In the Intersection of Fiction & Reality

*Caution: Don't believe everything you read below*

Since the week that I moved into the US, this library has been my surest sanctuary. The apartment, which I share with 6 more people, can sometimes be suffocating. Even the campus with its half known faces and half-forgotten names. But not the library, never the library. From the outside, it looks like a small castle, at least in my imagination.  It was the family residence of a local politician long ago and they donated it to the public library of this city. There are sitting arrangements inside of the library. But I prefer to sit on the hardened steal chairs & fixed tables on the circular veranda surrounding it. I like to see people passing by, enter & leave the library, the occasional whooshing sound of passing cars and of course, and the little wood on the opposite side of the road. Yes, I almost live a secluded life in this country. Besides my flat mates, my only companions are my solitary and books. I am not going to romanticize, sometimes I do feel all alone.

Maybe that's why, these days, when I see people bonding, I find a certain pull towards them. Do not think that I am just talking about people in a romantic relationship. Earlier today, as I was sitting on my favorite chair on the library veranda, trying to focus on the novel that I am currently working on, I found myself stealing glances at this father with his little son. Generally when I write, I find the characters taking shape almost on their own. I often do not feel that I am writing them. Rather, I am just a spectator in their lives as they unfold. All I need to do is note down the details. The rest is up to them. They live their own lives, take their own decisions. But all days are not the same. There are days when they don't reveal themselves to me. On those days I unwillingly take charge of their narrative for them, make decisions for them. But the problem is that I have never liked anything inorganic. Never in my life have I invested in friendships or relationships that did not start naturally. I tend to know whether it is going to work from the few minutes of the first interaction. 

Nowadays though, I think I may have been wrong about certain things.  Some of the characters that I write don't come to me so easily in the first few days. But slowly they open up. Some of them seem so stuck up when I first write them. But after a few days, they reveal to me things that make me look at them differently. There's almost always an explanation about why the first encounter or even the second, went so wrong. They have made me think about all those people whom I didn’t give a second chance after those initial cold conversations. So now at least I want to give those people on paper a few more chances. Even when they stop communicating, I try my best to keep my own line of communication open. I try not to make major decisions for them. Once I felt offended when the channel between us got blocked. Irritated, I took a big decision on her behalf. It didn't end well. When she returned finally, it was to express her resentment and her sense of frustration permeated my own being. It felt horrible. "Never again", I said to myself after that incident. 

Today was another one of those days. The words just were not coming.  The characters too were playing hide and seek. So I was finding it hard to concentrate on them. Instead my attention was being drawn time and again to the adorable father-son duo. Once again I tried to avert my gaze because it felt like I was intruding on their personal moments. So I looked at the open sky instead. It just reminded me instead of one of the many things I miss about my homeland. From where I come from the sky takes many colors throughout the course of the day. The dawn & evenings are especially brilliant to look at. The evening sky is different every day. I am sure it's like that in many different part of the world. Before coming to this country, I was under the impression that it's the same everywhere. Never once did it occur to me that the evening sky is something I'll be missing dearly when I was leaving home. Here almost every day is identical. And there does not seem to be any proper evening time in this land. Just an awfully long day directly ending into a dark night. 

It's that time of the year when we celebrate Durga Puja at home. It’s autumn, or commonly known as fall here. Back home we equated autumn with bright blue sky, white cotton-like cloud patches and a specific flower we call Kashful and of course Durga Puja and everything associated with it. We would get a week-long vacation for Puja when we were in school. Not that there was a lot of Puja vibe where we lived in Dhaka, but it was an occasion for celebration nevertheless. My birthday often coincided with Durga Puja and as a child one of my most eagerly awaited gift was the annual puja edition of Anandamela magazine. It's a children/ YA literature magazine that contained the latest outing from my favorite writers Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shirshendu  Mukherjee, Mati Nandi, Shashthipada Chattopadhyay. Anandamela meant submerging myself in the latest adventures and mystery solving journeys of my favorite literature character and teen gangs. The covers for Anandamela magazine was filled with illustrations of those amazing characters. I used to wait for that one day when I would wake up to the edition that my father used to buy on his way back from office. He would always give me in the morning, I don't know why. But it always managed to put a big smile on my face.

It would be very wrong for me to say that fall here is without its own beauty. The green leaves in the trees slowly become red and golden.  The landscape suddenly changes altogether and it can take your breath away. When those golden leaves finally fall, they glitter in the sunlight like flakes of gold. It is that view that managed to inspire awe in me when I first came here. It's fall once again and night is slowly setting in. Although the sky remains dull as ever, the leaves are preparing to play their roles in compensating that. The father-son duo get up, brush themselves off and start on their way home. I wait for them to turn the block and disappear. Then I get back to my writing once again.