I believe in magic!

When I was little, I first had the chance to see Jewel Aich as a magician on TV in a program hosted by Abdullah Abu Sayeed. I was so little and gullible at the time, that I was mesmerized by Jewel Aich's magic. In my mind, he didn't even seem human; he seemed to be so much more. His demeanour, his unnerving intelligence and his trademark smile made me feel like he knew answers to things I didn't even have the questions to. The magic was quite basic, but for a boy my age who is yet to see the world, it was something so alien that it gave rise to a thousand thoughts in my juvenile mind. I stayed up nights imagining and thinking, visualizing the same images again and again. “How did he do it?” I wondered. I was also scared a bit. How can you just make something disappear? Can he make me disappear? Where would I be if I disappeared from this world? Would I reappear in some unseen and unknown world? Is this magician at all real? Or is he some collective figment of all our imaginations? I was overwhelmed. I really wanted to see him, to meet the magician Jewel Aich. Years passed, and I could not meet the mystery man as a young child. Almost ten years later, when I was a HSC student, I used to frequent the Biswa Shahitya Kendro at Bangla Motor. I had the privilege of knowing Sayeed sir well. Here I met Jewel Aich, but here, I met him as an orator, an articulate man who was a close acquaintance of Sayeed sir. But, he never performed magic here. I was happy to have met him. But I was yet to witness the magic. I really wanted to see him perform right in front of me. I saw Jewel Aich on television again, in special programs on BTV during the Eid season, and although the simple magic tricks were no longer baffling, Jewel Aich was still a mystery. He was upgrading himself with each show. As I grew up, and became less gullible, he upgraded his tricks to an extent that still made me ask the same question after each show, “How did he do it?” Every time. In a show, Jewel Aich said he is constantly learning more about magic, and he referred to a grand act performed by the famous David Copperfield, an act of vanishing an entire train! Listening to him, I was left in awe. This man is so powerful. He can vanish anything! Why doesn't he vanish all the problems from Bangladesh? All the crime, the poverty, the social injustice? Why doesn't he magically make all these problems disappear? Much later on, when I had the chance to ask him, he being the entertaining man that he is, he said “Hey, that's an interesting thought! Maybe I should learn how to do that!” And now that I know Jewel Aich well, and I've known him for years, I ask him the same question still. I believe in magic! And maybe someday magic can find a way to rid our society of all our problems, because if it doesn't, I don't know if anything else can.