Once we used to live together,
perhaps like a joint family,
or maybe like the inmates of the same prison,
which Lord Mountbatten probably knew very well.
Our history of sharing is of many years,
and even today we share many things between us —
memories, emotions, friendliness, and enmities.
We also share borders marked by barbed wire,
where you often hang
the bullet-pierced bodies of our Felanis.
We share a number of rivers too,
which, at our end,
cry tearlessly during the dry season,
and cause flooding during the monsoon,
resulting from your unkind river consumption.
We also have a mutual business relation,
where we’ve a dependency on you
for various consumables.
Many of our hopeless patients
seek hope and sometimes get cures
from your medical arrangements.
But, for a long time,
inequality and your mistreatment,
like a malignant disease,
have diminished our trust and friendship.
If we trample your national flag,
and if you do the same on ours,
both of us will be hurt,
for a flag is not just a piece of cloth:
it symbolises independence and patriotism.
But before our trampling of your flag,
you have trampled our earnest aspiration.
Yet we’ll provisionally forget everything,
forget the blood-stained barbed wire,
dry rivers,
uncanny flooding,
and all those jeering
in your social and unsocial media,
if you show a little bit of positive gestures
to our present transformation.
We’re not what you think of us,
and we won’t ever be what you want us to be.
But if you extend your hands like a friend,
the way you did in nineteen seventy-one,
you’ll also receive our love
and enduring friendship,
like that you can expect from a trusted friend.
Rakibul Hasan Khan is a Bangladeshi academic, poet, and writer based in New Zealand, where he is at the moment a visiting scholar in English at the University of Otago. He can be reached at [email protected].
