A rented life

Memory has its own life that breeds and multiplies, when the same pain hurts again and again long after one gets hurt. She wants to sleep and forget, only thing that brings surcease to the pain that haunts her day and night. Every time she goes to bed, it is as if she takes her own life, putting an end to her miseries until she wakes up again.

It hurts like someone pouring melted lead into her veins, because the source of her pain runs in the blood. Sometimes she wishes she could drain out her blood, to cleanse her body of the shame that races through her arteries, pumped by her heart. She has heard about women who were raped in 1971, some of them forced to bear the children of soldiers who had disgraced them. What could be heavier than the burden of a woman who is compelled to bear the fruit of her own shame?

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She has learned over the years that life is not fair, that it doesn't work like two sides of an equation, when every wrong is righted, every mistake is corrected, and every sin is punished. She has many regrets in life, but nothing more than the happenstance of her birth from the groin of a man who has been the bane of her life.

The nights she can't sleep, she thinks of this man whose arms cradled her when she was a child, and whose shoulders carried her when she got tired as a little girl. It all changed in the middle of one night, the night when the dogs wailed and the night watchman blew his whistle, when every other daughter in the world were cuddled in bed in the warmth of their filial love.

This is the man whose blood runs in her veins, whose flesh is in her flesh, dispersed in her smile, dissolved in her tears. This is the man who is configured in her habits, constituted in her mannerisms, apparent in her appearance, the man whose ghost breathes in her soul like a relentless curse. She came from the seed of this man, sprouting like a plant that has now grown into a tree bearing the luscious fruits of beauty and youth. Men covet her now, men who remind her of the man, who had planted her in her mother's womb and then with one stroke of cruelty in the middle of a night, abandoned his wife and children like a planter rushing to disown his plantation.

She dies small deaths whenever she thinks of this man and she thinks of him whenever she looks in the mirror, smells her own breath, touches her own skin, and hears the murmur of blood rushing in her veins. She feels like a painting that wishes it was never drawn, a sculpture that wishes it was never carved, and a voice that wishes it was never heard.

On the nights when she doesn't sleep, when the wailing dogs and blowing whistles turn the dark night darker, when the resounding silence of the deepening night fills the world with the horror of death and desolation, she eats fruits as if to devour all things that are products of perishable unions. Children of broken homes are like amputees, who are haunted by the ghost of their missing limbs forever.

Often she thinks of those women of 1971, women who were forced to do the pleasure of ruthless men, and then forsaken to bear the children born out of the poison that was discharged in their blood. She paces in the house, turns in her bed, her mind agitated as if by the toxic fumes rising from her blood, her veins feeling like dark tunnels where a slithering beast moves back and forth.

She hates to take things from those she doesn't like, yet she owes her own body, her own life to a man whose death she wishes in her every breath. Nothing hurts her more than that, more than the helpless sense of being a prisoner in her body, serving life sentence in its every cell. Life is a gift, but it has been put inside a body that came from an enemy, who used her mother to do his pleasure and then left that woman for another woman like a lustful bee going from flower to flower.

Her life is a franchise of that frivolous enterprise, which dealt in bodies, not in souls. She looks at her mother and feels the pain that must be throbbing in her sore flesh, the flesh, which was steeped in the love of a man, who left her faster than he changed his socks. She has watched her mother grow old, her flesh sagging in the drag down of age, her beauty and youth defeated by sorrow and shame that raged in her like a silent storm.

The nights she can't sleep, the nights when she hears the clanking noise of hardened grief inside her head, she seethes with anger and, in her mind, blows up that man into pieces again and again. He still visits her mother while living with his other wife, demanding money from her every month, claiming that had she not bore him a daughter, a son would have supported the father.

Love has the irony of ink and pen, because the ink endures long after the pen has finished. Her mother still loves that man, still hoping that one day he was going to come back to her when his fascination for the other woman will fade away like the brief spell of spring. So, she has to pay that man every month to keep her mother happy, to spare this unfortunate woman the misery of self-flagellation that she couldn't try one last thing to get him back.

When she eats fruits during sleepless nights, she feels she is eating her own flesh, her teeth sinking into her own skin, because it is a shame when a man and a woman make love and bring children to this world, leaving them to roil in eternal hatred.

Dogs wail at night, because they resent the dog's life, the futility of being faithful amongst humans who steal from each other. The nights she doesn't sleep, she turns to herself, and sits face-to-face with her own miseries. She feels like an unwanted wedge between a man and a woman, yet it's their love and hatred that controls her emotions. The night watchman blows his whistle, which rings in her head like thousand bugles. She must wail before she falls asleep. She is living for a woman, who is living for a man. It's a rented life. She owns nothing.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.