Tangerine sunlight and Samira Abbasi

`Of moon and sixpence' is one of my favourite books by Somerset Maugham. The protagonist of the book, originally a middle aged stockbroker, left his home and disappeared. He had gone off to Tahiti and had become a painter!

Samira Abbasi studied civil engineering as a student of BUET and then left for John Hopkins University where she earned her Master's in Environmental Engineering. She learnt music from her early childhood and also performed in BTV, took part in debates and dramas, stood second in the combined merit list in SSC and HSC and has always been considered a `child prodigy' of the times when she lived in Bangladesh. 

Her husband Professor Khaled Sobhan had just completed his PhD and Samira was a new mother. Samira described her long journey and experiences with her Guru Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty to me. She had travelled with him in USA, she learnt, she practiced with table accompaniment (hard to find in USA) and kept up her musical pursuit.

I expected that of her, music has always been running through her veins. She taught music in Chicago and other places where she lived. She also started an Abbasuddin Shongeet Academy in USA, all in the same breath, as an inheritor of the Abbasuddin legacy, it was nothing unusual. She had learnt Urdu ghazals and carved a niche amongst music lovers in USA, performing on various occasions. Then she published her first Bangla book `America kache theke dure' and next one (a collection of short stories) `Golpogulo bhalobashar'.

In 2013 she started a quarterly Bengali life-style titled `Pakhi' which she edits from her home town in Florida.

I met one of her friends from School, Dr. Shikha Chokroborty. She said, `Nashid apa, Samira wrote so well. We could beat her in every subject but not in Bangla, when she wrote essays and her literary mind took off with wings, we were all left behind in the race.'

But she never took part in any race. Her class fellows became foreign ministers, ambassadors, business magnates. She left her job as an engineer and home-making took priority but her musical pursuits continued. She did not complain. First she gave us a CD of Urdu ghazals and then another one of Nazrul songs and then innumerable performances for various TV channels which are available on YouTube. The more challenges came her way, the more productive she became.

Then came the era of Facebook, and often I spotted very sweet poems, full of passion, love, new analogies, mixed with the touch of Nazrul, which has been an inherent legacy from the Abbasuddin family.

In 2011 she published a book of English poems, and some of them were written in joint collaboration with a German born US friend of hers, Demetrius Branca. They met during a web based course. The product of their friendship is published in the book titled `The Veil', carrying other poems by Samira alone.

Samira writes:
Does the thought of death scare you? Or are you scared of life?

Do you want to live your life, or just watch it go by?

Demetrius replies:

I am the Phoenix

I am rising from my ashes

I am blazing a fiery path into the sky

When I finished the book, I imagined a house with poems written all over the place. Just as the paintings of Strickland in Maugham's book, adorned the villa in Tahiti, no one knew!

The author is an academic, Nazrul exponent & writer.