When the young die . . .

When the young die, something goes out of the souls of the ageing. When the young die or are done to death by nature, by the elements of the dark, it is the future which becomes the casualty. The future ought to have been that of society, of the nation they were part of. With the death of the young in unnatural circumstances --- the violence of men unable to spot the dreams in the eyes of those they mean to push to oblivion, the moves of policymakers sending young men and women off to wars they do not wish to fight --- the present clouds over with doubt. 

We who grow old, we who believe this country will be safe in the hands of the young have in unending tears seen scores of our young die in these past many days. They had the right, the ambition to live. They were that shining chapter in our history which promised us a meaningful chronicle in the times ahead. That chapter is now a sad collection of crumpled pages flung into the air, to be blown away to regions far from where these young once sang and danced and composed poetry for this land they loved beyond measure.

It has always been like this in history, our history. The young paid for national honour with their blood on a February day, for they were not held back by fear of the consequences. For them, their language, the alphabets and sentences they framed their thoughts and conversations in, mattered more than the ephemeral that was life. These young fell on the streets of this city decades ago in order to ensure that the Bengali language stood high, that the banner of national dreams fluttered proudly across the land.

Thus do the young pass on, for the young always have a cause to live for and then die for. We who are old, we who are in the autumn of life, did not believe in our wildest imagination that the young who perished in the couple of weeks gone by would so early on close their eyes on life, on the rainbow dreams which shone bright in their souls. We understood their cause even if we had questions about their strategy. But never did we think, even for an instant, that these young people would fall, one after the other, like dominoes in this land they were supposed to preside over as mature, full-grown adults someday.

We grieve for these dead young today. Their passing has drilled deep holes in our beings, has left the heart battered in us. We look at ourselves in the mirror, but do not see our own reflections. It is the faces of these young which the mirror superimposes on us, telling us through the trepidation coursing through our beings that these young were our children, that in their apparitions come alive the youth which was once ours. They did not wish to die before their time, but time and men brutally ready to pull the trigger did not give them leave to live beyond that moment of death.

When the heart stops beating in the young, suddenly and precipitately as it were, it is a lesson from history we go back to. All those graves on the beach in Normandy speak to us of the crushed dreams of the young in whose death their nations found the meaning of renewal. And in this beautiful but tortured land that we inhabit and grow old in, it is the legacy of the young who went to war many springs ago that we remain grateful to. In their sacrifices, in the spots where they fell with their faces to the foe, in the blood rushing from within them to bathe the soil, was our promise of liberty.

When the young die, we who live on feel with alacrity our autumn giving way to bleak winter. For these young in this land, the bounties of which enrich life for the millions of us, have chronicled our history and held aloft and kept alive the many glories that have added substance to our heritage. It was the young who put an end to the abomination that was a field marshal's dictatorship and opened the doors wide, to let in the earliest breeze of democracy. It was once again the young who reclaimed the country from a home-grown dictator and then handed us the keys to a liberal future.

It is those freshly dug graves, of the young we have now lost in this summer of our discontent, which speak to us, the ageing, of the aspirations which powered their dreams, of the doggedness of the values they held dear in their final days of life. Remembrance of these young will be perennial for their families, for the parents and siblings and friends and teachers they have left behind. 

We who could not save them, could not observe them cheerfully conclude the odyssey they had embarked on, will for all time, in their absence, feel the loneliness, the emptiness blowing like the dry, mournful wind in our souls. They were our children; they were our grandchildren. They were the force which caused the light to shine on all our lives, before life took leave of them.

When the young die, flowers wilt in grief, poetry shuffles off into the woods, songs come to an abrupt end.

When the young are pushed to death, it is the elegiac which is sounded through the woods, through our hamlets, through our valleys and streams and rivers and seas. 

In the graves of the young lie scattered all our dreams, shattered into pieces like so many shards of glass. In the darkening hour, we grieve in a profusion of tears. 

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a writer and senior journalist.
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