If it was not for dada, I would have never found this poem; The Perfect High. A marathon of try-hard, remarkably well-rhymed sentences describing the tale of a guy named "Gimmesome Roy ". he is a generic adrenaline junkie who roamed around the world to quench his insatiable thirst for that one perfect high. At first glance, anyone reading it, in a nutshell, would too assume what I wrote the poem to be about. But that is not it. It is never that simple, is it? I do not actually know if I was the only one who found it to be so enticing, but it was fun reading it, as if Shel Silverstein, who usually drew cartoons and wrote children's rhymes, wrote it while thinking about another billion comparable souls and me. And If you want to know if you are among the masses, here is a link where you can read it.
"It seems, Lord", says Fats, "it's always the same, old men or bright-eyed youth,
It's always easier to sell them some shit than it is to give them the truth."
This sentence, the last line of the poem, is what got me to reread it again and again. And while I did that, unbeknownst to me, it tapped into a residual pool of cynicism deep inside, which I thought was devoid of. Yet, now, I can feel it ooze out like a riptide. It's ironic, in a sense. Even though I am someone who is very in tune with his mood swings and always tried to find positive vibes in almost everything, it seems a subtle cynical crow was always there, resting on my shoulders.
A few years back, I had to live with a crew of tree-loggers for one whole summer. My late grandfather in his time was a baron of sorts. Even though he had 17 kids, when he died, all the siblings of my father had inherited a considerable chunk of land in an extensive estate. One of my father's inheritance was a few acres of a mahogany forest in a remote corner of our hometown 300 kilometres away from where my current home is. As the forest trees matured to be harvested, the trees were cleared up and replanted. This was a time when both my brothers were out of the country, and my father being old who possibly couldn't survive on his own there, the duty of overseeing the logging fell unto me. For a few months, I ate, slept and lived with the loggers in tiny bamboo shades. It was pretty adventurous, to be honest. As I can relate those parts of my life with the true essence of "gimmesome roy".
The head of the loggers' crew was a pious, religious guy named Kashem Molla. He was the one who owned the huts we resided in. In terms of the village locals, he was moderately financially solvent due to his logging contracts. He was the definition of a successful man In rural Bangladeshi villages. But there was something wrong with the whole picture. For a comparatively rich guy like him, it was nothing uncommon to keep two-three wives simultaneously, which even now, at the time of rapid globalization, is still a thing in the villages. But there he was, with no wives and no next of kin, living all alone among his chickens, cows and rice paddies. It was only later when I learned why he was a lone ranger.
I initially agreed to go oversee the project only because I would escape the town, get high, and be comfortably numb with local drinks. It was a win-win situation. And so, within the first few days, I slowly and steadily had built an affinity with the crew and managed to separate the ones too fearful in God from the ones who had the devils in them.
Getting high and listening to the crickets in the day and drinking while playing tinpatti at nights is all I had to do. And sometimes, when the unmarried ones were up for campfires, the nights would become much more euphoric. In diabolically morphed Bengal accents, while being completely zoned out, the lads spoke of tales that city dwellers could rarely even imagine about. Stories for another time, perhaps.
On a similar euphoric night, they all told me the story of Kashem Molla.
Kashem Molla had a pretty wife. Right after the liberation war had ended, his father wedded him with a young girl, a kid, one might say. In the current context of the world, such acts would be deemed as pedophilic and superstitious malpractice. But Back then, it was ubiquitous. Wood Logging was in his family for four generations. And as Molla was the only child, he became substantially wealthy when his parents died. An eligible bachelor with quite a demand in the community. And so, even though the girls would still play with dolls, the fathers wed them while thinking only about financial solvency.
He was quite happy with his wife for a few years. At least till she came of age. As his job would dictate, he usually had to travel throughout the country, cutting down trees here and there, sometimes even for a few months. In the meantime, his wife would get lonely. For the first few years, it was fun for her to roam around and play with kids of the same age. But, eventually, she had grown past it and become a woman. And quite often, she would ask him if he could give her a child. A child who could help her to cope with the unbearable loneliness. But he could not give her what she asked.
And as a result, she had resorted to other means to fill the void. One day when Molla came back, she was gone, along with all the jewellery and the cash he had in the house. She had grabbed the hands of one of her admirers from a nearby Madrasha and went away, stepping towards the unknown. And that is how the marriage of Molla, a philanthropic wood logger, came to an end. Except, for some reason, I became obsessed with his tale. Even though this had happened more than two decades ago, I don't know why, it felt like the story did not end there.
During my residency at his house, I learned that Molla was quite a charitable person. Most of what he earned, he donated for the wellbeing of the village. He had even financed and bore the total cost of building the only mosque in the area. And that got me thinking. Perhaps, his story was slightly different than what the lads had let me know. Perhaps, just maybe, Molla was not who he seemed he was. My reasoning behind such a conclusion came from a few different things. One of them was that the mosque was built with lavish architecture. To finance such designs, it needs money, money which even Molla would have had difficulties providing. After all, how much does a wood logger earn?
At the very middle of the yard of his house, there was a tall Banyan tree. While sitting on the porch, looking at the tree, I sometimes wondered, what if Molla's wife didn't actually leave! What would have happened if Molla would've come early from his work and found his wife and her young lover on the bed. If I were Molla, I would never let an illegitimate child inherit my hard-earned riches after I die! What if he had murdered them? Would there be a mark on their grave? A banyan tree, perhaps? As Baba Fats had said " It's always easier to sell them some shit than it is to give them the truth."