I traverse the routes of memory

To revisit sunny afternoons

Spent in childhood's gardens

Many years ago, I used to spend my afternoons in a garden – an Eden of lush vegetation, birds and myriad insect life, bathed in that brilliant light only found in the tropics, the latitudes where Earth dons her loveliest raiment. The intense colors of those days are woven into the texture of my quintessential being, to be freed onto the blank page.

Turn back the clock, zoom in on a country formed by the silt of the three great rivers that flow to the Bay of Bengal: Padma (the Ganges, nicknamed Buriganga), Meghna, Jamuna, and their countless tributaries. It is the land of the flat delta, the alluvial soil (among the most fertile in the world) being deposited by the rivers: it is Eastern Bengal, Bangladesh today. Once the granary of India, erstwhile producer of Dhaka muslin – a luxurious fabric prized in the seventeenth century imperial courts of Europe and Asia. Here the climate is that of an eternal greenhouse, hot and humid, crops grow throughout the year. Nature's cornucopia includes palm trees, papaya, hibiscus, and other manifestations of nigh infinite bio-diversity that spring up beside the road, on the muddy footpath, planted by no man's hand. Since time immemorial the delta's loam has sustained civilization. Particularly since the cultivation of rice many thousands of years ago, civilization has flourished here, the fecund earth carefully cultivated to bring out the best of its natural predisposition to be fruitful. Rice and paddy fields chequer the landscape as far as the gaze can reach. An unbroken cultural tradition that dates back to antiquity expresses itself in poetry, song, dance and architecture that is graceful and pleasing to behold.