AN UNUSUAL EVENING

By S. M. Shahrukh · Issue 01, 2025

As evening descended, light clouds had taken a darker look and distant thunderclaps could be heard: the word brontide came to mind: it was going to come down soon. Not having eaten all day I still didn’t feel any pangs of hunger but the bloodstream screamed for whisky. Being a recovering alcoholic and being on the wagon for well-nigh five years, I would readily concede that I had fallen off the wagon at times during this, more or less, dry spell of unbearable existence of sobriety. Standing at the verandah I felt a light tremor. Couldn’t figure out whether it was low blood sugar or the ‘shakes’ also known as delirium tremens or DTs.

I decided to lie down and immediately nodded off.

He was talking to me about his life of a medical student. But.....but.....I thought he was dead. I didn't say a word, too befuddled to open my mouth. He took me around his room, showed me various specimen jars, they contained various organs. My lips failed to form any words. The skeleton standing in the corner of the room seemed to be following my movements across the room: I missed a few words he had said as I tried to follow the hollows of the skeleton's skull.

The door to the room opened with a whoosh and in rushed some people, all in a state of elation, screaming and shouting. But....but...they were people I had once known: friends who had long since bitten the dust. My medical student friend turned me by the shoulders and made me look at a jar; a foetus dipped in preservatives. All the others stopped talking and looked at the foetus.... intently. He said,

"This is the last undead person who died at childbirth at the shock of seeing all the dead people in the hospital room. Now there are no more undead people left in the world. "

I couldn't take it anymore and screamed, "But you are all dead and I am the only person alive in this room!"

The whole lot of them burst into a thunder of laughter and pointed fingers at me as their laughter peeled off of them like rain: acid rain that burned on my skin. I ran out of the room........

I woke up to the thunderclaps of late night. I sat up on bed and felt the shakes again.

I ran to the verandah, it was drizzling, the street had a light sheen from the cataract infected lamps in a cloudy moonless night.

Maybe my eyes were cataract infected; they are in fact according to my eye doctor. I felt the shakes again and again.

The streets were devoid of any living beings. All of a sudden I noticed a figure. It was gyrating in the dim light and the wispy rain. As the figure became clearer, it was Taramoni, my childhood masseuse. A dehati woman who was full of verve in her younger days, who had to grapple with a useless drunk for a husband and two sons, one died because he was a victim of a road accident and another, also dead, like her husband, dead prematurely from drinking cheap poisonous local booze or 'muchipotti cholai'. Taramoni, now old and decrepit, in total nudity, with her formerly upright breasts shrivelled to a couple of buttons like in a double breasted suit jacket, her unkempt bush grey like her life, was dancing the dance of death.

My shakes got worse and I felt myself vanishing gradually into the night air. The shakes became a tremor and I was in a state of upheaval. I wondered whether I needed food or a drink but undead. ...well, I didn’t feel.

Dhaka, 8th May 2016.