Mizan Rahman
For the past 10 years I have been following,
more or less, the same routine every year. Around the middle of April, when the
ice has melted away from the yards leaving the sludge and waste behind, I go
out with my car. Or is it the car that takes me out? My old car seems to know
my mind, like a trusted friend.
The cemetery near
the town of Carp
on a rural road off Highway 417, is just 35 km from my home. The springtime
urge that takes me there every year originates from a familiar voice that I
seem to hear, or imagine I hear, saying: Why aren’t you coming yet? What’s
holding you up? The same complaining voice that had managed to keep me always
on the alert for 41 years of our marriage-----that irresistibly beautiful girl
with the fury of a volcano and the charm of a nightingale. Destiny had taken
her away from me ten years ago. Now I have nothing but memories, staring at these
long unbearable months of Canadian winter, when everything seems to get frozen.
Waiting and waiting, and waiting more till the relentless grip of ice lets
loose.
April and May
are the two cruel months here in eastern Canada. Especially for the lonely
hearts. The ones who have lost their mates, the ones who are tormented by
memories, and by the agony of having failed to utter the last words in her ear,
the two magical words everybody craves for: ‘I love you’. How simple, yet how
immensely powerful those two words are. What a pity that we ordinary mortals
seem to be stingiest with these simplest words of life. We fail to utter the
right words when there is time, when the sun still keeps shining in the sky,
the rivers keep flowing to the sea, and the trees keep humming in the woods. It’s
only when everything has suddenly come to a screeching halt, when the time has
had its last breath, the mind seems to wake up to the reality of lost
opportunities. We spend our entire life on the most mundane things, only to
wake up to the most important ones when it is too late. Spring is that time of
the year when the lonely mind roams the alleys of memory in melancholy
solitude.
It’s not that she
remains on my mind at all times of the day and night. No, not at all. Time and
memory are the two perennial antagonists----engaged in a never-ending duel of
will. It’s an inherent law of nature---there’s no way I can deny or defy that.
Time exhorts you to move on. Memory pleads for a little pause----a moment of
reflection, for a bit of introspection. It wants you to slow down, to look back
from time to time, to stop for a silent bow by the lifeless body of your loved
one. Remembering will help fine tune your consciousness to a lasting state of
alert, while the ruthless Time will always put a damper on it. I used to think
about her at least once a day, everyday, and would feel terribly guilty if I
forgot to do that even once.
But not anymore.
Now she doesn’t appear in my mind for days, even months, yet I feel no real
prick of conscience. Time seems to have dulled my capacity to feel guilty. Or
feel anything, period! Maybe, at long last, I really have started moving on,
leaving her by the roadside. Isn’t it the destiny for us all ---to lay still by
the side of the road when the time comes and let the caravan move on, as it
always does?
Thinking about
her suddenly reminded me---my God, I didn’t clean the house for two whole weeks!
Not one day, not two days, but for more
than 2 full weeks. It would never have been possible while she was alive. For
her, the daily life didn’t mean much more than keeping her house spic and span,
as a showpiece in an exhibition would be. She would gladly forego everything
else in her life, but not the mandatory cleaning part. As long as she was able
to move her limbs she would work the vacuum without fail. You wouldn’t find a
speck of dust anywhere in her household. No way! Her living room, with all
those immaculately clean and polished chairs, tables and sofas, was what you’d
see in a fancy furniture store displayed as: “ For demonstration only: do not
touch, please”. Our occasional visitors would feel quite unsure about what to
do: to use or not to use. It was unthinkable that anyone would enter our house
with shoes on with my wife keeping an eye for such indiscretions. On one
occasion a well-dressed lady came in, took off her outdoor shoes and slipped on
her indoor ones quite nonchalantly. Poor lady had no idea that in our house,
any footwear, indoor or outdoor, was a non-wear----not allowed. Period! Quite a
scandalous situation it was, that’s all I can say. My wife wore a hard cold
face through the entire evening, while I was looking for a place to
hide----afraid to meet the eyes of that unfortunate guest of ours.
Our younger son,
Raja, had a dog when he was studying in New
York. He named him Nickel, although the cute little
pet of his was precious as a ton of gold to him. Once he brought the poor
animal to Ottawa
on a two-week vacation. Just imagine the mental state of his mother. She
couldn’t close the door on them, could she? One was her son, the other the
son’s pet dog that he could give his life for. So she had to find a way to
accommodate them both. Alright, you can come in, but on one condition. The
dog’s feet and paws must be cleaned with a washcloth dipped in soap water,
before he steps in. Poor dog must have been terribly confused, perhaps a bit
amused as well, on having this strange podiatric care that must have been a
rare experience for his species.
My wife’s
obsession with cleanliness was known to everyone in North
America, at least to those who knew us or knew about us. Which
meant, of course, that we wouldn’t have too many visitors while she was alive.
Out-of-town friends would always find a reason to stay somewhere else. Out-of-town
casual visitors were, of course, out of question to seek overnight
accommodation in our house. They would usually be scared away by the rumors
that were always in the air in our close-knit community.
But today, everything has come to a screeching
halt. She is no longer with us to fuss over anything. I wish she were. I wish
she were there with all the fussing she needed to do. Today, I wouldn’t mind
her ever-complaining, fastidious nature that kept me on my toes at all times of
the day and night. I would gladly accede to all the idiosyncratic wishes she
would want me to carry out. Today she is not here, but her memory is
everywhere. In fact, the real reason why I am still sticking around in this
house with all its emptiness and its constant reminder of the bygone times, is
precisely this: memory. The memory is over the unused furniture in the living
room that she cared about so much, over the bare walls that she insisted I
paint every two or three years, over the patch of bare land in the backyard
that were abloom every summer with flowers that she loved so much. How can I
leave the dust settle on her ‘spic and span’ coffee tables and bureaus and
sofas? She would have gone crazy looking at those layers of dust that I neglect
to clean today. Above all, how can I erase the fingerprints that she left
behind in this house and beyond everybody’s sight except mine? Why do I have to
be tormented by all the burden of love
that I just can’t seem able to unload?
Oh memory, cruel memory!
Let me give you
an idea how utterly different she was in matters of tidiness of her house.
There were as many as four vacuum cleaners in the house, one each for the three
floors we have, including the basement, plus an extra one that serves as a
spare-----just in case any one of the other three had to be serviced. She
didn’t have too many friends, but the one fellow who she befriended quite
naturally was Wali, our local Eletrolux store-manager-cum-serviceman. He was
her best friend! Almost every week she would need some service for her precious
cleaners, and who was her friendly ‘green giant’? Wali, of course. Poor fellow must have visited
our house at least twice every month. Always with a smile. Which pleased my
wife very much. In course of time they had developed quite a relationship!
So you see why it
is so difficult for me to leave the house un-vacuumed for two full weeks. It
would be an egregious offence if she were alive, and is an unconscionable one
in her absence. So I get down to work. Take the machine out and toil away the
whole day trying to get rid of two weeks of collected dust, and working up
quite a sweat in the end. There were a lot of junk scattered all over the house
that had accumulated over the years since her death. They couldn’t possibly have
escaped my dear wife’s sharp eyes, but they did mine. So I was determined to do
the right thing today, for fear of keep offending her memory for too long.
There were a lot of things that were clearly disposable-----she would have got
rid of them without blinking an eye. But, strangely, it wasn’t so easy for me.
One of the shelves in the main bedroom upstairs was packed with her
stuff-----stuff that was for her everyday use. Toothbrush, a half-used tube of
toothpaste (could you possibly throw that away?), her hairpins, and combs (
that she had no use for near the last few years of her life), two bottles of
Kerry Body Lotion that she had to use regularly for her pale dried-up skin that
shriveled like a dead animal’s hide following all those years of kidneyproblems,
a small mirror that once adorned her dressing table like a privileged companion
with peeping rights on her beautiful face, then becoming a cruel reminder of
the regal looks she lost to the transplant in 1975. I can’t recall when was the
last time she bothered to use that wretched mirror of hers that seemed to have
no purpose to be there at all in the end,
other than digging up the pain from the memories of a lost paradise. There was
also a small notebook that she used to jot down her weekly shopping list, never
failing to lash me with her razor sharp tongue if I failed to bring any one of
those items that she had marked for me. Apart from these little personal
trinkets there were a lot of stuff, clearly of no value at all, total waste,
that I should have thrown away a long time before. Maybe right after her death.
A normal person would do just that. But who says I am a normal person? For I am
not. I am, what people would usually call, ‘a sentimental slob’. I didn’t have
the heart to throw anything that carried her fingerprints----they are
everywhere, in every little object no matter how trivial it was. Now you tell
me how I could, how possibly could I throw them in the trash. Could you?
Vladimir Nabukov
wrote in his autobiographical monograph: “Speak Memory” (what a lovely name for
a book), as his opening sentence: “ The cradle rocks above the abyss, and the
common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between
two eternities of darkness.” A little while ago I read another interesting
book, “Museum of Innocence”, by a younger writer called
Ohran Pamuk. It’s story and narrative would appear to have no real connection
with the title of the book. In the hands of a very conservative reader it may
appear to be almost pornographic, and may get enraged enough to clamor for
banning the book, or at least for restricted sale, so that young impressionable
kids are denied access to it. He/she will no doubt discard the word ‘Innocence’
and replace by ‘Sin’. There is, of course, always a possibility that he/she may
instead be aroused by some of the gory details of the book, and start looking
for an immediate release of the urge. But the truth of the matter is: Pamuk’s
book has nothing to do with sex, certainly not with explicit sexual acts. No
trace of real ‘sin’ anywhere. Physical sensuality, yes, there is plenty of it,
but it takes a lot of sensitivity and insight to realize that physical
sexuality can sometimes rise beyond the cover of flesh and become part of a
solemn hymn of prayer. It is this silent prayer, this eternal craving for
liberation through the barriers of flesh and grime that permeates through this
beautiful book. I thought this is one of the most profoundly poetic expressions
of offering to the goddess of beauty and purity that I have ever read. I can,
of course, understand why a book like this will be completely incomprehensible
to ordinary Muslims hopelessly mired in the gutter of conventional
interpretation of ‘sin’ and ‘piety’. Pamuk is a Nobel Prize winning
author----it would be completely out of his character that he would write a
book on pornography. The symbolism in this story couldn’t escape anyone but the
diehard literalists and the most dim-witted religious zealots. In my own
interpretation what this Turkish author really wanted to do is use a familiar
man-woman erotic obsession to portray the sad decadence of his own society, the
inglorious fall of a great empire to the ruins of history. All he did is wrap
up the nation’s frustrated pride and emotions in a package of unfulfilled love.
Five hundred years before Turkey
had everything. Today she has nothing-----she is as pathetic as Kusum, the main
character of the story, whose mangled body is a metaphor of the land she was
born in. The bejeweled crown of pomp and glory no longer adorns the skull of a
great Sultan, but in a well-protected chamber of the museum---the museum of memories.
I have no qualms
about admitting that naming of this article of mine was inspired by Pamuk’s
book, even though my museum is not half as exotic or interesting as the museum
of innumerable trinkets from the exploits of his melancholy lover. Mine is just
a humble bouquet of memories. I told my sons: don’t expect any material
inheritance from me. Nothing that I will leave behind for you will have any
market value. I’m not even a celebrity that my personal effects will attract
collectors to bid for my belongings.
Do you know what
I inherited from my father? A useless pocket-watch----a laughable relic of the
bygone times. So antiquated this watch was that you won’t find a single repairman
today who would know how to fix it. It won’t fetch as penny in today’s market.
Does it mean, therefore, that it has no value at all? What do think, sons? If you haven’t figured
out in all these years whether or not this “worthless piece of junk” has any
value at all, then I’m afraid I haven’t been able to teach you anything. The
failure is all mine. My grandfather, my father’s father, didn’t have the means
to afford even that little “junk”. He used to work on his land, all day
everyday from dawn to dusk, didn’t have any opportunity to go to schools, but had
the foresight to send his son to school. In doing so he had to sell his crop of
jute, sometimes pieces of his life-sustaining farmland. What he left for his
son was even more worthless than mine, but do you really think his “worthless”
inheritance had no value at all? Market-value, no, of course not, but in its
intrinsic value measurable only in higher human scales that are discernable
only to the most sensitive minds, it was priceless. The most important of all
assets, my dear sons, is that spell-binding thing called “dream”. Likewise, my
father sowed a seed of dream in my heart through a piece of “junk”----a
laughable little time-piece that, to my mind, has transcended all times.
You do not live
with me anymore. Moved out a long time ago. You have your lives, I have
mine-----in our separate ways. People who are fairly close to me but do not
know me too well wonder how I manage to live on my own, all alone in a moderately
large house. Perhaps in their minds, they blame my sons for ‘callously
abandoning’ their aging father to fend for himself while building a comfortable
lives for themselves far away from where they were born. They must have
concluded that your mother and I had raised a couple of cold, heartless boys who
did well in their personal lives, but failed miserably in their moral
obligation to their parents. Don’t pay much attention to those senseless
thoughts of my so-called “well-wishers”. I suppose they mean well, but I’m
afraid they do not know me well, nor do they know you at all. They can’t
imagine that the decision of staying alone was entirely mine----and mine alone.
It had nothing to do with what you wanted for me to do. How will they
know that my living “alone” isn’t quite as simple as that? My “aloneness” is
only on the surface. In reality I have all the beautiful memories around me,
especially your mother’s, with her foot-marks on the floors, her fingerprints
on the walls that I didn’t have the heart to paint out after she died, her big
smiles poring down on me everyday from those large pictures hanging in every
room of the house. Not just she, you as well. There is an old trunk in the
basement that contains some trivial things from your childhoods-----Babu’s
first baby-toy, his first report-card from the public school in Parkwood Hills,
Raja’s first handmade wooden car, the birthday card you presented to your
mother by drawing on a piece of cardboard what only a child’s wild imagination
can think of. Your mother would never allow me to throw them away. Now that I
have inherited them by default I can’t either. Do you see now, why I do not
need to feel alone in this memory-filled house of mine? Also why it isn’t possible for me to leave
all these behind and move to a place full of blank walls and lifeless rooms? Here,
in this ‘lonely’ house I feel I have built a personal museum and I am its sole
curator. It is my hope that you two brothers will appreciate the value of these
memories and take care of them when I will not be around.
A familiar
phrase in the West is ‘Spring-cleaning’. In the oriental culture we do not have
anything quite as formal as that, but we do have a concept similar to that in
our literary tradition. There is a famous song by the great Bengali poet
Rabindranath Tagore on Bengali New Year, called “Esho He Boishakh, Esho Esho”,
where he talks about the need for cleaning up the waste of the year before for
a fresh start ahead. There was a time when in our house, too, we had a sort of
“spring-cleaning” every year, when there were people to create enough ‘waste’
to need cleaning at all. That was the time of mindless acquisition, drunk with
the craze for piling up goods whether we needed them or not, just for the feel
of it. That was time when we owned the rainbows of the skies, the stars of the
galaxies and the wings of the butterflies. As soon as the winter ice would melt
away my wife, my dear, dear wife (we used to call each other “Mona”, goodness
knows why) would put an old toothy garden-tool called “rake” in my hand and
dispatch me off to the lawn with a command: no dinner until the lawns on both
sides are raked and cleaned. Quite oblivious to what it meant to the poor, weak-bodied
diminutive husband of hers, she would often add: have you bothered to look
around to see how dirty those windows have become (have they? Why, I didn’t see
any dirt there!) ? So there you are.
Raking and cleaning on Saturday, windows-wash-and-polish on Sunday. Isn’t that
called ‘slave-labor?’ Of course that wasn’t the end of it. How about the
garage? All the sludge and filth from the winter? And did you have a look at
the car? My God, how dirty it is. Don’t feel like getting in there except with
workers’ boots and clothes, she would say. Who would say it’s a 10 years old
car, people would say we got it from Henry Ford Sr. himself! No, why would you?
How possibly could you have thought about those subtle things with a brain
completely drained of all gray matter after years of trying to teach math to
bunch of dummies. And on she would go until I finally gave in and picked up the
tools to get to work. Burnt in scorching sun of midsummer heat of Ottawa, and totally
exhausted, I’d be back in the house late in the afternoon, hardly able to
speak, and almost near death out of thirst and hunger. If you want to call it a
‘good day’s work it surely was! It was brutal. Sometimes I thought it would
kill me one day. But her majesty was happy, and I’m still alive!
And yet, when I
look back to those years, those bygone times of day-to-day struggles of keeping
things moving in an orderly fashion, I take a step back, become wistful. I wish
she was still here to hand me a rake with a stern look and a firm warning: work
all day, or no dinner at the end of it. I wish so much to have someone in the
house, a taskmaster, like a drill sergeant who would push me around
relentlessly, everyday, then gently but surely cuddle up to me by my side of
the bed at night. I’d give anything to have those times back when there were
enough people in the house to create a lot of waste and junk that I’d have to
work extra-hard to clean up every week, or risk my wife’s severe admonishment. I
know I can’t do things as well as I could before----do not have the energy, the
patience or tenacity to work all day. All the backyard gardens have been
covered up, all flower plants uprooted, all the hedges and bushes remain untended
for years and years. There is no one to draw my attention to the mud and sludge
in the garage, or the dirt on the windows, or the filth on the car. Everything
is quiet now, eerily quiet. The voice, the sight, the mock threats of ‘do the
work or no dinner’ are all gone. Those beautiful days, those golden times
riding on the wings of angels, have vanished in thin air. Now the piles of dirt
in my garage and driveway never move, like some ragged pages of ancient
history. That dreaded ‘rake’ in our garage, still carrying her fingerprints, is
in no hurry to move from where it has been strung on a hook since she died.
Once I thought I should throw it away----just a piece of junk, that’s what it
was. But I couldn’t----something held me back. There were a few car-wash
accessories in the garage that have lost their usefulness. So how shall I get
rid of them? Where else, but in this
secret vault of mine that is my very own museum of memories. None of the items in this
museum has any market value whatsoever-----they wouldn’t even sell in a garage
or yard sale. And that is precisely the point, my sons. They are simply
priceless. Do you understand, I mean really understand, what I am trying to
say? Do you really have the ability to
comprehend the value of these ‘pieces of junk’, having been used to an era of
boundless affluence fed by a relentless march of technology?
The large closet
in our master bedroom upstairs had been packed in stuff at one time. Most of
them had some use from time to time while she was alive and relatively well.
Now there is no use for them, none at all. Yet I didn’t have the heart to throw
them away. They seem to have acquired a life of their own. They are alive and
alert. Whenever I go near them in an attempt to clean up, something holds me
back-----a silent voice, a plaintive look, a sullen face. So I leave them
alone. Exactly the way she left them.
The bedroom
closet has four chambers. Or should I say four set of shelves. The one on the
far left contains a thousand and one saris, that have been gathering dust since
way before she died, to the point that you can no longer tell their original
color. The one on the right is stacked with my own personal things-----shirts,
pants and jackets, sweaters and pullovers, most of which I do not wear anymore.
The chamber in the middle is for everyday use----my pants and jackets which I
keep wearing till they start smelling, my undershirts and pajamas, that are
thankfully not visible to anyone but myself (for otherwise they would cause me
a lot of embarrassment). With my wife alive that would never be possible----
shirts no more than two days, pants a week at most, jackets maybe two, but no
more. That was her way. But now, who cares? I have complete freedom to do
anything I want, keep my house any way I like to. On the side are two shelves
of linen, solidly packed. On the top shelf are stored petticoats goodness knows
how many-----millions if you ask me. One of her idiosyncratic habits was to
wear a freshly washed petticoat after every bath, everyday. Otherwise, she
would say, her skin would warp and she would feel itchy all day. On yet another
shelf are countless number of towels-----towels of all kind, bath, hands, face,
everything dumped together. In an orderly fashion, of course. In her house
disorder was disallowed. Now that she is gone I feel tempted to shuffle things
a bit to make room for other things, or just leave an empty space. But once
again, she appears from nowhere to hold me back-----I just can’t move my hand.
The very top level of the closet, almost beyond my reach, contains some of her
precious possessions-----silk serviettes, embroidered tablecloths meant only
for special occasions, like invited dignitaries, ambassadors, bureaucrats,
deputy ministers. For her the decorum on the dinner table was far more
important than the menu. “It’s not important what food you serve for your
guests, but how you serve them is what shows your culture”. That’s what she would say. All of this ‘treasure’ of
hers is now lying there in the dark closet, the closet of memories, gathering
dust and rust year after year, untouched and unattended since her death. For
the last nine years I have hung on to those precious items as if they were the
most valuable things one can imagine. I just couldn’t bring myself up to the
thought of getting rid of them, or even doing a bit of dusting and cleaning.
That would be grossly disrespectful to her memories. I know what you would say.
Cheap sentimentality, quite unbecoming of my age and social standing. You know
something? Yesterday I decided enough is enough-----it’s ridiculous to have
things in the house in such disorderly and slovenly state, that would, in fact,
amount to more disrespect than respect. She would not approve of
it----definitely not.
So I set about
moving things around to bring a measure of order to my household stuff. One
might describe it as an attempt at lining up the files in a proper system. I
decided to convert the empty room in the basement into a full-scale family
museum, devoted entirely on my wife’s used and unused stuff-----things that she
might have wanted to throw away someday, but now I can’t think of that. How
does one throw away something that your dear departed life-partner had her
fingers on, and will carry her memories till eternity? This room, I decided,
would become my personal sanctuary of recluse, of thoughts that only she would
know about. Something that some devoted Hindu friends of mine set aside in
their house as a prayer-room ( puja-ghor, as they say). Yes, something
like that-----my own, my very own puja-ghor. Why can’t a temple of memories act
like a pulpit of prayer? What is memory, after all? Doesn’t it represent the
eternal longing of us the ordinary mortals to send our earthly experiences to a
transcendental level at some point of our lives? In his novel “Museum of
Innocence” Ohran Pamuk set about collecting every little trinket that his lover
Kusum had ever touched or left behind, down to the meanest piece of chewing gum
she chewed and threw away (that he so dutifully collected, like a possessed monomaniac),
then stored them all in his secret family vault. This bizarre act of irrational
junk-collection of his would appear quite silly on the surface, but deep inside
I think he wanted to bring forth in a symbolic trivia the eternal message that
no matter how much pomp and grandeur there may be in your dream-house, every
palace ultimately gets deposited in the heap of history as nothing more than
relics of times gone by. It is this unusable, broken-down dilapidated house
that Pamuk used to store every little item that his lover ever touched, thus
creating his own temple of prayer. In my case the dream house had never been
much of a “palace”------how could I have afforded one with a lowly professor’s
salary? So my “museum” is just a humble
little room in the dark corner of the basement of a modest suburban home.
First, I brought
some empty bags from the basement storeroom that I used to take on my frequent
travels to all parts of the world to attend meetings and symposiums. Now that
the traveling is over the use of those bags is over as well. Except now----in
the service of my planned museum. (They are too bulky and old-fashioned to take
out for use in the open, anyway). I was surprised to see that it took three such
bags to empty just one little closet of my wife. We never appreciate the volume
of things we collect through our lives until it is time to store them away, or
even just throw them away.
As I kept digging
into the mine of memories I got to the drawer that contained some old
letters----perhaps the most precious of them all. Mostly my own letters, sent
to her from various places of my stops abroad, some written by her to me.
Curious to see what kind of an emotional slob I was at my youth I decided to read
a few. Agh, I thought. I’d not want anyone to see any of these, not while I am
alive. And yet, I couldn’t just throw them away, since they were something that
my wife treasured through her entire life, so I had no right to destroy
something that no longer belonged to me. But what I did own, however, are the
precious few letters that she had written to me. Nobody, but nobody, would be
able to take them away from me. She wouldn’t write much----just a few words,
very mundane, lifeless words, despite the fact it was she who went through an
honors program in Bengali literature at the university, not me! She studied
poetry, but there wasn’t any poetry in her letters, nor in her day-to-day life.
She would squirm at the thought of writing letters, to anyone, even to her own
folks. Would you believe that it was I who had to draft her letters to her own brothers
or sisters, that she would grudgingly copy on a fresh letter-head, and be over
with the ordeal? Incredible as it may sound, it was true, literally true. This
makes it all the more important that I preserve every little piece she ever wrote
to me when I was away on out-of-town trips. They were just priceless!
My wife wasn’t
particularly attached to any material thing in her life, even though the size
of the enormous amount of useless stuff that she managed to accumulate in the
house would indicate otherwise. Strange as it may sound, but it’s not too
uncommon to find people who have absolutely no real attachment to any material
object he/she may have acquired through his/her life. Sometimes I felt my wife
was a compulsive collector-----collector of useless objects that are never
going to have any market value. How useless and how enormous we had to find out
the hard way twice in our lifetime-----once when we moved from a rental
facility to a brand new semidetached
home we had bought with a loan from the bank, second time when we moved
from the semidetached to a single home with yet another loan from the bank. In
course of time things kept piling up, until they filled up every little space
available in the house. There is a lot of stuff in the basement that remain in
their original state-----they were not even unpacked, let alone used. So was
the collection-crazy wife of mine, whose total indifference to their actual use
baffled me all our married life.
Today she is
gone. And here I am struggling with a strange dilemma. Should I or should I
not? Should I, can I really, throw them away? Just because she isn’t there to
forbid me not to? I know I can’t, I simply can’t, throw away those rare letters
of hers----that carries her hand-written words, words that are so banal and
lifeless, you’d think it’s kind of dry legal jargon. Are you eating well? You
do lock the door behind you, don’t you? Never go out to strange places without
company. Last, but not the least, do not be tempted to take a sip of liquor
just because others are doing. Don’t worry about me. Children are fine. And
yes, I love you! At last a word that has a meaning. Love!
So you tell me
how I could possibly throw these away.
But enough is
enough. Enough of old-fashioned sentimentalism. I have to clean up the mess.
Have to find a way to stop the ever-increasing layers of dust settling there
permanently, morphing into mommies of dust eventually. So I decided to move her
closet stuff to the basement, something I should have done long ago, but didn’t
have the heart to. Every time I touched a petticoat or a brassier and thought
of putting it in a basket I felt she was looking at me with wide open eyes-----as
if she couldn’t believe I’d stoop to that in my lifetime. As if she was saying:
So you think it’s time for me to move from the bedroom to the basement? Even
you? How could you? How could you possibly do that to me after all those
beautiful years of living together, in good times and bad, in rain and hail? Didn’t we always keep our hands together
vowing never to let go? What happened to that vow? I know what you might say.
Childish emotionalism. I guess there is a bit of emotion still lingering in the
air. What can I do? How can I help being what I am and what I’m destined to be?
The hardest part
of it all was when I was trying to move away her things of everyday use-----her
toothbrush, dental floss, her glasses, body lotion. She was so sticky about her
personal hygiene that she insisted on brushing and flossing her teeth even the
day before she sank into her final comma. She wouldn’t bear to think of anyone
complaining about her bad breath-----you can imagine what a life-long challenge
it was for me, a rustic simpleton who was never too particular about how his
breath smelled. Today I take those junkets of hers, and find myself torn apart.
What can I do? Then there was an old half-toothless comb that she kept on her
dressing table, even though cruel disease of hers had shorn away locks and
locks of thick heavy, wavy, long-flowing hair that she used to mesmerize young
men with in her youth. In her last few months she had absolutely no need for
that comb, yet she kept scratching her skull with it as if she never lost her
hair. This comb obviously belongs nowhere but the waste basket. But you can’t
tell me that. There’s no way I’ll ever throw that away. Much too precious a possession
it is for me. One of my prize exhibits in the museum. Only my sons will be able
to appreciate what it means to the entire collection when I’ll not be around,
when they will reach their middle ages, when the distant memories will keep
visiting them in their dreams, in the rain-filled melancholy days. Memory has
the longest shadow of all.
The little room
in the basement that is to house my museum of memories was built in 1985 when
we just moved into the new home. Our younger son used to visit with us at least
twice a year, each time for two or three weeks. This is why we needed to set
aside a room to place his (baby) grand-piano so that he could continue
practicing his musical scores. We had to do a major carpentry work to lower the
piano to the basement floor----that was quite an experience. These things one
can do only once in your lifetime----no more, perhaps no less too.
Today my son
doesn’t come for a visit anymore, his mother is gone, and so is his piano. Now
there is nothing but a blank stillness pervading the air all over the house. We
had reserved this side little room in the basement ostensibly for my personal
use----sort of a home-office. That never happened. After she died I had brought
all of her personal effects from the hospital room and deposited in a far
corner of that room-----her hospital gown, towel, slippers, a broad sheet of
cloth that she liked to wrap around her body. Absolutely disposable garbage,
you might say. Maybe you could very well throw them in the bin, but I couldn’t.
Still can’t. Now they are no longer ‘garbage’, rather invaluable pieces of exhibits
in my museum. They are priceless. It is my hope, should I say hope against hope
that my boys will continue to be drawn to this private museum of mine year
after year and feel compelled to come for a visit whenever the urge becomes too
powerful. I really do not have much more to leave for them as a legacy-----nothing
to boast of anyway. Ultimately we all reduce to ashes, don’t we? Ultimately we
all become fossilized relics of the distant past. Perhaps not even that. There
aren’t too many crazy fellows like me who wouldn’t leave any ‘real’ property or
wealth for his children and grandchildren, except a laughable little ‘junkyard’
that he fancifully calls a ‘museum’. It has to be a man who lost his mind,
people might say.
Ottawa, 13 July, ‘12
(Translated by the author from his 2011
Bengali article entitled “Jadughor”
মীজান রহমান
Mizan Rahman,
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