Shuvro Biswas
~~~The Shuvro Chronicles~~~
A man wakes up one morning groggy and tired. He walks across his room and opens his curtains to let some sunlight in.
Outside roars on the world of the Bronx. Inside hangs a picture of a little boy smiling while sitting down in the middle of a field in a foreign countryside.
The man walks to the bathroom and looks at himself in the mirror. He sees a bearded and mustached face of a still pretty young man. This man is I, and this is a short and concrete version of the story of my life.
March 24, 1990: This was the day it all started; this was the day I was brought into the world. The world of Bangladesh: limited, messy, and chaotic. This was the world I would spend the first five years of my life in. This was the world in which most of my early development would take place.
Even though at first glance Bangladesh may not be the best place one would want to raise their child in due to its high rates of corruption, poverty, and crime, I believe I learned a lot by being raised in such an environment. Such an environment either breaks you, or makes you strong, and in my case I lasted. I lasted long enough to learn that the world isn’t the fantasy most children are brought up in. I learned that even though the world isn’t perfect, one could weather it with the opium of hope and optimism.
At age five, something incredible happened. My mother had won the Diversity Visa Lottery. This meant if we wanted we could move to America. Most Bengali’s would jump at such an opportunity, but our situation was unique. My dad, instead of continuing the family line of work of farming, had just graduated college with a degree in commerce and gotten a job as a banker. He was moving up in society rapidly, which is a pretty difficult feat in Bangladesh. Now, he was faced with the hardest choice of his life: continue living a decent life as a Banker or leave everything behind to move to America?
After days of painstaking brainstorming, my parents decided to leave everything behind and come to America for one reason. This reason was to provide my brother and I with greater educational and life opportunities than would be available in Bangladesh.
In America, we lived in New York City for our entirety. New York is unique in that it is a truly international city. We found a small Bengali community to live in, in the Bronx, even though the majority of people in our neighborhood were of Hispanic descent. The only problem this posed was that of communication. My parents spoke English, but the people in the community mostly spoke Spanish. However, we got by.
My dad found a pretty decent job as a pharmacy assistant at a local pharmacy. While he worked, I attended a local elementary school. There I assimilated with the Hispanic culture. This is how it continued to be throughout Junior High School. However, I would soon get into the Bronx High School of Science. There I would be exposed to many other cultures, namely the Chinese, Korean and Jewish cultures. While this came as a shock for me at first, I adapted to my new environment and grew to love it as I did my last environment.
Around the end of high school I got into the Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College. I chose to attend this college because it was the most economical of my college choices. It would mean that I would not have to graduate with a 100,000-dollar debt.
Recently, I have begun to think about what exactly I want to do with my life. I started contemplating the Air Force ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) program that would guarantee me a career right out of college. Furthermore, they would help pay for graduate school. The longer term one thinks, the better off one is. There is much more contemplation to be done, and much more places to be taken by life.
I was born poor like many men and basically had nothing.
In the wildernesses of Bangladesh where they like farming.
See my dad, he got tired of waking up to be a rancher.
Worked his way through college and became decent banker.
Luck bestowed on my mother won the Diversity Visa Lottery.
Which meant we could do more than write poor man’s poetry.
We came to America and tried to make something out of something.
Now I’m in college trying to figure out where I’m heading.
Nice line: “We came to America and tried to make something out of something”