The weight of its wetness stretched across the skin of her face. A single tear drop that escaped her half-closed eyelids as she breathed her last seemed to have washed away all the pain that she had endured for decades.
Her frail body looked even more fragile as she lay dead, surrounded by a host of mourners. Some were crying, some others were remembering the dead in her youth—how beautiful she used to look, how good she used to be in the kitchen, how swiftly her feet moved on the sewing machine. Strangely, none of them had seen her in her youth. Yet, as the ritual demands, they were remembering the folklores told from one generation to the other.
When my grandmother died at 93 it took more an hour to untangle the knots in her hair. The nurse had to apply almost a bottle of oil on the dead woman’s head. Her eyelids would open and close in rhythm with each stroke of the comb that rummaged through the tangled mass. Finally as the nurse finished her job, grandmother’s head lolled on the pillow covered in a white case, the excess oil spread in an uneven cloud. The women of the house dressed her in the finest of clothes. Grandmother’s steel almirah was open for everybody’s inspection. The racks were filled with mekhela sadors, shawls and the much-eyed jewellery box in one corner. A necktie which once belonged to her husband hung on the inside door.
It was almost 20 years ago. Everyone says it was perhaps the arthritis in her knees that had become unbearable and her legs gave up one day. She fell in the courtyard and never got up on her feet. In that accident, it was her urge to live that got crushed. After that she refused to speak or eat her meals. There were times when she would soil the bed and get admonished.
Everyone who came to enquire about her health would say: “It’s time God took her away. She was too old and had endured the trauma of her husband and four children’s death.”
As the hearse van waited outside the gate, they lifted her body and placed it down with a jolt. Soft plumes from the burning incense sticks got lost in the cloud of fume left behind by the rickety van. It was time to say goodbye.
