Crying for the warmth of tears
Saturday, 10 November 2007
Maswood Alam Khan
NOW I realise why my mother was so desperate a few months before her death to meet her relations and acquaintances and why after her emotional reunions with her missing soul mates she used to be more desperate to persuade them into staying with her as long as she could plead with them not to leave her.
There is a metaphysical phase in everybody's life when our soul cries for meeting once again our old friends, our old classmates, our surviving relations, our old fiancés or fiancées and the one we met only for an hour or two during a train journey whose contact address or telephone number we had forgotten to note.
But, our society is dominated mostly by materialistic people who consider such low-priced emotional yearnings or shenanigans a signature of mental weakness, an epiphenomenon of worthless people who are doomed to fail to survive keeping their backbones straight and holding their heads high in this world for the fittest.
To those worldly people mental phenomena are nothing more than some complex but controllable functions of the material brain governed by physical laws.
They will pause to hear you if you sell anything that relates to classical physics developed by Newton and his successors. But, they will chuckle with a mocking note if tears roll down your cheeks on listening to the classical Tagore song on 'inviting old soul mates for a long sought-after rendezvous'.
So, our young children feel shy to cry their eyes out in public. Their souls, nevertheless, cry in private. Their cries for help and their songs of melancholy are thus seldom heard. Their repressed personal impulses and delicate desires are thus stored inside the transpersonal chambers of their conscious minds and later buried in the deepest regions of their unconscious psyche. No wonder, why our youngsters are nowadays so curious about pills known as 'ecstasy' and 'yaba'!
We are very busy with our mundane chores and we cannot really afford time even to say a 'hallow' to our friends and relations over telephone or drop them a few words over electronic mail, let alone while away the whole day forgetting to take meals or chat away the whole night burning the midnight oil the way we found our elders idling away their time with their kith and kin when life was easy and only the fools were busy.
There are only on two occasions when we meet in a reunion with our relations and friends: one is a formal ceremony of one's marriage and the other a grieving ceremony of one's death. In a marriage ceremony we remain reticent and reserved and cannot really afford to laugh and in a funeral ceremony our nerves are frayed and we can't help crying. Hardly there is an occasion where we can burst out laughing like a drain. Hungry for laughing my family of cousins decided to get together at a reunion soon where we could be laughing until we would be crying.
Recently, we had family reunion at one of my cousins' place. We got ourselves prepared for our forays into sessions of laughter. My uncle planned the day down to the last detail. We were looking forward to a big day when we would be eating like gluttons and singing and dancing like the stark raving mad all day or possibly all night as the reunion was taking place after a couple of years.
Everything went exactly as planned. The paramount part of the reunion, a musical soirée, started off in the evening with our fondest uncle reviewing what happened to whom all these bygone years and provoking peals of laughter among the young and the old in his inbuilt way of twining his words with snippets of jokes and quips.
My cousin Chameli---the best singer in our whole family---sang the reunion premiere: a Tagore song. Young or old, singer or crooner, nobody was spared from the daunting and scary performance to sing a song. The oldest performer was eighty years old and the youngest only two.
As we all were drowning our loneliness under a warm blanket of camaraderie soothing away our pains with serene sounds of songs and music and the number of attendees was gradually tapering off we only a dozen of us, mostly elderly, did cling on till the neighbourhood of the midnight to the best of the best part of the reunion: a classical Nazrul song Chameli resonated in a reedy voice punctuated by her interjecting 'raags' along with her accompanist Manju Khan, the only non-relative in the gathering and a great Tabla performer who knows when and how to undulate his head, half- close his eyes and stare the singer in the face while fluidly beating his hand-drums to regulate the flow of 'serotonin' inside all the brains of the singer and the listeners: "Janama Janama Gelo, Asha Patha Chahi, Maru Mosaffir Choley, Paar Nahi Nahi"........(Many a lifetime I have already passed traveling over the 'desert of life'; still I am not dropping my gaze into the 'destination of hope' that is yet to be visible in the offing).
Alas! After twelve hours of our merry making as we were about to call it a day we sensed that the cockles of our hearts got pretty warm not at the wafts of laughter but at the warmth of tears. We enjoyed crying in delight to shed loads of tears!
No science, no philosophy should be allowed to rob us of laissez-faire right of crying, our birthright. Crying sedates pains of our souls and the songs that cry about the twinges of our life balloon us up to havens. Tears that visibly mist our eyes and tears that invisibly soak our hearts unburden our souls and unleash our minds.
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank, and may be reached at: [email protected]
NOW I realise why my mother was so desperate a few months before her death to meet her relations and acquaintances and why after her emotional reunions with her missing soul mates she used to be more desperate to persuade them into staying with her as long as she could plead with them not to leave her.
There is a metaphysical phase in everybody's life when our soul cries for meeting once again our old friends, our old classmates, our surviving relations, our old fiancés or fiancées and the one we met only for an hour or two during a train journey whose contact address or telephone number we had forgotten to note.
But, our society is dominated mostly by materialistic people who consider such low-priced emotional yearnings or shenanigans a signature of mental weakness, an epiphenomenon of worthless people who are doomed to fail to survive keeping their backbones straight and holding their heads high in this world for the fittest.
To those worldly people mental phenomena are nothing more than some complex but controllable functions of the material brain governed by physical laws.
They will pause to hear you if you sell anything that relates to classical physics developed by Newton and his successors. But, they will chuckle with a mocking note if tears roll down your cheeks on listening to the classical Tagore song on 'inviting old soul mates for a long sought-after rendezvous'.
So, our young children feel shy to cry their eyes out in public. Their souls, nevertheless, cry in private. Their cries for help and their songs of melancholy are thus seldom heard. Their repressed personal impulses and delicate desires are thus stored inside the transpersonal chambers of their conscious minds and later buried in the deepest regions of their unconscious psyche. No wonder, why our youngsters are nowadays so curious about pills known as 'ecstasy' and 'yaba'!
We are very busy with our mundane chores and we cannot really afford time even to say a 'hallow' to our friends and relations over telephone or drop them a few words over electronic mail, let alone while away the whole day forgetting to take meals or chat away the whole night burning the midnight oil the way we found our elders idling away their time with their kith and kin when life was easy and only the fools were busy.
There are only on two occasions when we meet in a reunion with our relations and friends: one is a formal ceremony of one's marriage and the other a grieving ceremony of one's death. In a marriage ceremony we remain reticent and reserved and cannot really afford to laugh and in a funeral ceremony our nerves are frayed and we can't help crying. Hardly there is an occasion where we can burst out laughing like a drain. Hungry for laughing my family of cousins decided to get together at a reunion soon where we could be laughing until we would be crying.
Recently, we had family reunion at one of my cousins' place. We got ourselves prepared for our forays into sessions of laughter. My uncle planned the day down to the last detail. We were looking forward to a big day when we would be eating like gluttons and singing and dancing like the stark raving mad all day or possibly all night as the reunion was taking place after a couple of years.
Everything went exactly as planned. The paramount part of the reunion, a musical soirée, started off in the evening with our fondest uncle reviewing what happened to whom all these bygone years and provoking peals of laughter among the young and the old in his inbuilt way of twining his words with snippets of jokes and quips.
My cousin Chameli---the best singer in our whole family---sang the reunion premiere: a Tagore song. Young or old, singer or crooner, nobody was spared from the daunting and scary performance to sing a song. The oldest performer was eighty years old and the youngest only two.
As we all were drowning our loneliness under a warm blanket of camaraderie soothing away our pains with serene sounds of songs and music and the number of attendees was gradually tapering off we only a dozen of us, mostly elderly, did cling on till the neighbourhood of the midnight to the best of the best part of the reunion: a classical Nazrul song Chameli resonated in a reedy voice punctuated by her interjecting 'raags' along with her accompanist Manju Khan, the only non-relative in the gathering and a great Tabla performer who knows when and how to undulate his head, half- close his eyes and stare the singer in the face while fluidly beating his hand-drums to regulate the flow of 'serotonin' inside all the brains of the singer and the listeners: "Janama Janama Gelo, Asha Patha Chahi, Maru Mosaffir Choley, Paar Nahi Nahi"........(Many a lifetime I have already passed traveling over the 'desert of life'; still I am not dropping my gaze into the 'destination of hope' that is yet to be visible in the offing).
Alas! After twelve hours of our merry making as we were about to call it a day we sensed that the cockles of our hearts got pretty warm not at the wafts of laughter but at the warmth of tears. We enjoyed crying in delight to shed loads of tears!
No science, no philosophy should be allowed to rob us of laissez-faire right of crying, our birthright. Crying sedates pains of our souls and the songs that cry about the twinges of our life balloon us up to havens. Tears that visibly mist our eyes and tears that invisibly soak our hearts unburden our souls and unleash our minds.
The writer is General Manager, Bangladesh Krishi Bank, and may be reached at: [email protected]