In the small town of Sahaganj, a fairy tale land, there were several intensely green areas, apart from paddy lands, remnants of its past sylvan glory. The town was once depopulated by a sapping epidemic– Burdwan fever– also called the malaria. Misquitos were held responsible. but it was more likeltly to be the doing of Fate. For the next time around, after a brief period of glory, the town itself had vanished into a never never land, bricks,buildings,edifices and all.Just a few people remembered a wee bit of its glory– they too were on the vanishing path.
Much of it was merely a paddy ground in its previous incarnation, dotted with several mango groves. thy were usually impassable for the thorny undergrowth. At least one had a non- thorny clearing. that was where myself along with Peter Michael got lost for several hours one monsoon afternoon.
After the first shock of getting lost, i fell inlove with the magical clearing if and when I could find it. Its magic made it hard to find.
My father was the well-known Daubrahma Bachaspati, who ran a chatuspathi school in Bangshabati. My mother breathed her last in complications of childbirth before she could breast-feed me. Father named me SarasvatI after the river that merged into the sangam, and brought me up as a worshiper of the goddess SarawvatI. I went to his school, where I was the only girl. In those days, the SarasvatI river in these parts was mightier. It had enabled a healthy trade- international on its shore. The business centre was called Saptagram and our village was part of it. All sorts of people could be seen in the region. Normal, very fair very dark, yellow. And they spoke all sorts of tongues. The trade was brisk and our people earned gold in exchange of terracotta figures and images, coarse cotton textiles, fine textiles from Dhaka. That Saptagram boasted of some fifty chatushpathIs was also because of foreign traders. They needed to learn our languages and arithmetic. My father’s toll was no exception, for along with Samskrita and Ardha Magadhi, he also taught saurasenI of the western seaboard.
Sohrab was the son of a tycoon from the other side of the western sea. Their business was all-embracing and far-reaching. He put Sohrab in father’s school for some ulterior motive of far-reaching design.And we fell in love with each other. Everyone agreed that I was beautiful, though I didn’t see it myself when I looked at my image in the brass plate filled to the shallow brim with water.
This hide-out was Sohrab’s discovery. His father used to buy fresh mangos from around here for export. In his quest to cut down all middlemen, he began to engage his own appointee to lease orchards. This was one of his. The caretakers would build a bamboo platform in the clearing to sleep on and they guarded the fruits from errant stealers. Sohrab liked the look of this one and requisitioned it for his personal use. It was a beautiful place. Sunlight reached down to the ground refracted through the many layers of foliage’s. Everything was faintly green, without any glare. We could hear the bird’s chirps but nothing else. No one could see us from the outside. It was an ideal lovers’ tryst. The merchants from abroad also had different religions. Sorab’s religion was different. That didn’t matter to either of us.
yes, we had seen many religions: those who worshipped the adideva, the Krishna Vasudeva, the Krishna Gopi, Shakti in her many forms, and Buddha’s and Jina’s religions.
In the recent past one more religion, Islam, had entered our land. So many faiths in one place are bound to create animosity and confusion. But in my lifetime, it wasn’t so.
Adolescents anywhere would fall in love, whatever their creeds are, and they need some privacy to talk to each other and kiss each other. That’s why trysts are important. But the trouble was that Dayananda Mukhopadhyawho ran another chatushpathI nearby also had a son, Neeleshvar who was a staunch Saivite and had glad eyes for me, though. He lacked the courage to say so. He had us followed to the tryst and one afternoon,when I was waiting there alone for Sohrab, trespassed and violated me., not alone but along with his cohorts. I was outraged but defenceless. Later when Sohrab arrived, he found my bleeding dead body on the bamboo platform. I was staring vacantly at the sky– rather the green aura that filtered through the foliage’s. He had no idea who did it, but shattered he was. Only the week beforehand told me that he wished to become a ratnabanik, a gem merchant. He wanted to export rubies from Brahmadesh to the world market and settle in a faraway land. Now his dream and my life were gone.
For well-nigh 300 years, I had been waiting for Sohrab’s ministrations, but not to any avail. The bamboo platform rotted away some undergrowths crept up but still no reptiles, no scorpions dared to infest the hallowed clearing. It grew gloomier and gloomier by the day, this lugubrious green-tinted clearing was lonelier than ever, till one day I saw two boys entering it for shelter against rain.no, they weren’t Sohrab or Neeleshvar but two unrelated alien kids of about the same age.They couldn’t help me any.
সেই জোনাকিরা 