Good-bye, My Friend, Good-bye

Iffat Nawaz

It was late November, the air was cool enough for jackets but friendly enough for walks around the block. My place full of sunlight gave a poet a little free time during the day while we were all at work. Though she said she didn't feel like writing much, Ruby Khala, she read mostly in those days.

We took turns cooking at night and sat around the table with candlelight and warm food, our dinners lasted hours. Sometimes they would end with poetry. We would read each other's works, we would play with Bangla words and try to translate them into English, and some of us would recite poems by the dead. One in particular still rings in my ears, one by the Russian poet Sergei Esenin, titled ”Dasvidaniya” which the poet wrote with his own blood before committing suicide. We were somehow addicted to this specific poem that last week in November, always returning to it and ending the night with the recital:

"Good-bye, my friend, good-bye.
My love, you are in my heart.
It was preordained we should part
And be reunited by and by.

Good-bye, my friend, without hand, without word
No sorrow and no sadness in the brow.
In this life, dying is nothing new,
But living, of course, isn't novel either."

By the end of the recitals our hearts were heavy, drowning in the intensity of extreme melancholy, almost in a trance. We didn't know that sadness often comes as a warning to what might become of our futures, weighting all losses which waited around the corner, we had no idea about it at all except in what we felt through Esenin's poem of death.

The next week we had arranged for a small dinner party. It was Ruby Khala's birthday. She was due back in Bangladesh to her son and husband soon leaving us behind in Washington DC. Moutushi was thinking of all the ways she can give the best to her mother, she is like that, Moutushi, out-and-out, loving.

It was December by now, December 3rd to be precise, Ruby Khala's birthday. We cooked Bengali food and Moutushi bought a birthday cake to celebrate. We were getting ready for the feast when the calls started to come. Fire, politics, deaths, murders. Moutushi's muffled cries on the phone to Bangladesh, Ruby Khala's restlessness to find out what had happened. We didn't tell her. How can one tell a mother that her son was just killed? And her husband is near death fighting for his last breath? How?

She knew there was a fire; she knew her husband had burns but was surviving. And we all kept on telling her it's going to be okay, although all of us knew nothing would be. When Moutushi and Ruby Khala got on the plane to Bangladesh the next morning, we didn't know if we did the right thing or wrong, lying to a mother, a wife about the death of her son, of the critical condition of her husband. We just knew we couldn't do anything, nothing at all.

Ruby Khala and Moutushi reached Dhaka too late. Khalu was already gone. They found the most important men in their lives burnt to death; their apartment sealed off by the police for investigation.

Two years have gone by now. Birthdays of the dead and alive have come and gone. People have started to try to put the past behind to at least be able to live, though that seems near impossible. No resolution, or justice was offered to understand, to grieve with peace.

I have forgotten many details of those days myself, except sometimes when I sit down to dinner at the dining table, and the July air blows through the room with a moist cry, I hear the poem of Esenin, I see the eyes of a woman about to lose her husband and her son, and I repeat again “In this life, dying is nothing new, But living, of course, isn't novel either, Good-bye, my friend, good-bye.”

Copyright (R) thedailystar.net 2010