Convergent Lines

It had been raining since late night. Sritoma woke up to the sound of mellow rumbling of clouds and rain drops whispering outside the bed-side window. The incessant rain through the night had metamorphosed the sultry summer night into a cool and pleasant morning. Sritoma, 15, stared outside the window with sleepy eyes soaking in the flavor of the early morning rain. “Toma! Are you up yet?”, Anuradha’s voice from the kitchen brought her back to reality. The morning was supposed to be beautiful, but instead it seemed shrouded in gloom. A lot had been going at home since the last two days. Dadu was ill, very ill, more than he had been all these years—compounded by his whim not to be taken to a hospital and “left to rot”! Finally, they did manage to coax him to a nursing home, but by then he was too weak to protest. And then there was this man….“Come, get your breakfast dear! How much longer would you take to get out of bed?”. Sritoma pulled herself up. It was a virtual holiday. It had...

It was a strangely eventful last weekend, one of those that just urges words to form in your head, turn into sentences and knock wildly until you finally let them out. So I guess I’ll have to put down what went through, or at least the part where it all began—my trip from Lausanne in Switzerland to Kaiserslautern, a small town in the middle of nowhere in Germany. It was going to be my first experience in the Eurail and I was excited for more reasons than one. The first leg of the journey didn’t disappoint at all, from Lausanne to Basel, the two and half hours left me gaping out through the gigantic window panes as the train sped past the Swiss countryside. The pristine beauty of the scenery around was unprecedented. Meadows rose from the railway tracks and climbed up the mountain slopes which seemed a stone’s throw away, and the vast expanse of verdure was interrupted in between with lakes and streams gushing by. The small stations in between were quaint with and vividly colorful wit...

Testing times, and it’s been pretty busy; lots of thoughts wandering my mind—disorganized and diverse, fighting for space—I’ll let them make their own music… Yesterday was bhasha dibosh (language day). I couldn’t resist writing the Bangla expression, because the essence of this day is so emphatically linked to this language. It was in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) that a great movement was started in protest of Pakistan’s declaration that Urdu should be the official language of East Pakistan as well. This movement was unique in its objective, no material gains, no bridges to be made, no factories to be shut, no wages to be increased, just the fundamental right to speak the language of your choice, the language of your birth—which is so innately ingrained in each one of us. Bangladesh hosted the opening ceremony of this year’s cricket world cup only a couple of days ago, and in a country that owes its birth to this language, what more fitting way to begin the auspicious occasion ...