Death at the time of mangoes

The police interrogated friends and relatives, while the parents of the young man asked each of them to swear by placing their hands on the Holy Quran if they knew why their son had taken his life at a tender age. When they were convinced that nobody knew anything, they decided to let the secret bury with the dead. There were certain things in life that went with a man to his grave, the father explained to the mother of the dead. No matter how far one dug into a lost civilization, it was not possible to recover all its secrets, he said to her sounding like a riddle.

Every year when the summer came and the air was redolent with the scent of sweet mangoes, the mother stood under the tree where her son hanged himself. She cried, prayed and stared at the branch from which her son had plunged to his death. He was so young, who still smelled the milk of mother's breast in his breath. How she had carried him in her womb for nine months, where he grew from a clot of blood to flesh and bones, when she loved to eat green mangoes mashed with salt and chili! The irony of fate was that her son would be conceived and dead at the time of mangoes, which she liked most amongst the fruits.

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The father passed away within few years of the son's death, and she would also be going any day. How birth and death were spaced in life like bus stops on a long road, some getting on where others got off, the journey undertaken by generations of men and women again and again! She was still sitting in the bus, waiting for her turn to be disgorged at any stop next. How she wished life was a bus that could be turned around to go back to the stop where her son had sneaked out in the middle of the night to hang himself.

She only wished to know what had compelled him to give away the life that was seeded in her womb and nourished by her blood and milk. He was born with the umbilical chord wrapped around his neck, perhaps an early sign of how his life was also going to end. She knew a man was born to die. But an unexplained death could not get a closure like missing people who were never found.

Her son was young and strong, his face glistening like the skin of a fresh mango that is round and tight, full of juice and flesh. He was her only son, only child, only miracle that she ever produced to talk and walk upon earth, to remind that her life was breathing through another life, which would grow and multiply, and make sure someone of her blood would be sitting in the bus all the time.

She could still feel after all these years that his heart was warm when she held the body of her son in her arm. There was something still burning in his heart, which did not cool off even long after the rest of his body had turned into ice. She knew her son was in love, his heart agitated by the struggle that must have forced him to take his own life.

She resented that only if he had talked to her once before he proceeded for that final act to do away with his life! She asked God to give her the strength to bear the loss of her only child, who dangled from the end of a rope like a rag doll, vacillating in the morning breeze like the pendulum of a clock. How he understood so little about love, and how he was so young to know that one must suffer in love like an incense stick which must burn to give away its fragrance!

A successful love is like a transacted business, which once completed is seldom repeated. People take each other for granted in marriage, and love, in that sense, resembles mangoes, which last as long as they are not ripe. Ripe mangoes smell sweet but start rotting if not readily consumed. An unrequited love stays green forever renewed in the aching heart of the disconsolate lover, where the name of his beloved echoes like the chant of believers in holy shrines.

She has not eaten a mango in as many years as her son died. The scent of that fruit brings the smell of death to her nose, reminding her of the loss of the fruit of her own womb, his hands dropped limp, his tongue stuck out, his head lowered as if in the shame of the cowardly way he chose to slip out. His eyes were closed to hide the pain that he suffered, his body stiff and stretched from the attack of death that squeezed his life through his mouth. He looked like a rinsed cloth, a wetwash that was hung out to dry, a tragedy that fluttered in the morning air to announce that another life was defeated in the night.

Her husband once told her that the American Indians believed the soul of a mutilated body would be forced to walk the earth for all eternity and could not ascend to heaven. What about the body of a mutilated soul, she had asked him. He said he did not know the answer to her question, but his guess, for that matter, was that it would still be the same. What happened to the soul of her son, which must have been mutilated by the anguish of an unfulfilled love? Does it still walk upon the earth, unable to ascend to heaven, circling in the gust of air, unable to break the cycle of that curse?

It was a Friday morning when a young man visited her in the house. She looked at the visitor and figured that he would be of the same age as her son was at the time of his death. The young man brought her a gift, a sack full of ripe mangoes because his mother told him that she liked this fruit. When she heaved a sigh and said that she had stopped eating mangoes ever since her son hanged himself from a mango tree, the young visitor said to her that he had come to ask for forgiveness on behalf of his mother. He said his parents died in a car crash, and his mother told him in her deathbed that she was to blame for her son's death.

The mother of the young man, who took his life by hanging himself from a mango tree, embraced the young man whose mother had died in a car crash. As tears rolled down her cheeks, she said that love was mysterious next to God, but it was not to ruin lives if young people knew how to be patient. There was no success or failure in love, she said. It was like the flowers, which must be appreciated for its fragrance as long as it lasted.

Next morning the old woman was found dead, her face wearing the calm and confident expression of a detective who had just solved a mystery.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.