Death like a camera

Lots of water will flow under the bridge where she was found dead and the lecherous men, who nibbled on her body like vultures on cadavers, will find fresh preys to satisfy their lust. In the concourse of conspiring and condescending men, we might never know who killed her, because there is double standard in the man's world. They will be rotten, yet they will want to be respectable.

It worked like the click of a camera as death captured the image of life before the shutter closed on the aperture. A beautiful woman looked sordid in that image, because it told a grisly tale beneath the surface of her glamour. She was a pawn in the hands of men who passed her around like salt at dinner.

In death, the woman got posthumous recognition for her life: how she lived got known only after she died. She was the child of a broken home, and she left behind her own child in her own broken home as if to perpetuate that tragedy in a vengeful manner. She was a woman who had bum rap with all the men in her life. The father abandoned her, the husband pimped her, and the lover exploited her. In between other men used her for ribald pleasure.

If closely looked, her life was just another flavour that stoked the appetite of sex-hungry men. And if she lived for that grottiness, she died for it too, a glamour girl killed and hurled under a bridge like an expired toy. Her body lay in the morgue for days before anyone identified it, a rude way to finish the life that wanted to soar in the trajectory of fame.

She has left behind the trail of a devastated life, videotapes of her sexual romps, condoms in her house, aphrodisiac tablets, ungrateful friends, and servants who witnessed her pain. She has left behind relatives who are embarrassed, a husband who wanted to push her to other men and an alleged lover who is a suspect in her murder.

She has left behind a father, who watched it all like an inanimate object. He was often forced to sit through tasteless altercations between two men, the husband and the lover of his daughter. They talked about her infidelity, and coerced her to confess her relationship with other men. In the feat of anger, one of them once tore the clothes of the daughter as if to condemn the flesh, which came from the father.

Her death opened a little trapdoor, and let out ominous secrets of seedy impulses like bats flapping out of a dark basement. Her death was a sacrifice that lifted the shroud of mystery, and revealed how respectable men and women were engaged in despicable ways of life. One thing led to another, and it peeled off the surface to expose the underside of a nefarious world where money and drugs had reduced life into a sensual extravaganza!

But more than anything, her death brought us face to face with each other. It showed us how decent people are not always so decent and how they hide their duplicitous characters behind the mask. It makes you worried if the girl next door, or a colleague at work or other people you meet everyday are alright, whether the wholesome faces they put up to you are what they look, whether we can take people by the face value anymore.

And that is tremendous erosion of trust, because next time when you see your neighbour or an acquaintance, you cannot help thinking of people having two dimensions in life: people as they are seen and people as they are. That makes one paranoid and nervous because one would be forever going back and forth in the back of one's mind.

That doesn't mean people are not going to have a personal life. One doesn't have to show everything to others. At the same time one doesn't have to hide everything from others. But there must be an honest link between what is shown and what is hidden, because human relationships cannot be based on surprises all the time. That is a comfort the loved one brings and the stranger doesn't, a friend does and an enemy doesn't.

This woman forever lived with enemies and strangers. She slept with men she didn't know too well, because they gave her money and favours. But then she also slept with men she thought she knew because she loved them. We don't know which of the two kinds of men eventually killed her on that fateful night, but all of them had put her on a slow deathwatch. All of them had already killed her long before she died.

May be everything would have been fine had she lived on. May be more men would have passed her amongst them until she got tired of them or they got tired of her. We don't know what would have happened to her if she were alive. But death has changed everything for her. It flung open the doors and windows of a dungeon where she was condemned to live a tormented life. Death brought her the release, the escape, her last breath putting an end to the agonies of a life of the living dead.

It is hard to tell how people who knew her are going to remember her. It is hard to tell how the man who killed her is going to reconcile in his mind the cruelty of his act and the memories of having made love to her in the past. Let us face it, she is not the only woman who might have been killed by her lover. But she must be one of the few whose death would be haunted by life.

But there is someone else who will be haunted by the life that haunts the dead woman. It is the child she has left behind who is going to grow up in the shadow of her flesh and murmur of her blood. Her mother had left her in the care of others when she was a child, and now she has left behind a child in the care of others. In her way, she has closed her circle of life, but opened a new one for the child.

And this child will be the true victim of this tragedy, when she will grow up in an inverse relationship with rest of the world. When everybody else is going to forget the mother, the child will come closer to her memories as matured thinking will magnify the ability to reconcile with the past. Where will this child go between a living father who let other men sleep with his wife, and a dead mother who left behind the reputation of a slut?

Lots of water will flow under the bridge where she was found dead and the lecherous men, who nibbled on her body like vultures on cadavers, will find fresh preys to satisfy their lust. In the concourse of conspiring and condescending men, we might never know who killed her, because there is double standard in the man's world. They will be rotten, yet they will want to be respectable.

I for one pray that the mother's soul should rest in peace, and the child should grow up to have a normal life. An English novelist named Christopher Isherwood writes in Goodbye to Berlin, "I am like a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." The least the lousy father can do now is help the child grow up thinking, so that when the shutter goes down on the aperture it doesn't capture the grotesque image of another life.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.