When Ushashi was first born; barely did I know, between her second and third birthdays, I shall not be seeing her for nine long months. After completing the immigration and customs of the Dulles IAD, when finally the mother and daughter reached the spot of waiting greeters on a December 2011 afternoon I initially had to struggle for making an eye contact with my daughter. That was due to the imposing ‘made in Bangladesh’ that her mother put on her in anticipation of a chilly DC exterior. In a lot of issues the afternoon marked a set of ‘for the first times’ for me. It was a negotiation with a circumstance to which I was, indeed, probably not even familiar.
Because Ushashi’s stay in Bangladesh got extended to an unexpected spell of nine months and because seasons have changed in the meantime meaning a lot of adjustments for this innocent baby, all the clothes her skinny body could accommodate for the Dhaka DC flight were “Bangladesh made”. I saw her in clothes I just never saw her putting on before: in terms of size particularly. Cyber technology unfortunately did not connect the father’s end to the daughter’s. Except for the couple of still photographs that my cousin sent to me on Ushashi’s birthday all those nine months she was only in my imagination, off and on assisted by her voices over telephone. When I called her mother the mid-night of 11th December, she fortunately took the phone set and ‘accepted’ my wish.
All nine months what I would do whenever I would bump into any parents with kids of Ushashi’s age was asking the baby’s date of birth. Dulles IAD was the venue of a tough negotiation for a father connecting the daughter in imagination to the one in reality.
I wish Rabindranath had authored a sequel to his Kabuliwala based on the famous protagonist’s reunion with his own Mini! I know there are many fathers in modern Asia, Africa and the Middle East looking for such a script.
No comments:
Post a Comment