Life sentence for death

He felt blank in his head, which was spinning from lack of sleep. Like someone gasping for breath when released from a stranglehold, his head was looking for thoughts to overcome the lightness of not knowing what to think. He wanted to think, think about the years of his life, which went by like a speeding train, not knowing where to begin, not knowing where to end.

He could not sleep at night, his mind floating in incoherent dreams like scattered clouds drifting in the sky. He fluttered in bed between waking up and falling asleep, torn between opposite feelings, between a compelling sense of loneliness and a gripping horror of unfulfilled companionship. His mind churned like a stormy sea, awake even when he was sleeping, a sense of loss draining his strength although he was resting.

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She lived in his memories year after year like an ember in the smoldering fire. She pushed and pulled his heart like a rope in the tug of war. When she got married to another man, he walked ten miles everyday just to catch a glimpse of her face. He was warned many times to stay away from her, but as soon as the night dissolved into the day, he felt the urge to see her again.

This morning, like many mornings before, he felt the urge to see her again, to hear the music of her giggles, ringing like the clinking sound of a thousand bangles, her thin lips parting like a peeling fruit, her eyes shining like new marbles. But last night he thought of it, thought of it frame by frame, turning the pages of his life to remember how it all began, and how it all ended.

He lived a life he never wished to live, because he could not change anything, saying what he said, doing what he did. Her husband soon married another woman, and abandoned her. When he sent the proposal to marry her, she turned it down and refused so much as to spit on his grave. She blamed him for wrecking her marriage and ruining her life, by planting the seed of doubt in her husband's mind.

Outside the window, the grassy road rolled out like the tortuous body of a slumbering snake. The morning breeze blew in his face as he stood in front of the window, thinking how life was such a waste of time, how all things came and went in the endless repetition of the same futility, his father and his friends, his relatives, the madman, the medicine seller, the snake charmer, the magician whose trick was to swallow razor blades, how all of them came to this world and how all of them were gone, most people in the village looking like strangers as if it was a field raising altogether new crops.

He was restless at night thinking of the morning, the morning that was going to fetch him the night again, working like spasms that throw a man into light and then take him away into darkness. Human lives were nothing but the reverberating heat produced in the friction between night and day, renewed in the rotation of the sun and the moon, the comely shining angel of hope fighting alone against the dark beasts of agonies, broken hearts, betrayed love, shattered dreams, sighs and tears of human beings, light chasing darkness in the concentric circles of purported destiny.

It was destiny that they met but never came together. It was destiny that he lived alone and she lived alone, that the vagaries of fate kept them apart. It was destiny that love burned in his heart like a votive candle in a forlorn temple. It was destiny that she passed her life like a ripe fruit, which dropped from the tree in a deep forest, and he could not pick it up because the distance between them was infested with misfortunes.

He did everything to reach out to her, to speak to her, to tell her how his heart pounded with the grief of not being able to connect with her. He went to her house, called her on the phone, wrote to her, sent friends and relatives to tell that his life could not be complete without her, that he longed for her like a journey longed for its destination.

He remembered everything last night, when all the pains he had suffered over the years concentrated in his heart and hurt him like the aching bruises from earlier blows. A dry burning wind came into the room as he was going to remember how her husband and his men confronted him one day and left him bloodied and unconscious in a paddy field. They broke his legs as her husband kept repeating that Majnu should never be able to walk and see his Laila again. It took him almost one year to recover from the deadly wounds inflicted by those wrathful men, who threatened to kill him if he was ever seen in their village again.

It was a terrible way to live, to suffer the pain long after the wounds were healed. He once read it in a newspaper article that some Spanish writer had said that life was not what one lived, but what one remembered and how one remembered it in order to recount it. For all these years since he was attacked, since her husband left her, since she refused to marry him, he has struggled with the question of how he should remember his life should he ever need to recount it.

Today he is going to have a chance to recount his life to a person who has been at the centre of it. He has to tell her everything, every flash of pain, every spark of hope, every shot of desire that burned in his flesh, boiled in his blood and crushed in his bones. He has to tell her how he lived inside a lifeless body, his soul helplessly tormented by love like a piece of iron sitting in the furnace.

Last night he looked for a single sentence to summarize his life. She wants to see him at last, her life critically hanging in the balance between life and death in a hospital bed. What will she say to him and what will he say to her? How will two discrepant accounts get reconciled at long last? Is she going to say she was sorry for scornfully ignoring his love for her? Is she going to ask for his forgiveness so that she could die with a clean conscience?

The gust of hot wind filled the room with intense heat before he realised that the sun had climbed to the mid-sky since he came to stand in front of the window. He has to get ready, take a shower, eat something, get his clothes ironed, and shoes polished, and rehearse his thoughts once again so that he can go to her with an organised mind.

He is going to tell her one thing for sure that he has been dead for long many years, serving a life sentence for death. But is she going to be mentally alert to understand what it means? It is destiny again that the book of his love has to be balanced at a time like this.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.