Admonishing Abinash
[Some context to the piece: Bengali Hindus, the indigenous people of Bangladesh, now on the verge of extinction, are once again facing a spate of brutal attacks across the Sheikh Hasina-led country at a time of celebration of the community’s biggest religious festival – the Durga Puja. Reports accompanied by photographs and videos of vandalised pandals smashed clay images of deities, burning households, and desecrated temples in Comilla, Noakhali, Chandpur, and Chittagong have been pouring in on the social media since the night of Maha-Ashtami, a day considered to be especially auspicious by Bengali Hindus when the five-day-long Bengali Hindu festival of Durga Puja reaches its peak. Across the border, there’s no sign of the CAA being implemented in India either, and no respite for the hapless Bengali Hindu in his ancestral land. Promises are made only to be broken?]
Abinash, stop knocking at the door. No one is coming to answer it.
Sorry, but your life doesn’t matter, Abinash. Nobody gives a damn about you – about the fact that you, too, exist. Therefore, hide away your sorry self from public sight. In this wide, wild world, your existence or non-existence doesn’t make much of a difference.
Don’t be unreasonable, Abinash! Speaking up for you is not profitable by any good margin – it’s going to fetch neither glamour nor votes. By lending their support to people like you, no government is going to gain any advantage in international trade, and no leader is going to win any personal glory that can assure them of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Therefore, go away – and be silent while you and your folks exit the stage.
We trust your persecutors to take care of your and your family’s safety – they are in the best position to protect your temple and household. To the best of our knowledge, the embassies of both countries have congratulated each other for upholding peace and rule of law. Nothing more is needed to be done.
You’re not from some exotic locale in the Middle East, are you now, Abinash? Evidently, you are not. Your skin is a bit too dark for that – and that’s not very helpful to pull off good photo-ops either – and so, Abinash, your rights do not matter. You or your family or your people do not feature anywhere in the global programme of plucking and distributing the golden fruit hanging from the lower branches of the forbidden Tree of Rights that graces the Garden of Eden.
Abinash, you damned fool! How could you ever believe that you’ll be welcomed in a foreign land with foreign arms wide open? How could you think, even for a second, that rescuing you from those hyenas who hound you day and night will be charitably prioritised over votes, you idealist idiot? And look, Abinash, the elections are now gone, at least for some time they aren’t coming back in these parts – and alas! that little experiment didn’t even yield the desired results. No gain, no righteous pain! So, you can now take your stinking fish-eating body back across the border, Abinash – and you can practice your weird voodoo rituals of offering sacrificed meat and fish curry to the goddess while staying in those marshlands where you belong; there, do your stupid stuff all you want!
And while you make your god-ordained silent exit from this world, take along that funny tongue with you, the one in which you speak – or garble, more like – by whose virtue you make those horrible rounded rustic sounds. For you know very well that your mother’s tongue – naturally ranking far below such stately languages like Urdu and Hindi – doesn’t matter to us either. It can rot away under loads of Middle Eastern words for all we care. Now off with you and your boorish tongue!
The temple where you worship has the blood of innocent animals on its floor. How horrible! How primitive! The goddess in your temple drinks up blood! No, you fool – only you could make your pea-sized brain imagine such barbaric horrors. The goddess doesn’t want blood – year after year she is perfectly happy to listen to the loudest DJ and the monotonic-monotonous refrains cut up from the Bollywood cloth for nine nights non-stop! You flesh-eating glutton! Even during Navratri, your lust for animal meat doesn’t take a break! Away with you, fool – shoo!
Your lot are weaklings, Abinash – you have never been able to defend yourselves – or so we would like to believe. Who cares about the historical eye which would dig out the heroism and sacrifices of the Agni Yug revolutionaries or the untold saga of the armed resistance of 1971 or even the obscure Bango Sena! The set story about your folks is also the convenient story – for it’ll smoothen the passage of your extinction from 40% to 23% to 7% to nihil. Arrivederci, Abinash!
