চলো আজ বৃষ্টি নামাই | লেখক - বিশ্বজিৎ ঘোষ, পাঠ - অরিন্দম বসু

It was a gloomy monsoon night in Calcutta. A young man was lying on the street corner. The place stunk of piss and cheap liquor. A little further away was a jasmine seller trying to sell a bunch of garlands to a young couple, heading home in a cycle rickshaw. A rag picker was walking down the alley with a big sack of rags on his back.

The young man looked down at his walking shoes, lit a cigarette and smiled. He adjusted his mane like hair, whistled a black American ghetto tune he had learnt from his Anglo-Indian friends, and moved on.

Where it all started

The first memory was of a January evening inside a tropical jungle café. It was the regular hangout of the Lion and his friends. Every evening, he would play a broken old guitar, which belonged to the café for centuries. Together with his friend, a happy Hippopotamus on percussion, he would roar out jungle songs from around the world. It was one of those wet, winter evenings when the café's warmth was refuge to many animals from the jungle, a Fox and a Hamster entered the café. They looked like they had come from the distant woods of a faraway land. Sitting a little farther from the Lion's den, they seemed to have taken interest in the music. As the Lion finished playing, one of them came up to him and said, “Hello I am Hamster. My friend Mr Fox and I are musicians too. Would you mind if he plays a song? ” The Lion hesitated. The jungle was his territory. However, out of courtesy, he nodded and passed on the guitar to the Fox, who picked up the broken old instrument and played a mystic nomadic melody.  The beauty of the piece had taken the Lion and his friends by surprise. Before he could ask the whereabouts of the two, the Hamster strummed the guitar and sang a song. As you all might have understood by now, the song was beautiful too, and the voice, gentle, deep and warm, rekindled every little sense of romance within the Lion's heart. There was something strange in the affect with which she sang. It was difficult to figure out  where the Hamster came from, irrespective of her impeccable articulation in the way she spoke or sang. Her warm expressions and gaze were not so distant after all.

চলো আজ বৃষ্টি নামাই | লেখক - বিশ্বজিৎ ঘোষ, পাঠ - অরিন্দম বসু

Arindam Basu

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