Moon, memory, manifesto: A personal, lyrical essay on Atrai

These two things—the river and the train—continue to haunt and fascinate me.

Their sounds—and their silences—are deeply woven into the texture of my daily life. I keep hearing the river streaming by—and the train whizzing past—in my head and even in my dreams. I'll never forget that full moon hanging like a brimming bowl of milk, tilting gently to pour its light over the River Atrai—the river of my childhood—where the fresh eternity of silver danced with the tiny infinitudes of ripples: cadenced, luminous, mud-colored. Nor will I forget the sight of a train getting wet and glistening in the afternoon rain in Atrai.

How could I forget you, Atrai—my river, my place? Atrai is both the name of a river and of a rural region in Bangladesh. I spent part of my childhood in a landless peasant community there—a place that, at the time, was an explosive site of Maoist activism and was even declared an "independent zone" during the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971. And when I was barely 13, one gray afternoon, it was a Maoist from Atrai—my uncle's friend—who placed in my hands a soiled copy of The Communist Manifesto in a Bangla translation and urged me to read it.

He did not, I recall, hand me the little red books that were circulating with a vengeance at the time. So, at 13 years-old, I puzzled over and struggled with many ideas in the manifesto but ended up clinging to two words at least: 'bourgeoisie' and 'proletariat'. I made only a feeble sense of them, forming only a vague idea of what a class struggle might mean. Even as a child, however unclear my ideas were at the time, I immediately identified with the proletariat, imagining that we must combat the bourgeoisie to build a better world.

Still, the river and the train—and that full moon, an abundant fountain of silver, cascading over the river Atrai—never ceased to enchant me. Yet it's also true that I saw the same river—Atrai—drenched in blood and swollen with corpses and saw the moon bleed heavily in the prison-cell of the sky. I heard the train groan as it passed, packed with nothing but disposable numbers—the brutal faceless anonymity that the powerful multiply effortlessly. I also watched the rain morph into a raging gust, a violent burst of dark petals in the night, ripping apart peasants' mud huts in and around Atrai. I remember—with brutal, burning clarity—how my grandfather's thatched roof fell apart, as if it was a forced offering to the swollen clouds. By no means did the damn rain seem beautiful then.

And guess what? By 14, I began to see the river, the train, the rain, and the moon themselves shimmering in the pages of the Manifesto itself. I realised—through my fumbling, half-formed ideas—that even the moon, too, must be liberated from the bourgeoisie, from the oppressor.

Dr Azfar Hussain is Director of the Graduate Program in Social Innovation at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA, where he also teaches Interdisciplinary Studies, and Vice President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies (USA), where he is Professor of English, World Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies.