The story of a living dead

She thought of him since he left, his memories howling in the wind, haunting like thousand ghosts, hearing him, seeing him and smelling him, her mind numbed by the shock that he was gone as quickly as he came. This is a familiar thing in a woman's life, this coming and going, this union and separation, when she is betrayed in love, when she leaves her parents, when children are grown up and gone and the eternal fear spinning in the head like buzzards circling over carrion that her husband could leave her for another woman or she might die before the children were grown.

But she forgot everything when this man came, just like a patient forgot his pain after morphine was administered to him. She looked at him, talked to him, the smile, the voice, the touch of the man, who lived inside her skin like hopes inlaid in cherished dreams. She lived to see him and felt like death when he was gone, her life chopped into many lives, each lasting as long as she stayed with him.

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So when he left, she wished to die again. She has been living in this hocus-pocus for too long, now she saw him, now he was gone, her life alternating between joy and sorrow of fulfilment and loss, as if she was a flower that bloomed in the spring when he came and wilted in the summer when he left. If tears were blood, her anaemic life already would have come to an end, this life that lived in the desperation of a torn limb hanging from tendons.

At night, she cried in bed when the lights went out and the unsuspecting man next to her fell asleep. It seemed to her that he glowed in the darkness, that she could hear his breath in the silence of the room, his footsteps echoing in the bloodstream rushing in her head. What becomes of life when one must carry the burden of a disconsolate soul, when one must live one's life in two opposing streams, drifting in one, drawn into another, united in separation, separated in union!

He lives far from her, yet she feels close to him and the man who sleeps with her in the same bed appears to be a distant thing. She has thought about it, many times, many nights, smitten by shame, torn by guilt, resenting it, regretting it, but returning again and again to the same old thing. She took vows to forget him, promised to start it over with her life again, accepting fate to take the cash and let the credit go.

But love grows in separation like forest fire burns in the wind. It is the threat of putting it out that also keeps it going. Love is a contradiction when lovers quarrel to show their affinities, when they hide to show, stay away to come closer, cry in joy, give to get and lose to win. When he comes to her, she fights with him. When he leaves her, she fights within. In the dead silence of the night, she realized that life was short and she was spending it in the endless wait for a man who was not within her reach.

She has often thought of vice and virtue, trying to sort out the morality of cherishing another man while she was married, wondering about her husband, her children, her identity as a mother and a wife, hesitating if she has the right to love another man while living in the keep of one.

Then she always returned to where she started, her love of the man swaying her heart like summer breeze swaying the twigs and the branches. The heart loves like the mind thinks, attraction for that man coming as naturally as she is reminded of him. It is not easy to explain how she feels, the churning bed of a river beneath the calm surface of water, thousand sighs buried in every breath, thousand glances hidden in every look, thousand tears flowing in every remembrance, and thousand hopes shining in every dream.

Sometimes she wishes she could talk to someone about it, feeling the urge to let out the secret that hurts like a festering wound. But who could she share it with? Who could understand why she is attracted to another man, while she was a mother, a wife, whose task in life was to raise her family and stay beside her husband? Why life should be all about role playing, being either this or that, one thing or another, cut out like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, carved into a part that fits the whole?

Every time he leaves, a part of her goes with him, and what goes with him is her freedom as she must wait to meet him to feel that she is complete again. She has heard of a country in Africa, where the only way a woman gets divorce from her husband is when she commits adultery. Even then a husband refuses to divorce his wife, because he doesn't want to return the dowry he took from her family. The poor woman then has to pay a fine of seven cows for adultery or spend six months in jail.

What is marriage if two people are not in love? How is it any better than adultery if two bodies fornicate when their hearts remain strangers? She has been married for many years, yet she never felt she was married for love but for an obligation as if to repay what she owed to her parents, to the society, and now to her children. She feels sorry for her husband, because she never felt she owed him anything but the mistake of spending his life with her.

She wept until the light of dawn lit up the sky. The morning comes after the night, the eternal mystery of the universe rotating in the endless repetition of light and darkness, the cycle of what is revealed and what is hidden. She will leave the bed to prepare breakfast, send the children to school, iron clothes for her husband and sit down with needlework until lunch. Then she will take a nap, wait for the children to come home and prepare for the night before her husband returns.

But she is going to think of him, she knows she will, because in her life tears are the only connection between what is revealed and what is hidden. She looked at the clock on the wall and thought of him. He must have gone home by now. She will wait for him until they meet again to tell him the story of a living dead, who dies every day to live for him and lives every day to die with him.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.