Flowers to the grave

In his mind he said to himself that fate had again triumphed over hope, that two people separated by the distance of many years could not meet by the distance of a few moments. As the sound of wailing voices and shuffling bodies drowned his thoughts, he was not sure if he wanted to leave or stay in the room.

He calculated that he could have found her alive if he had saved time, skipped the haircut, shave, and search for clothes, not fussed over the breakfast, sugar in the tea, car wash, and then not rehearsed over what he would say and what she would ask. He would have found her alive if he had answered her call one day earlier, had he made up his mind sooner to come and meet her in the hospital.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

It must have been a matter of ten minutes at most, the elevator stopping at each floor, picking up and dropping off people, until it arrived on the tenth floor and then a minute or so to find her room. If somehow he could have squeezed all that time, he could have arrived few minutes earlier, while she was still breathing and alive. She must have waited for him, because she knew he was coming, until the fits of death clouded her mind.

She said she wanted to tell him something, that she was in her last days and wanted to die with a lighter chest. But would she have been able to talk to him even if he had arrived sooner? Was her mind still working, only moments before the onslaught of death? Would she have recognized him even if he had arrived before she died?

He never wanted to see her again, neither alive nor dead, never again to step on her shadow, come within the earshot of her voice, or smell the air stirred by her presence. All these years he carried so much rage inside him, rage that brewed within the walls of his chest with the wrath of a thousand storms, diminishing him every day through sleepless nights, shame, loneliness, ratcheting up pain that could not be cured by doctors of the world.

He would have said all of these to her if she were alive, if their conversation had progressed as he anticipated. She would have told her why it happened, why she married another man, may be she would have also said sorry for hurting him so much for all these years. May be she was thinking that she could clean up the entire slate with the stroke of a single apology or confession. People, who have a sense of approaching death, often feel the urgency to fix lifelong mistakes overnight.

But he felt the calm of a storm that had spent its force as he stood before his dead adversary, reminded of life's futility, that birth and death, pleasures and pains within these extremes, were nothing but the illusions of a magic lantern show. All these years he lived in the fury of vengeance to get even with a woman, who had cheated him in love, vowing to treat her with utmost cruelty once he got his hands on her.

As he stood at arm's length from the dead woman lying in the bed, he felt despaired like a detective who found, after a hot pursuit, that the criminal had slipped his net. A haunting sense of grief crept on him as he realized that he had been cheated twice by the same woman, who left him once when he was ready to love, and again when he was ready to hate. He choked on tears while his heart was ready to explode, fighting back the loneliness that devours a pugilist after his sparring partner has left the ring.

Someone asked him to leave the room because the dead would be prepared before taken to her house. He made for the door, looking back at the bed where several women were turning the limp and inert body, which he coveted throughout his life. Now this body was going to be buried in the earth, then it will decompose slowly, the flesh melting like a block of ice kept in the sun, the head-turning body of an attractive woman reduced to bones.

The blast of a noisy city hit him in the face as soon as he stepped out of the room, screeching cars, honking buses, tinkling rickshaws and the uproar of multitude streaming through the streets, everything in stark contrast to the ecology of the room where he witnessed how a life had come to its end. This is how the world has moved, unrepentant for the fallen, selfishly turning to fulfil its cosmic journey through wars, devastations, holocausts, plunders, storms, cyclones and tidal bores, above all death. The human beings have ingested that selfishness, their earthly life honed by an instinct to survive at any cost.

Many years ago when he had fallen in love, when the angst of youth roared in his head like the howling wind blowing in the prairies, when lust rocked his body like the eruption of volcanoes, when the desolation of a plundered city gripped his heart, when the ecstasy of countless festivals inundated his soul, he wanted to die in the intensity of life. He needed someone to hold his hand, to give him courage and comfort in the undulation of desires, surging through his body day and night.

Love is an expression of life, but he never thought that his entire life will become an expression of love. He could not fall in love with another woman, although flurries of women came into his life, women who meant nothing more than a stack of bodies that added fuel to the seething fire of love. He consorted with other women for the same reason someone, who wanted to remember his loved one, brought flowers to the grave.

All things come to an end, fire in ashes, journey in destination, flowers in fragrance, conflict in resolution, work in outcomes, and motion in stillness. What should happen to his love now that she was dead? Until he finds the answer, he will bring flowers to her grave.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.