tried! In a crude ironic way, he did for me what Professor Rajjak had done for Ahmed Sofa! But I am no Sofa, and when I die, I will never be even a fraction of as renowned as him! For me, It is a eternal bleak cold night in February, and the clocks are defective.

_{A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand, were being sprinkled from a window overhead; Then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal! It was the rain.}
-Marcel Proust