Ei Tara, Shei Tara
	
	“Ei Tara, shei Tara. This star is that same star. These stars I look up to tonight this night are the same stars my grandfather’s fore fathers looked up to. These stars are the stories of the heavens and the Earth and all in between. There lies the star that you will follow home. They are a map that we can no longer read.  We have betrayed the trust of their knowledge so they retreat back into the sky of which they came. We took for granted the natural beauty that shrouded us from the beginning of time. We have insulted their generosity and replaced them with artificial light. So they abandoned us as we abandoned them. But still they come to those who still need them.”
	“Where did they go, grandfather?” the boy asked inquisitively, “I do not see a single one here.”
	“What about those children back in the villages of Bangladesh? They don’t have streetlights on every corner or building lights at night. They have the stars. When I was a boy, my grandfather and I would look at the stars from the meadow. Some of them would soar across the sky as if they were to crash into the Earth. They bring together our world with that of the heavens. But of course you can’t see them here because the ambience we have created distorts our eye’s perception of the cosmos.” replied the old man. He looked down at they young astonished face, wonderstruck by the passion the boy felt for the ways of the old world his generation had long forgotten. 
	“I want to catch a shooting star one day,” the boy stubbornly said.
The old man laughed at the young boy’s fierce determination, much to the boy’s dismay. 
	“One day I will catch a shooting star and then I will bring it to you,” he argued. 
	The boy sat there and looked up to the sky above his New York City flat. It was noisy and unnaturally illuminated by a fuzzy, yellow glow. There were few visible stars and he searched the sky for a shooting star. Every airplane that twinkled was a disappointment to his eager eyes. He longed to see the stars that his grandfather had seen.  He longed to see a shooting star.
	That boy became a man. And that man stood looking at that same New York sky many years later, but it was not the same. 
	“Ei Tara, shei Tara,” he repeated the old Bengali proverb. It meant this star is that same star that your ancestors looked at and the same ones your descendants will look at. He stood there considering the irony. These stars were not the same ones he had saw with his grandfather. He doubted his descendants would see them either. This world was being consumed by cities that burned the night away and beat it back into space. Tonight there were fewer stars than that night some twenty years ago, if that was possible. After his grandfather passed away, for the first time, but definitely not the last, he felt no one understood him.  He asked himself then, “Who will watch the stars with me now?”
	Only silence had answered him now as it did when his grand father died. The few stars looked pathetic in the night he still felt very passionate about them. 
	After his grandfather’s death, he became frustrated with the limits of his life. He was bewildered that most people were oblivious to the simple blessing they had been given without want. He spent his days at the Hayden planetarium enveloping himself in their glory, counting the days until he could leave his home in New York and enjoy the bounties of the real sky. 
	His dreams of becoming an astronaut were thwarted by his weak stomach. He dabbled in astronomy and astrology but he figured that he didn’t want to spend lifetime learning about celestial objects. He wanted to experience them and become a part of their world. So instead he traveled the world as a sailor, going from place to place working and stargazing. The more he saw the more his fascination with the night sky grew. He was enchanted, captivated by the spell the skies put before him. Even though he had memorized nearly all of the night sky, his heart tugged at him to go in for a closer look. 
	The world made sense to him only when he turned his back to it. He had been lost in the wrong time he believed himself to be of Copernicus and Galileo.  He understood the pain of those before him who had looked at the sky, as he did now, wishing to he could somehow touch them. But he found himself much more fortunate than his predecessors. He had the privilege to see both aurora borealis and aurora australis, and countless shooting stars. He reluctantly ascribed his good fortune to the advances of modern technology, the very thing he loathed as a boy in New York City. It occurred to him that there was still time for him to become a pilot and navigate the skies that had mesmerized him for so long. 
	And now here he was on the same rooftop where he had started. The feeling of discontent overwhelmed him again, confusing him. Hadn’t he followed enough of his impulses, when would his thirst be quenched? He grew irritated at his nephew who he had brought up to the roof to share what his grandfather had shared with him.  This child however could not care less, he was anxious to get back to his game console. He thought his uncle to be backwards and old fashioned. The ignorant child left and he continued to gaze at the sky. 
	The encounter with his nephew reminded him why he had been so restless to escape from New York. He drank some scotch and left without saying good bye to his estranged family. 
	After a good twenty something years he had become a well-respected pilot with a failed marriage. After his divorce he slowly drifted away from his family as he did from most people. He just couldn’t stand people after awhile, he felt too different from them. He hadn’t spent much time with his family during the marriage. Afterwards his daughters didn’t expect him to keep more than the bare minimum relationship of the occasional phone call, cards, presents, etc. Outside of that they were practically strangers.   
	This particular night he was piloting a flight from Pennsylvania to Dublin when he was informed of a meteor shower. As predicted, dozens of shooting stars began to fall from the sky.  Seeing them up close was much more mesmerizing then seeing them from Earth. His eyes widened in amazement and he felt content for the first time in many years. In all his years as a pilot he had never seen something as awe striking as this. He looked to the copilot for a positive reaction but instead saw the young man had passed out from fear, but he was too happy to care. He felt that his heart could burst from happiness but instead it had other plans. He was at the end of his career and it seemed cruel that he would have to leave his beloved job so soon after he had found what he had been searching for, for so long. He didn’t want to stop, rather than being content with this, he felt greed and he wanted to search the skies to see it again. His heart was tugging at him again asking him to do the unthinkable. They both knew what he wanted. He wanted more than anything to become a part of the heavens itself. Seeing it would never be enough. His endless days fawning over the beauty of the night sky taunted him. The sky was taunting him, mocking him. It was showing him a wonder he could never be a part of.
	His frustration obstructed the voice of reason and he turned to a new destination. The panicked flight attendants went over to the cockpit to disconcert their demented captain but the door was bolted shut. He accelerated the plane into the sky imagining it to be his rocket ship despite knowing the planes engines would go no further than 40,000 feet. His passions drowned out the screams and sobs of the terrified passengers.  The higher they rose the closer he felt to the stars and he calmly said,
“ Ei Tara, Shei Tara.”

	That night as many watched the plane spiral downwards to earth, some likened it to a shooting star.













4
Ei Tara, Shei Tara, 9-10, p.