A bleeding heart

He bounced in the couch, clapped in the air and spoke with a cackle in the voice, giving a sense of the struggle to hide the pain, which gathered in his face. Twenty years, he said, was a common thing between sugar palm tree and his marriage. Then he looked with a smack in his face and set out to explain what he just said. A sugar palm tree could be male or female, but it takes twenty years to know its sex.

It took him twenty years to know his marriage. He lived with a woman under the same house, in the same bed, eating at the same table, sharing jokes, visiting friends, making love, raising children, their togetherness of all those years divided into days, multiplied by hours, split into moments. How their bodies were attached but minds were detached!

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The bleeding was compounded by headache and fever, which lasted for three days. For the first time in his life, he realised that loneliness was worse than death, which sentenced a man to the horror of his tormented soul, reminding him every living moment that he was not needed. For twenty years he broke his back for his wife and children, only to feel desolate in the sunset of life like a clamourous house abandoned all of a sudden.

It was hell to become lonely and single after twenty years, to bear the burden of memories, weighing on him from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning till he closed them at night. There was a sense of grief that never left him since his wife was gone, the grief that swirled inside his chest and pushed its walls like strong wind threatening to crash the doors and windows in a storm. He wished he had not lived to see this day, to lose his wife, to lose his children, to come back where he started, his life curled up inside the coils of time like a rolled up manuscript going back to shelf.

To live more is to die more, each day the shadow of death encroaching upon the trail of life, every breath wasting the body like a burning candle, the end waxing as fast as the beginning waned. He looked at his hands, gray hairs scattered like shreds of white wool, telltale signs of a body that had lost its vigour. He shuddered at the prospect of dying alone, breathing his last in his bed or collapsing in the bathroom while taking a shower, the fabled story of living abruptly ended by a pain in the chest or a dizzy spell.

He loved his wife and he loved his children, and now they were gone. People come together and they separate all the time in the great churning of life that forever mixes joy with sorrow, gain with loss. He had plans, he had dreams; he wished to stay with his children and their children, enmeshed in the concourse of life like a petal in the flower. The blood could not have come from his head. Three days after it happened to him, he was still convinced that it was his wounded heart, which had exploded under the burden of grief and splattered out the blood in his sleep.

His daughter had turned eighteen and the son had just learned to walk, each reaching a time of life when both needed their father. They came from him, his own children, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, yet he was removed from them like the seed, which had vanished once the tree was grown. For many years he desired for a son, his heart heavy with sadness that he would die without leaving a male descendant to carry his bloodline.

It was not always that he missed his wife, although he thought of her day and night. These days she came across as a familiar landscape, which looked bleak and dreary, one that evoked a sense of yearning, not for what it became but for what it was. He wished she had not been so arrogant, so self-centered, misguided by his in-laws to ruin his life. He sprang up on his feet and went for a brisk walk around the couch, as if a toy, which was suddenly powered by an upsurge in its battery charge.

He cooked for himself, washed his clothes, made his bed, swept the floors, did the groceries, entertained visitors, tidied up the apartment, got used to doing the chores of life he had long learned not to do since he got married. He was also told how man needed a companion when he was old, to nurse him, to talk to him, to protect him from the concentric circles of loneliness, which draws life into its dreadful jaws.

He was convinced by all of that in the heady days of his youth, when the demons of lust worked up the body, their ferocity igniting flames of passion in the layers of flesh. In the last three days, when his body burned with fever and his head spun in the emptiness of a plundered soul, he thought of what his father had repeatedly said to him. Marriage worked like an illusion, he said, when two lonely hearts came together to believe that they were not alone any more.

He was always lonely in his worries and anxieties, and it must have been true for his wife as well. They talked to each other, touched each other, looked at each other for countless moments, standing like two trees in the woods, each on its own ground, each in his pain and sorrow, alone in union, two streams in one flow. Human body is lot like a carnival when it is young, he argued while returning to the couch. It juggles, it swings, walks on the tightrope, jumps, skips, takes the rides -- acrobats, clowns and circus animals featuring in its veins and muscles.

His body was quiet and exhausted, much like the morning after a long carnival night. He was pushing sixty as the termites of age were eating into the fibres of his body and making it hollow. He needed his wife and he needed his children, he needed to be surrounded by those he loved before the darkness of death descended on him.

He wished someone had talked to his wife and told her that life was short. There was time for everything, time to sow and time to reap. He wanted to collect what was scattered and get back what was lost. He took a deep breath and held his nose, lest his heart was going to bleed again.

It was a tragedy to born and die. It was even worse to be married and separated. But the worst was yet to come when one is loved and hated. He loved for twenty years and now he was hated. It felt like separation every moment and it felt like death every day. He wished he knew, if his wife also felt the same way.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.