Didun weds Dadan

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(In memory of Debmalya's Thamma and the soul, she left behind)
...summer had begun in Calcutta, in the form of an infant spring. Trees swayed like fishtails in patient water. The clock said, ten minutes to eight. Time had stopped. The battery was to be blamed. Time. Well, time never stops.
Breakfast had been served, by then. Food for the old in a new plate. Kept covered on Dadan's side table. Dadan had been woken up by the liquor tea's aroma. He was very specific about 'chaa' since he began understanding life. He realised, he was late. His wrist watch read, thirty minutes past nine. Which meant, he was very, very late. Late beyond repair. Quick gobbling, in old age, makes wrinkled skin and loose muscles appear as swinging clothes on a breezy day. He was supposed to meet Didun. It was Didun's ninth day at the city hospital. Hasty old men with support sticks look like minarets, symbolising life. A walking metaphor for life. Life that had been survived in.
Didun. The woman, who, amidst arranged marriages and arranged patriarchy, had the power to confess her love in a chithi that she had hidden in her blouse that contained her round, the then tight breasts. Mounds of flesh, like mountains with a valley of separation, which only had words to communicate with. Didun, who often quoted Robi Thakur and hummed Ghazals, which were important to Dadan. Dadan fell in love with her audacity before he could fall for anything else. The truth that lurked in the crescents beneath her eyes, the joy in her moving lips, the morning sky in her iris. And her waist where horizon emerged like shyness. Her womanhood was in its infancy when she got married to Dadan. He was warm but she didn't understand sex. Love was slow like a dawn that prepares for a morning.
Her shidoor-filled river between her thick, ageless hair, her altaa-lined feet, her ability to get traced by the sound of her nupur, amused Dadan. They grew into love, together and oblivious. They knew, what it was but they never spoke about it. They never required to confess. Because they knew and that was very important.
But they fought, too. Didan's silence meant fury. Women are like that. They sow rage and reap love. With time, a family occurred to them. It grew into a habit.
Sunny morning turned gray, that day. That day, which happened after fifty one years of family-growing. But Dadan was late. And before he could leave the house, home left him. Didan evaporated into the realms of love outside the window. And it rained, it rained very heavily. A precarious rain, that had promised to never return the day when Didan's nails sat on Dadan's young back like an act of possession. She had said, she was afraid of thunders. Her hair, black and messy, laid on Dadan's chest like it belonged to him. And it really belonged to him. That night was the night, they had their first kiss; four days after their marriage, in mid-July.
The rain washed away with itself the colours that were destined to stay. Dadan's old face was shocked with melancholy, one wouldn't know whether he cried or he laughed. Men try not to cry. And that, in itself, is just so sad.
Didan had died. With her death, memories were born like lava out of a volcano. Burning, violent. Flowing like continuous perspiration, trickling down, beneath silken clothes. Loss had aged on Dadan's body like an arthritic ache.
Fifty one years of love. Fifty one years is perhaps synonymous to forever. Because when they talk about love, they talk about loss too. Almost in the same breath, with a pause, unnoticeable.
He cried like a child who's been denied mother's scent, that day. I cried too. More for the memories and a little bit for the loss.
I thought to myself, it'd have been better if people died with the memories, they make. All of us are escaping from pain. And in the process, we endorse the same.
The sun had set in our house and in our hearts. The night was calm. Dadan didn't have to wake up early again, the next day. He removed the clock from his room.
Time no longer mattered.
He read her letters and counted days in his breaths.
He did not want to die, essentially. Neither did he want to live.
He wanted to leave, undyingly. Because, perhaps, he knew that when someone dies, many other people die too.
At the age of death, he didn't fear death but the pains, it came with.
~Mui.
February'17.