For Suman...

We were wondering if it was the right place to have a seat. Things looked a touch too far, a touch too high. And then the famous old strings...the curtain went up...and there he was...bang in the centre of the stage...bowing down and yet not really bowed. The guitars were to the left of him, the synthesizer to the right. He had just completed his sixty years. What about them? How old were they? To time...to space...yet another gift. He sat. The light and shade started their play around that posture. He was like a mark...a little speck of light in the dark...he had become a pure image. It took sixty long years for him and eighteen for me...there he was...still that half-lit face with a stubble looking at me from the cassette-cover of his first album--"Tomake Chai". I was seven then. It was 1992. My father had brought it home. The eighteen years of adulthood had already marked the encounter, his sixty marking senior citizenship for him. That much of distance was always there...always needed...for company...for fable...for the sound of silence. He was an old man now, baldness all around him. Gone were the cassette-days... stirrings still in the head.

He had kept his promise to me, making me think, dragging me to the road, albeit a road not taken, to haunt me forever. The spectre of the political, as intrinsic as the vestiges of thought that could never go from the dim mind--all sought in vain and yet never unsought...there he was--as always clasping and unclasping the fingers...trying to hold on to something, as if never there. What could the songs do? Could they change the world? Could they feed the have-nots? The questions were all simple...much like their answers...holding on to the wind a touch more before blowing away. The old grit in the bone was still to induce the time, as if ever been...for the "ever"...for the "been"...to erupt... to explode...songs with the ringing core of truth--our very own "ganola", caretaking the voices as well as the silences in truth in what he would call a guardianless and intolerable time. There was a heap of words inside the heart and thus the courage to climb the word-mountains from the beloved time. The pins were fixed.

He named them...the loved ones...of music...of life...so many names...so many, a little too many, lost in the clockwork. He insisted the lights to be on. He wanted to see...to look..."to see to look"..."to hear to listen"... to feel the bond...preserve it.

"Bhange jeno janlar garad shobar"

----my way of loving what would be termed the 'political'...

"Tomar chokhe alokborsho korbe jokhon gan rachana

Tokhon tomar ratri chhunte amar emon kangalpona"

----my way of loving what I now derivatively call the 'two of love'...of rupture...of company...

He always made me understand their affinities. Love was more political than ever in the barricade of kisses...weaving on.