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After twenty-five years, I am returning to the village, my chest buried beneath a thousand cubic feet of sorrow. I have nothing left but a small treasure of memory, the last inheritance of a life spent elsewhere. I return tired, weathered, undone. No one is waiting for me. Does the house still stand? Does the doorway remember me? I know nothing. Hot sighs tear through my chest a saw biting from both sides... And then, Labonya? Her small, delicate face rises from the ruins of childhood, her pearl-like teeth opening into a smile. I was twelve when I left. She was nine, perhaps ten. Did she know then what love was? Who knows. I only know I had already fallen in love. And Ibada... how is she now? How many years have passed over the golden face of that Khasi girl from the tribal settlement near Madhabkunda? She was my age. On a green betel leaf she wove, in the fine lettering of words, the first love letter of my life: “Come back before the day ends, my friend.” The day has grown old since then! I have wandered through continents, crossed borders, outlived seasons, yet nowhere in this immense world did I find a place for myself. Ibada, are you still there? I am coming back. The thickets have forgotten my footsteps, the rows of betel-nut trees stand like strangers. Kushiyara has split wide open its ancient breast; its waters lie exposed like a wound without a bandage. The fishermen are gone. No nets heavy with the silver bodies of Hilsa. No ferry. No boatmen. The launches have vanished, and with them the old, melodious sounds of the river. Yet the nomadic boats still float beside the ghat, drifting homes with nowhere to belong. The world has changed so much... But their wandering life has no destination, while I have a path of return and memory to lead me home. Asirganj Bazaar hangs by the fraying thread of memory. I search the crowd for one familiar face. There is none... Loneliness closes around me. The pregnant afternoon sun seems to recognise me. Even my shadow remembers the road, walking beside me as though it has never left. Inside the village another village has risen, a world of hollow faces, bloodless eyes tilting silently towards me. A welcome without warmth, the rehearsed embrace of a vanishing illusion. As if from twenty-five thousand feet above, I seem to look down with a hawk’s unblinking eye at a village swooning beneath the sky— a shell-less village of concrete, its childhood long stripped away. By then I had reached the house, or what was left of it. Weeds clasped the walls. Birds had inherited the rooms. Cockroaches, rats and grasshoppers darted through the ruins, small survivors of a forgotten kingdom. Then, suddenly, a dog from among the weeds, it came barking, not in warning, but in welcome, rushing towards my legs as though it had been waiting all these years. I touched it gently. It looked strangely familiar... so much like Tina. It stared into my face, then licked my hand, and something in its eyes opened a door I thought time had sealed. Surely, a descendant of Tina. How strange the intuition of animals. They do not need names. They do not count the years. They simply know who has returned. We humans are forever busy with the rituals of belonging the formalities, the practised smiles, the gestures we mistake for feeling. We carry memory like stones beneath the skin, yet when the living moment stands before us, we fail to feel it. We remember, but we do not recognise. The dog remembers nothing. And still, it knows... I have come home.

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