Thy boy's wrold

★ 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।

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