Ten thousand lightening bugs...and those surrounding them

You would not believe your eyes
If ten million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep...


Other than the exaggerate count, I could very much quote those lines. I never realized exactly how much I have always loved fireflies ever since my mum showed me. The moment I saw the creature up close was when I started really loving them. If memory serves right, the first was when Ammu was bringing me back from the doctors one night across the huge playground in front of our apartment building. Mongla is such a place, that, even now in 2010, you can walk around outside, whatever gender, whatever age, and be in as much threat as if you were walking in the city in broad daylight. To get back to the story, we came across a firefly just sitting on the grass. Ammu very gently picked up the firefly with a little paper and showed it to me. It was a bug. Nothing beautiful or pretty about it. In fact, it was an ugly bug. I loved it! Who cares what it looked like; it was a living thing that had a bulb on it's butt! And thus began my love of fireflies. I think if it was possible, I could watch fireflies every night. One of those things that you can't do without for more than 24 hours, like seeing your family ... or your cat. Corney as it may sound, I wish there was a giant firefly that I could hold. It would light up enough to brighten up a room. But I wouldn't keep it in a jar. I feel very sad when I think of fireflies closed up. I would release it and follow where it wants to go. So long as I am dreaming, I would let it lead me back to Mongla where it would become such a tourist attraction that the little town would become populated once more for all the tourists and the ships that would bring their exports to this vibrant and friendly little town. The giants walls surrounding the unimaginably precious river would be torn down, along with cement factory. The bricks of all the buildings would be painted a deep red. Madhobi lota plants would once again be planted on one the sides of the entrance gates. As well as the shiuli tree next to the restored bench. The gates and the fences would be rebuilt, only to have the children discover a break near the back of the building, that's just calling for sneaking adventures; calling to be told off by some perfectionist parent as they squeeze through the break, risking tears in their clothes and cuts and grazes on their skin. The front corner of the front garden would once again have a brick-framed flower patch, leaving enough area in the yard for kids to play bou-chi, kather putul, mangsho-chor, badminton, kushum-kushum-ki-pata, and whatever other games they could come up with from their seemingly endless imagination. The krishnochura tree would provide the perfect shade for the girl to fall asleep under, though left to guard the necessities for the choruibhati as the rest scatter and go back to get more. And who could forget those slithery, sneaky snakes? The occasional trespasses through the gardens, embarrassing all the lojjaboti plants into shying away their leaves. No, they're not the trespassers. These homes are theirs as much as ours. Too much of their rain forest have been taken over. This is as much their home as it is ours.

I've babbled on quite a bit. But not enough. It would be good to know that somewhere, someone reading this post has become just that much more appreciative of the simplicity of their childhood; look at the past and discover the necessity for that simplicity for them to be as good as they are now. And maybe I also want to make people a little jealous.

Yes, I became misty eyed. It was when I thought of the river bank that is now being closed up and almost consumed by the cement factory. We never liked it when it was being built. We all thought it would bring down the beauty, standard and simplicity maintained in our town.

But to say that I miss everything in that town from my childhood would be a lie. There are probably events in every child's life that later become their trials in adulthood. If I could erase mine, I could have said that I miss everything in that town from my childhood, including the snakes, including the grazes, including the massive cut on my forehead and the back of my head (one no longer wonders why I'm such a nutcase), including the leeches even. Why leeches? I have lots of stories. Aaah, where to begin. In the rainy seasons, when we would come across a leech on the path, we would all start yelling "lobon lobon! lobon ano!" And someone would run into Borsha's house and ask chachi to give us some lobon. A quick run back to the crowd of kids, pour the salt all over the center of their attention ... and watch :D. E2 was famous for squashing things, a reputation he still does not want to let go of. Instead of pouring salt over it, E2 once decided to step on it, and step on it, he did, the result squirting on the onlookers. Thank goodness I wasn't close-by. But I had my fair share of leech bites. But that's a story for another day, when it isn't 1:20am, and my eye isn't going through excruciating pain from a paper flick, and when I'm not hungry for a few more pages of North and South...

On that note, I bid adieu.


They fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You'd think me rude but I'd just stand and stare.