Inmate of illusion

Family and friends told her it was an illusion, that she was in a state of shock and needed to let go of what was gone instead of holding it inside her chest. They said she could not be his wife because they were never married in the eye of God. But she knew she had taken the vow in her heart, promising to a dying man that his memory was not going to be replaced by another man. She found it hard to believe that people preferred to get married in front of others before they got married in their hearts.

Two years later when she graduated from college, her parents forced her to get married, insisting that one life was too short to be given to the memory of a dead man. Love, they said, was frenzy of youth which had nothing to do with the purpose of life. It was important to get married, raise children, grow old, play with the grandchildren, and then complete the cycle of life just like a tree that starts from the seed, grows to bear fruit, and then gets chopped into firewood before burning into ashes.

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But he always remained on her mind like the stars hiding in the daylight. She thought of him, saw him in her dreams, and heard his voice, his agonised face in deathbed flashing before her eyes every night when she lay down next to her husband, feeling guilty in the embrace of another man she had promised was never going to come between them. But she couldn't cry anymore, her eyes dried like a spent stream in the summer, her empty heart aching from the spasms of sorrow, haunted by the ghost of lost love.

She gave birth to two children, naming her only son after him, although her husband initially resisted the idea. Man could be ludicrously jealous if his woman cherished another man, even if that man was long dead and buried. She wept again after many years when she called her son by his name for the first time, as if after all these years her unfinished desire for the love of her life had gathered into the flesh and blood of a child conceived in her aching womb, soaked in the grief of her loss, in the vapour of her tears.

So many men lived in this world, so many of them vicious and vulgar, yet this one man, one she loved, one who moved in her blood and breathed in her breath had to die so young! Her parents died between the birth of her two children, and friends and relatives died over the years. Life evolved like a plot with changing cast, his memory receding as familiar characters disappeared, people who reminded her of him, people who reminded her that once the power of love was defeated in the clutches of death.

After all these years, she could hear the footsteps of death inside her own body, as if a whimsical assassin, who took the life of her beloved, had now returned to finish his job. What could one make of life if not the warmth of flesh, the flesh that quivered in the intensity of living, lust and love shooting through it like voltage in live wires?

She loved him, and that love kept her flesh warm for all these years, long after the flesh of her beloved had turned cold and stiff in the rigors of death and time. He never responded to her call again, never moved his hand to wipe her tears, never stood up to take her in his embrace, never cast a glance on her, all these years her flesh yearning for him like a parched land awaiting a rain shower.

Why has she lived without him, and how could she live without him for so many years? She has asked these questions to herself many times, wondering how life was stubborn not to allow erasure of what was destined to endure. She wished to die every night, smitten by shame, guilt and loneliness, her spirit eaten by the moths of anguish, yet refusing to give up in the face of the emptiness that turned life into nothing but the eerie desolation of a deserted house.

The doctors have told her that she was going to recover and live for many more years. What did they know about life and death? What did they know about how death could sneak up every day on the breath that arises from the bottom of a despairing heart? What did they know about how she had died a long time ago, never to recover from the loss which had left her hollow, going through marriage, childbearing and middle age like a conditioned animal in a laboratory experiment?

When she looks back at her past, when she steps back to those days of youth, life shrinks and freezes into a single moment when his eyes moved around friends and relatives and then fixed on her before going still. She couldn't clearly see his face, her eyes blurred by tears as if she was watching him through torrential rains, before the room drowned in wailing voices as doctors frantically tried to find his pulse, and everybody else rushed to his parents who were rolling on the floor. She had felt a sharp pain shooting through her body that numbed her heart as she stood in that crowded room full of strangers who were connected to her by one single life that had just finished its earthly time.

People come into this world and then they go away, all of them, expiring like merchandise on the shelves of a store at varying times. It is now her time to go as it was once her time to come. What about the burden that she has carried all her life? What did she do to deserve this terrible suffering, this curse of longing for what was gone?

The sun was setting on the western sky, smearing the world with crimson shadow that reminds her of the approaching end. She will get ready to offer her evening prayer aided by her daughter, because she feels exhausted if she has to sit upright without any support. Then she would lie down, waiting for her son who would come straight from work. Until then she would close her eyes and think of him, reclaiming the memories of love from the wasteland of the past, his face emerging like a photograph developing in the darkroom.

She is now prepared to die, eager to cross over to the other side with the restlessness of someone who is waiting to unite with a long lost friend. There is a time for people; there is a time for trees. To be born is to die, and it is a part of life. She has been an inmate of illusion all her life, falling in love with love itself, her grief-stricken heart searching to find the answer to a simple question. Why love, if it hurts so much?

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.