Love and repentance

The patient was sitting on the edge of the bed as the round and slender hand held the glass in front of him. The whiteness of milk as if reflected on his face, which looked pale and dry from long suffering. The other man, who was thinking sitting in the corner, thought even more. God worked in mysterious ways, he said to himself, because who could ever tell how life was going to close its book on him!

When she left him to marry another man, he didn't think he was going to live another day. It was painful and lonely as the shock of betrayal had shattered him. For countless times since then he thought how the other man was immensely more fortunate than him. He felt ransacked and vacant like a plundered city, its treasures emptied to fill the coffers of an invading army.

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The patient chugged down the milk in one gulp, and the hand with the lustre of a ripe banana, wiped the white ring around his lips. The thinking man thought again, how he spent his entire life wishing if he could only hold that hand again! One man's luck is another man's lamentation, because the equation of life wasn't based on equalities!

The hand put the glass back on the table, and then went back and forth several times to prepare the bed for the patient, who wanted to lie down. He looked haggard and drawn, his hairs scarce, face limp and livid, his body spread on the bed like scattered bones. The man sitting in the corner looked puzzled. How could anybody fall sick under a hand, which could touch and stir even the dead?

The patient writhed in pain, clutching his abdomen with feeble hands, turning from side to side in the bed. The air filled with the music of tinkling bangles as the hand rushed to him from the table and ran its fingers in his hairs as if to relieve the pain by their magic strokes. The other man fidgeted in the corner of the room, unable to decide what he was going to do. How the game of life had turned around, its pain tormenting the man who once tormented him!

Suddenly he noticed that the hand was unstable, quivering from time to time as it grazed the patient's head. He looked up the line of the hand and saw the woman, to whom it belonged, was wiping tears with her other hand. It was a scene he swore to see many times in his life, his heart filled with the ecstasy of someone who had taken his revenge.

The doctor came to examine the patient, pressing his abdomen like poking a sack of grains. The nurse came and pushed an injection, promising that it was going to put an end to the misery for rest of the day. This was not fair, thought the thinking man standing in the corner. There was no injection to put an end to his misery, nor anybody ever showed any concern for his pain.

If a river could tell how it hurt when they dredged its bed, if a tree could tell how it felt when they chopped its trunk, if the wick of a lamp could tell how it suffered when it burnt, if a slaughtered animal could tell how it cowered under the butcher's knife, only then could he tell how much it hurt him after she was gone! It happened when he was at the peak of his dream, when his heart was swollen with pride and ready to explode with abundance of joy.

When he looked at her face in this room and looked at the man, who was sleeping in the bed, a strange numbness came over him. How he suffered because of them, mere mortals like him, the woman who cheated him and the man who robbed the jewel of his heart, both condemned to suffer in their turn.

He has lived alone, haunted by the horror of betrayal for which he couldn't trust again. He was a driven man, shame and sorrow combined into an impulse for revenge, which swept his soul with the force of a storm that ravaged his life in a trail of destruction. His blood boiled every day in the fire of that grief, while its humiliation pricked him like a thousand thorns.

He was under the same roof with her once again, where only other soul was the patient who was sleeping like a dead. She was still sobbing, holding the rail at the head of the bed as if she was trying to gather her strength. If life should come to this in the end, sickness, sorrow and seclusion, what was the meaning of what happened between them? What is love and how does it connect people? He looked at her hand, which was locked in a grip with the rail as if a mesh wrapped around it.

He coughed several times to get her attention, until the hand finally loosened its grip and then folded to cover her head with the end of her cloth. She asked him how he was, in a voice that seemed to have traveled from the end of the world. He didn't know what to say because the words choked his throat like a crowd rushing to a gate. He coughed again, and then wanted to know why he was asked to come after all those years, what more was there to take away from him!

Nothing for herself, she replied. She wouldn't have asked him to come if not for the dying man, who wanted to see him, she said. Her voice grew in strength like the glow of a stove after it was turned on. She took a pause and then slowly said that her man wanted to talk to him before he died.

Love was a war, the thinking man was compelled to think. Why would the conqueror want to talk to the vanquished? Next day he returned to find out the answer, but the room was empty. The patient had died the night before and was taken for burial.

As he left the hospital, the thinking man thought again. The same man has cheated him twice, which wasn't fair. Men stole from each other only to leave everything behind. The hand flashed before his eyes and his heart filled with desire. Why couldn't he hold it, now that her husband was gone? All was fair in love and war, because one perpetuated the other.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.