<i>Basanta: when dreams blossom</i>

The dance of a grasshopper or the colour of a flower is all part of the ceremony to welcome the queen of seasons. Nature seems to proclaim loudly: it is festival time -- Basanta arrives today. Photo: Amran Hossain

The seasons have come full circle once again. With the earth having gone through its revolution and all its rotations all the year round, it is time for the flowers to bloom, for melody to course through the valleys and mountains, for colours to create patterns of life across the sky. And all this celebration arising in and beyond our courtyards and stretching into what is clearly an endless swath of the pastoral, to a certain extent the virginal, is but a message we have waited a whole year for.
It is spring. It is Basanta, that moment in the cycle of time when life replenishes itself through the sheer joy of nature passing softly through a transition from foggy cold to hearth-warming and heart-energising splendour. Something of a tender note is in the air. The blue in the heavens brings forth the message that the butterfly is ready to sing once more, that birds are yet again in a mood of the frolicsome and joyous. Gaiety underpins life -- in young people and old, in the silence of the woods, in the tranquillity which defines homes in the rural recesses of this land of the beautiful and the bold. For Basanta comes pregnant with charm -- in the blushing cheeks of the young woman for whom an eager man, wrapped in poetry, waits in the leafy shade of an ancient tree. It comes weighed down with memories --- of the days that have passed into memory, of those who have passed on to life beyond the frontiers of the temporal, of the clouds which have slowly lost themselves in eternity.
Pahela Falgun is that. And much more. It celebrates those who see reason to celebrate its coming through a sprinkling of flowers along the way -- the better for poetry to sprout from ground made cold by the blasts of winter wind. Pahela Falgun is but a metaphor for reflection on the years which have gone by. The aged look back at life that is past, to look ahead to life that yet will be. The young sing and dance as if the day will never end. Troubadours walk down the dusty paths through the villages because it is the seductive silence of the Basanta that calls. The crickets prepare to resume their interrupted tryst with men who sing and with women who dance in ecstasy in the light of the moon.
On Pahela Falgun, grandeur substantiates our dreams. Those dreams shine through the passion poetry we weave for those we love, through the sparkle which lights up a thousand stars in the eyes of those we care for.
The blossoms of Basanta are a hint of the fruitfulness of nature. In Basanta are intimations of the monsoon to be. Basanta is that special dewdrop in time when men and women reignite the flames of high romance in their being. Tactility is all.