At that time 4 chocolates were available for 1 taka. Free itching medicine was available at the hospital. If you jumped from the bridge, after a couple of hours you would find a muddy goof under your nose. But even if thousands were searched, pocket-filled yaba and phone-filled porn like now could not be found. Oh yes, we used to fish. Do you know the fake? Triangular blue mesh. Then I would enjoy hilsa as if I got puti fish.
I would wait in the evening, when the wind would blow loudly and this awkward thing (reading) would end. In the evening, when no one was around, I would take out the peacock from the book and measure it. Then I would give him chalk powder and put it back in its proper place. We thought the peacock was big. I would respect him as much as a peacock if he would please give me a baby peacock! In this way, peacock and chalk powder are mixed in our story, the smell of which we still find in the pages of every book. When you see sugar, think of it as cocaine, we 90s boys think of it as chalk powder at first. That is our simplicity. We used to collect polythene during the day or in the evening. To light a fire. My mother used to say that there was a fire in the wool sweater so we would take off the sweater and go to the fire. Turning the hands and feet out of the fire and piercing the skin of the finger with a needle was the highest sign of smartness at that time. It was a trend to burn a broken pen in a fire. This generation will never know the smell of burning polythene and pens, they will learn how to stick needles in the skin but will not get any exciting feeling. Because now they get the thrill of eating erotic clips and vegetables with red water.
We saw how a rope was tied to the top of a glass sprite bottle to bring kerosene. Gradually the rope would turn black and the bottle would be covered with dirt. The year 2000 will never know how the kerosene burns after extinguishing the stove, how the sound of one-on-one, two-on-two reading from every house in the evening beats the frog's roar, they will never know the book. They know YouTube tutorials, the smell of socks after school all day and books by foreign writers.
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Times have changed, I will not blame the age, I will not blame the time, I will not blame this generation. Blame us, blame this 90s. Why were they so beautiful that the next days did not even come close to their side? In those days, Facebook was not a prisoner on YouTube, so we spent our childhood in the fields, in the haors, in the fire, in the water, in the forest. Will you ever be able to suppress our McGuire, Alif Laila and the new bud with your Game of Thrones, YouTube and Facebook? What do you think? Can you?