I’d been told, on an evening ice-cream trip only some time ago, that I wasn’t supposed to see that head of hair, normally hidden in her hijab. In Hanan’s religion, hair is a woman’s intimate jewel, forbidden for anyone to see except the husband. And yet here we were, past a winding path of mental concessions and negotiations, in this moment, on this bed. Morning light from the windows behind us softly lit the scene.

Like so many times before, I was waking up next to this curly head. Even once would be a privilege. What a blessing to be waking up again and again next to this rare person with such a big heart.

It was a weekend. A last wave of sleep was rolling in, wanting to draw me back under for some more minutes, and I could probably give in. I closed my eyes. My logical conscious and hypnagogical unconscious made contact, and in that twilight zone they birthed a thought.

Why do I wake up every day as myself? Suppose sleep is when the personal soul is sucked back into the edgeless silence of the one unified soul. When you return from it, you could become anyone, right? Why then do I return, every morning, to the same body and mind? The self is such a frustratingly persistent isolation. Wake up, remember that I am Neel, remember the other times waking up as Neel, remember my projects I’m procrastinating on, see Hanan, fleeting thought about our future, then all my other memories and visions and problems. Every time.

What if instead, on the way back from the big soul, I wake up as Hanan? One soul flitting back and forth between two mindbodies as they are trying to journey deeper into love? Is that too much to ask? Does that cross some forbidden boundary? Is love only wanting to become one with each other, but vanishes if we succeed? If I did wake up as Hanan, how would it be to see me from her eyes? Would I be able to bear seeing myself with so much love and intimacy and promise?

And with that last half-articulated wonder, my mind began to give itself up to the dark of sleep. The final image I saw before the black took everything, was a distant white light approaching, in the shape of a vertical eye. Did someone once say that that’s what a soul looks like?

As my mind was trickling back, I still remember that last dream picture I saw: a white vertical eye that receded slowly into the dark. It doesn’t really mean anything.

My brain was still downloading. Who am I? I’m Hanan. Ah yes, Hanan, life is hard and heavy.

I open my eyes. I’m on my right, my head on Neel’s arm. Oh yes, this guy.

As my brain re-downloads my life in these first seconds of awakening, I realize anew, like yesterday and the day before, that this has been an interesting chapter of my life because of Neel. He is interesting in the ways you can explain, like his life and views and interests. But there’s something ungraspable there, unspeakable. Neel cannot quite be explained by anything he has come from or appears to contain. There is a living unpredictability, an electricity from outer space, that he knows not fully himself.

I watch his sleeping face and iridescent blue earrings in silence for some more time before our day will begin.

I know that he wants to spend his life with me. And he doesn’t know, that I know, that that is not to be. Neel lives in a dream world without constraints, and I live in the real world with people and expectations. In that world he has appeared quietly as an anomaly, and he must disappear as quietly.

Ah, my mind. Within a minute of waking, its neurotic narrative engine is already at full speed. That one time when walking down the rock steps to see the mossy waterfall, he turned back to catch me talking to myself, and it was so embarrassing.

Neel keeps saying though that our minds are very similar, that we think the same things. I’m not sure about that, and I’ve told him so. He says this from knowing only the parts of my mind that I share with him. He’s a child. Despite his confidence in his own intelligence and maturity, there are some parts of me that he is not ready to know yet.

I asked him the other day when we were smoking in my car, what does he think about when he wakes up every day or goes to work or takes an evening stroll? He tried to answer, but I can’t get the full picture. I haven’t told him, I wish sometimes that I could teleport into him, see what it’s like to see the world from his eyes, think the world with his thoughts, live in the world with this extraterrestrial energy that I cannot grasp. That energy is an entity, something that will do anything before being controlled. It scares me.

But I have also fallen in love with it. It projects a fearless laser-like path into the future. Where does an argumentative atheist get such unshakeable faith in life and destiny?

My head hurts. It’s too much to think all this, the words are getting heavy again and the images blurry. How would it be, if, as I let sleep take me this time, I do teleport into him? I would never have to tell him that which I wish I’d never have to tell him, he’d simply understand why. But there is no such thing, in this plane of reality. If only life were that easy. No, Hanan. It’s just Hanan and Hanan, over and over again, for you. There is no such thing.

And with that, I think, the darkness of sleep took what remained.

Brache interpreted his psychedelic experiences in the framework of transpersonal psychology, developed by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof among others. This book is where I first learned of the idea. At moderate doses of psychedelics, Brache, like others, breached into the hidden aspects of his personal psychology. But at stronger doses, he would sometimes break through into inhabiting what seemed like a collective consciousness, with collective trauma. For example, he sometimes felt the consciousness and trauma of an entire population of people being killed and wounded in war.

Is there really such a thing as the consciousness of a collective of people, and a way for us to switch to it? We don’t know what consciousness is yet, but we generally assume that it has a fixed physical scale. The consciousness that you and I normally experience exists at the scale of our bodies. This makes sense, because its contents involve the functions and concerns of only our individual body and mind. Also, if the brain, that innervates our body, produces our consciousness (which we don’t know for sure), then there is no clear reason why it should exist at any other scale. Within this consciousness, we feel only our own physical and mental pain, so the way that we usually try to heal them is with treatment for our physical body, and our individual relationships.

But is it possible that different consciousnesses can inhabit different scales of the same system? Are there little consciousnesses in our different body parts and organelles that make up the whole organism that is us, but somehow partitioned off from this integrated consciousness that is reading this right now? And similarly, if we are individuated parts of a greater organism, such as society, or the planet, could there be a bigger consciousness at the scale of the greater organism, that our subjective experience is usually cut off from? And is it possible for a consciousness to switch across these scales, and carry memories from one to the other of what it felt like?

A while ago I was noticing yet again, that sometimes I feel crappy and low, even without any problem in my life. And the idea came to my mind: what if some of our pain is not our own, but the pain of others out of our sight, leaking into us? Could our universe be this way, such that under the surface of compartmentalized individuals, there is a substratum where invisible psychic energy leaks across permeable membranes, from one consciousness to another? Even if we are able to visibly and materially isolate ourselves from others, this energetic stream may be of such nature that it is not siloed within individuals. It spills out of one into many, and it is absorbed from many by one. Which seems unfair: why should we pay the price for others? But then, how thankful that it is so, for without this sloppy mixing, the best life strategy would be to ensure only our own well-being and isolate ourselves from the deprived. Morality discourages this of course, but that is widely viewed as a human construct. But what if the need for empathy is not merely a human construct, but the physical consequence that psychic energy is not so easily isolated? Then the decision to heal that trauma is not simply our duty to repair our individual problem, but the taking on of the healing of the whole ambient energy, of universal karma.

When I use the word energy here, I am not implying the physics meaning of kinetic or potential energy. I mean the more colloquial, woo-woo meaning, of the vibes of a person or a place, or the energy you may feel in your body when you are mindful of it. I know that the more rational of us would be annoyed by the use of the word energy in this context. As a physicist, I was among them. That’s a physics quantity with a specific meaning, so I have no idea what you mean that you feel someone’s energy, I used to think. But then I started being able to feel my own and others’ energies more. I also learned that physics itself appropriated that word from colloquial use into its stricter definition. And now I see too why the woo-woos call it energy. When I think of the contexts in which I have felt this substance I am talking about, no other word comes to mind that is more appropriate.

The question is, is that energy a real physical thing? Is it something that has properties and can flow, chemically interact with other energies and transmute through cause and effect, with definite properties and laws?

We have created devices to sense and transmit other kinds of energy, such as light, heat, electricity or magnetism, and that has helped us solidify them into objective science. What are the devices that sense or transmit this psycho-emotional vibe energy? Over the last few years, as I have felt such energy within myself and others, and even some strange energetic phenomena, I have realized that our body-minds are themselves such sensing and transmitting devices, if we become sensitive enough to notice. But since we are yet to develop a theory or external sensor devices for this energy, many in the scientific community could deny the existence of such a thing in itself, beyond the conceptual level of neural firings.

With this woo-woo energy, we are perhaps at the stage where we once were with electricity, say before the Renaissance: some people had experienced it in some natural phenomena or with their very bodies, even fatally, but these were still scattered subjective anecdotes of a phenomenon that we did not know the properties of, or how to objectively measure with a device. True, there exist non-living, purely material objects that respond to electric energy, with which we eventually built those objective devices. For the psycho-emotional energy on the other hand, so far the only responsive entities seem to be biological and conscious, i.e. able to have a subjective experience of it.

Nevertheless, I am more and more convinced that there exists this world of energy, superimposed on the physical world, following its own laws of cause-effect, transmutation and flow. This parallel energetic causal chain may not be entirely isolated from the material world though, but the two may interact and influence each other at some focal interface points. Physics can account for the material causal chain, but we do not as yet have a science describing the causal flow of this energy. Many believe that the properties and causal transmutation of these energetics is entirely contained in the material account, but I feel that that is not the case. There are some energetic properties and phenomena that are invisible to current objective measurement methods, and thus outside the grasp of current material theory.

Such energy flows from generation to generation as well, and is linked to intergenerational trauma. There have been studies to show that the children of holocaust survivors had greater tendencies for anxiety. Even though holocaust trauma did not alter genes, it caused epigenetic changes that were passed down to the children. This is the material part of the inheritance of trauma. If we had a language and map of psychic energy as well, perhaps even a way to visualize it, like infra-red heat, we might be able to see, perhaps quite literally, how psychic energy flows directly from person to person and from generation to generation, in an eternal karmic chain of being shaped by the previous, and shaping the next. Dr Gabor Mate in his book Scattered Minds emphasizes similarly that we have looked too much only at the material aspects of attention deficit disorder: its genetic inheritance and pharmaceutical cure. But there are ways in which it, like other psycho-spiritual energies, is inherited directly due to the influence from parent to offspring.

To me it seems in fact that we humans are nodal points in a causal chain or web of energetics. A large part of the impact we have through our lives on the fate of the universe is the way we transmute, or not, the sum of the energies we receive from others and our previous generation, before we send them forward to others and the next generation. And if our serious interest is to heal from the traumas in individuals, societies and the planet, we will find more answers when we expand our lens beyond the material, into the energetic causal flows around us that we are an inevitable part of, and take more accountability for it.

The healing that occurs through psychedelics is often attributed to conscious visions and insights that help us identify and work through trauma and behaviour patterns. Most of the patients going through psychedelic treatment at our Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy at UT Austin, report that they have healed through such conscious visions and insights. But some of them report no such conscious experience, yet they feel better. I have myself had some experiences with ayahuasca and psilocybin that elicited no conscious visions or insights, yet felt mysteriously better afterwards. Entire long depressive seasons vanished without explanation. Some of these times, even when I had no visions, I intensely felt these medicines inhabiting my body, through my felt awareness of what I can only call, again, energy. It was unmistakable how strongly I was feeling the presence of this energy in my body, as if it was life energy itself being breathed into me. And it seemed that every minute that this energy simply inhabited my body, it intrinsically healed me, without needing to show me any insight that I needed to do anything about afterwards. It reminds me when my friend explained that in Christianity, salvation comes either through work or through grace. This mode of subconscious healing by the plant medicine seemed to be such an occasion of grace: a divine energy healing merely by its presence, even as the conscious mind habitually yearns to work, grasping for something to understand, do and claim about it.

We are developing now an explanation for how psychedelics work in terms of molecules and neurons. But without a science of the energetics I am talking about, I feel like we may leave a very important part out of the explanation of healing: the part outside the workings of the conscious concepts and in the workings of the non-verbal energy of the body.

Now my final thought about the climate. Lately I’ve been seeing small square flyers around Austin about a meeting to discuss climate anxiety: a growing psychological distress among many of us about the impact of climate change on the planet and our existence. At the American Psychological Association’s annual conference which I attended, there was a large panel dedicated to working with climate anxiety. For many people, this is sensitive liberal snowflake nonsense. For some in the middle, climate change is an intellectual and engineering issue. But for many, and I speak somewhat from experience, it may feel like they can feel the pain of the planet as their own. This is not conceptual in the same way that the death of a loved one is not conceptual, but an agony, an energy, felt in the body. If some can feel the trauma of a collective of humans when their edges have been melted by psychedelics, could it not be that others can feel the trauma of the living ecosystem beyond even that, of the planet organism, whether or not aided by psychedelics? So yes, it seems to me that climate anxiety is an extension of transpersonal psychology.

Science is not a stasis. It has shifted shape across the decades, sometimes despite itself thankfully, and brought ever greater phenomena into its domain. Here’s hoping that it will continue challenging its own bounds, and perhaps listen again to some forgotten or suppressed knowledges in this age of materialism and the rational-verbal, to take us closer to a coherent theory that integrates the transpersonal, the energetic, and the planetary.

I feel like I am in love with someone, but she doesn’t agree, so I am grasping with my mind and heart every few hours.

What would it mean for me to truly let it be?

Is it the conceptual understanding? Of mindfully observing the grasping thoughts, and watching them float away? And is it also the energetics? Unpleasant feeling of loss and discontent comes up from the belly through the chest, wanting to move the heart and the limbs and the mouth towards the actions that can possess her, and you feel and watch and breathe as it passes, and do nothing else.

And is there a level of letting it be, that is yet deeper?

A level so deep that you are no longer letting it be. You are one with the it. The universe penetrates fully in through the skin, closer and closer towards the core, burning it all off, until it reaches the center and vanquishes it, and there is no self left. It is all the outside.

Maybe there is not even an energy or thought of resistance to the happening that arises any more, perhaps even a divine bliss in the happening of things?

Or is that too much to ask? My heart trembles in fear at the thought of it. How can I be content with anything that happens?

One evening as I stopped at his truck, he asked me, ‘Hey professor, is this true?’, and handed me a square paper across the counter. It was a crayon drawing of the blue-green planet earth and the sun in very black space. A white tail was coming out of the back of the earth like a comet, suggesting the arc of the earth’s motion. There was a brown man standing on the earth next to a yellow box on wheels, and a big red arrow was pointing at the man.

I smiled at the drawing, ‘What is this?’

‘Yesterday my neighbour Armando and his little girl Carla stopped at my truck, you know she goes to school with my girl. Carla was drawing, so I said, can you make a drawing of me? I wasn’t very serious, you know, but she did make a drawing later at home. She is a sweet girl. They just came by and she gave me this. I was thinking she would just draw my face, or the food truck or something, but this is what she drew. And she said this is what she learned in school, about where we all are.’

‘Ah, that’s cute. Yeah, she’s right, that’s where we are’, I handed back the drawing.

Mehdi looked at the drawing and at me again. ‘Huh, really? We are all on this round rock just flying through this black stuff?’ he pointed at the black area in the drawing. Carla had really intensely rubbed her black crayon into that area, it was very dark and even a bit scary. ‘Is that where all of this is?’ he asked, gesturing at his surroundings outside the truck window.

I still couldn’t quite believe that this was all new information to him. But he was staring at me seriously, and his eyes placed the heavy weight of his question on my shoulders.

I stopped smiling and took a few moments to think about how to best answer. Then I said, ‘Yes Mehdi, all of us, this whole city, really every human being and all the animals and plants and mountains and seas, are on a round rock that is shooting through this black emptiness called space. But the rock is much much bigger than you and your food truck compared to how she drew it here, and there is no tail coming out of it like that.’

Mehdi’s eyebrows rose as he took in my words and stared at the drawing. Then he looked up at me, as if putting together so many things in his head, and asked, ‘So everyone knows about this already, and this is all okay and normal? What does it mean, and where did it come from and what’s going to happen?’

I took some time to absorb his emotions around the questions. Then I said, ‘Yes Mehdi, I think a lot of people know this, they learn it in school, but we don’t really even think about it every day. And if you ask me what it’s all about, honestly I think whatever you see happening around us is really just like a dream, but sometimes with more rules and patterns than a dream. And because of those patterns, some people, you know in your mosque or in my university, say they know what it all means and where it all comes from and where it goes. But you know, I don’t think anybody really knows.’

Mehdi grew quiet again and absent-minded for a few seconds. Then he snapped out of it and asked for my order, and I got a shrimp and rice with falafel. He quietly put it together and gave it to me, then we said our goodbyes and I got on my motorcycle and rode home through a thickening mist.

স্মৃতির অতলে ডুব দিলে কতই ঘটনা। কিছু মনকে আনন্দ দেয়, আবার কিছু ব্যথিত করে। বয়সের ধর্মেই কখনও আনমনে সে সব টুকরো স্মৃতি নিয়ে চলে রোমন্থন।

আমাদের উদ্বাস্তু পরিবারে আমার দাদা-দিদির মতো আমাকে বিশেষ ঠাঁই নড়া হতে হয় নি। শুনেছি আমার যখন আনুমানিক ছয় মাস বয়স তখন থেকেই আমাদের এই নাকতলার উদ্বাস্তু কলোনীতে বসবাস। পূর্ববঙ্গের বাস্তুহারাদের পুনর্বাসনের জন্যই পার্শবর্তী আরও কিছু উদ্বাস্তু এলাকার মতোই এই সরকারী কলোনী — নাকতলা। এলাকার মাঝ বরাবর চলে গিয়েছে নেতাজী সুভাষ চন্দ্র বসু রোড, প্রায় প্রায় পুব-পশ্চিমে। তখন সে রাস্তা মাত্র ফুট দশেক চওড়া, দুদিকে সারিবদ্ধ গাছ শাখা-প্রশাখা বিস্তার করে মাঝ রাস্তার বেশ কিছু উপরে এপার-ওপারের সংস্পর্শে এসেছে। সকালের রোদে কালো পিচ ঢালা রাস্তায় আলোছায়ার আঁকিবুকি। রাস্তায় গোনাগুনতি যানবাহন। রাস্তার দক্ষিণ দিকে ছোট ছোট জমিতে খুবই সাধারণ বাড়ি নিয়ে আমাদের উদ্বাস্তু কলোনী। বিপরীতে, রাস্তার উত্তর বরাবর ব্যক্তিগত মালিকানায় অবস্থাপন্নদের বাস। তাঁদের বাড়ি বেশ বড়, অনেকটা জমি নিয়ে, প্রতিটি বাড়ির সামনে অনেকটা খোলা জায়গা, ঢুকতে হয় বড় লোহার সদর দরজা পার হয়ে। ও সব বাড়ির বাসিন্দাদের সঙ্গে এ পারের কলোনীর জমির লোকেদের মেলামেশা নেই বললেই চলে। তবুও আমাদের কাছে ওদের পরিচয়জ্ঞাপক কিছু শব্দ ছিলো — ভোলার বাগান, ব্যানার্জী বাড়ি, মিত্র বাড়ি ইত্যাদি। (বর্তমানে একটি বাড়িরও অস্তিত্ব নেই, সুন্দর বাড়িগুলি একে একে ভেঙে, জমি খণ্ডিত আর হস্তান্তরিত হতে হতে অবশেষে তাদের ঠাঁই হয়েছে আমাদের মতো পুরোনো কিছু অধিবাসীর স্মৃতিতে।)

কলোনীতে আমাদের ছোট্ট বাড়িটার প্রায় বিপরীতে ছিল ভোলার বাগান, তার পূবদিকে ব্যানার্জী বাড়ি। ব্যানার্জী বাড়িতে নানারকমের ফল আর ফুলের গাছ। আর ছিল বেশ বড়সড় এক পাখির খাঁচা — সিমেন্টের মেঝেতে লোহার স্তম্ভ দিয়ে লোহার জাল দিয়ে ঘেরা। মূল বাড়ির বামদিকে জমির প্রান্তে সারি সারি একতলা কুঠুরি — পরিচারক-পরিচারিকাদের বসবাসের নিমিত্ত। পুরো জমির চারিদিকে কাঁটাতারের বেড়া দিয়ে ঘেরা। ব্যানার্জী বাড়িতে ঢুকতে হতো লোহার বড় গেট পার হয়ে। গেটের পাশেই দারোয়ানের দোতলা ঘর। ছোটবেলায় আমার স্বাধীন চলাফেরার পরিধি ভোলার বাগান, ব্যানার্জী বাড়ি, মিত্রবাড়ি অতিক্রম করতো না।

বাড়িতে আমার চার দাদা, এক দিদি। আমি সকলের ছোট। পাশের বাড়িতে বাসন্তীদি, আমার দিদির বন্ধু এবং পুতুল খেলার সঙ্গী। দিদি আর বাসন্তীদির পুতুলের প্রায়ই বিয়ে হতো। বিয়ের পর বৌ দু’একদিনের জন্য শ্বশুরবাড়িতেও যেত। পুতুলের বিয়ে, বাড়িতে ঠাকুরের পূজো এবং আসন সজ্জার জন্য বা অন্য অনেক অনুষ্ঠানের জন্য দিদিকে দেখতাম খুব ভোরে বন্ধুদের সঙ্গে ফুল তুলতে যাচ্ছে। সে ফুল দিয়ে খানিক পরে বন্ধুরা একসঙ্গে বসে একাগ্রমনে মালা গাঁথতো। আমি পাশে বসে দেখতাম। অনুভব করতাম মালা গাঁথবার সময়ে সকলের ভক্তিভাব। এই আসরে ছিল এক গোপন প্রতিযোগিতা — কার সংগ্রহে কত পরিমানের, কত কিসিমের আর কত টাটকা ফুল। মালা গাঁথার আসরে আমার জায়গা হলেও ফুল তুলবার দলে বিবেচিত হতাম না।

শরৎ কাল। শিউলি ফুটতে শুরু করেছে। সাদা ধবধবে পাপড়ি, আর গেরুয়া বৃন্ত। সাজিতে যখন থাকে বা পূজোর আসনে ছড়িয়ে দেওয়া হয় সাদা-গেরুয়া মিলে এক পবিত্র দৃশ্য। শরতে অন্য ফুলের তুলনায় শিউলিরই কদর বেশী।

একদিন আমার খুব ইচ্ছা হল দিদিদের সঙ্গে ফুল তুলতে যাওয়ার। দিদির কাছে নাছোড় আব্দার জানালাম পরদিনই ভোরবেলায় আমাকেও সঙ্গী করতে হবে। আমি সঙ্গে থাকলে দিদির সাজিতে ফুলের পরিমান বাড়বে ভেবেই হয়তো দিদি রাজি হয়ে গেল।

শরতের প্রত্যুষ। আসন্ন পুজোর বার্তা দিতে বাতাস বেশ হিমেল। অত ভোরে ঘুম থেকে ওঠা আমার অভ্যাস নয়। চারদিকে হাল্কা কুয়াশায় আচ্ছন্ন। মৌন। ছাইরঙা ভোর। আমার মনটা খুবই প্রসন্ন। এক হাতে ফুলের সাজি, চোখে তখনও ঘুমের রেশ, দিদির সঙ্গে বাড়ি থেকে বের হলাম।

দিদি আমাকে নিয়ে চললো ব্যানার্জী বাড়ির দিকে। গাড়ির রাস্তাটা পার হলাম। দেখলাম দিদি ব্যানার্জী বাড়িতে ঢুকবার লোহার দরজাটার দিকে না গিয়ে একপাশের কাঁটাতারের বেড়া বরাবর হাঁটছে। এক জায়গায় দেখলাম বেড়ায় একটু ফোকর। দিদি আমাকে নিয়ে হামাগুড়ি দিয়ে সেই ফোকর পার হয়ে ভিতরে ঢুকেই ঠোঁট আর আঙুলের ইশারায় আমাকে সতর্ক হতে জানালো। কেন এত সতর্কতা? কেন মূল ফটক ব্যবহার না করে ফোকর দিয়ে ভিতরে আসা — বুঝতে পারছি না। দিদি আমাকে নিয়ে চললো বড় এক শিউলি গাছের নীচে। ব্যানার্জী বাড়ি তখনও নিদ্রামগ্ন। গাছের নীচে শিশির ভেজা সবুজ ঘাসের উপর সাদা হয়ে রয়েছে ঝরে পড়া শিউলি। উবু হয়ে দিদির পাশে বসে কুড়িয়ে নিচ্ছি ফুল। ধীরে ধীরে আমাদের সাজি ফুলে ভরে উঠছে। ভিতরে ভিতরে প্রচন্ড উত্তেজিত হলেও আমার বা দিদির কারও মুখে কোন কথা নেই। দুজনের হাতই ফুল কুড়োতে ব্যস্ত। একবার দিদি আরও ফুলের আশায় গাছটাকে সজোরে এক নাড়া দিলো। আরও একপশলা টাটকা, সাদা শিউলি ঝরে পড়লো। কিন্তু সেই সঙ্গে কানে এলো দারোয়ানের ঘরের দিক থেকে এক বাঁজখাই হুঙ্কার। আর দেখতে না দেখতেই কুয়াশা ভেদ করে তেড়ে এলো লোকটা। আমাকে একহাতে সজোরে টান দিয়ে দিদি বললো — পালা। দৃশ্যপটের এমন আচমকা পরিবর্তনের জন্য আমার মন একেবারেই তৈরী ছিল না। শিউলি ফুল কুড়োতে এসে এমনভাবে পালাতে যাব কেন? সাজি হাতে নিয়ে কয়েক কদম দৌড়ে দিদি এগিয়ে গেছে। আমিও অগত্যা লাগালাম দৌড়। আবার সেই কাঁটাতারের ফোকর গলে বাইরে। উর্দ্ধশ্বাসে পলায়নপর আমি ও দিদি ভোরবেলার শান্ত, মৌন, স্নিগ্ধ পরিবেশের সঙ্গে একেবারেই বেমানান।

সেদিন দুপুরেও অন্যদিনের মত দিদি আর ওর বন্ধুদের মালা গাঁথবার আসর বসলো। শিউলির মালা নিয়ে সুন্দর করে ঠাকুরের আসন আর তার সামনের মেঝে সজ্জিত হলো। কিন্তু সেদিকে যতবারই তাকালাম, মনে হল, শিউলি আর যেন ঠিক আগের মতো শুভ্র, পবিত্র, নিষ্কলুষ নেই।

This evening as I lay on the floor, in the quiet I heard scratching noises.

They were quite close to me. Inside the floor or the walls. Something moving, then stopping, then moving again.

Either there are rodents in this house

or my mind is buckling

to the pressure

fraying

at the edges

returning

where it came from.

●

I find it hard to talk about myself.

Anyway, a sleek black hollow has opened up next to me.

Before it did, I would have found it incredible really,

that such a pure dark void could open up in this space.

But here it is, like one of those unbelievably lightless blacks I saw online

like vanta black vanta black

It is a shiny hollow; I feel curious. It leads somewhere painful, but at least new.

I lean in closer, and then I know

That it will now take over

and suck me in

and I can let go.

●

When I was a child

I could be in a room filled with loud and joyous people

and if there was one sitting quietly in some hidden corner

not feeling well

I would know all the time their pain in my chest

even though I wanted to forget.

Then as time went by,

my wish was granted

and then I knew

I was all grown up.

●

I remember when I was

left alone as a child

and I closed my eyes

space would disappear into

expansive void

and great masked eyes

would appear

and I would begin crying

for help

●

One time, a man came to our house

when something funny was about to happen

and he said he was blind

and we were sad and helped him

and the funny thing did not

happen any more.

And then we saw him walk away from our house

nimbly through the chaotic traffic

and we were very cross.

●

This evening as I biked

down to the river

and the sky opened above

my heavy heart

I wondered if I once had chosen

to play this cosmic game

over nothing

and simply forgot.

But yes, I am ready for all of you

and all of this to vanish

in a wisp of smoke

without caring to leave

a shred of explanation.

●

On the warm sunlit beach

I lay on my back

as faces floated through the sky.

I found on the sand

a little girl’s bracelet

and it made me remember

when everything was easy.

I was the only passenger on the bus there and back, and in the falling dusk I roamed alone the grounds under which lay buried thousands of bodies.]

The warm April winds had started to blow over Celle since morning. It carried with it the smell of grass, fruits and fragrant German flowers, although it did not need a very careful nose to also catch the whiffs of gunpowder and burning. The wind wandered without aim over the fields and the roads, swirled about quaint farmsteads and swooped low over the airstrips, caressing the tarmac with its warm finger.

From inside the huge black stone building of Bergen-Belsen, there was no way to tell that there was a summer wind blowing outside. The only inhabitants of this institution who had the good fortune to feel it were lined up outside in the courtyard with their belongings and starting to be marched out of the gates. They would have to walk 20 miles to the nearest rail-station, and slowing down or stopping could invite a bullet. At the station they would be packed into closed freight cars and would head off in the suffocating darkness to the nearest death camp.

The greatest venture of human history was on. It was a daunting task, to delete entire races from the face of the planet, but the Nazis had shown that with careful planning, meticulous control and inflexible ideals, anything was possible. The ‘resettlement’ in the east had suppressed all uprisings with extermination camps — factories of death where Jews, Romas, Jehova’s Witnesses and similar filth would be flocked in by the thousands from every direction and killed in gas chambers or burned in pits. The Nazis did not wish this fact to spread, so the ones deported to the Auschwitz death camp would be kept oblivious of their fate until the very last moment. The ones who survived the train journey would be selected on the basis of physical fitness: right meant slave labour, ten to fourteen hours a day. Left was the gas chambers. The ones selected left would be requested to keep away their belongings and remember where they put them. Their hair would be shaved for making warm cloth, and they would be led naked into the chambers which carried signs outside saying ‘Bath’. Sometimes, to keep the panic down, they would be given towels and soaps. When they entered, doorways would be locked and pellets of Zyklon-B, the killing gas, thrown in through vents in the walls, and the ones inside could stop worrying about where they put their things. After the operation, the naked corpses would be surveyed for gold teeth or other valuable items. The bodies would then be removed and buried in pits in the ground, and the interior of the chamber cleaned by the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners at the camp exchanging labour for a few more months of life. The belongings of the prisoners would be redistributed around Germany. Of course, accurate knowledge of what went on at death camps was scarce among the prisoners. What circulated was dark rumours and much-retold accounts of the very few who had been able to escape.

Many refinements of the killing processes had produced large chambers with greater accommodation, and more effective gases. All institutions — governmental, commercial, religious — did their own bit to facilitate this process of mass deletion. The result had been an efficient, large scale industrial process of extermination of the enemies of the Nazi party. Twenty thousand Jews could now be burned in a day, a huge improvement over the earlier methods. The undoable had been done; the Final Solution of the Jewish Question had been achieved.

But support for the great Nazi dream had waned. Some felt that the killing of industrially skilled Jews was an economic waste, some had slightly softer reasons. The Allies had gained power and fought back. Russia, America and Britain had begun to recapture the lands occupied by the Nazis, places where unreported torture and killings had gone on, villages where the air smelled of burning human fat. Slowly, the full scale of the Nazi project was beginning to be unfolded. In despair, the Nazis started pulling prisoners in eastern concentration camps further west and into the heart of Germany. Freight trains would bring hundreds of prisoners from eastern camps every day to the extermination centres.

Ernst watched the prisoners from where he stood in the line, holding on to his tattered cloth bag containing an irrelevant note scribbled by his mother a day before she died, half a cashew nut for his lunch, and two pebbles. Thin, skeletal bodies were piled high on both sides of the meandering alley in which the long deportation line now stood. Everyone’s face that Ernst looked at betrayed clear, prominent fear. German officers prowled the site, occasionally picking out children and old men from the crowd and shooting them. The shooting was very loud in the still summer afternoon, but it failed to startle even a child such as Ernst — he had got used to it.

Among the ones in front of him, Ernst could spot Heinrich, their neighbour, the one who had broken his kite and had had to make him another when he wouldn’t stop crying. There was Luise, Heinrich’s daughter, hidden under her mother’s cloak. She is trying to smuggle her daughter out of a concentration camp and into a death camp, thought Ernst. Ernst had spent a lot of his troubled childhood with Luise, running around their crowded ghetto when the German police were not present, climbing roofs and playing war, something for which they were never in short supply of inspiration.

He saw Bernheim further up the line, the young, lively man who always talked about hope, resistance and escape plans. Ernst could still vividly remember his wild, red face when he ran, breathless, into their room in the camp one day with a piece of paper in his hand. He talked very excitedly about peace and freedom, then laid out the paper for everyone to see. It was a news article in Russian, torn from the last day’s paper:

Soviet Troops Advance Further; Unearth Terrible Evidences of Genocide

Ravensbrück, April 10, 1945: As of now, the Russian Red Army has progressed further west in the attempt to drive back the Nazis from occupied regions where they had held Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and political opposers captive in different camps. Reporters accompanying our soldiers followed their progress, and write back that a lot of skeletons in the German closet have been uncovered. Among the evidence that has been found are unburied corpses at the German camps that number over thousands, gas chambers and burning pits, some of which the Germans have tried to demolish before leaving. German SS officers encountered at the camps have been forced to bury the corpses. Although it is evident that the Germans have tried to clean up the camps before leaving, the state of the camps conclusively confirms that the prisoners have been forced to live in abnormally crowded conditions. Although the survivors from different camps liberated by Allied troops are being treated at army camps, many of them have died since liberation from a fatal spread of typhus caused by the lack of proper food and sanitation. The colossal mass-elimination of the Jewish population has repeatedly been referred to euphemistically by the Nazi authorities. As events unfold, we only expect more atrocious evidences of the ‘Final Solution’ to come into full view of the rest of the world.

Air bombings by Allied Forces have, in the past few weeks, rendered many railroads defunct, and the primary method of deportation of prisoners to death and concentration camps has been growing increasingly difficult for the Nazis. Still, the Germans are trying their best to absorb the prisoners in eastern camps further west before the Red Army arrives. In spite of their efforts, the situation as of now vouches for a comfortable progress for the Allied troops into the west. Sources state that liberation of prisoners from the remaining death and concentration camps is only a matter of some weeks, after which the generals behind the Final Solution will be tried at courts of law.

‘Look, look!’ Bernheim stabbed his finger at the paper with burning eyes, his thin, starving face flushed and sweaty, green veins pulsing in his temples. ‘I told you! I told you to keep your hopes up and drag on for a few more days. Here they are! Here they are at last and the war is over, everyone! Now it’s just a matter of not getting deported west before they arrive. We’ll live! We’ll live, everyone, and they’ll let us out and we can have food and bathing water again, and freedom and peace!’

Bernheim hadn’t been lucky enough to escape the deportation today. He was standing in the grounds, sweating and fidgety, as the long line started to move slowly out of the gates. All his hopes of survival had turned to dust.

Ernst’s eyes hovered over to Officer Franz Meyer, a young German, possibly in his twenties, patrolling along the line, occasionally poking a prisoner with the end of his rifle. This was the last time Ernst would see him. The first was the day of their arrival at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was some time after thirteen of them were shoved into a tiny room with one window and low murmurs had begun to grow out of the stuffy silence, that there came a loud banging on the door, and a gruff voice said in German to shut up or they would break in and shoot at random.

Every voice in the room died into a full dead silence at once, punctuated only by the loud and persistent crying of a baby in the darkness. The mother, trying to stop her child, looked around helplessly at the other faces staring at her from the shadows. The banging came again. Ernst was on the other end of the room, and in the darkness he could not figure out exactly what was happening, but he heard the wails of the baby being replaced by quiet stifled sobs.

Just when everyone thought it had passed, the door opened with a loud bang and an officer with a rifle entered, silhouetted by a surprising amount of daylight outside. He had bits of lunch and blood over his uniform. Behind him, outside the doorway in the bright sun stood a second officer, leaner and younger, squinting into the room. The one inside bellowed loudly in German in the same gruff voice, demanding to know who had made the noise. The mother put away her baby in another person’s arms and got up. The officer ordered her to come out of the room. She started crying, but obeyed. When she was outside, the officer aimed his rifle at the centre of her forehead and shot once. She fell, the blood slowly forming a halo around her head where she lay. The other, younger officer kept staring at her body for some time, before closing the door again.

After they went away that day, the baby was found to have been dead for some time. The mother had choked it.

The day after this, Ernst was summoned by the young officer after roll-call. As he walked up to him and stood, he felt a mad urge to run away, to shout for his parents, but then he remembered that they were long dead, and somehow that made him stand frozen in front of the lean, fair man.

The officer looked at Ernst for a few seconds, then asked, ‘Was ist dein Name?’

An innocent question like asking his name caused an amazing number of visions in Ernst’s head: the officer noting it down, making sure he would get selected for the deportation to the west, the long, frozen walk to the station across the dirty snow, the dark, packed freight compartment where many died, the death camp, the gas-chamber, the gas vents, pain, darkness.

‘Ernst, Sir. Mein Name ist Ernst Gruber.’

He surveyed Ernst with his cold, steel eyes for some time more, then shuffled in the pocket of his uniform. He produced a black cloth bag, took out a cashew nut from it and held it out to him. Ernst looked up at him in fear and apprehension. His eyes were still grey and cold, but he nodded once.

Ernst took the nut out of his hands and looked up again.

With the same impassive expression, Officer Meyer said in German, ‘Run.’

Ernst had heard about this a lot of times, and seen it once from the window of their room in the ghetto. A truck of German soldiers had arrived late one night and marched a number of Jews from downstairs out into the middle of the road. Then an officer had said, ‘Run.’ All the Jews had run, except one that kept rooted to where he was. The officers had shot after the running Jews, all of whom fell dead on the road. When the echoes had died and the night had grown quiet again, the officer had looked down and smiled at the person who had stayed put.

‘You didn’t run. Good.’

The man had smiled back with fearful eyes.

The soldiers had got onto their truck, and when it was moving out, the officer had shot the man from the back of the truck. The man had died with his hands clasped in a frozen gesture of mute surrender.

This whole vision came whirling back into Ernst’s head. He looked up once at the cold, unfeeling eyes of the officer, then turned and ran like a hare, his heart thudding in his ears.

There were no shots.

The day after, Meyer had come and taken Ernst out of the room. This time Ernst knew that he was done for. No German ever did anything good for a Jew. He had been foolish to imagine that the matter was over, that he had been able to escape from a German officer.

Officer Meyer told Ernst his name, gave him a cashew nut and ordered him to run. There had been no shots.

For a week this had continued, until Ernst slowly grew an inexplicable trust in him, and knew that he would not shoot. Why he chose to trust a German officer he did not know. Perhaps because in his world, he was running out of things to trust.

Today was Ernst’s eighth day in Bergen-Belsen, and he was standing in the line to be deported west, fully aware that children and old men were usually, although not always, dragged out of the line and killed on the spot before the walk began.

The other officer, the one with blood and food on his uniform was there. Ernst watched him approach Heinrich’s wife. He saw the girl she was trying to conceal with her coat, grabbed her thin arms and pulled her roughly out of the line. The mother fell to her knees, crying, begging, imploring. The officer held his rifle to her head and said in drawling German, ‘If you don’t want to die too, get back in the line.’

The mother got up, sobbing, and returned slowly to the line as Luise watched her in fixed disbelief.

The officer smiled at Luise and shot her in the chest. Her frail body fell without sound.

Something inside Ernst squeezed his whole soul into a tight fist. Luise. Luise of next door. Happiness, sunshine, laughter. His only friend. Now a starved, dirty mass of skin, bones and tattered cloth lying in the dust.

The officer stepped over the body and looked down the line. His eyes stopped at Ernst. The corners of his mouth twitched in satisfaction and he strode forward. At once, Ernst could hear his own heartbeat.

There was a sudden hard object on the back of his neck. He looked back to see Officer Meyer pushing his rifle nozzle into him. Meyer smiled at the other officer and said in German, ‘Relax, Otto. I’ll take it from here. You go see that side,’ motioning forward.

The other officer nodded, gave Ernst a menacing yellow eye and left. ‘Give him something he’ll remember, Franz,’ he said as he strolled away.

Ernst looked up at the cold steel eyes of Officer Meyer. He grabbed Ernst by the arm and pulled him out of the line. He held the rifle to the back of his head.

‘Walk.’

Ernst put his hands up in the air and started walking. They rounded a corner where there were no patrolling officers and the line of prisoners went out of view.

‘Stop,’ said Meyer. ‘Turn around.’

Ernst turned with his hands still in the air. The long black nozzle of the rifle pointed between his eyes. He looked into the darkness of the nozzle, then up at the officer. No German soldier ever did anything good for a Jew.

Officer Meyer looked at him coldly for a second — the huge, unfeeling black nozzle swaying in front of Ernst’s eyes — then said, ‘Run.’

Ernst turned and ran, clutching his tattered bag close to his body, his heart beating louder than the sound of his footsteps. He felt dimly the dirty stone walls of the camp sliding away from his vision, the many bodies littered high on both sides of the path, the ground thudding beneath his feet.

There were no shots. Ernst stormed into the room breathless. Every eye in the group surveyed him in mute surprise. He only stood panting, looking at the faces.

A few more hours of life.

After answering the eager queries as to how he came back and being generally disbelieved, Ernst sat down and opened his bag. Looking around to check if anyone was watching, he quickly transferred the half cashew nut into his mouth.

He was still chewing after the nut had long disappeared, rolling around the inside of his head its exquisite taste, when there were a couple of shots outside, and some shouting in a language he didn’t know.

Ernst had become so used to hearing gunshot that he could immediately tell that this sound was of a different kind. A different gun, different bullets.

He ran to the sole window before anyone could reach it. The whole room crowded around behind him and peered down.

A number of armed men in a different uniform were running through the courtyard while a few of them stopped the deportation line that was walking out of the gates. A few German officers were lying dead, along with the one who had killed Luise. The prisoners were frozen with fear. Ernst saw another troop of these soldiers run around to the back of the concentration camp. There were repeated gunshots. Five were the new sound. One was old. All around there was shouting — some in German, some in this new language.

There was a sudden banging on the door of their own room.

Everyone in the room froze. There were running boots outside. The banging came again, and a voice called.

 ‘We are British. We have come to save you. We are going to open the door, don’t be afraid. We have come to rescue you.’ Once in the foreign tongue, then in broken German.

Then the door was opened by a soldier in the new uniform. He stared wide-eyed for a few seconds, taking in the condition of the room and its inhabitants, then said in faltering German, ‘Get out. You’re free. You’re going to an army camp with us for food and medicine,’

A few seconds of stunned silence, then it was as if the whole room woke up as a single being after a long time. The murmurs grew to shouting and cheering, and they trooped out of the room, joined by other streams of half-naked and starving men, women and children running out of their dark prisons. Everyone had an inexplicable expression on their face as they absorbed the shock of this new reality.

Ernst skipped down the stairs, pushing through the crowds. All around him he could hear commands in broken German. When he reached the courtyard, he saw the bodies of German officers lying everywhere, in pools of blood. Some officers were knelt down beside a wall while a British soldier stood guard. So some had been left alive, thought Ernst, running through the chaos and shouting. He reached the gate. That’s when he saw it. He stopped suddenly and stared at it, panting.

Offcer Meyer’s body lay face up and spread-eagled just inside the gate of Bergen-Belsen, his steel grey eyes looking up at the summer sky. There was blood on his chest, and footprints. As Ernst stood looking at him, Officer Meyer’s impassive voice sounded softly inside his head, ‘Run.’

Ernst knelt down beside the body. He did not feel like crying. He did not feel like anything. He looked around once. No one was noticing. He slipped a hand gently inside a blood-smeared pocket of his uniform and drew out the black cloth bag of cashew nuts.

Ernst ran out of the gate of Bergen–Belsen concentration camp, pushing through the line that was being led out through the fields by the British soldiers. He broke out of it and ran to the middle of the field, panting heavily. He had eaten almost nothing in the past few days, but he wouldn’t touch the nuts.

As Ernst looked around, the rough ground beneath his naked soles, the warm summer breeze, the clear wide sky above his head, all came filtering slowly back to his consciousness after a long, long time. Ernst breathed in the smell of burning, gunpowder and wild German flowers. Peace, freedom. How would life be from now on?

He looked back at the camp. For the first time, the dark, inflexible stone walls of Bergen-Belsen failed to intimidate him. They only injected in him a sharp and painful burst of sadness. Luise, friend through so many times. The sunshine and happiness in his childhood life of squalor and hate. Ernst stared at the iron gates. They seemed to be calling him back. The dark rooms, the long roll-calls under the blazing sun, the alleys of the dead, the incessant shooting…

Ernst tore himself from the thoughts and looked back at the glittering blue skies and glowing summer fields through which the line of prisoners progressed. And very slowly, a vision seemed to form by itself in his head. Officer Meyer, and his steel eyes that never betrayed an emotion. The crystal summer sky in his eyes, and footprints on his chest. ‘Run,’ he said to Ernst, clear and gentle, motioning forward.

Ernst clasped the bag of cashew nuts tighter in his hand, gathered all the strength and hope he had left in him, and started running towards the long line leading out to the army camp.

There is no home. Float, float, float.

There is nobody else. Adrift.

It doesn’t mean anything.

Even my personal history keeps detaching from me, time slips away through my machinations.

Who am I? What is this? Does love mean anything?

I don’t think love means anything. It is not of the left brain. It is not a symbol indicating some other from of gratification (like money). It is not downstream of something, it is itself. It is self-created, its own justification. It bows to nothing else, it doesn’t even have to make sense for it to work. Its symbolic meaning pales in contrast to its true experience. When love comes, it melts much of you away. What remains does not understand in terms of symbols any more. Abstraction has been blasted away by an overwhelming feeling that leaves little to free will. ‘Making sense’ is what stops making sense then. The table is completely flipped.

I feel like a man suspended between heart and mind, trying to make them friends.

I realized soon that much of what sets the value is really just speculation: people buying and selling because they think its value is something, and that’s what actually ends up deciding much of how the price will move. Not all of it, but most of it. These are emerging assets, so there is a lot of uncertainty and hype, so people’s perceived value is not a reliable indicator of its true value.

So, when the dust settles, is there a true value? I had bought some ether, and I wondered, is this ether only valuable because people agree to value it, like gold, or is there some intrinsic value?

I think that it does have intrinsic value. There are some issues with regular fiat money, and there is the desire for some fixes. So people are figuring out the technology for a new form of money, whose transactions can be verified without a central authority etc. So the intrinsic value here is in the technology: the ideas that have been thought of and the algorithms that have been implemented.

That seems kind of a nebulous source of value. You know, the river originates from the melting glacier. And if we climbed the mountain and reached the glacier, we could see for ourselves the origin of the river. Where does the value of ether originate? Where can we see it forming?

The value is contained in the intelligence that is developed and programmed into the Ethereum system. And that intelligence originates in the minds of the people who are doing this work. So every time that Vitalik or his friends search in their mind for ideas and find them, right there is where the value is being created.

And where do new solutions emerge from in the mind? If you ask me, I think it is magical. Science, art, inspiration, innovation, they appear to come from some magical part of the brain when in the right headspace. An idea wasn’t there before, it was unknown even to the mind that was about to have it, and then it appears and becomes known. And somehow this magic happens for free. Where in the universe really do these new intelligences come from? Are they invisibly hanging out, waiting to blossom forth in minds? What do they ask from us in return? Seemingly not much, only perhaps it asks us to share.

It seemed very interesting to me, that on the one hand people are using this digital money to measure the values of things in a very zero-sum transactional sense, and sometimes fighting and swindling each other for it, but at its source the gift of the intelligence embedded in it is free.

I feel similarly about nature’s gifts of psychedelics. They come to us as a generous gift of concentrated powerful magic that simply grows on the ground, so I think we should be similarly generous and pass them on and their wisdom as gifts, and not build a selfish or greedy profit-based business with them.

like a great bird’s wings

misty hedges, wet back alley float by

How long will I be here

filled with concrete

counting my breath

Time is ticking ticking ticking

will it be future when it ends

will anyone have

waited for me