ABSTRACT
Surely April is no longer the cruelest month in a world of fake news, quid pro quo and border walls, if only because lilacs (read economic growth rate, rising stock market index, and increment in nonfarm payroll employment) are bred out of an impeached president making America great again. For the wasteland lies elsewhere – in another world – where a radical historicist Karl Marx stands a lonely figure, counting the beads of a rosary as he chants the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach over and over again: “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx, 2002). That should be some solace for me ‘trapped’ indeterminately in the current geo-political defining binary that echoes, quite literally, B. V. Karanth’s (2012) autobiography Here, I cannot stay, there, I cannot go. But then, spring-time Bangladesh, brief though it is, spawns blossoms in tall, fleshy, rough-barked, spike-laden, and leafless Shimul trees, Bombax ceiba of the family Bombacaceae: large flowers that set the sky ablaze in flaming red. You could not miss it in the rural flat plains, standing majestically against a pale-blue sky. Now, besides the flower, the tree is of immense value in commercial terms, most importantly for coffins. But laying aside the coffin and concentrating on life and living, I may inform you that if you are fortunate enough to live near a Shimul tree in the rural areas, you will surely not miss the strangest sight when the buds pop open. At this time, wafts of wind blow Shimul seeds away – seeds enveloped in a gossamer of fine cotton tentacles – setting them off on an endless voyage across – I always thought after the tales of Arabian Nights I heard in my childhood – seven seas and thirteen rivers. As a child, I would often run after these wafting gossamer clouds as they floated, believing, in all earnestness, ‘they’ must be fairies. As I realized later in life, fairies are of course figs, twigs, and fiddlesticks.
