CUL-DE-SAC

He walks on the streets of the city with a bum leg and needs a crutch to take his steps. He wears a shabby old shirt, shabby old trousers, two sizes too big and a shoe without any socks; the black shoe has patchwork of leather pieces of different colors. The shoe is probably stolen from someone who has bigger feet. His hair is knotted, his long beard is the same; his haggard appearance gives one the impression of total lack of any hygiene or any attempts at cleaning himself, his chapped lips hold a burning cigarette with glimpses of his brownish black teeth. It’s the middle of the afternoon and he is high, has been for over a day now. He has in the inner pockets of his grubby coat, a small packet of heroin, a lighter, a pipe, a spoon, a syringe, used more times than can be recommended, and he has a razor, the thin edge kept sharp by using the sidewalk as a whetstone; no one bothers about his addiction or him, not even the cops moving in their vans all day and all night.

It rained before dawn yesterday; the morning was clear but there was still the cooling breeze that persists after rains. She woke up very early and decided to take her early morning jog before her usual time; she came out to her verandah before the first light and the serene and cool weather made her restless to go out. She dressed up in her tight stretchy jogging trousers, her loose T-shirt, her trainers and used a thin cloth to wrap around her shirt; something she had learned to do in this predominantly Muslim country. She put on sun cream on her browning white skin and used a hair band to tidy her hair; she put on a pink one to give an expression to the thrill that the relatively cool weather instilled in her.

This lady worked at a charity financed by the country of her birth, somewhere in North Europe. She had lived in this developing yet poor country for over a decade; she was not bothered by the squalor where she did her charity work, She had come to love this country, this city of millions with many living in slums plagued with all imaginable problems came under the aegis of her work. She was in her forties and had never tied the knot.

She came out and started walking and then gently jogging. The rain swept streets looked cleaner, the dust settled by the water of the clouds, the trees looked greener, and she sighed. She felt very happy; this is the favourite time of the day for her. The avenue was deserted, the early morning rain had delayed the people she usually saw in her route; she saw the dogs dozing, the building security guards comatose on their chairs, the beat cops snoozing in their van. She looked up and saw that clouds were gathering again, threateningly, menacingly; she didn’t care. She turned to a side street, she had never entered that alley before, didn’t know it was a cul-de-sac.

The addict came slowly out of that very alley a few minutes after the lady had entered it. He wiped the blood from his razor on his grubby trousers, the red of the blood losing its way in the black abyss; he was counting the money she had in her small pink purse which she used to carry on a thin string around her waist. Her cell phone, also hanging on the string in a pouch, went flying on impact of her fall and settled in a street-side bush, the addict never noticed.

He cursed as he threw the purse into the gutter; that measly amount would not give him a buzz for more than two days. The blood from her slit throat went down in a stream to meet the pink purse in the gutter, making it turn a blackish red; her bright pink head band was getting bombarded by fat drops of rain. Yes, it had started raining again; the clouds looking blacker and blacker as the sun rose in the east, hidden from view. The skies would mourn all day with angry sad tears.

Dhaka, 3rd July 2014.

© S M Shahrukh and Traces of Orange, 2014.