★ Childhood ★

There is a kind of longing that lives only in children — pure, unhurried, and entirely without embarrassment. It does not know the word impossible. It has not yet learned the etiquette of reasonable expectation. Likewise, it simply wants, fully and openly, with the whole force of a small heart.

For this boy, the longing had a shape. Wings. Luminous eyes. An impossible grace. It was called a pori — a fairy — and it lived in the space between his grandmother's voice and the edge of sleep.

His dida was a woman of extraordinary storytelling gifts. Every night, when the overhead fan spun its slow revolutions and the mosquito net turned the bed into a small private world, she would sit beside him and unspool the universe. Fairies, she told him, lived in the highest branches of shimul trees. They left silver dew on flower petals at dawn as proof of their passing. They appeared only to those who were patient, whose hearts had not yet been corrupted by impatience or doubt.

"ওওও দিদিমা পরী দেখব,,, পরী দেখব,,,পরী দে,,,,,খ,,,, " — প্রতি রাতেই সে এই বলে বলে ঘুমিয়ে পড়ত।

Furthermore, he would begin the chant every night without fail. His small voice would grow heavier with each repetition, the syllables softening and blurring as consciousness receded, until the final word dissolved entirely into the pillow before it was ever completed. He never finished the sentence. Sleep always arrived first, like a gentle thief, taking the last word before it could be said.

And every morning he would wake with the ghost of something almost-seen at the perimeter of his dreams — a shimmer, a warmth, a presence that evaporated in the ordinary daylight before he could look at it directly. He was perhaps five years old. Perhaps six. The precise number did not matter. What mattered was the quality of the wanting: absolute and unqualified and entirely without strategy. He wanted to see a fairy the way a thirsty person wants water. Simply. Completely.

Now,

He began reading everything he could find that contained them. Library books, school readers, the old dusty volumes in his uncle's study that smelled of another era entirely. Each culture offered its version — the apsaras of the Sanskrit epics, the ethereal companions of Sufi poetry, the folk creatures of rural Bengal who inhabited rivers and banyan trees and the twilight space between prayer times. He consumed them all and compared them with the seriousness of a scholar assembling evidence.

From this extensive research he derived his criteria. His pori would be natural — not the decorated, performed beauty of films and magazine covers, not the artful construction of cosmetics and lighting and flattering angles, but something prior to all of that. Something that was beautiful the way a river was beautiful, or a particular quality of morning light: not because it was trying to be, but because it simply was. She would have eyes that looked at you from right there — not from behind glass, not through the managed distance of self-consciousness, but directly, presently, without gap or translation.

He grew. His grandmother's hair turned from gray to white. The shimul tree in the yard outside continued its seasonal cycles without producing any visible fairies. But the longing did not diminish or become embarrassed by its own persistence. If anything, it clarified. He was no longer simply wishing. He was, in the patient and methodical way of someone who has decided that a thing is real, and a thing can be found, beginning the search.

He did not know that the search would take twenty years. He did not know that it would take him through four cities and three institutions and past a hundred ordinary faces, each one examined and found, with honest regret, to be not quite right. Likewise, he did not know that the ending would come on a Tuesday afternoon in Khulna, announced by a broom and a green T-shirt and two eyes that looked at him from right there — present, direct, entirely themselves.

He only knew, with the serene certainty of childhood, that she was out there. He would find her. He had promised himself.

পরী একদিন পাবই — এটা ছিল তার মনের প্রতিজ্ঞা, ঠোঁটের কথা নয়।

★ 2005 — Jilla School ★

In 2005, he entered Jilla School — a decision that belonged more to circumstance and proximity than to any deliberate plan. The institution was reputable, accessible, and entirely, exclusively, populated by boys. This last fact registered without particular consequence at the time of enrollment. It would register more significantly in the years that followed.

He arrived as a chubby eleven-year-old with a rich interior life, a grandmother's stories still warm in his memory, and an absolute conviction that somewhere in the world his pori was waiting to be found. He had no particular reason to expect to find her at Jilla School. He did not expect to find her there. He simply arrived and began the business of being a student.

The world of an all-boys school has a particular texture. It is loud and physical and competitive in ways that are unmistakably masculine: cricket in any available space, arguments about footballers and film stars, the elaborate social hierarchy of the classroom that determines, with brutal efficiency, who matters and who does not. He navigated this world with the careful attention of someone observing a foreign country. He was not outside it — he had friends, he laughed, he argued about cricket with genuine passion — but some part of him was always slightly apart, watching.

Girls, in those years, existed on the periphery of his daily life. They were encountered at family occasions, glimpsed at the market, present as sisters and cousins and the daughters of neighbours — but not as daily presences, not as people he had the opportunity to know. And the few encounters that did occur followed, with dispiriting consistency, the same script.

He was the chubby boy. He was pleasant and friendly and easy to be around. He was funny when he wanted to be, helpful when asked, reliably gentle in a way that made him unthreatening. All of these qualities, which would eventually prove to be genuine virtues, functioned in those early years primarily to ensure that every girl he met treated him with the warmth of comfortable familiarity rather than the charged awareness of romantic possibility. He was cuddled as a brother. He was never looked at as anything else.

He accepted this with more equanimity than it deserved. Or perhaps the equanimity was possible because the girls of Jilla School's periphery were, in any case, not his pori — he could feel this clearly, without needing to examine it closely. The frequency was simply wrong. What he was looking for had a particular quality that he recognized by its absence, the way you recognize a missing note in a melody you know perfectly.

So he waited, and he studied, and he grew, and he observed. He got better at observing. He developed the habit of patience, which would turn out to be the most useful thing those years gave him. In a boys' school, you learn to be comfortable with your own company. You learn to live inside your own head without going restless or bored. You learn that the absence of something you want does not have to be the absence of everything.

He graduated from Jilla School still chubby, still searching in his particular quiet way, still carrying the promise he had made to himself by lamplight in his grandmother's stories. He was wiser. He was more patient. He was certain, with a certainty that had survived several years of disappointment and continued to increase rather than diminish, that she was out there.

The world was large. He had covered only a small piece of it. He had plenty of time.

ছেলেদের স্কুলে পরীর দেখা মেলে না — এটা বুঝেছিল সে। তবু বিশ্বাস হারায়নি।

★ 2010 — Notre Dame College ★

Notre Dame College arrived in 2010 with a reputation that preceded it like the announcement of a natural phenomenon: impressive, inevitable, slightly overwhelming. It was academically rigorous in ways that left little room for anything else. It was also, of course, another boys' institution — a fact that by now felt less like a circumstance and more like the universe's particular running joke at his expense.

He arrived with a specific resolve that had crystallized over the Jilla School years. He would not be distracted. He had, in the abstract, a powerful sense that his life was meant to go somewhere particular — somewhere that required full attention, full presence, full commitment of his energies. A relationship, with its beautiful chaos and its demands and its extraordinary capacity for consuming the entire interior life of a person, could wait. He was building something. He would be ready when the time came.

So he made his promise. Not aloud, not ceremonially — just quietly, between himself and himself, in the way that the most binding contracts are made. He would leave Notre Dame without a relationship status. He would keep himself available for what was coming.

Notre Dame in those years was a city of young men in microcosm — competitive, idealistic, running on too little sleep and too much ambition, packed into corridors and classrooms that hummed with collective intellectual energy. He studied. He read beyond the syllabus because the syllabus was never quite enough. He developed opinions about things that mattered and the vocabulary to express them clearly. He made friends who challenged him. He argued and was argued with and learned the difference between being wrong and simply being incomplete.

He was, by any external measure, thriving. And underneath this thriving, like a river running beneath a city, the search continued in its quiet way. He was not actively hunting — Notre Dame offered no field in which to hunt — but the orientation remained constant. Everything he was building, he was building toward something. He was becoming the kind of person who would deserve what was coming. He was working on readiness.

The loneliness, when it came, came not from isolation but from the particular ache of not yet having met the person who would make his interior world visible to another person. This is a specific kind of loneliness that has no good name and resists treatment by any of the usual remedies. You can have friends — genuine, warm, funny friends — and still carry it. You can be engaged and stimulated and fully present in your life and still feel the specific absence of the one person who has not yet arrived.

He felt this and named it honestly and did not try to solve it with inadequate solutions. He had learned from his grandmother that some things required patient waiting. The shimul tree did not grow faster because you stood beneath it willing it upward. You tended what you could tend and waited for the season to change.

He left Notre Dame in the time that Notre Dame required, having kept his promise exactly. He was more educated, more formed, more certain of who he was and what he valued. He had not complicated his path with connections that would have required untangling. He was ready.

He did not know for what, precisely. He only knew that the readiness was genuine and the direction was forward and the pori was somewhere ahead, waiting to be found by someone who had prepared himself to find her.

প্রতিজ্ঞা রেখেছিল সে। কোনো সম্পর্ক ছাড়াই বেরিয়ে এসেছিল Notre Dame থেকে — মনে একটাই স্বপ্ন নিয়ে।