Elder Uncle

He sits alone, in quiet solitude, on the balcony.
Around him, the world moves on—
days unroll as they always do,
mornings spilling into weary afternoons,
time dragging its wounded limbs.
He never imagined life would pass in such despair,
each day dissolving into the sameness of the last.
 
The rush of time, the weight of progress,
is like a river striking against a frail earthen dyke—
the banks collapse, homes are torn apart,
and life is scattered into exile.
Days come, days go,
the body weakens, even as the world pretends to flow forward.
Is it motion, or only a metaphor that deceives the senses?
 
Once there was a heart
that lingered on the banks of the Padma,
restless, grieving, searching for permanence.
Now the shores have drifted away—
or perhaps it is only he who has grown old.
Locusts swarm upon the modern mind,
gnawing at its spirit,
while nostalgia clings like a fever.
 
He remembers being a migrant soul,
an exile returning from the other Bengal,
bringing family across into India—
a long battle for dignity,
fought and won through sweat and endurance.
The fruit of that struggle is here:
standing on the second-floor balcony,
he surveys the world as the patriarch
of a well-rooted family.
And yet what he sees below
is a society of decay,
politics exhausted of vision,
a land without meaning.
 
Even in this adopted place,
kinship survives only until death.
Then night arrives,
cloaked in the disguise of colored dreams.
The lifelong bachelor drifts into imagination,
floating with poetry and literature,
back to the river-land where golden hilsa
dives into water,
where spring winds lean on the tips of ripened paddy.
In one lifetime,
he could never fully grasp this vast universe
of laboring men, of dreams, of hunger and hope.
 
Now, in retirement,
how much remains to be known?
Still, the mind unfurls its wings,
flying across countries and borders,
searching for love, for tenderness.
 
And there he sits,
in his easy chair upon the balcony,
like an ancient banyan tree—
his presence casting a shade
that shelters us endlessly.