YD6-68(TRT) Into the Veil of Nyx: West of the Padma River
BOOK SYNOPSIS: Step into this journey of becoming, where the cosmos whispers its secrets, and identity blooms like dawn. This story is an unfolding suite of chapters clarifying my book: The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring: How The universe Sculpted Our Minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness, aware of her need for a body to reveal herself and exercise her wishes, the narrative leads to her birth and the name she will claim: Sunshine.
Epigraph: Nyx drapes the road in her patient hush, while Helios, exiled, smolders at the rim. Aetheria waits in reflections not yet cast, her message buried beneath hornbeats and forms. The ledger signs what myth won’t confess, and silence, at last, is mistaken for arrival.
#RoadToKhulna, #AetheriaAndNyx, #BangladeshJourney, #FieldworkUnraveled, #NightCrossing, #SurveyInShadow, #FerryAndStrike,
YD6-68(TRT) Into the Veil of Nyx: West of the Padma River
Besides Ibrahim—mustachioed, pudgy, a liaison from the National Security Intelligence (NSI), or akin, folded into my team—who flickers wide-eyed, exclaiming: ‘Ho!’ to the service road ahead: the jockey figure, saddled deep into his backrest—he who tweaked the ignition. Six pistons growl awake, coaxing us toward the chaos of the intersection. While Kashem in the passenger seat translates back to me, steering away from the sky-scraping, glittering Sonargaon Hotel—where Michel and I had spent the last few days gathering teams for the expedition.
At the twirl of a traffic officer’s arm, our jockey driver noses us toward the three-lane snarl of downtown Dhaka. A hush—the officer's whistles caught mid-breath—as a lone rickshaw man, skeletal legs treading, slips across the intersection. Our Jockey driver shivers, edging forward, facing a stalling tangle ahead. Displeased gazes from rickshaw figures, contrary to pedestrians darting across the restless trail of yellow Vespas, objecting to the constrained discipline. Drivers, obscured in the shadows of reflecting windshields, sit sentient—behind bestial radiator muzzles amidst dim headlights—cars, pickups, microbuses—all impatient for the onslaught. Through the deserted breach, we complete a U-turn, circling the concrete median, straggling into the opposite triple lanes, trailing dull taillights.
The jockey driver - honk, honk, honk. . . - threads us through a tone-deaf herd of honking chaos. But the traffic thins. The median unravels. Lanes dissolve. The leading flow loosens, its swarm unraveling. The city shed its flurry of storefront lives, commercial facades, straddling into dark, beaten-earth road shoulders—bleeding into shacks that unravel toward the countryside. A wavering stitch of suburb trails along the narrow two-lane artery, where rickshaws stream in gentle Indian file. Reaching frustration. I ask. “Why do you keep honking when the way is free?”
Kashem, translated—as the jockey figure—answers without a flinch, calm as a midday siesta. “It’s a necessity.” He upholds the horn-blowing—a creed. But gradually, the honks return—the jockey’s nervous tick, involuntary—filling the cabin with each pulse. A line of rickshaws stretches ahead, shuffling in procession. Until one breaks rank. A reckless pusher—feet spinning like a treadmill—edges past at a snail’s pace, unconscious of our fivefold-speed approach. Motorized, we weave past the rickshaw speeder, through a trickle of oncoming traffic. My words still echo. “Kashem--Now! If he hoots, I can understand.”
The jockey’s wrist, locked on the steering wheel, hinges—his lingering hand succumbs to the twitch of a beat, fallen loose. A restraint pulse drags backward to the fleshy heel, settling onto the rim. A semblance of twitch rolls across the ball of his hand—sporadic ghost beats, held in check. But then—fallen to the ball of his thumb—taps in the air, rehearsing in mind: ‘unnecessary.’ Until his thoughts relapse. The thumb-tip fine-tunes, a pianist tapping the same note. A counter-voice whispering—‘Keep alert!’ Then a twitch—leaps. A blow to the horn. And retreats. Mindless, his hand folds back to its perch. Discipline, dissolved. The cycle resets. The rhythm returns—thumb tracing from the ball to the nail—a loop etched in the circuitry of the mind.
My mind, too preoccupied by the emerging new world, keeps Aetheria at bay—her dawning withheld from thought—as before me, the asphalt band bleeds, its charcoal hue absorbing light, darkening the wayside. Void of mirage, absent the shimmer that speaks her 'I’m here'—the message desert reflects when they deceive. Our jockey driver scrambles to ‘Heu’ us past a lumbering bus.
We overtake one bus, tail the next. Only to fall behind another. Gecko men cling to its fenestrated chassis—hands, feet, silhouettes swarming—a few shadows crouch atop the roof. The bus halts before us, blinding the oncoming roadway. The gecko figures slither down windows, then leap—while farther ahead, boys and girls spill through the crack of the bus’ door.
Others squeeze back in, clinging to every seam of the chassis. The raw crowd circle, blind to gecko climbers, reabsorbed by the beast. I ask, “Do they also pay a fare?”
Like foam settling into a pool of water—The crowd, straggling, composed—faces the zebra stripes. The bus pulls away, and we, too, glide past the still mass, poised at the edge of the crosswalk.
Kashem, without a stray glance, replies, “Yes. The moment you climb a moving vehicle, you have to pay.”
As the village unravels and stitches itself to green fields, we pull beside a shaky wayside stall. A colored array of Jerrycans crowns a table. We step out, stretching limbs, while diesel funnels into the SUV’s tank—then sink back into our seats. The jockey figure drives us on, along the two-lane highway, traffic loosening, exhaling into the polders.
Men tread sportive on rickshaws, their tiered silhouette skeletal against the light. Buses and upcoming trucks—patachitra muzzles—lift their enshrined chassis into view, sunlight animating their organic graffiti. Fenestrated panels stretch and flip into drop-side cargo beds, veering across unmarked lanes, shunting past rickshaws.
The sight explodes my curiosity, unspooling my question. “Why—these bright paintings?”
Kashem replies, reciting from an old creed, “It’s to make the bus beautiful.”
We cruise, straddling flatlands tapering into blur—polders stretched like a giant’s bristle carpet. Fluorescent green fields unfurl beneath the retreating hush of daylight. The moist earth lies sheeted by nature’s weave.
We pass the polarized solitary cultivator—wealthier, he who plows single-handed—his tilting blade trailing behind two thick tractor-wheels, donkeying forward through the hush of distance, the shimmer of a brand-new small engine. A break from the expectancy: a man swinging a hoe over his shoulder, chopping the earth into dusk.
The road, in pursuit of the flatlands, bends beneath the breath of Helios. His arc falters—sunlight softens, shying away. My mind unmoors. It slips—drawn by the immediate, intense world—astray from perceiving the mirage of Aetheria. Her will, sculpted in fractured light, in the bold marionettes of her destiny—like dew on a blade of grass cashing a sunflare—a gleam in a buttling dark landscape that fails to hold my gaze.
Nyx following close, catching up with the veil of dusk—the pitch-black ink spilled a river hiding its stream, laying stagnant like prey, lost between the Himalayas and the sea. After crossing the bridge, a headlight beam awakens our course, shrinking the polders as they funnel into the roadway, twilight’s discreet shadow across our shoulders—Nyx’s farce revealing itself in the slew of rickshaws brushing out from the roadside bush, their passengers peaceful, spectral.
Specters of battered buses and trucks—worse than visor-crowned—emerge from the dark depths of night, leopard-slinking, their lights half-blind, one-eyed, or absent to hollow sockets. A glimmer in passing—our compact glow brushes theirs, and still, they do not flinch. Blind workhorses nosing forward, survivors of long wars.
We’ve entered the clandestine hour—when traffic officers have left the roads, home by candlelight, among family. The highway bustles, but there’s nothing to fear, while we trail, assuming the stream ahead. Still, my mind reels at the magnifying recklessness—price wining: glassless, hollowed bus chassis drifting a carcass across the night road—without the flicker of a cigarette light.
We pass the apron to a disbanding junction—its road dissolving strangely into the void. ‘What could lie out there, without the flicker of a village light?’ We skip the curiosity of trailing the spill of headlights into the evanescent stretch of asphalt—mourn the side road, desolate, as the world slumbers in an isolation beyond reach. Soon forgotten, in our pursuit of the thoroughfare.
The peaceful beam of our headlight brushes the bitumen like a lullaby—until it ricochets, sudden and upward, off a looming block. Lights shatters beneath a stalled truck’s undercarriage. ‘Ambush!’ my mind flashes, as if we are all tuned to the same frequency—our thoughts in the weather, filling the chassis blind to a world without windows.
Trotting along our course—but no—our jockey driver slackens to a snail’s pace. The windshield frames out, absolving our sight of the roadway ahead. To my utter surprise, the dashboard dims, as our headlight beams boomerang the glow into our eyes. We slow—slothful—to a halt, right up to the tailgate. A cargo trampoline fills our view—too close, too mute. I seethe at his lethargy. His lack of foresight. My arm shoots, finger slicing through the air toward the free lane—out of this snare. To snap him awake. I bark. “Pass there. . .” The oncoming lane had been clear—no approaching spec of light. Anything to exit this sentient rat trap.
The driver’s obliging hand drifts off the steering wheel, gesturing toward the gear stick, while his mind struggles to lift from the comfort of his perception. Unconvinced, he shifts gears—reversing from the tarpaulin tailgate, as if wakening from a half-held thought. Hesitation grips the first gear. He pulls forward, headlights slewing offside, arousing a train of umpteenth cargo tarpaulin trucks.
The driver throttles the idea of overtaking. But then—shadows bounce from the darkness, sweeping an agitated flashlight, batons banging across the hood. One shadowing the other bandit emerge, signaling the jockey driver to maneuver back in line. Lights fold the tarpaulin tailgate to darkness, as the pistons knock a final revolution—and the bandits absorbed by the night.
I ask Kashem, “What have they said. . .”—then again, at translating past the incomprehensive driver? Kashem, mumbles too soft—as the driver jolts under the bouncing back baton-bandits. Metallic clangs strike around the chassis, circling—until one is left bashing beneath the rear window.
My Sun in Warthog awareness: sentience forged to instill fear. But I do not fear. Silence seizes the men’s palpable aura, shrinking them into fright as an unimaginable metallic twang resonates—enshrouding the interior with its spell. I ask, “Who are they—what do they want?”
As my team holds their silence—sentient of their shame in the darkness, over the violent behavior of their own—I vault over the backrest into the driver’s seat. I shift gear, reverse from the canvas tailgate, and spin the SUV around in the roadway. But my imagined reaction is thwarted, exiled to an overprotected corner—sealed by men too resistant to confide in me. A flashlight slices through the half-wound-down driver’s window. The driver’s eyes skint. And in a guttural breath, Kashem translates for me to hear: “There is trouble ahead.”
The clanging stops. The bandits vanish into the folds of the night, the impact still trembling through the chassis. I repeat, louder, insistent: “What’s going on—what do they want?” The night hangs, waiting. Until, Kashem says, “They’re Hartal. . . and want to know if we know about the general strike.”
‘That’s not a strike?’ I reflect—but the thought barely forms before the chassis jolts, loud metallic twangs, reverberating through the cabin, keeping us on alert. At the half-wound-down window, the driver flinches, leans toward the upper gap—whispering—fishing behind in his hip, pulling a wad of notes from his pocket. Bribing. From the night: a hand—swift—swoops in and snatches them. Gone.
Then the flare—a flashlight’s beam returns, sweeping across the shirt in the passenger seat in broken arcs, to Kashem’s window, catching the briefest flash of glass. He spots Ibrahim’s chest behind the driver’s backrest, dropping the flashlight beam to his lap like a judge’s gaze—lingering briefly rest on still hands.
The bandit’s face on the verge of withdrawing—but the driver’s guard unsettled him. The flashlight sweeps back, spotting me in the lost corner. He catches the driver’s protest. A hand jabs - clacks - a slap slips across the driver’s check. He calls for my ring. As I slipped the encrust diamond along a Star of David off my pinky, he turns his craggy face away. Half-withdrawing from the gapping window. His gaze drifts past the tail-tented truck, down an alleyway of line-up haulers. He pauses—silent gazes cast forward, a sentry at his checkout post. Then, his face returns—bestial, backlit—flaring now at my wristwatch, instead of demanding my ring oblivious to mind. But the bandit’s mind, toggles, his eyes slip away, returns the spotlight pooling my lap, he nods—my wallet. I’ll shift my weight, awkward on the bench, when he drops his demand for the black leather bag, cowering beside me.
The bandit’s eyes—still insistent—press in the driver’s face as I offer a defense: “It’s only a computer.” I say. Reluctantly, I thread Rico’s black leather bag between the front backrests. The driver relays—proud—‘There are no valuables!’ He shows the bandit, ‘This isn’t money,’ unzipping it as the flashlight beam vanishes into one dark cavity to the next. But then—a hand, spectral and swift, slips through the half-wound window, and extracts my leather wristbag. Outside, four hands clumsily wrap my purse like a specimen, pass into a workshop of shadows, bath in a pool of light. A plumber’s pipe slips beneath the clasp, tweaks—the lock snaps. Hands dive, pulling free banknotes—tempting to flutter away—and the traveler’s checks. My certainty. Then, they toss the purse back. The night absorbs them.
Shouting—over Kashem’s unraveling—aimed at the jockey driver, to sense the urgency in the bandits' distraction by their loot that offered us. “Turn around. Get out of here.” My finger jabs the trip odometer to zero. But my words didn’t land, Kashem freaking, crying, “We must go back to Dhaka.”
We back up—what ought to have been instinctive, feels delayed, as if freedom required permission. In the hollow of darkness, the jokey gains his confidence, performing a tree-point Y-turn, bringing us to face the road back to Dhaka. I lean through the backrest, breaking the silence.
“How you’re going to pay for the diesel?” I asked him.
Kashem’s eyes dart to the rear, where the luggage is packed tight. With a tilt of the chin, he says: “I have money in my bag,”
“Why didn’t you tell me? You said they took all your money.”
Kashem nods, “Yes.”
I stare past the SUV’s windshield, into Nyx's gapping night—a cosmic vacuum swallowing the debris of Helios, silencing Aetheria from dreams. My mind reorganizes the chaos. ‘We’ll leave it as it may be,’ I reflect. “But, that doesn’t mean we’re going back to Dhaka.” I say. “I came here to do a job. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
I press again, “No—First tell me—how far we can drive on the diesel left in the tank?” The question dangles. Kashem is baffled. I repeat myself—unknitting the words with sharper edges, insistent, attuned. He mutters to the driver, who casts a glance at the dashboard fuel gauge. Still perched in the strange theater of aftermath, our BT&TB, Bangladesh Telegraph & Telephone Board representative from head office—remains quiet.
I baffled Kashem again, asking. “Where is the nearest telephone?” I can read their smoking thoughts, and the men exchanging glances, riddled by the obvious. With pride, Kashem replies, “… It’s open twenty-four hours.”
Through the silhouettes of two figuring shadows in the front seats, the headlights remain steadfast—awaking the slender roadway, until the disguised apron flares offside—that surprising T-junction we had flushed past earlier in the night. We crawl the corner, pursuing a tapering road into vanishing—but Kashem’s directions shift. He navigates. The headlights sweep off that secondary road into a veining dirt road, rising onto a molehill path, to reach a crowing palisade of cigar-shaped trees—halt in front of an expendable metallic gate, leading to a looming colonial outpost mansion.
I urge—pressure rising words. “If the telephone exchange is operative all night, then there must be somebody on the property.” Half-hinged in doubt, Kashem steps down, hesitates, then circles the front fender, breaking into the glow of the headlight.
Kashem, bathes in glare by the grill gate pillar, speaks to a semaphore. Then, like a hand washes—unscrews a bolt; the grill folds open. The BT&TB technician—slink and coiled—presses his shoulder to the gate, signaling the jockey driver to pull up the SUV behind him. We tail the figure toward a sketchy, looming mansion, folded in Nyx’s shadows—his strides unperturbed by the light-blinded zombies of the old woods. He shirts a shrubby roundabout, stepping toward the whitewashed corner. Around the flank, he lifts a hand, wraps the blind facade’s door.
A bulging belly, swaddled in a white tunic, protrudes from the straight edge of the wall—flawed with wonder at the brevity of Kashem’s words. Then vanishes, swallowed by the crack in the doorway.
We follow, catching up with Kashem down a meager-lit corridor, beneath a sleepy bulb toward the far door. The figures vanish, to find them in a substantial room, the relic of a switchboard in the quiet hours of the night features in the far corner. But, alert and hefty, a switchboard operator, draped in a white thobe listens in—in a streamline exchange, he slides the handset across the switchboard to Kashem. I stand—alone, marooned, unable to grasp the thread. Impatience ripples through me. I cut Kashem speaking on the telephone. “Who are you speaking to?”
“The police,” Kashem says.
I sift through Kashem’s reply—“You have to lay an official charge at the police station.” He re-dials. Again, the police station. After an exchange, return the receiver to the all-night telephonist, and we fold back into the room.
“Yes. They’re coming here,” Kashem says. Before ten minutes could unfurl, the officer enters the room—khaki uniforms pressed with pride, a baton gripped like scepters. The senior officer, flanked by two others, steps forward, extends a handshake. He pursues an incomprehensible dialogue, threaded between the men and my team. Wordless, they lead me away—outdoors, around the telephone station, back into the waiting SUV chassis.
We drive a growl, pulling from the front yard’s roundabout—headlights sweeping wide, glancing off a stationary van’s open tailgate. Revealing armed soldiers in combat uniform, rifles ready, flushed from the shadows. We leave the Isuzu van behind, onto tracking back down the slope, the road to the T-junction—turning off, onto the straight deserted thoroughfare to Khulna.
Cruising through the evanescent countryside, headlights skim the edges of sleep—fields hushed, we locate the wayside store shacks, deserted for the night. We slow—on the spot, where the jockey driver blinded us into the tailgate of a tented tarpaulin two hours ago. We step from the SUV.
The driver, restored—a cup of tea cradled in his hands, steam rising. He sits beside a soldier from the joint base, while a second stands at the edge of our trailing lane. A bamboo pole raised to his palm, bowing toward the red glow of a muzzled paraffin lamp, as headlights bloom, drawing nearer. A truck slows to a stop. The soldiers peel back the truck’s breathing canvas, searching inside—nods. The truck rumbles onward, trailing into the folds of the night.
“What are they doing here?” I ask.
Kashem says, “We’re close to the India border.”
At a guess, we were witnesses—as if they were searching for a culprit, and keeping us close by—but then, we embark. We cruise behind the leading Isuzu van, the road stuttering over the metal seam of rail track, onward to a zebra hump—the van slows to a halt, bringing us to stop beside a straw-thatched house.
We idle behind. Someone raises a voice, a hand signal. Kashem, translate. “It’s further…” While I watch, the police’s stern expression avoids hearing. Then, his face softens. Kashem translates: “Their jurisdiction ends at the railway.”
The younger officer, posted at our jockey driver’s window, leans in—then withdraws. “He’ll contact the other side,” Kashem translates. The policeman’s face turns away, baffled too, in search of a phone. He fades into a distant blur, shadowing wayside retailer shacks, tight alleys—by distant gestures, a phone booth buried in the clutter. He returns, to stand by, waving our jockey driver on. The diesel engine growls, pulling off a short stretch—headlights gliding over rail tracks, flaring up as we approach a police officer grounded by the roadside.
A fresh face fills the driver’s window. By courtesy, I step out—a transfer of jurisdiction unfolds a quiet choreography. Kashem dialogues for a quarter-hour, while I linger near the SUV’s flank, listening to the village wake—a cough stir—then I return to the SUV.
When a living bust dawns in the window, rifle cradled as if part of his anatomy. Kashem asks, “Can you make space for this man?”
I say, “Sure.” I open the door. He folds in. The Khulna officer, by an eyesight, taps the driver’s shoulder, points down the road. We cruise the stretch, dusk piggybacks a rickshaw, past the man pedaling to start his day. We veer off the thoroughfare, entering a village—a rooster cries—and pull up in front of a backdated building, whitewashed, but time-stained. Doors fling like startled wings. Familiar silhouettes—my team—wiggle out of their seats while the rifleman steps down to the sidewalk, crossing through the glow of an open door, disappearing in its quiet, bureaucratic dawn.
By seven-thirty, Kashem reappears at the SUV’s flank window. “We can go now,” he says. I open the door, he climbs into the rear. Behind Kashem, a police officer approaches, Kashem translating, “His superior has to agree.”
A nod toward the ledger, the form, the signature—the robbery now recorded—an assurance to recover Philips TRT's advanced five-hundred dollars for mission expenses, slipped into last night’s shadowplay. Our purpose here-on diverges from the police: they chase the bandits. I have no heart left to dwell in this dim village. No reason to wait for some half-sleeping superior to ink approval with a lukewarm sigh. The officer shrugs, reading me, Kashem says. “Khulna isn’t far.”
Comments
Post a Comment