১০১.১ / কবর থেইকা পালায়া

কবরে যাই না বহুদিন। স্ক্রিনেই কাজ চলে। কবরে ঝুইলা থাকে সারি সারি টাংস্ট‍্যান বাতি। এক কলিগ সেগুলা ফুটায় এখনও। একটা। আরেকটা। তারপর আরেকটা। জ্যান্তদের কারবার সব। আমি ঘুরি জিন্দাবাজার। ডিজাইন করি ফরমায়েশি কার্ড, নিজের নিয়ত, যা পাই। ঈদেচান্দে চাঁদনি চক। গজকাপড়ের করিডোরে ফ্যানের বাতাস খাই, ঘামি। শুনি দই ফুচকা, লোকাল বাস, জলের গান, কাজল দেওয়ান। হেডফোনে, ফিডে, যা পাই। খুচরাখাচরা লাইকে খাড়া হয় বডি ন্যারেটিভ। আনন্দ পাই তাতে। কবরের সমান।

Revisited§

I wrote this during my leave for Eid-ul-Azha 2016, korbanir Eid. As a child I heard Azha. Now I mostly hear Adha. My role as head of a film department had ended five months earlier. I moved into another job, as head of training. The title still said “head.” The work was teaching in-house interns basic film technique. For me, film pedagogy had come to feel like a salaried job. I had been away from film sets for a long time.

A former colleague kept making no-budget practice films. He had made shorts but called himself an aspiring filmmaker. In the industry around us, a fiction feature was the entry ticket. LED panels were replacing heavy rigs. Tungsten bulbs stayed in no-budget practice. He kept blowing them, one after another.^[1] He stayed loyal to his feature dream.

I stopped calling myself a cinematic time-space designer. I made work an agency or an HR desk could recognize and pay for: cards made to order. My own days became another design problem. That Eid I went to Chandni Chowk. I stood in the corridor of the fabric market under a ceiling fan, sweating, checking my phone. A post of mine collected a few likes. I wanted internal stimulation and external validation.

The four names mark what I listened to that month, from viral pop to pala gaan. I had begun picking up songs from the feed, trying to keep pace with pop culture. Being a serious art-house filmmaker had become heavy. I wanted lighter listening, yet I caught myself judging what I enjoyed. The feed supplied the songs. I supplied the commentary on my own pleasure.

During those weeks, people died elsewhere. Workers in a factory fire in Tongi. A suspect in a police raid in Azimpur. Mir Quasem Ali on the gallows. On Eid, rain and blood turned the streets red. The text names none of it. I let urban violence become ambient noise. I could afford to.

Truffaut’s Day for Night keeps asking which matters more, the film or the life. In 2016 I was living inside that question. Away from the set: a desk, a humid corridor, a passive feed. By then we had already begun gathering around Biralpakhi Cine Club. I left the set and kept the title, the classroom, the club. The attachment to cinema stayed.