A SIGH BEFORE DYING

By S. M. Shahrukh · Issue 01, 2025

It’s pouring outside, the leaves of the trees shaking wildly, he looks out the window and sees the rain gods dancing a dance of death, he forgets the pain for a moment, but it comes back with a vengeance. He looks up at the ceiling, the fan going round and round, it looks like a vortex of doom, ready to consume him. He is delirious but knows for sure that the cancer is pushing him into the quicksand, the morass of time; never to return, never to love, ever again.

She touches his arm and he starts. He looks at her but speech has left him, he looks at her, his eyes making an appeal to ears that cannot hear the language of the eyes. She looks at him with pity and tells him to relax but his eyes don’t listen to her plea and goes on speaking.....

“Take care of those beautiful eyes, run flower petals on the lids, those will be my kisses. Remember my touch when you run your fingers on those pouty lips; the teeth of your comb will be my fingers when you brush your black tresses after a noon-day shower. Oh, how I will miss your ample bosom with the deep brown protuberances, the roughness of them in sharp contrast with the fair milky mounds; the beautiful deep seated navel, the dark thatch below that you always trim but never make it vanish whole, and the pleasure spot.............”

She puts a hand on his eyes as if the look on them is making her blush. She goes to the dresser and opens a drawer and takes out the strip of sedatives that the doctor had recommended the last time she took her husband to him. She runs her fingers through his thinning hair and gently asks him to take a pill. He opens his eyes, the excruciating pain making his face contort; she forces the pill down his throat. He swallows, closes his eyes, feels the wretched pain of unrequited love, and gives a deep sigh at her prosaic nature. The downpour outside eases and then stops, momentarily, as he drifts into the realm of everlasting sleep.

She mistakes his silence for sleep and takes a shower, washes her clothes, puts them on a wire running across the room, has her lunch and lies down beside him and falls asleep.

They live in a small town far away from the capital city and in an old house of several rooms. The owner rents the rooms to middle income small families with a common kitchen of several cookers. She cooks for the unmarried young man who lives in the room adjoining theirs; he pays the couple for the food; they need the money too.

The young man comes from his work late in the wet afternoon of this rainy day and knocks gently on the door of the couple next door. She knows the knock, she knows the time by heart; she jumps up from bed and rushes to open the door. They stand outside the door and chirp like birds, and the afternoon becomes evening, the darkness of the clouds hides any trace of time. The body, she left alone on the bed, gets colder.

Dhaka, 12th July 2014.