Nothing on earth could possibly make me happier than the day on which I landed at the Toronto International Airport (now Pearson) on October 13, 1972.  I recall, my emotion reached a new height of intensity as I was bubbling with profound joy and high spirit. From early on, I had a sort of snobbish kudos in patronizing everything “English.” To talk turkey, I had in me a sentiment which had the strength and fervour of a belief. 

Soon I began to “Canadianize” myself in my new “home” having been enthused with the notion: “make our country your country.” Naïve as I was, I thought I had the whole world by the tale and foolishly did I flatter myself to have become a “Canadian” overnight like an overblown flower. London, Ontario, my first “home town” in Canada, remained to me for months a world of perennial surprise. The Thames River, which I had dreamed of thousand times, appeared to me enormously fascinating with its quiet, calm and serene atmosphere. As a sensitive young man of 23, for the first time and under extra-ordinary circumstances, I saw the real winter of London, Ontario. By Christmas 1972, I had already experienced the elements of indescribable beauties in natural sceneries. I was enthralled by the enchantment of winter frosts, with icicles fringing the eaves, and every bough and twig of the naked garden trees in the tingling air. 

One day, as my feelings billowed over my sensitive mind, I sat down upon a bench with an invincible desire to write meticulously about my inmost feelings of ineffable joys. As I tried to write about my beatific state of mind, I felt, as though, I was benumbed with a gust of wind. In the twinkling of an eye, my hand trembled. My feeling acted most deceitfully towards me. I realized I badly needed a steady flow of stock of words to express my feelings of the time. I experienced the whole gamut of feelings in one of the most traumatic moments of my life. 

Suddenly it began to pour and the first few drops of rain spattered in my jacket. In a twinge of conscience, I realized the ever pervasive and continuing reality of a dual character in me as my mind wandered back to those fragrant memories of my school days in a feeling of wistful longing for my country of birth. I became so enamoured of the beauties and memories of Bangladesh enshrined in my heart. Though by then I had lived in my new “home” only for six months or so, I felt as if I had been a castaway living in exile. My own sense of loneliness soon began to mirror in the landscape which had been a source of inspiration until then.  

Being imbued with a sense of patriotism, I came to realize that I had always loved what I had seen in Bangladesh - the bucolic scenes of Sylhet, where I grew up as a child, meandering rivers and lakes and fascinating hills and dales. I felt that there was something incongruous about my nature for I had been out of harmony with my own instincts. I discovered how wantonly I had neglected my own mother tongue in an attempt to “master” English Language from the time I enrolled at Dhaka University’s Department of English. In my fecklessly fatuous effort to learn English, I deprived myself of the opportunity of learning and honing the language of my foremothers. 

With a sudden overwhelming inrush of realities, I could not divest myself of the fact that I had not been true to my impulses; and that I had always pretended to have learnt a foreign language. My continued efforts to write in English, even with a tremulous hand, made me increasingly phlegmatic that brought no fruition to my desired poetic effusion. I became subject to fits of morbid melancholy and depression that only helped me dramatize my own sense of outrage and self-pity. I was forced out of imaginative world into recognition of un-enduring actualities of life. I was never able to scribble in English. With my poetic debacle, I came to a true self-awareness from delusion to self-recognition, from illusion to reality.