Noshin Nisa

Cities didn’t change that much, the essence of home kept fluctuating for the girl living in the places, even if the places didn’t change. In an “almost-a-village-but-just-a-small-town,” at the very edge of the world, a place where the world seemed like it would end, the world was the widest open for the girl. With very little understanding of people and space, anything visible was the ultimate truth, and the truth was beautiful, the truths that only exist in hazy nostalgia now. The bluish silver sky stretching over the rooftop rushing through the gray cold wind of the night, the stars raining some sparkles into the winter-fog, and the moonwalking with her as she moves to her house of fog adorned with the starry sparks; and the not so smart people on the half-raw streets in the scarlet evening at the tiny little place, glancing at her with void minds reflecting her ignorant fascination to her. The theatre of imaginations closed, the girl shifted to the fast pace of life, to the big glorious city, and the fascinations dissolved into a strange vast hollowness, and every creature around her only resonated with the hollowness, as if everyone, silently, without caring for an invitation, gathered for the grand assembly of hollow desolation.

The desolation got filled a bit one day with the first rain of the year. That rainy day of summer in the city of pollution and industries looked like a battle of silver splashes and bronzy shinny smoke. The sun became too comfortable in spreading global warming not wanting to hide, the mighty surges of pollution could never give up, and the mildly stormy rain did not accept defeat in bringing some fragrant treat for the exhausted wind. The girl was sitting at the last bench of the class, mindlessly gazing through the window into the rain, and a surprising friend showed up, sat beside her, smiled, and congratulated her for witnessing her first rain in the new city, as if it was some big deal! The girl smiled back and nodded, realizing that she really was witnessing this simultaneously refreshing and polluted rain. This time an ashy off-white smog was floating in the rainy air, and a house in the smog adorned with pearly raindrops opened its door for her. The girl’s fancy old theatre opened again, this time with lots of transformations.

The girl has a strange habit. She needs to find the deepest level of the soul of anywhere she is in, whatever that soul means, she couldn’t explain. It is just a vague idea that cramps her brain. And until she gets to achieve that verification type of thing, she feels like the atmosphere is making a whirl, binding her and then pushing her out of her space of existence. Only on rare times, that whirl calms down and she is set free to simply breathe and exist. The same cage-like buildings, the same suffocating streets packed with hollow strangers, the same smoke-filled air veiling the sky, all turn into something else, magically merging on an enchanting surface when all of them are perceived from the height of a sixth-floor balcony. In an absurd moment, an attacking noisy city turns into a windy cloudy fairyland. Interestingly, the very balcony resembling other usual cages seems like an opened cage, ready to let her leave to fly. The numerous concrete buildings all built like identical cages, spreading across the blurry horizon like an overwhelmingly gigantic carpet with iron thorns, and the intensely busy roads wriggling around the empty space between buildings looking like intricately knitted artwork, and the gray heavy air poised below the untouched surface of the sky where pure white clouds can freely fly around, and the sun is visible for real with sharp golden rays, and some flashes of wind harrowing with freshness; the sheer contrast between that bright world of the sky and the gloomy layer of smoky air luminously hovering, all of these objectives make her not believe that she is here in this phenomenon of the strange city, make her wonder what this city even really is; and the confusion excites her, the contrast interests her, gives her existence that soulful verification to set in without having to be pushed away, convinces her to willingly call this city at least a resident, if not home yet.

The girl’s theatre of fascination keeps getting versatile, new images, new movements, and acts are adding to it. When it gets a serious gloomy day, with no sunlight, only sliver heavy air and pouring rain, and a denser traffic comes as a bonus, through the drops of vapor and rain dancing on the glass, the girl watches multiple dramas unfold. A young pair giggling on the rickshaw enjoying the rain, an adult depressed man sulking on the crowded bus cursing the universe for the rain for making him late for his job, a teenage kid panicking in the taxi for getting late for exams, a young child extending the arm to hold one raindrop, the small stalls on the footpath and the smoke of stove swirling out, a young person holding on tight to the umbrella getting lost in the thoughts while sipping some tea in the middle of a chaotic rain-stricken crowd, a kid wearing a colorful raincoat grabbing the parent’s finger walking and stumbling, and an unlimited number of strangers wandering all around, drenched, exhausted, focused on some aim, but still aimless. Or, that one special evening at the yearly fair, brimming with a feeling of freedom. No, there is never any free space anywhere at the fair, just the people that suddenly radiate so much of exposed freedom even in the compacted space. The cold of January steams with the people’s excitement into the chilling sandy wind of blue evening, and the people seem to have shed all kinds of baggage away to purchase boxes of annual bliss.

The arts of many lives commence on her renovating theatre. On a clean lurid night, when the chaos fades at a distance from her small balcony, the moon and the stars hang over the peaks of giant buildings, and the cages of each building appear like normal windows that glisten with the colors of the people’s stories that live behind those windows, and a silver smog gleaming with that glint of people’s windows’ takes the shape of a quaint theatre-house, the girl slightly smiles and steps in that house in the smog, to find the reflection of the city to feel at home.