Taking Back A Grown Nostalgia

The opposite of what most people do is what he has decided to do. He is headed the place from which generations have been fleeing. Acquaintances enquired if he was leaving the increasingly becoming political capital of the place for another hundreds of miles away from where he is headed. Upon learning their jaws drop, and the expression on their faces suggests he has gone mad. Or perhaps he has not succeeded in this city.

But he said where he is headed since he was asked, and what they wanted to know doesn't go beyond finding the mere name of the place. From the shock, from the comfort they have earned here, and the listless things, he can tell they simply are disgusted by everything about where he is headed. From them the scent of earth had long faded, their language long corrupted and very soon they will disown it.

Now, he regrets having told them. This remorse reminds of what his best friend's father said once back in school days. Son, if you have a dream, and if you have been watching it grow every moment and you carry it in your heart, then you are the only one who knows it more than any other being who walks this earth. So, to talk about it is to invite discouragement or destruction. Keep it close without any word, even if you have the words ready, till it has materialised. He thinks back and sees the old eccentric man who drinks his own urine, he was kind and always gentle, never spoke a harsh word.

What he has heard, the expression he was treated with, make him chuckle. But he conceals it behind his pressed lips. He knows he won't be in front of bigger mannequins clothed in designers' clothes, his will be that place where his old and smiling grandfather led him holding his tiny hand, answering all the silly questions, for the old man wanted his grandson to know more than he knew then. The airport won't be as sprawling as those he had seen; it will be that aerodrome-like airport guarded by those eye-rolling people with superpower. And those pot-holed snaky roads will be muddy with explosives below and beside them. But he knows he is willing to pick his way through to get to his village, where the mornings are veiled with mist and the surface of the earth carpeted with grass below dew drops.

He doesn't know what ideology will work, since he doesn't know any of them. He can't cover the place with banknotes, for he brings no money. He brings a nostalgia bigger than the one he had taken with him when he had left the place. There won't be shiny suits to match his intense eyes, he will be in his home-woven khudei with a hoe in hands to work on the plot where his father used to work. After those sweating hours he will be on the thongah of the family pond to wash his feet and hands in water below the duckweed. People will say, words will spread and he will soon be forgotten, but he won't forget himself and the land that made him.