Eid Therefater

Part I

I remember last summer I celebrated Ramadan in the quietness and unnamed comfort of home. I got married just months back and was on a job that asks the surrounding of a computer table along with the internet and my night's quietness as their time-zoned entrapment in dollars wanting to be converted into rupees. I was happy, the way a happy prince thinks in his homely adjustments and in the prospect of future adventures.

It was just months after my marriage and my long-time friend, now companion, was slowly becoming aware of her surrounding. The newly built room was her place of exercise, of thought and action, and she rarely reaches out to the locality and I ought not to think of her doing so as she lacked ennui to be vocally outright rather she missed irrevocable anonymity called a city. For people in the villages are ever watchful of your comings and goings.

I held her understandably care for the Muslim households that befall the nearing poverty of the bidi makers back in our land to the far, road-side riches of a couple of teachers whose sense of lawn before their house visibly soothed her. A few days before I accompanied her to the country market and all her knowledge of inflation proved wrong. For we poured bags in our wishes and the price we paid in love stretching our hand with coins.

I already had started tuition for a 12-year girl and his small brother whose notorious imaginative power led me to this curious engagement called teacher-absolute and occasional playmate (both the roles I played for the first time) thing from where I used to give him tasks and every single time he amazed me. On one such occasion, he had to think of himself as a bird and he immediately looked over my shoulder, over the window and found a flapping dove to his aid. He was all birdie that day, giving me gusts of wind on my face, coming down from his wings. Of Eid, he wrote to offer his namaz with his father near their mosque and the food he would have after is meat and rice, told with the immediacy of a child's answer.

We paid a visit to their house on the day of Eid, in the afternoon, and for a moment realised we ourselves, the husband and the wife, had not talked for months with the intimacy we were with the family's longstanding members. After sometimes I was left to exercise my carefully crafted wanton boyhood with my student, the boy. We were victorious with the lawn cricket and every other moment we were accompanied by the other elders checking our progress. The boy was callous as one could expect him to be with his own environment. By the time we reached home, it was night and we were so delighted.

I had to leave home and adjust myself again to the new surrounding of my job, quite a long distance but not wholly new as I happen to spend my days here as a student at the same university. This time the role changes and so are the responsibilities. The anticipation to work in known circumstances cheered me up and I was all to work and study. They say the dullness of Jack lies in Jack's attitude. I almost forgot to take leave, at least in a sense that she complains me of. I know I am a cocooned cat only to be nourished over milk and fishes.

Lately Eid came to this lawless land where folks like me feel dejected to think even such thing exists. Or such is a human phenomenon, that we hardly care for the means but to its inappropriate repetition in the cycle of its appearance. I thought of the curios mix we would be, had we friends get to gather for nothing in this day of Eid. We would think of something to do thereafter, or to go someplace or to do nothing roaming the roads in talks and thoughts. They had their namaz and now I am here to share their offerings. Heavily elated but also secretly poised in my thought of many different anecdotes. It is no normal day, but it normally took us all in same familiarity and same warmth.