Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 37
by Shahidul Zahir
Translated by V. Ramaswamy and Shahroza Nahrin
Part 2
Torap Ali added that on witnessing this sight of the lines on Mafijuddin Miya’s palm seemingly dropping down from his fingers, he had an uneasy feeling, and he had felt a strange kind of fear; he said, I stopped cutting his hair and kept gaping, and I asked him, Miya saheb, why are the lines of your hand like this? I couldn’t figure out whether that annoyed Miya saheb, but he turned kind of grave, and in turn asked me, Like what?
I picked up courage and replied, It’s as if it’s rolling down, it’s like something falling down to the ground. When I said that, Miya Saheb examined his hand, as if he had never seen his own hand before; after that he slung his arm down at his side and said, Je jinish jhoira pore Torap, ta hoityase jebon, ei haat theikya ja jhoira pore ta hoilo tyaj; amar ei bari aar ei gerame ami ki jebon aar tyajer abaad kori nai? It is life that falls off, Torap, and what falls off this hand is vigour; did I not cultivate life and vigour in this household and village?
The people of Suhasini who had gathered at Mahir Sarkar’s courtyard steadily got entangled in the web-like branches and sub-branches of the tale that Torap Ali unfurled; turning his gaze towards them, and taking a long puff on the hookah, he said that even after hearing what Mafijuddin Miya declared, he felt a strange fear, and observing his fear Mafijuddin Miya had told him that he did not believe in palmistry; he had said, I will live to be a hundred-and-eleven, that has already been fated.
Torap Ali said that Mafijuddin Miya undid the knot of his lungi in the dark shade of the persimmon tree that afternoon, revealed his right buttock, and showed it to him, and Torap Ali mentioned that the number ‘111’ seemed to be written with black ink on the skin of his buttock, wrinkled by age; he continued, Somehow the fear did not leave me, but I didn’t realise what it was then; now I realise that it had occurred to me that it was blood coursing down the lines of his hand; When I brought the calf home yesterday evening and observed the flaming red visage of the moon, I had it in my mind, but I don’t know why I didn’t realise it then, that it was this moon that had slipped off and floated out of Miya saheb’s hand, the moon was soaked in blood.
When Torap Ali stopped speaking, the village folk kept recalling the moon in detail; although they were not convinced of Torap’s proficiency in astrology, nevertheless a suspicion arose in the minds of some of them, those who were old now, who had seen Mafijuddin in their childhood and adolescence, or heard about him, that Mafijjudin Miya probably had some kind of bond with the moon.
The people of Suhasini recalled that Mafijjudin’s Ma was mute, she was incapable of making even the slightest sound, and the night this mute woman was convulsing in soundless agony atop a bloodied haystack while giving birth to Mafijjudin inside their ramshackle hut on a fallow plot on the bank of a canal, Mafijjudin’s father, Akalu, was sitting outside beside the door and savouring a smoke. The people of Suhasini later learned that Akalu’s mute wife gave birth to a son after a lot of suffering, and at the very moment of the boy’s birth, Akalu, who sat waiting outside beside the door, heard the cries of the infant floating out from inside the room, and after that, a shaft of moonlight flashed through the canopies of the trees and fell flat at his feet.
Akalu later told the village folk that as soon as the baby cried out, the moonbeam emerged and fell, dispelling the congealed darkness, and then he realised that it was full moon that night and that this full moon had been in eclipse all this while; the baby was born the moment the eclipse began to lift, or alternatively, the eclipse began to lift the moment the baby was born.
Akalu said, Ghorer moidde sawaler chikkhur huinya choimkya uttsi, dekhi ki, amar dain paayer paatar upur chander alo aishya poirse, I was startled to hear my boy cry inside the room, and lo and behold, what do I see, moonlight had fallen on my right foot; he added that his heart filled with joy at once, and after that, entering the room, he found the baby lying on the wet straw between his weary wife’s legs, just like the people of Suhasini said he once found this silent wife of his.
But, that night he could not pick up the human baby after he entered the room because of his wife’s fatigue-induced slumber; he observed that the connecting cord between the newborn baby and his mother was still intact. Seeing the baby in this condition, he then felt like laughing because it struck him that the baby was stuck like a baby goat tethered to a pole; but either without giving it any thought, or owing to a kind of unknown fear, he folded his arms. Instead of trying to set the baby free by pulling the cord out of the uterus, he simply waited.
After that, when the baby was separated with the placenta emerging from the uterus, he put the baby next to the bosom of his naked mother who was lying on the straw in the darkness; he came out, and looking up at the sky, he saw the moon gradually emerging from the malefic clutches of Rahu, and moonbeams began to rain down upon the leaves of trees and on the fields, and it seemed to Akalu that he could hear the pitter-patter sound of these falling moonbeams in the night’s silent realm. Sitting on the veranda near the door of his hut, he lit the tobacco in his chillum from the fire made with paddy chaff and smoked; after that, when the full moon was completely unveiled and it bloomed directly overhead, he went back inside his hut and he heard the slurping sound of a breast being suckled.
Akalu, the landless farmer of Suhasini who lived all alone with his mute wife on a fallow plot of land, then got busy; he cut and brought laths from the clump of bamboo behind the homestead, and removing the baby from his mother’s bosom, he carried him to the moonlight outside. He then cut off the umbilical cord of the infant using the bamboo laths, and tied its stump with a thread, and in the radiance of the heavy downpour of moonlight on the homestead through the gaps in the foliage, he washed the baby with water from the pitcher.
This is an excerpt from the Bangla novel, Shei Raate Purnima Chhilo, by Shahidul Zahir, translated by V. Ramaswamy and Shahroza Nahrin.
