Page 26 - Mousumi

Weaver
BUILD YOUR OWN STABLE MUD
HOUSE
By Tushitha Basak
The yellow lights of the tram flicker
on and off. The bogey is nearly empty
barring us and a young couple. The
humdrum drag of the wheels on the
rails somehow gets drowned in the
cacophony of the rising evening
traffic. Seated beside
an open window, we feel the cool of
an imminent Kalboishakhi storm
against our right cheek as we stare at
the passing cityscape.
It was on such a night of windy
turmoil that we had made up our
mind to come to the city. The
deepening cracks in the mud walls of
the hut had germinated dream of a
pukka house. This fragile shelter of
thatch and cob had survived many a
Kalboishakhi storm and yet our heart
craved for concrete roofs and tiled
floors. Following the rugged roads of
the village, we came upon paved
metallic roads of the city, adorned
with street lights and billboards, with
the hope of a more secure future.
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It has been forty years now. It’s after
forty years again that we look out of
the tram window with the same
attention to detail as we had done on
our first day in the city. And what a
makeover! The city now has a brand
new garb with buildings so high that
we can no longer view the sky
through the rectangular tram window.
The heavy density of the surrounding
traffic makes us wonder how we will
get past to the other side of the road
once we board off. Seated in this
dingy tram bogey with flickering
lights, we finally feel the exhaustion
that the surge of the city life has
thrust us against. We feel the
throbbing pulse of the city around us
and we know it’s too fast to keep pace
with the old brag of our heart.
So our mind wanders off to yellow
mustard fields and open sky, thatched
huts with mud walls. Our heart aches
for that humble sense of living that
we had once left behind. We recall the
days when, as a kid, we had
accompanied our father to fix the
leaking roof before the coming of the
monsoons. Our mother’s laughter
echoes in our ears as we helped her,
in our own clumsy way, to prepare
the mud to fix the capillary chasms in
the wall. We can distinctly hear the