When I came out of British Council, it was almost noon. Outside, it was very hot and humid. The ray of the sun was at its scorching best! Anyway, my throat was as dry as hell, so I could not speak - I felt that my head was so empty that I could not even think as I was fasting at that particular day - internally, I was longing for breaking my fast in the evening. I was feeling like I was going to vomit anytime! I was getting acquainted with the fury of the nature - more precisely of the scorching summer heat for the first time in my life! At that moment, I could honestly confess bitterly that I will be staying home for the rest of the holy month of Ramadan and this will be my first and last visit to a library for the rest of the year!

Suddenly, a thought - which sometimes, I bother to ponder, came to my mind. It goes like - 'that pupil who remains patient only for the month of Ramadan like me and dillydallies or remains impatient for the rest of the year, should at least try to do some good deeds for the poor for the compensation of his/her soul!' Well! I thought like that because every day, each and every moment in my life, I felt like I couldn't control my inner hunger - hunger for love, hunger for having other people's undeserved emotions, hunger of all my five senses!

Anyway, I tried to calm myself with the other thought that I had to return home - where people always want to go back when they get bogged down by complex thoughts in the middle of the road! And guess what! (Un) luckily, the human life has given us some natural remedies for those damn (!) complex philosophical thoughts! I am talking about bitter-sweet little things like "haggling". As I was preparing to haggle heavily with those rickshaw-pullers nearby, to my utter surprise, none of those species was to be seen anywhere! Well! there was a brand-new (!) rickshaw standing just beside the tea-stall, but the owner was nowhere nearby! So I started to walk slowly, though I fixed my eyes on the rickshaw, just like a docile stock broker always gazing not only wishfully but also emptily at the computer screen most of the time in a stock exchange office waiting for something to happen!

Then bang! Here he comes out of the tea-stall! I wish he was more energetic and young like me! For one thing, he was too old to pull a rickshaw properly! And for the other, his appearance made me pretty nervous! He was skeletal, fully clad in a dirty and threadbare Punjabi, with a shawl wrapped around him! I understood a tiny bit of what he was thinking at that moment: Of his long journey on the blazing roads in the roasting long Bangladeshi hot summer sun; of transporting totally strangers for some hardly-earned bucks, which would not be enough to provide for his (whole) joint family's food most of the time, the physically-challenged part of his body, of the terrible untold stories of his life, of the small earthly (!) earnings which he always forcefully consider to imagine as "as much as necessary" !

-What's your name, old man?

-Well! Fazar Ali is my name, but people also call me Fozu!

-Where are you from?

-I'm from Pabna- it's Pabna town, to be precise. My house is beside the "Pabna Mental Hospital"!

Well! to be honest, after watching him and listening to his words, my first impression were not so impressive, beside, are you thinking what I am guessing right now of him?

I doubt it even now that he didn't have a clue what all my silence was about! So he proceeded gleefully-

-So where are you from?

--I'm from Ishurdi. Are you familiar with that place?

--Yeah! I had been there before! Although I am from pabna, but I have been living in Dhaka for the last thirty years or so!

-- For the last thirty years?!

--Yeah! I had a garage in Tongi, which occupied thirty to forty rickshaws everyday. Life was great at that time! I could make my ends meet then!...

--How about your family?

--I have a son and a daughter. My son is a bus-driver who lives in Chittagong. But he doesn't visit me often! My daughter is working as garments-worker. And I am an acute asthma patient!

--Why don't you go for treatment?

--It takes extra-ordinary effort and financial solvency to have a

treatment of asthma! At least two thousand taka is needed every month for the treatment! It's a horrible joke, you know!!

-- But as far as know, Dhaka Medical has a reasonable asthma treatment facility.

--Yeah! I had also been there! But money is needed in each and every process from checking in to having a single test result!

--You know! My daughter is a doctor. If you insist I can discuss this issue with her!

--Oh no! I have been taking some form of medication from a hekim! So, I'll be fine!

--So what happened to your garage business?

--Just blame my luck or the lack of it! It all happened in a single day! That particular day, it was a very stormy night, as far as I can remember! There was a great thunderstorm! That blizzard blew all the hopes of my life! I could not even save my wife from that mayhem! Next morning, when I went there, each and every single component of all my rickshaws were transformed into a huge piled-up mess by furious nature's will! If anything more was needed to make it look perfect - was the next thing that followed which was not totally unexpected of my neighbors! I was the only witness to this universal phenomenon when the neighboring people from my vicinity took the rest of the debris!

--What did you do next?

--What could I do? What was there to be done anyway? I phoned my son from my neighbor's home - as expected, he refused to pay me anything, not even a loan or something like that! So I was forced to settle in a slum!

--How much do you earn nowadays?

--Not much! I wish, my days shall dawn soon! But I am unable to pull a rickshaw all day long! If you insist I can reveal that I earn around two hundred taka per day!

Literally, I was lost in thoughts! How could I soothe him for all his evil luck! At first, I thought of giving him some cash as a means of fetra. Then I came to the reality-check that he would surely refuse!

All of a sudden, we were both caught in a traffic jam. So the rickshaw-puller proposed a thought to me and said-

--Can you do me a favor?

--Yeah! Sure!

--If you get down from the rickshaw now, then I can take the rickshaw to the other side of the road, so from then on, we'll move pretty smoothly as the side of the road is half-empty!

I tried to make him understood the situation - as I was not in any kind hurry and also I try to obey the traffic rules most of the time! But who listens! Without listening to my ill-timed (!) advice, he proceeded as he wished! As I got down from the rickshaw, he tried hard to take the rickshaw to the other side of the road in the first few attempts, but he failed miserably and I had to watch all this haplessly! Actually, he was to too old to pull a rickshaw, let alone lifting one! But to my utter surprise, he finally could do that after some more futile attempts! Then, I got up again! But, this time, with a difference! I noticed that that he had a blood-bath of some sort! Actually, he collided with the road divider and fell off! I asked him to park the rickshaw so that I could buy some medicine for his injuries. But he didn't reply! Anyway, in-between our conversation, he somehow managed to pull the rickshaw up to Panthapath- my final destination! I told him to wait as I had no change in cash at that time! I rushed home and brought some medicine with me in a hurry! But alas! When I returned, he was gone - gone forever! The rickshaw puller was nowhere to be seen again!

I was restless when I returned home. I thought that nothing is going to be the same again in my life! Maybe or maybe not, who knows!

From time to time, I felt very guilty to my soul! The one and only thought that came to my mind repeatedly was that this poor soul would find nowhere to treat his physical wounds let alone the mental ones! I could vividly paint a picture in my mind that how he is going to have to do his each and every redundant daily chores for the rest of his life!

How fast time passes and more startlingly, how hastily we change daily! I dare not to say about others whom I could not care any less than I do now! I can honestly confess here that I always think about myself - not about my soul but about my earthly possessions!

But there is somebody like Fazar Ali who dares to care!