当我大约四岁的时候,玛玛吉和我会坐在窗边,看着外面起伏的山丘。我们会看着深绿色的奔宁山脉随着山顶上冉冉升起的太阳而改变颜色。那些郁郁不乐的云像灰色的面纱一样笼罩着天空,把群山笼罩在黑暗中。然后,当玛玛吉没完没了地谈论她的童年时,一抹橙色和桃红色的光芒就会从房子里透出来,反射到她的脸上。我们会看着飞机飞过山头,玛玛吉那水汪汪的眼睛呆呆地盯着,看着每一架飞机飞过,又消失在视线中。“又来了一个,”她叹了口气,回到壁炉旁,我们在那里吃着酥脆的黄油吐司和浓茶的早餐。我看着她把面包蘸到茶里,在杯子里泡着,面包上的汁液偶尔会滴到她的下巴上,她的嘴里大口地呼吸着没有说出口的句子。我每天早上都看着那空洞的眼神,看着窗外。“妈妈,孟加拉国在哪里?”一天早上我问她。 She sighed deeply between the morsels of bread and sips of tea. “It’s somewhere far, far away.” She whispered the vowels with long breaths as if to send each word there. “Farther than my school?” “Much farther – you couldn’t walk there. Oh, but it’s a beautiful place. Always green, there are rice fields, and the sun shines until it sets in the sky, and the children laugh and play all day.” A smile broke out on her lips, causing dimples in her cheeks and her eyes to sparkle as if by some miracle she was transported there. I smiled at the thought of being there. “Can we go there?” She rose up from the fireplace, slowly, almost dreamily walking to the window. “That would be all I’d wish for,” she said, shaking her head. “But it is not possible.” “Why, Mamajee? Why can’t we go back?” She breathed in as she looked up at the pale sky, the rolling towns across the Pennines, the stillness of it with the bare trees and shrubs that winter had now rendered lifeless across the landscape. A plane flew over, and her eyes followed it until it disappeared into a cloud. Her smile faded out, like sunbeams cast over by a rain cloud, as it passed out of sight. “Oh, can we go there tomorrow?” I asked eagerly. “No, not tomorrow.” Her expression saddened. “Why, Mamajee? Why can’t we go?” “Because…” She paused, distracted, shaking her head a little. She remained with her thoughts, unresponsive as she leaned her head against the window, her breath fogging up a circle against the glass. As she looked on through the window, she seemed suddenly distracted; her eyes were drawn to a light beam on the hill. A car had pulled up on the driveway of the white house that stood alone on the hill, surrounded by fields. From a distance, a man dressed in a suit could be seen entering that house. I saw Mamajee’s face turn as grey as the clouds above us as she stared on closely. Then I saw tears that fell like raindrops from her face, gliding down from the crevices of her nose and dropping from the angles of her chin. “Why are you crying, Mamajee?” I asked. I tried to swallow the buttered toast. I climbed up onto the windowsill to get a bet-ter view of what had saddened her. She took deep breaths that fogged the window, and I saw her hands tremble. “Because this is how it is written; everything is written this way. It was part of the grand plan. You, me, everything that has happened, everything that will happen, our entire existence, it is already written. We are only here to submit to Allah’s will. It is Allah’s wish, and we can’t change what Allah has written for us.” She seemed to tremble uncontrollably now, as if the words shook her to the core.
*
我一直在回顾一下,在我生命中的最后四十年,致力于通过页面,章节章节刻录的那些言语。我如何迷失在别人的故事中,别人的书,别人的梦想和别人的生活。我在那天渴望那一天,渴望它的纯真,在生命中用我的观点脱颖而出,在那个窗口中枯竭之前,它会被带走。之前,当它很简单时,我所知道的只是妈妈,房子和滚山。我回顾那一天,现在重新发现我已经知道的那样,你不需要单词的东西,或者用笔拼写。一个孩子,我那是四年的孩子,只选择被爱;真主的爱是幸福,是什么让我最开心的是感受到她的爱,感觉它像阳光比山上更远的阳光辐射。但是那一天发生了一些改变了这一切的事情。我已经意识到,虽然我的梦想被爱并取悦她,但她的梦想远非我们所在的地方;我们可能已经与那个窗口共享了同样的视图,但那一天是我意识到的第一天,我们肯定没有共享相同的角度。 I may have been four years old, but for the first time, some-thing that Mamajee said disagreed with me. You see, I wasn’t born for it all to be written for me. I was born to write it.