The burden of existence
A thousand ethereal beings gathered together to watch a spectacle unfold near an unmanned, almost deserted rail crossing, not far from the nearby station. Among them were several witches burned at the stake in the latter part of the seventeenth century in a European village. Also present were the spirits of some women whose souls had been saved with their dead husbands in a village on the Ganges basin.
These saved souls had congregated in that particular place to see another of their kindred soul being saved, along with two nascent souls, two of her children. The older one was an eight year old boy and the younger one a girl of five. The woman herself was about 25 years of age, of an average height with a gaunt body; her two children also bore signs of emaciation.
"Where are we going, mum?" said the boy, as they were walking on an unpaved road on a winter evening, with heavy fog limiting their visual distance.
"To your cousin's", she answered briefly.
Given the nature of her journey and its ultimate aim, she seemed unusually calm. It seemed as if her thought processes had become suspended. Perhaps it would be an excellent thing getting rid of one's emotions in the mindless workings of the mindless universe.
She was moving on calmly to her desired destination until her daughter interrupted her.
"Mum, are we going to stay there for long?" she asked her with as much tenderness in her voice as could be possible in the uncorrupted world in which children are accustomed to live.
The mother remained silent.
There were several fresh scars on her face and from her gait it could be discerned that she was also suffering from severe leg injuries. Biting cold, accompanied by sustained chilly winds, seemed not to have any effect on her. But the children frequently shivered as their clothes seemed to be grossly inadequate to withstand the cold.
Several minutes later, the woman reached a fork in the road, with one of the roads leading to her birth house and the other to the crossing, where she was about to end her painful procession of life. Seeing the road, her memories suddenly revived, she resumed her thought processes and began to sob silently.
II
The name of this nightly voyager into witchdom is Nurjahan Begum. She was the fourth child of her parents. Her father, Abdus Sukkur, was a poor village farmer who died fighting for his country's independence, leaving the family helpless. Her mother, Kulsuma Akhter, struggled to run the family.
Gripped by poverty, Nurjahan could hardly entertain any romantic feelings in her young age. Yet closer inspection would reveal that she had no fewer strings or hidden throbs in her heart. She was the prettiest girl in the village. Despite the poor and dirty existence she led, one could still see the veins running through her skin. She hoped to capitalize on her beauty and secure a bright future wedding, with a well-to-do husband. But all her hopes were dashed when her mother married her off at thirteen to a day labourer double her age.
Work was scarce and her husband, Rashid Mia, could barely eke out an existence. He would go to work in the morning and return at midday, only to depart after lunch. Returning in the evening, he would go out again to the bazaar where he used to meet his fellow day-labourers and try to find the next day's work. Sometimes he succeeded but oftentimes, he returned un-hired, being forced to ration out his meager income.
Despite all the hardships, Rashid Mia managed to run his family and lead a relatively happy conjugal life. In the twelve years of her married life, she bore her husband three children. One of them died two months after birth but the other two had managed to survive.
Things were going well until someone's gaze rested upon Rashid Mia's beautiful wife.
Abbas Uddin came into Rashid Mia's house on a winter afternoon. She treated him just like a neighbour and conversed with him. As a matter of courtesy, she invited him to visit them again.
Abbas considered her innocent behaviour to be a sign of fallibility and continued to visit her, mostly while her husband was away at work. With the increasing regularity of Abbas's visit swelled the suspicion of her husband and curiosity of the villagers. A profound distrust developed between the two and Rashid Mia gave his wife some final words of warning.
"You cannot certainly flirt with someone else while remaining my wife; next time I see you talking to him, things will turn dangerous. Mark my words!" he warned.
Nurjahan tried to protest her innocence but to no avail. Rashid Mia had turned a deaf ear to her.
"You can tell him not to come anymore. Why do you blame me for something I have nothing to do with?" she said.
Rashid Mia had already left for the bazaar.
The next evening, when Rashid Mia returned home after toiling the whole day in the field, he saw his wife cooking rice on the open hearth and the man, keeping some distance, sat by the fireside. The children were also out there playing hide and seek in the yard.
In a fit of anger, he chased the man away and when he was gone, uttered a powerful word three times.
"talak, talak, talak", he uttered.
The sky, which she assumed to be nothing more than a mere rooftop, fell heavily upon her. Finding no alternative, she left for her paternal home that very same evening.
Two months went by when her husband returned to bring her. She had no alternative but to go.
But secret and bad things never remain secret and once they ultimately come out, they spread like wildfire, engulfing the minds of people in its trails.
Without wasting much time, the village elders assembled to discuss the matter and punish the couple for the adultery they had committed after having their marriage annulled by God's law.
Proud of their wisdom, which they call "ancient wisdom" that cannot be wrong, and strengthened by the inviolable laws of God, the village elders summoned the couple to a place which had already attained some fame for such proceedings.
Curious crowds of villagers had begun to converge at the place long before the trial started. The allegation of adultery had been decisively proved and the jury delivered their verdict.
"A hole is to be dug, she is to be lowered, and stoned one hundred and one times," the verdict read.
Preparations were complete within a short time and she was lowered. After receiving the sixtieth stone, she fainted. But in order for her to be absolved of her sins, she must receive the remaining stones. Such were the purifying powers of stones that they filled the remaining space in the pit, burying her sins under the rubble; and when she was resurrected a short time later, she emerged innocent as a baby.
After absolving her of her sins and bringing her up from her purifying place, the village elders and clerics declared her to be married again with another man and then divorced in order to live with Rashid Mia.
The village elders left the scene one by one, seemingly content with their performance in the soul-saving mission.
Enough meaning of life had been imparted to her. She had intimately known existence and whatever meaning attached to it. Now she had decided to unload the burden of this existence.
III
Death, when it comes like a flash of lightning, is like the trampling of an ant --- atoms disintegrating, mingling with other atoms, and matter losing consciousness.
About ten minutes are yet to go until the next express crosses the crossing and takes three souls with it. Nurjahan Begum had almost arrived at the crossing but suddenly she stopped, paused for a moment, and then hugged her children. She was still shedding silent tears but she also seemed circumspect enough not to let her children understand anything about the coming event. Multi-chambered, thin-layered compartments of the human mind are too frail to keep one kind of emotion seeping into another.
She tried to justify accompanying her children on her journey. "They are, after and above all, my halves. Together they make my other self", she convinced herself.
"It is just a few seconds, all will be over then; death will come unannounced to them, lasting just a moment". She tried to differentiate between the two kinds of death, her own death and the deaths of her kids.
It seemed that the sooner the train came, the better. It was hard to resist the bombardment of memories of a lifetime. Memories are another cargo yoked to the wagon of life.
She finally reached the point she had wished for. None was in sight. Given the presence of dense fog and biting cold, there was little possibility that anyone would cross the point and even if someone was to thread it, his eyesight would certainly be evaded by the surroundings. Nurjahan moved a little bit northward and sat on the track. She told her children to take some rest, tied their clothes with her sari and began to wait. She had taken full preparations to tie their souls to the train and all she could do now was wait for its arrival.
After a few moments, the headlights of a coming train began to pierce the dense fog. She did not need to worry about the track because it was a single track railway. She took the heads of her kids in her breast and began to comb their hair.
Hardly did she know that she was going to add a new twist to the billion years legacy of wanting to live a bit longer, perhaps a little bit, at all costs.
IV
Several expresses had crossed the point before a dairyman discovered the trio. People began to throng the place to have a look at them. Word finally reached Rashid Mia, who immediately rushed to the spot and arranged for the bodies to be taken home.
When the news of the incident spread to the village, a flurry of condemnation began to circulate. The village elders were still more stunned by her impiety.
"She is as impious in death as she was in life", opined one middle-aged man.
"Doomed to hell", announced the lead cleric. "It is a grave sin, mother of all sins", he added.
"She cannot be buried in the usual manner", the clerics decreed.
"God's laws shall prevail". The village elders reached unanimity.
In two days' time, another digging was conducted and Nurjahan Begum was once again lowered. Due to the size of the hole, she could not be lowered upright; she was somehow squeezed and the hired men hastily filled the hole. Her two children received more ceremonial burials as they were the victims of their mother's impiety.
The next morning the villagers awoke to find a lock of hair in the nearby field which had apparently been unearthed by some wild animals. It was fluttering in the winter breeze. The hair, which one cleric recommended to be cut in public for her impiety but was later saved in favour of stoning, had finally made its journey from the shallow grave.
Rumours were in circulation for quite some days that a white-clothed woman was haunting the village. Mothers warned their children not to go out alone after sundown. But the rumours had also subsided in due course and everything became normal. Apart from this, her death failed to cause any stir in the overall workings of the village, and the universe is certainly far bigger.
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