Raining in the sun

Between yawns she looked at her husband who was lying in bed like a bundle of clothes. He appeared dead to her if not for the rise and fall of his bloated belly, and it occurred to her that sleeping was almost like death. She wondered how she had been dying with him night after night but increasingly losing her wish to wake up in the morning. In that cold dawn, standing in front of the window, she realised that life was nothing but an acceleration of death.

She cast a tormented glance at her sleeping husband who was to blame for her unspeakable sorrow. She examined the contour of his body like a surveyor studying a landscape. His hairs were frowsy like a battered broom, his face pale as tallow, his moustache messed up like sliver of hastily peeled dry coconut, and the wax in the corners of his eyes looked like stains of sorrow. This complete wretch of a man drank her youth and beauty like a vampire, and snored night after night with his belly up without showing any gratitude or remorse.

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At the strike of eight, this apparently dead man would stir and get up to slouch through another day of deceit and betrayal, having clandestine meeting with his secret lover, and going through the day in her arm. At night he would come home to lie down next to her as if to keep company at the dinner table after having eaten outside. She looked at his eyes closed like drawn curtains and wondered if he ever realised that the worst hell for a woman was to smell another woman in her husband's breath.

That morning she decided to leave her husband, and go abroad where the dignity of life wasn't based on genders. She joined her sister and brother-in-law, followed by her mother who refused to let her daughter go out of sight. In the first few months, she missed her husband, and the hope that he might come one day to take her back lurched in her mind like the sun shining through a patch of cloud.

But then time healed her wound and she was able to take a job in a drug store, which was within walking distance from the house. An income gave her the freedom, lack of which once made her the slave of an odious man. She refused to meet another man and think of getting married again, because marriage was just an excuse for man to subjugate woman.

She often felt emptiness in her heart, while the vague yearning, which entered one cold morning, twisted in her bones from time to time. She could feel a sense of incompleteness and compared it with that of an amputee haunted by the ghost of her missing limb. Her mother often reminded her that a woman needed a man in her life like the sun needed the moon, the ebb tide needed the flow tide, the body needed the soul, the night needed the day, the betel leaf needed the betel nut, and the new moon needed the full moon.

Inside her she knew her mother was right. She thought of a companion every now and then whenever she was happy or sad. The winter started in December and the snow came earlier than time. Snowflakes covered houses, fields and trees, and it was cold and white all about her. The thudding sound of snow banks sliding down the roof of the house kept her awake night after night as she wondered if her life would have been the same if she had been married to a man other than her husband.

At night she could hear the footsteps of her brother-in-law from her room in the basement, which resonated in her heartbeats long after the house fell silent. She thought of death in that silence, as if the house was a catacomb where three of her dearest people lay buried in separate tombs in separate rooms. She thought of man and woman, how their union propagated life and separation disrupted it. This was how the world evolved, powered by the love of men and women, their hatred throwing it in chaos.

On a Sunday morning she had a long discussion with her brother-in-law at the breakfast table. He said that the conjugal life was a delicate balance between the fire of the body and the ice of the soul. She said man was obsessed with the fire while woman craved for the ice, that man was polygamous because it was in his nature to spread the fire, and woman, like ice, froze on the man of her choice.

In the summer her sister and mother left for Bangladesh, and she stayed with her brother-in-law. The nature had awakened after its long slumber during the winter and once again, the branches and twigs were clothed in green. The days grew longer as the sun lasted until late in the evening, and the air was charged with new hope and vigour. She would come home long before the sun went down and sit in the deck on the backyard, watching butterflies in the rhododendron bush. As the day approached the sunset, the western sky filled with shades of red and orange, making her worried that she was missing the colours of life.

Her mother and sister returned at the end of the summer, and the house suddenly slipped into silence. The two daughters wouldn't talk to each other and the brother-in-law talked to neither. The younger daughter stopped taking her meals, the elder daughter was distraught with anger, and the brother-in-law spent his time in the basement watching television until his eyes were ready to come out. The mother stayed in her room, lamenting that her misfortune was like a wicked witch, which set out to ransack her life as soon as she was comfortable with it.

The story came to an abrupt end when the younger daughter took her life with overdose of sleeping pills. It rained on that clear sunny day and the wailing mother thanked the nature for cleansing the air, laden with the shame and tears of her unfortunate daughter. At the funeral people asked why such a young girl would have committed suicide. The sister wept, and the brother-in-law was quiet. Only the mother told everyone that her ill-fated daughter had come from dust and to dust she had returned, dispersed by the wind of life that never blew in her favour.

Three days short of her 26th birthday and six months after her former husband had remarried, the younger daughter was buried at the Stafford Muslim Cemetery in Virginia, USA.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.