The Fourth

Gayam started running, leaving his pot of water made out of gourde skin, rolling at the river bank.

He had already noticed the footsteps on the other side of the river bank - the grey grasses on the slightly wet soil messed up with prominent footsteps!

How many, he had tried to count. Five, seven, twenty?

Gayam didn’t learn to count beyond that! May be his father could!

That's when he had started running towards their home, worried by the thought of his father.

He ran quite fast, although awkwardly, trying to ignore the discomfort due to his permanently deformed set of legs. Ultimately, he is one of the fastest runner among the other few runners of his clan. Many of them are deformed further, by birth!

Their were already a small crowd in front of their cave when he reached there, panting.

And the small crowd grew larger fast, and went berserk when Gayam could tell them what he saw in that morning.

The entire clan started preparing.

The ones who are completely handicapped and incapable of doing anything, were moved back to the rear end of the cave.

Another group of slightly more abled men, lacking one or the other set of limbs, and bogged down by diseases, formed the guard at the entry of the cave.

They will be the supply line for the frontmost row of men.

The rest, around seventeen of them, limped forward towards the range of trees.

Even the trees looked hagged, completely deformed!

The seventeen men had stones and sticks, two of them carrying bow and arrow too. They scrambled atop the trees. And started waiting.

It was a dark night. And eerily quiet.

The sounds of the wild animals and the insects have long been wiped out from the face of earth!

The enemy were spotted at the break of the dawn.

A group of around fourty people, carrying stones and sticks as well, were coming painfully slowly, dragging their deformed limbs, towards the awaiting group in the trees.

Gayam's group also got ready.

After eighty years of the devastating nuclear destructions of the third world war, the last surviving seventy-one people on earth - deformed and mutilated, faced each other in the fourth world war, to kill!

- Translated from the short story "চতুর্থ", written by Somnath Chattopadhya, published in his book "আণবিক".

For those who want the original story, here is the link for the required details.

বইটির ব্যাপারে

Wheeling All the Way

I could see the finish line at far – the flags flowing wildly with the wind. I pushed at the pedals further, pulling all I had in my reserve, every last bit of it. And the wind started whooshing past me, all my sensations narrowed down to the blurred wheel in front of me, and the blurred-out white line of the road.

It all got fuzzy.
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One year ago from this day, when we all started our preparation for one of the toughest hilly race of the country, which lasts for three days, and nights, we started with pure energy. It's not a very easy task to keep the same momentum for an entire year, and the year passed by with highs and lows, and we flactuated between energy and apprehension. But the one thing that was constant throughout this preparation phase was the determination.

Someone once said, you can not be motivated every day, and in those days, discipline takes you forward.

It's the same discipline that made us going while the unexpected happened.

Nothing goes all planned in life, and sports is part of life. That's why it was purely shocking when I toppled with a fraction of second's decision of braking, and ended up in a thorny bush, dangling 10 meter from the diving edge of Sahyadri. That's why Tamal went into an asthmatic attack with the tension of that incident.

Life never goes planned.

But a true sportsperson's spirit is to refuse to give up.

We never know what's lie ahead of us, what's our future. But then, why not create it, if you want to be certain. And that's exactly we had to do at the moment of crisis. Bravery was the only option at that time, and oh boy, bravery was what all showed. The rushing crews, the fanatic co-riders, and the human spirits all around, we were ready in the next 15 minute.

15 minute behind the race, and an unfathomable amount of psychological uphill to climb.

We raced on.

Days were hot, burning the scratches from the thorns, and the nights were cooler, providing reliefe – I told you, life is all ups and downs.

It was a race against time, a race against our own mental barriers. But we fought together.
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I refocused on the road, wheeling like a rocket.

A few more meters to go – a hundred, two-hundred? There was no one in front to chase, it was just me and the finish line.

I looked back.

I smiled.

And then I was home.

The Way You See It

The doorbell rang, and I cursed that damn over-active person who invented electricity!!

I was feeling quite relieved that our cook decided to bunk her duty today, otherwise the doorbell would have slapped me off my bed almost two hour earlier than now. I looked at the clock, and after half-a-minute of trying to focus and re-focus my eyes at that, I was pretty certain that my clock hands were pointing at the 9 o'clock!

I tried hard to feel guilty for waking up so late, but the stupid guilt goes to vacation on almost every Saturday, and never comes back before the irritating Monday morning. Damn, I am spoilt!!

So, I just went back to the bed, and started enjoying the luxurious “nothing-to-do” state. But, you know, I told you that an insane person had invented electricity a long ago, and there have been many more consequent inventions, and one such is called internet. So, I picked up my phone and turned on my WiFi – not my fault, you must understand - It's called “progress”!!

The first thing we all do now-a-days is to check how others are doing, from such platforms where it's impossible to understand how they are doing!! Humans!! But, you know, we are social animals, and thus, to make sure I am a part of it, I opened WhatsApp to waste my time further.

And this whole time, from forcefully being waked up in the morning to this how-to-spend-my-time moments, I was wondering if I would have the power to slow down the time so that I can waste more time at my leisure. And the only person who can stop time, or in that matter stop a lot more things, in our generation, is the great Rajnikant. And coincidentally, it was Rajnikant's birthday.

And, it was also the birthday of two more persons who are very close to me. One of them is now out of my reach, where I can't wish him a happy birthday in person, so, I browsed my WhatsApp contact list to wish the other person a very happy birthday.

And, when I opened the contact, his WhatsApp status surprised me! It read - “At a juncture where birthdays mean a year less to live”.

Well, there are three kinds of words for me – one that just goes past me, no impacts; another that makes me think, deeply sometimes; and the final one is the one which holds me at one place, dumbstruck, and shakes me at my root after I regain sense.

And those words fell into the second category.

We are from that lucky generation where birthdays are documented and remembered by a lot of persons around us, for various different reasons, and celebrated in many different ways, in more than one time. The generation of our parents were not that lucky, or unlucky, in this matter, and the generation of our grandparents is the one when no one bothered about even remembering birthdays! How cool!

Being a part of the last generation after which humans started evolving towards robots, I have experienced my birthdays to be special and celebrated every year, in a human way. From my 5^th birthday to 10^th, I guess my birthday celebrations meant my mother cooking me my favourite dishes, my grandma doing the same with another set of my favourites – I am not going to focus on what happens on the next day – and my dad gifting me a sports item that I thought I secretly dreamt of. And yes, the 5^th and 10^th ones also experienced a bunch of my friends gathering at our home, enjoying the lunch and a one-and-a-half hour of cinema session by watching an animation flick. Bliss!! Well, the next 10 years, the core activities remained same, my glutton nature growing more and more strong every time. Well, of course there were other celebrations as well – different in school days, different in college days and different in work life. The type of celebrations changed, however, the fun never subsided!

It was not until around 25 may be, when the thought of “ageing” first crossed my mind. Was it early?

And it was not until very recently that it dawned on me that birthdays are, in a very obvious and plain way, linked with death as well.

Well, maybe I am getting older, or getting wiser, or both! And probably that is the reason that I have already got this on my own recently, those words fell into the second category, not in the third.

But nonetheless, it made me think.

The words that were troubling me the most were “a less year to live”. And thus, the most important question I was searching the answer for was how do I know how many years I am going to live!

My friends around me knows that I am quite a philosophical person sometimes, spreading a lots of “gyan”!! And one of them is so irritated with my “gyan” that she wants to kill me every time I open my mouth, even to take a bite of my food!!

But yes, I am quite experienced when it comes to “life”. Dealing with happiness, sadness, pleasantness and unpleasantness, and so on.

But I am not an expert when it comes to “death”!

So, I am not sure about when we will die. And therefore, I couldn't calculate (though that's nothing to do with my absolute incapability with mathematics) how much more or how much less we are going to live as I don't know the last day, I couldn't subtract.

Although I didn't get the answer of the question, however, I got another insight while searching for the answer.

We may not know how long we live, or when we die, but a single day spent on the thought of that is a day less to live.

The sun will rise, and set, the moonlight will mesmerise the lovers who could never be together, the gentle breeze will nourish the green grasses which have seen many journeys on many directions – and all these will continue even after we cease to exist.

It's one life, it's ours to spend, it's ours to spend well – so that when we go, we will never be able to count our lives in days, rather we could remember it as a bundle of memories and moments.

“At a juncture where birthdays mean one more year of existence”.