Maswood Alam Khan from Maryland, USA
Flowers in a garden usually smile without making any sound as I have been used to seeing in Bangladesh. But it seems flowers in Maryland smile with a sheepish grin at the end of winter and then laugh in exuberant colours at the advent of spring. Flowers also dance, as I now see in Maryland, when the branches of the trees and plants, short and tall, garbed in their fresh green leaves with flowers clinging sway in the wind to the music of birds twitting.
With the eyes of a Bangladeshi as I look around in Maryland I find only flowers and greenery, a puzzling beauty I am not accustomed to. Wherever I cast my eyes I find flowers and flowers: in the gardens, on the grassy lawns, on the roadsides, on the balconies and in the wild bushes. As I walk on the walkways I find flowers on the sides giggling at me. As I sit on a bench at a bus stop under a shade flowers again wink at me from a corner just outside of the shade. As I enter an office premises flowers at the entrance greet me with a smile of welcome!
I have never seen so many colours, so many flowers, so much fragrance and so much care of the gardeners as I have now been witnessing in the springtime Maryland in America. I wish I could be a poet to paint the splendour of spring that has sprung the nature to unfurl its beauties.
“How do you feel with the springtime greenery in Maryland?” I asked Mini, my sister-in-law, as she was driving me and my wife to Montgomery Mall. She replied: “This is marvelous”. “But, do you find something amiss in the greenery, Maswood Bhai?” she asked. “I don’t. What is that?” I replied. Her narration: “When I first came to Maryland decades back I wondered why the greenery was so unfamiliar to me! Then, to my amazement, I discovered the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle! There is a plenty of green trees in Maryland; but there is a scarcity of water. You won’t find many canals or creeks in Maryland, let alone huge lakes or turbulent rivers. To my view, green trees in Maryland—without canals and rivers crisscrossing the land—looks like a paragon of beauty in a lady who is blind”. “Wow! You are so right, Mini”, I exclaimed.
Yes, Maryland must bow her head in shame when she would attempt to compare herself with my country Bangladesh, a country so soft, so wet, so soaked by water everywhere and so graced by the lush green of the nature. Maryland population of trees and plants don’t find water so readily available to quench their thirsts like in Bangladesh. They have to depend on small pockets of water preserved in the niches of rocks and layers of soils deep underground. Birds are there in Maryland to fly and chirp around; but not many water fowls, ducks, gooses and swans are there to swim on canals or to dive into lakes, producing the raspy quacks, so familiar a sight and a sound we have been used to enjoying in Bangladesh!
The writer can be reached at e-mail: maswood@hotmail.com
http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/more.php?news_id=134393&date=2011-05-03
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