In the Netrokona Countryside
by Joseph Immel

On the veranda at night, bright orange flowers are sleeping in their mother's arms. The hanging cedar wood smoke smells sour and perfumed. Soft white moths and beetles crackle in the porch light. Auntie sits beneath the moonlight in her rocking chair, remembering a ghost story.

Along the road, cloaked in the mist of the night, a young man journeys by oil-lamp playing a flute. I think of joining him on his road and in my imagination the distant notes float on the thick humid air over the rice paddies.

Soon my flute teacher and his friend arrive in the garden. We can hear that the Bengali nighttime is a chorus of flutes. He asks permission to play and I tell him, "Yes." His friend covers his head with a blanket and hides his feet under his lungi to avoid the mosquitoes.

Later, I sing about the sound of silence and explain the meaning in Bengali. They say it is, "romantic". I'm tired, and auntie is already sleeping so I go to bed wrapped in a thin cloth.

A termite loudly eats dinner inside the dresser. The mosquitoes are still singing many songs. I fall asleep but realize I am dreaming of demons; the malaria medicine wakes up my mind. Sound and visions move throughout the night, even consciously I am aware of them.

The morning adjhan floats in and out my consciousness. Frogs sing in the rice paddies, ceaselessly ignoring the call to prayer. Then flat clouds hover in the pink and blue. The marooned sun, nature's lazy farmer, sits in the grass under a tree near the horizon. And nothing moves except an old tattered cow crossing the roadway.