Without my brown study, where would I be? At least not here, elucidating on what has been a not-so-unpleasant vision; in fact, if I may ignore prim Aminura for a moment and let honest Aminura opine, it was quite a fine figment of my imagination.
The vision arose on a late afternoon hour of a summer day. The blazing sun even after singeing the earth for hours, was still relentless and continued to be scorching. Naturally, the thoroughfare which my classroom window overlooked wore a deserted look…
On such a soporific hour I was there, seated exactly opposite the window-did it mean that though I purportedly was in the empty classroom on a Sunday so that I could concentrate better in studies, I actually sought distractions myself?- and typing an assignment on a borrowed laptop, wondering each time I saw somebody passing by what could have made him/her venture out on so excruciatingly hot an afternoon? For quite sometimes nobody walked past my view and I was almost fully focused my paper on ‘social security from development perspective’. Suddenly, for no real reason, I looked up from the laptop screen straight outside the window and what did I behold there?
I saw a tall, gaunt, broad-shouldered figure with a solemn visage briskly walking past my view. I saw him barely for a few seconds but my fecund imagination needed no more time to flood my mind with impressions galore. “Tall, athletic and kinky”-this description of Agasthya Sen’s appearance in the novel ‘ENGLISH AUGUST’ could very well also be the description of the appearance of the person who just passed by. “This is interesting,” I told myself. “its not often that you see people who resemble one of your favourite literary protagonists.” So, who could he be? Obviously, he is a student; but what else apart from that? Could he be the great August himself who had come just to ‘hi!’ his ardent admirer, Aminura?
Or maybe, he, with his tanned, honey-brown complexion and lanky looks, is a character out of a RUSKIN BOND travel piece set in the Himalayas. I can easily imagine him on a picturesque but dangerously narrow road in some remote part of the Garhwals, panting with exhaustion but also satisfaction after trekking for hours. He likes to trek alone because the wild flowers in the lush forests, the gushing brooks and the distant snow-capped mountains get intimate only with a solitary trekker, so he tells Mr. Bond during their single rendezvous on a wild, hill road.
Or perhaps, his lineaments wear a staid expression and his bearing is of aloofness because he is a lot like STEPHEN DEDAULUS, the protagonist of Joyce’s ‘THE PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN’. Like Dedaulus, he dreams of escaping the grim realities of existence some day and until then, chooses to follow ‘cunning, silence and exile’. Maybe…
Or maybe, he is none of them; he is a character my own imagination has eked out. He is the MONK! No, he hasn’t joined any order, he doesn’t live in any hermitage either. He is a monk whose hermitage is his own intellect and humour! He doesn’t wishes to escape the materialistic world; instead, he lives in it, mocks at its sheer craze for everything kitschy and at its petty insecurities and he cherishes the world that is co-existent with this more palpable, more predictable one-the exciting, mystery-filled world of nature which enriches human emotions and sharpens human intellect….
I have seen him several times since then and he doesn’t any longer seems to be anything more than maybe, a slightly eccentric fellow with a solitary disposition. Yet, at times I am reminded of that blazing afternoon when he seemed to me like so many of my favourite fictional characters! Maybe, MAGIC REALISM is more than a mere literary device; maybe it is a reality-maybe, that afternoon, even if only for a fleeting second, my dearest literary heroes did walk past my class room window. And, so did the protagonist of my own novel which I am yet to pen-he who will be called THE MONK!
