Garden of life

When she was young, she often worried about old age, the dreadful stage of life when one is trapped inside a decrepit body like a lost civilisation buried in ruins. She never felt that way when she was young, although she knew that life was always drawing death in every breath. But old age was like having one's back against the wall, when one retreated so far from an approaching assailant that one couldn't recede anymore and helplessly waited to be taken by him.

So many people she knew had been already taken by that assailant. They vanished like the secret police picking up political activists from their houses in the middle of the night. She has seen them vanishing all around her, her grandparents, parents, in-laws, siblings, uncles, cousins, neighbours, favourite film stars, singers, eminent personalities, her life shaved like a log of wood until it sharpened to the point of preparing for its own death.

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This afternoon she wanted to walk in the garden, dragging her aged body for the exercise that kept it light and cheerful. But only three steps made her tired, her legs feeling heavy and numb with the burden of the world strapped around them, her head spinning like a potter's wheel with a vapid sense of life filling her heart like fluid rushing into cavities. She reached for a branch of the henna tree and slowly motioned her body to sit on the grass. For a moment, she thought she was a ripened fruit that had dislodged from the tree and fallen on the ground.

This is how the end had started for her husband. He came back from his walk one afternoon, carried by people who found him unconscious on the sidewalk. He was laid in bed where he stayed until he died one morning, never able to walk again, talking incoherently from time to time, tears trickling down the corner of his eyes like pus oozing out of a festering wound. Old age is like a wound that aches and hurts, when the body rots away in its every cell, when one is spent in flesh and bones, waiting for death inside a hollow shell like those Greeks, who waited for the Cyclops to come and devour them!

Once she wished to die many years ago, when her body was like a fresh bloom, when she could look in the mirror and feel pride murmuring like a running stream. But still she wished to die because her first husband had left her, because despite her gift of beauty and youth, he was attracted to another woman. Now standing on the edge of life, waiting to fall off and disappear in death, she realised how life in old age was an inventory of unsettled scores. She never loved her second husband, yet she spent her life with him while longing for the company of her first husband whom she never met again!

The garden looked so barren and lonely, dry leaves sweeping in the wind to resonate the howling void of life that passed before her in the blink of an eye. Yet she went through so much in life, so much in sorrows and sufferings, so much in unrequited love that bothered her like the throbbing pain from a wound that couldn't heal.

The gray sky above her head spread out like a canopy, smeared with the soft light of a setting sun that glowed with the anguish of a departing day. Old age is twilight between being and not being, an interstice between light and darkness, a half-way house between the splendours of life and the silence of death, a time when a fully full life is also fully empty, when one is ripe but hollow and insipid.

When her first husband died, she wept for him. The sad news had suddenly snapped a chord inside her heart, disrupting her only conduit to a lingering hope that one day she was going to get back what she had lost. Certain circles never close in life, the calculus of justice and fairness culminating in riddles. One of those riddles is to crave for what is hard to get. She went through life in her own strides, raising children from her two marriages, cooking, cleaning and playing wife to a second man, yet nurturing hope like the dimming lights of a sinking boat that her patience was going to be rewarded in the end.

She looked around her, surveying the plants and trees which grew under her hands. She had started to raise this garden since she came to this house, when her husband went to his office and the children went to school, planting seeds, turning earth, mixing manure, sprinkling water, tending creepers and tendrils to avoid the memories of her first marriage, which tried to crowd her mind during lazy afternoons. Every plant in this garden has been aired by her deep sighs, their leaves and branches laden with her grief, their grounds soaked with her tears.

It seemed to her that a tranquilised beast was crouching on the grass, her body feeling inert and heavy, her mind drifting back and forth between past and present since future no longer looked certain. She has lived with two husbands, six children, and their spouses and children like a tree with two roots and many branches, one of the roots being aerial, her second husband, who swung out there in the wind but never ran deep into her life.

As a young girl she had learned the secrets of being a woman from her mother, who taught her not to trust men and beware of their charm. Yet it was a woman who betrayed her, her own sister who took away the man of her life. Her sister said everything was fair in love and war, and that she had no regrets about snatching the man because she couldn't have lived without him. When her sister died two years later, she didn't go to her funeral and the man who separated them got married for the third time.

Life is a garden, she said to herself, where men and women bear out their fates like plants and trees bear fruits and flowers. Fates are seeded in fates, when every life is no more than a tree which grows from the seed. She has seeded her children who have seeded their children in turn and now the time has come for her to vanish because the seed is always forgotten once the tree has grown.

Today, she wants to forgive her sister, before she too is felled by the axe of fate.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.