Hiraeth

 

“Hiraeth”

- A profound longing for a home, place, time, or way of being that may be lost, unreachable, or perhaps only exists in the heart.

This word is a Welsh word, which has no English translation, our Ravi Babu may have expressed it in some word in Bengali, I can't remember at the moment. It has some similarities with nostalgia though.

“A homecoming that may have been lost in the flow of time, or never existed in reality.” I have been wondering for a long time what name to express this feeling!

If I had the option of time travel, I would probably want to go back to some specific mornings of my childhood over and over again.

My grandfather would carefully open the main door of our house at dawn and leave for the mosque with great care. I must have been only five or six years old then. Whether it was the scent of Nana's perfume or the intense attraction of the shiuli flowers, I would wake up and stand quietly behind the curtain, as if no one could see me.

Whenever Nana left, I would leave a few seconds later, unnoticed by everyone. I was that Subha Sadique, the sole owner of a huge tree in the courtyard of Khulna's Newsprint Colony. The flowers would fill my dress, but they would still be as countless as the stars in the sky! At that time, the only goal in life was to collect all these flowers one day! If only the aunty of that house had not mistakenly swept the house one day!

When I was in college, when I would walk home from the hostel, my grandmother would stand at the crossroads after walking half a mile.

Who knows how long she had been waiting.

I would get angry and say, "Why are you coming? Couldn't I have gone home alone?" With a smile on her face, my grandmother would say, "Here I am, I just came."

Time is lost, or not lost. Like old-fashioned cinematography, our countless still images keep moving one after another. As the reel progresses, our moments, our surroundings, and those who loved us at that time also change. We get used to taking for granted some easily obtained illusions, and one day, suddenly, after traveling a long distance, the surrounding scenery changes completely, and we don't realize when and where we lost what!

Now, 2018 seems to me, the common ancestor of my previous version and the current version. After that, we are evolving in two completely different parallel universes! After not wanting to study anymore after medical school, I may still be picking flowers from a hyssop tree in a jungle, or I am chasing after all the other dreams I had.

Just sometimes, neural networks are created and then I suffer from hiraeth! I want to go somewhere, which is no longer in reality.

Afsari Alpona