It Withers and It Dies |
Issue 16
|
|
I sat on the floor with my arms wrapped around my knees, feeling the coolness of the crimson tiles under my bare feet. Freshly sucked lychee seeds lay atop a copy of the Prothom Alo, clustered in a puddle of juices that collected ink as they oozed through the thin pages. The sleepy afternoon silence was broken only by the television’s dim murmurs and the faint grating of a saw against wood.
“Can you come to lunch tomorrow, Ma?” Her whisper of a voice almost melted into the rhythmic sawing outside. It was the first thing she had said aloud in some time. “Yes, Nanu.” I hoisted myself off the floor, making my way to the adjoining kitchen. “Yes, I can.” Letting the lychee seeds slide off into the trash, I turned a rusty tap and let a stream of water drum onto the steel sink. My palms lingered in its coolness, a brief respite from Khulna’s throbbing heat. The dark curls my grandmother had gifted my mother, and my mother me, clung to my forehead. I loved my hair, and I loved that I had gotten it from them. I didn’t know if I had ever told them that. But I had a feeling they knew. As a child, I used to stoop by the door and peek in, hoping to catch a glimpse inside the bustling, steamy, seemingly cavernous kitchen, back when it had been the beating heart of my grandparents’ home. The whistling of Calcutta tea kettles and sizzling of over-easy eggs in the morning; the scraping of knives against cutting boards that soundtracked the readying of a family meal; the hushed, giggling exchanges of local gossip as pots were scrubbed clean after dinner. Habib Uncle, a smiling man who always smelled of molasses and somewhat resembled Bob Dylan with a Khulna tan — and he leaned into it too, the fluffy-headed scamp, with his pearwood harmonica that he could barely even play — used to slip me orange slices whenever I had tried to peer in. I could almost still hear it all, even as the sawing outside grew louder by the minute. The kettles from Calcutta had been long sold off. Habib Uncle had died of cirrhosis four years ago. “Hot day, huh, Nanu?” I returned to the living room, two glasses of water in hand. My grandmother responded with a blink and a blank stare. Her hands gripped the sides of her wheelchair, the veins running up her forearms prominent and blue against her graying flesh. Her upper lip quivered ever so slightly, as if she was constantly teetering on the precipice of breaking into tears. “See, I knew you should’ve let Umna Auntie help give you a bath this morning,” I chided her, placing one glass on the floor and the other on the table next to her. “Just let me know when you want some lunch, okay? I think the cabbage is almost ready.” Her orna had slipped down her bony shoulders. Two decades ago, she would have playfully wrapped the same shawl around me as I giggled underneath its soft, checkered canopy of cloth. It had seemed gigantic back then, like I could get lost within its green and golden folds, enmeshed within its faint scent of citrus. Today, it could barely stay on her shrinking frame. “Ma,” she said finally, speaking up a little over the sound of the sawing. “Can you come to lunch tomorrow?” My grandmother’s Bangla was faint, fragmented, and faltering. She hesitated between words, her crinkling voice briefly trailing off before making its way back; with each pause, I could almost see her eyes dancing aimlessly across the floor, as if grappling for the direction her question had been heading in. “Yes, Nanu. Of course I can.” She seemed content for a little while. “Ma,” she spoke again. “What is that sound?” The caustic grinding of steel on wood had indeed grown more aggressive, as if repeatedly catching on something and tearing right through it. “Nothing, Nanu. Let’s turn this up.” I reached for the remote to the TV, a thick gray box that made everything on its fuzzy screen look like it was older than the country of Bangladesh. Not too tall a hurdle, given that most of the furniture in this house was. Heck, the house was considered old when my mother’s first cries bounced off its walls, and that was the year of the war. The television, five decades and the birth of a nation later, hadn’t budged. It was on this screen that my grandparents had listened to the midnight declaration of war as the first tanks began rolling down the street outside; had scanned maps and tracked the continuous fighting to determine when it was safe to get baby formula for my infant mother; had read the name of Nanu’s brother on a list of soldiers whose bodies had been identified; had watched as the first flag of independent Bangladesh was unfurled from rooftops nationwide. It was on this screen that my mother had grown up watching Bangla dubs of Star Trek and, thirty years later, I watched the English reruns. A series of framed photographs lining the top of the television, reaching across generations and the color spectrum, showed my grandmother, my mother, and me each in our early twenties. If the world around it had changed, the television certainly hadn’t noticed. “How’s this, Nanu?” I asked, landing on a channel airing a wildlife documentary. I turned, and my grandmother’s eyes weren’t on the screen at all. “I don’t like the sound, ma,” she whispered. Her gaze was fixed on me. “Nanu -” She lifted her hand off the arms of her seat, and I watched its slow, shaky climb to meet mine. The warmth of her colorless grasp was so startling that my wrist almost jerked back in reflex. Her soft palms pressed my fingers into a fist and held it there. “They’re cutting down the tree, Ma.” The last time my grandmother had been able to hold my hand like this, she had still had her smile. It had been a crooked and toothy and pure smile, one that felt like the sun peeking through the clouds just to look at you. It had been a little lopsided to the left, just like my mother’s and mine. “They’re cutting down your tree. You live there, Ma.” But time had changed her face. Her skin sagged as if slowly melting off of her skeleton. Her eyes, perpetually glazed over in silent exhaustion, drifted to the floor even as she faced me. Her lips were pursed in a tight, thin line. “They have to, Nanu. They need the space.” The sawing lacerated the air with its unruly, arrhythmic screeches. Barbaric. Unnatural. “No,” she said simply, her voice straining ever tighter. Her hand, clasped around my fist, shook to and fro. “No, it’s your tree, Ma.” “It’s okay, Nanu.” I reached for her other hand, but she squeezed the arm of her wheelchair in a quivering grip that drained all color from her wrist. Her mouth crumpled, and she began blinking profusely. I grabbed her head and pressed it against my stomach just as she released her bated breath in a hauntingly unfamiliar cry, a sound I had never heard her make. An almost animal sound, wrenched from her lungs and strangled by heaving sobs. I slipped my fingers into her hair, staring at the wall as her face trembled against my ribs. “It’s alright.” The sawing seemed to have grown deafening by now. It was impossibly loud and ridiculously close. “Tell them to stop, Ma,” she begged, her words almost swallowed by choked whimpers. “You live there.” I refused to take my eyes off the wall. She pulled aimlessly on the sides of my shirt as the sawing dug into our ears, refusing to subside. “I don’t live there, Nanu. No one does.” The sawing cut into my head, my neck, my chest. I wrapped my arms around Nanu’s face. The blades couldn’t get to her. “You live there, Ma.” The horrible screeches crescendoed, enveloping us in the unforgiving wailing of a tree being gradually torn from limb to limb. The sawing was now screaming — piercing death cries that rattled the windows. “Ma,” she uttered, but the rest of her words were cut off by a deafening, noiseless snap that plunged the world into momentary silence. For a vanishing moment, every sound stopped. The hollow, lifeless thud that came after sounded distant and decisive. I cradled my grandmother’s head, listening to the sobs seeping out of her body. *
|
Adeeb Chowdhury is a writer from Bangladesh. His short stories and essays have appeared in Dulcet Literary Magazine, Black Fox Literature, Unearth, Brown History Magazine, North Star Literary, among others. Awards he has won for his writing include the James Augustus Wilson Writing Award, the Skopp Award on the Holocaust, the Feinberg Undergraduate Research Prize, and North Star's Best Nonfiction Award. He lives in Binghamton, New York, where he works in financial planning.
|