Eagam Khaling
Sabitri has been shouting at her five years old son, “Why did you accept the sweets from that man? From today onwards, if you accept any sweet from him, I shall badly punish you!” Today, her face is reflecting more frustration than usual. She walks grumbling here and there and in that way that a single day also passes off.
The next day, Sabitri wakes up early in the morning and investigates her nude body in the dressing mirror of her room. There she quickly loses in a dream and wakes from it with an unknown fear. But after some time, she gains the same anger that she had has been living with for many days. She murmurs, “Why is that man doing this to me? Doesn’t he know that I am somebody’s wife? He knows everything, but why he behaves in that way? From today, if he dears to whistle at me, I shall spit on his face, and if he gives any sweet to my son, I shall go straight to his place and throw that on his face.”
The son is still asleep. After adding a warm blanket on him, Sabitri walks out of the room and looks towards that man’s place from the close verandah. There, she remembers the last year’s incident that how that man had cunningly touched her hands and body. Now, she regrets not having said anything to that man at the time, and this wets her eyes. She screams within herself without any sound.
By this year, it has become five years that Sabitri’s husband has neither sent any information about him nor any money to her. She gains acute frustration whenever she remembers it. While cooking food for lunch, the two questions suddenly start rattling in her mind, “What would I do if my husband never returns? If he had married another woman, in that state!
Again after some time, that man’s thoughts occupy Sabitri’s mind. Just a moment ago, she hated that man much, but now a strange bud of love starts sprouting in her heart. She does not know why that is happening to her. She says to herself, “That man’s eyes are beautiful and looks me with love, but he is not brave enough.”
After some days, Sabitri goes to the maternal house and immediately returns, leaving her son there. At night, while climbing up-stair, finishing her all kitchen works, a small boy of her neighbor comes running to her and handovers a letter. She reads the sender’s name—it was her husband. Now, this suddenly increases her frustration. She does not want to read the letter, for which she had waited five years. She carelessly runs towards her room. When she enters her room, she could not believe how that man was already inside. As she tries to scream, he holds her tight and closes her mouth with his hand. She negates and tries to stop his all evil acts, but she could not do anything except melting herself with that man’s hand, lips and breathings.
The next day in the early morning, when Sabitri wakes up quietly searches for that man with her hand on the bed, but she does not find him. After a while, she looks at her body in the mirror and turns her eyes on the table: yesterday’s letter is still lying unopened. She suddenly moves out of the bed and burns the letter by lighting a lighter. After then, as she is gesturing to her God, she walks towards the kitchen, singing a folk song composed by herself.
[Eagam Khaling hails from Darjeeling. He has published an anthology of poems in 2001. Since then he has been publishing his poems in local, national and international journals (and e-sites). He is a teacher and also a research scholar at the Department of Philosophy of North Bengal University.]