I read William Wordsworth’s little poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” when I did not know what a daffodil looked like. Mind you; it was before the era of Google and YouTube, so most people had a little bit of freedom to imagine, to make things up in their head based on their readings, and were permitted to live with that without being called ignorant, tech illiterate, or simply lazy. “When all at once I saw a crowd,/ A host of golden daffodils”, I read and thought daffodils would be pretty, like a dazzling marigold or a seed-studded sunflower. I lived with that. Then I came to the land of daffodils. The first April, many years ago, I spotted a yellow flower with its little head struggling to keep itself high on a balcony of a council-commissioned multi-storied shabby building. That someone can use a broken bicycle seat to keep a square plant pot seemed ingenious to me, hence the scene stuck in my head. Days later, I saw the same bulb of plants in a supermarket, and the price tag said, “Daffodil bulbs”. I still remember the disappointment that I had. “Is this a daffodil? Is this what people write poems about?” I was convinced that Wordsworth was either mad, or too patriotic, or had never been anywhere in the world. He was too homed in a land that made me feel out of home.
But little did I know then that home would not mean belonging to everything, everywhere, and everyone. Home can be a place that we know – maybe a coffee shop where we sit and read; a bench, a gift from a friend or family remembering a loved one, where we take our office lunch, or just a walk that we take through the same road while phoning back ‘home’ because the new home does not have any extra space, or the neighbours may find the conversation ‘too loud’ for their taste. I think roads, like humans, are strange. Some begin in one area, and the area changes when a walker reaches the other side, but the road keeps its name – like the long Richmond Road that connects Richmond and Twickenham. Of course, there are streets, alleys, avenues, drives, closes, mews, meads, courts, and yards on both sides of the road, but if we focus straight, we’ll reach either Richmond or Twickenham. Then, there are other roads that act as a long joiner, yet their ownership remains undecided. See, that’s why roads are like humans. Some achieve name and fame. Some nothing, yet they may do the same things! The road connecting Twickenham and Teddington is one of those nameless or too-many-named. In the 40 minutes of walk between bustling Twickenham and bubble-like Teddington, a walker can pass by Ferry Road, Manor Road, Twickenham Road, Strawberry Vale, and Cross deep Road, one merging on the other, and none of the names may stick. But I don’t rely on the names. If habit is second nature, over the last three years post-pandemic, I have mastered my habitual nature of walking twice five days a week on that series of roads.
“Wow! Impressive! You walk more than an hour per day! That must keep you fit!” Compliments pour in if I say to anyone that rain or shine, I prefer walking than taking any transport. I agree with them, but the responses represent our post-fitness/well-being world. People might have had different ways to react one hundred years ago or even 50 years ago. “A lady like you should not walk that long” or “don’t you have a spare penny to get a bus when it’s wet?” The other day, I saw a man jogging, wearing a sweat top that boldly campaigned, “Less is More.” I laughed; there were times when most people in the world indeed had less – less food, less money, less travel, less holiday, less ambition, less dreams, fewer opportunities, and less chaos inside and outside their heads. And I am sure in those times, the ‘Made in China’ or ‘Made in Bangladesh’ tops and jerseys ambushed taglines like, “We deserve more” and “Give more to pounds, penny will get more.” Different times, different slogans. Workers in Dhaka, Beijing, and Hanoi need to produce more and more sweat-tops with slogans of their times to avail less and less in the hyper ‘unreal cities’ of displacement and dreamlessness.
The walk I take from Teddington to Twickenham is my home. For what is home if not a journey? A journey towards what we love, the love we lose, the loss that will never be repaid, the repayment that better be kept in debt. What is home if it does not allow us to have our ‘me time’ without intrusion, where our thoughts have their undiscovered universes of stories, songs, memories, facts and fantasies, reflections and ruminations collapsing in time and space? What is home if its mundaneness does not make us wonder about the mystery of creation and the silence of nature? When we reach ‘home’, we are caged, caged to do the work that builds a family, caged to create memories of togetherness that we treasure, maybe on the forever caging social media. Home is the unhoming of our caged thoughts, feelings, and fantasies. My walk reminds me of all the walks I took and the walks I desire to take, but who knows when? Someone once told me, “You have a hectic head”. Sure, I do. The walks allow me to feed into my busy head — 5-minute podcast on philosophy, 15 hours of audiobook of the Quran, most of all, the songs of Rabindranath Tagore keep lingering inside my head. Singers of different generations, qualities, and intentions of Bangla music keep singing Tagore’s songs repeatedly. Some take Tagore as the ultimate mystic soul of Bangla; some want to prove to their listeners that they cannot be bullied down to the so-called ‘mass culture’; they have proper musical training and singing Tagore’s songs is a testament to this. More ambitious ones will experiment with Tagore and can be easily trolled on social media. I wonder, without Tagore, how Bangla music and literature would have survived. But I know it would have, just as without Shakespeare, English plays would have survived as local products.
Home cannot be the same each day; just the walk cannot be. On Mondays, I stroll and let the world unfold around me. Mums kiss bye to their children who zigzag their ways amidst the London traffic to reach their independent schools. I observe their neatly buttoned blazers and shiny shoes, and I admire their innocent carelessness as though blazers and shiny shoes are no distinction to them. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I ignore the world because these days remind me that I am a worker, and the Google taskbar alerts me to all the calendar plans I make. I think that Thursdays are the busiest all around. After all, God created the world in six days, and in many parts of the world, Thursdays are the last of the weekdays; in some other parts, it’s the last-minute panic day before things cool down.
To my surprise, I was not wrong. Yes, there are surveys and research on the ‘most’ and the ‘least’ productive days, and Thursdays appear quite a lot on the busier side. On Thursdays, buses seem overcrowded even from the outside; a stream of Generation Zs and Alphas drag themselves out of buses. Glued on their screens even when they walk erratically, I look at them and wonder what the world means to the generations who often don’t know what they miss and always keep searching for something to hold on to. Thursdays are hardly pretty. Do you agree with me that it rains a lot on Thursdays? Not like a quick tropical shower or the heavy downpour, but the annoying spitting, too light for an umbrella, too heavy for a jacket, the shoes are always wet, and the glasses are forever foggy. No, I have not done any research on this. Why do I need research when I know it through my body? Then comes Friday. Friday connects the mundane world with goddess Venus. Is this why Friday nights give us a strange, unknown flutter feeling like we may have a new partner in the old bed? Or an exotic dinner that’s just another Uber delivery from a take-away round the corner? Most people spend their Friday nights flickering through Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV before they settle on their Facebook scrolling, feeling jealous thinking about all the lucky people out there who are having the fun of their lives. Half-finished pizza, a can of supermarket bargain mojito, and some sugary doughnuts can trigger all the rush of emotions that people successfully suppress the whole week.
Not long ago, on Fridays, I used to treat myself to a cup of white coffee and a croissant from one of the local cafes in Twickenham. Local cafes somehow make us feel better about the world with their ‘ethical’ promises. Coffee is ethically sourced, milk is locally cowed – if cow milk is the choice we get. And the ‘ethical’ justification they give for the high price they take. We contribute to making someone’s life in Africa or Asia better. Do we? I used to feel ethically elevated with my coffee and croissant until I was diagnosed with hypertension, forcing me to recheck the unquestionable balance between saving the self and saving others. On Fridays, I never stop wondering about how business-as-usual life can be in some parts of the world when there may be wars, cyclones, and earthquakes in other parts. Dogs do their walking and shitting at the corner of Radnor Gardens, people walk while texting or chatting, maybe planning something up or deferring something down for the weekend, and joggers and runners do their physical rituals before they start the day.
On my post-hypertension Fridays, I feel stoic about resisting my temptation to have a croissant and coffee. I am unsure whether people miss people when they lose them, but I missed my Friday treat in the first few weeks. This was also the time when I formed my theory of the world’s ritual of moving on, as though nothing matters. We can only be sad about losing something insignificant – a cup of coffee, a croissant, a lunch bag, earphones… Anything more significant than that, our coping mechanism tells us to be on guard, instructs us to pick up our pieces to get things in motion – we have bills to pay, rents to deposit, babies to look after, and future to mend. We are insignificant. We can only half-clean our own mess without messing up others’ lives. We cannot be responsible for what is happening out there. In Ancient Greece, women and enslaved people were not considered fit to vote. Now, most of us are fit to vote as soon as we blow our 18th birthday balloon, but we don’t find anyone fit to run, let alone rule a state. Finding a lesser evil among evils is a difficult task. Soon, humanoid robots will help us to decide who will be a better evil than an absolute evil in the long run. “Alexa, tell me who I should vote for?” Sounds like a sane question to ask.
Human’s routine-bound living is disarrayed compared to the regimented indifference that nature exercises to ignore all around. The Thames is the most indifferent of all. When people say that water has a lunatic power to draw us in, I feel like telling them that you have not seen the indifferent stillness of the Thames in winter. Whether there is a deluge inside us because we are in or out of love and may hope that the Thames will reciprocate to our internal deluge, we are sure to be disappointed. The Thames in winter is glassy, glossy, icy still. The river is the silent carrier of emotions that humans find uncontrollable. Many months ago, I sat on a bench in Radnor Gardens overlooking the Thames. The Autumn trees lacked any empathy or colour. The stillness of the scene made a mockery of the deluge that I felt. I had a silly cry over something that was not worth crying for. But then I thought maybe even Alexander Pope sat here and forced the Thames to listen to his complaints about bad poems, superficial social life, and London women. Who knows? Perhaps Virginia Woolf wrote letters to Vita Sackville-West sitting where I sat? Maybe the Thames saw both of us with all our fragilities, vulnerabilities, and loneliness and, like a true confide, never disclosed anything to anyone?
The weather can play up its silly game to trick humans, but trees, plants, flowers, bees, and insects cannot be that easily tricked by the weather’s whim. They wrap themselves in a blanket of greyness whether the winter is mild or severe. In Autumn, Aspen, Common Beech, Field Maple, Hawthorn, and Silver Birch may test your English vocabulary of colours. Without searching Google, how many orange colours can you name? One Autumn tree can carry all the orange shades a colour-nerd can think of. I don’t get nature very well. It takes on shades of fiery colours in Autumn, then drops off all colours in winter, and then snatches everyone’s heart and eyes with all kinds of colours in Spring that continue well into Summer. Why can’t it just be all colourful all the time? But, of course, nature teaches us what love is. Both love and nature don’t like to be taken for granted. The more we demand, the less we get.
Early in the year, the misery of winter dragged on, the post-Christmas blue pushed me to do the unspeakable and the harsh rain forced me to question my money-tight staycation plan or the entire plan of settling in Britain. Then in mid-February, the weather still damp and dreary, I found a wonder at an uncared-for corner at one series of roads between Teddington and Twickenham. A yellow little bud was trying to keep her head up, searching for the first ray of the sun. Then I realised I had outlived the winter, and Spring would be here. Before I knew it, it would be Summer – long days, the sun shining, colours all around, barbecues, ice creams, planned and unplanned holidays. When my heart leapt up with a gamut of emotions finding the yellow bud at a corner, I realised why Wordsworth wrote the poem on daffodils. When I took a photo of the flower and posted it on my Facebook, I thought maybe I have also made Wordsworth’s land my own home!
Migrant Writing 