Children of The Sea 12: The Grand Finale

This pic is really making me nostalgic. This was taken in Inani beach. We have this "Pituni" series of photographs, where all of us gets beaten (fictitious beating, of course), and one of us takes a snap. Previously Afzal and Murshid got beaten, and this time it was Sujit's and Pintu's turn.

Kicking Away

My friends tried beating me up as well, but their attempts were half hearted, and the photo is not good at all. It seems like they are beating me and yet I'm having a blast.

We returned to the cottage and started dressing up for our departure. These pictures were taken during the final hours of our stay in Coxsbazar. Our bus was due at 11:00 AM, and we didn't have much time.

Just Before Leaving

These two pics were taken just before we were checking out of the cotage. The long and sad faces tells it all. The picture below was taken in Himchori, one of the more "photographful" parts of our tour. We took a lot of photos in himchori, partly because we were too exhausted to keep on walking, and partly due to the marvelous scenic beauty surrounding us.

Let me take you back to a flashback event of the tour. I was about to leave the GP job during the eve of the journey. I have already submitted my resignation, and I was just serving the notice period. We went shopping on the day of our departure, and boy it was a hectic day's shopping! We went to the market opposite to Dhaka college, popularly known as ODC(opposite dhaka college)! As soon as we ascended from the rickshaws, it started raining, and we got stuck in the wrong market. We had to stay there for a while, and then we moved on to other shops. The shopping was boring for me, as I had nothing specific to buy. I did end up buying a t-shirt and a three quarter pant, which later on proved to be quite handy. Apart from the useful stuff, we also bought a football. It cost me about 150 bucks, which everyone was supposed to pay me back. But this payment I never received! Also we had slight refreshments, which cost me another small fortune. Tushar and Pintu was with me, and we had some fun in a shop. The conversation started like this "Pant erokom crease pora ken? Amar ishtri kore newar shomoy nai". Then I suddenly asked

"When is your flight?"
"At 11 PM"
"Damn...er moddhe dhuye ishtri kora ekdom ee possible na"
"Yeah, and I really need these pants....Germany tey kapor choporer onek daam".

Okay did Tushar actually mention Germany? I don't quite remember. Probably my treachurous mind has made up this thing....and it'll naturally be Germany. When I first started writing this story, Afzal was still with us, in BD....but he left for Germany a few days ago. I really miss him. In the last year, he got really busy with his job. It was a very demanding job....a lot more demanding than mine, and he'd be really tired on Fridays, and hence he'd often skip our regular afternoon addas. I missed him in those addas, but I really missed him in this tour of ours. He was with us till the very last moment, only to not appear on the moment of leaving.

We carried the football all the way up to Coxsbazar, from Dhaka, and everytime we went out with beach in mind, someone of us thought about taking it along. But it never happened. Pintu was the initiator of this concept. Playing football besides the sea--a very exciting idea in writing, but in reality, it didn't seem that much convenient. Otherwise, why wouldn't the ball get his shot within these three days? The max we did with the ball was just kicking it around for a while on the final day. When we were packing up our belongings, it was clear that the ball wasn't going with us.

Poor ball....we couldn't even find a kid to give it away to. We gave the ball to the caretaker, who hesitantly accepted this gift from us.

We gave the keys to the manager, checked inside the two rooms one last time, for detecting any important things that we might be leaving behind, and then we got out and took those final set of photographs.

We bade farewell to the cottage, and walked out with heavy hearts. I couldn't believe the journey was coming to an end. It all seemed like a dream to me. The days flashed in my mind. I constantly replaying some of the fun incidents that occured.

We got on board the Hanif bus, the journey back was hectic and eventful. The bus stopped in Chittagong, where we got down to have lunch. The break was for 15 minutes, but it's quite impossible to have lunch within that short time. So we kept the bus stalled (with a lot of passengers) for about 15 minutes.

The driver was stolen from an NFS game...no the Porsche one, probably from NFS 2...where cars can run 400 kmh...he drove so fast that it was nearly impossible to sleep, even in the later hours of night. He even started competing with another rival company bus. The other driver was smart, and after 3 hours of heavy fighting (it was a fight, trust me), our driver spoke out loudly "Abar dekha hobe...tokhon dekha jabe". I was astonished, but all the other people behaved in a way as if this is the natural, expected behavior from a bus driver of Hanif.

We saved a lot of time due to the crazy driving, but we also lost that time when we entered Dhaka. The entrance to Dhaka, the Kachpur area, was horrendously jam packed, and we didn't get home before 11 PM...another full 12 hours journey.

Naturally, I was exhausted, but the happy feeling of getting back to home sweet home and reuniting with the family drove away all pains.

Is there any place better than home?

The End

Dear readers, thanks for reading! It is you who have inspired me to finally finish this epic.