Toronto Journal
<i>Purbo-Paschim: Mojar Golpo</i>
A Bengali cultural cyclone tore through the epicenter of the financial district of downtown Toronto in the first weekend of July. It was the 28th North American Bengali Conference in which Bengalis from North America as well as Kolkata and Bangladesh converged in a cultural rhapsody. Torontonians looked on as ladies strolled by in crisp cotton sarees, while the men rivaled them in colorful kurtas and the occasional dhoti. I was caught by surprise. There I was, toiling for a couple of weeks getting the house painted and spring-cleaned in anticipation of my parents arriving from Dhaka for the summer. They arrived, and I was busy trying to impress my mother with brushed-up domestic skills when Mikhaela, my five-year-old, told her "O Nani! Mummy has been cleaning for ever and she is mad with us if we make a mess!" As my mother smiled, I ran to catch the ringing phone. It was Rehana bhabi who breathlessly informed me: "Bhabi, what are you doing at home? Such a darun Bengali conference and you are spring cleaning? You can still come for the last day of the conference!" Resigning myself to the fact that I could never quite reach the standards of my mother's generation, I thereby abandoned my domestic persona in favour of my cultural one. The Metro Toronto Convention Centre is a humungous conference center in the heart of the financial district of Toronto. It has three gigantic conference rooms with a capacity to seat thousands of audience members. There were two manchas going on: the Rabindra Mancha and the Rice Mancha. The former had artists such as Nachiketa Chakrabarty (Song Adunik, Jibon Mukhi - Kolkata) Sharmila Mukhopadhyay (Song-Rabindra Sangeet- Kolkata), Anup Barua (Song-Nuzrul Geeti -Bangladesh), while the latter had a brilliant mime by Partha Pratim Majumdar (Paris, France) as well as a Kabya drama by Aruna Haider (Bangladesh, directed by Amar Mukerjee,Toronto). Song recitals were also performed by Ferdose Ara (Bangladesh) and Indrani Sen (Kolkata). As an audience member, I sat quite charmed by it all. But the best was yet to come… I wandered into one of the smaller conference rooms. While I was aware that a literary seminar was going to take place after a few minutes, I had no clue as to who the speakers or topics were going to be .I settled into a seat. The audience was mostly from West Bengal, and quite mature. I spotted some Bangladeshi friends and waved to them. I asked the lady next to me about the speaker. Her eyes widened and she said: "Ki bolchen? I have been waiting all my life to meet him -- it's Sunil, of course!" Sunil? Sunil Gangapadhyay! The literary seminar was titled 'Mojar Galpo', and the speakers were Sunil Gangapadhyay, Suchitra Bhattacharya and Sirshendu Mukhapadhyay. The presentation was conducted in an informal manner and the writers narrated humorous stories about their lives and their writing. The session was very interactive with the authors fielding questions from the audience and there was much laughter all around. It is often said that an author's work is influenced by his or her background and personal history. Sunil Gangapadhyay's stories and the warm humane manner in which he narrated them conveyed the vital humanity of this author. One of his stories was about the circumstances surrounding his first poem "Ekti Chithi" (A Letter) published in Desh magazine in 1951. During his boyhood days, his father Kalipada Gangapadhyay was of the opinion that the summer holiday months were wasted by young Sunil and his friends. So every day he gave Sunil a task to memorize a long poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson and then translate it into Bengali. Sunil recounted the frustration that he felt as his friends chased kites while he had to struggle with the lyrics of Tennyson's poems. As he noticed that his father was barely comparing the original to the translation, he thought that he might as well write his own poems and pass them as translations of Tennyson's. This ruse was quite successful. And so in this manner, he started to write his own poems. Sunil also talked about his poem "Ekthi Chithi". There was a girl that he interested in, who was a sister of one of his friends. As he could not directly send her a letter, he wrote a poem "Ekthi Chithi" and sent it to "Desh" magazine, to impress her .Sunil narrates with a chuckle and a twinkle in his eyes, that on the day that it was published, she came running to his house with the "Desh" magazine and said: "Dekho Sunil, there is a new poet whose name is similar to yours! Ki mojar!" After the seminar was over, I spoke with Sunil for a few moments. When I told him that I wrote a column for The Daily Star, he said he was familiar with the paper and read it occasionally. He also said that he appreciated his readers from Bangladesh and that he had many Bangladeshi fans all over the world. I then asked him if his creative process was influenced by foreign literature such as French or the English traditions. He replied that although he had translated a lot of Tennyson, he was mostly influenced by Bengali literature and that his form and structure came from the traditional classics of Bengali literature. His advice to aspiring writers was this: "Learn from your own classics". In his opinion, we as Bengalis inherit a deep pool of knowledge and culture into which we could dive into to emerge with little gems of wisdom. Before I left, he asked me my name again and said: "Bhalo Theko!" in a warm manner; I felt deeply touched by this man and raconteur who had interpreted the human journey in his own special way and delighted us with his adda.
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