THE BETRAYAL
" Ma, ma, ma".
Even the frantic cry of her son could not deter Mukti from escaping. She was fast heading towards savoring the first taste of freedom. It was dawn and the entire locality was enjoying the last lap of early morning slumber before bursting into daily activities. The time was just ideal for Mukti to break away from the shackles of round-the-clock humiliation and torture. Her drunkard husband was fast asleep. She bore all the brunt of his inebriated bellicose mood swings the previous night silently, pinning hope for a much-coveted carte blanche at the earliest daybreak. She tiptoed to the door, stealthily turned the latch, and opened the door partially to allow her slender adolescent body to pass through lest anyone woke up. Out in the open was she at last under the vast sky with a few stars still twinkling at one side while the other was gradually changing hue clearing the pathway for the sun to rise. She was about to feel the unique smell, a mixture of the dew-soaked earth and vegetation in the twilight air when the eerie stillness was broken by a shrill cry. "Ma...ma ...ma". It was her four-year-old not seeing his mother around. No, no looking back, never, the mom still in her teens thought. At first, she walked fast, then she ran and ran for her independence, for her life. Her feet, drenched with the dripping- in dew from the crushed grass, were slipping out from her sandals intermittently. She stooped time and again to press the toes forward to slip her feet in with an uneasy glance around lest anyone noticed her. But no, no one for God's sake was awake except for the chirping avian, getting ready for a busy schedule ahead much before the humans wereup. Just when Mukti was about to suppress her fear and sprint faster a stinging pain almost paralyzed her. The smallest toe in her left foot had hit the corner of a pellet jutting out from the path. She knew she was bleeding in her foot from the wet feeling in the area. Instantly, the age-old foreboding such hindrance might ensue came to her mind. Her heart sank. But the superstition was too insignificant in comparison with the dream she was chasing. It was a dream of breathing, laughing, and living freely. It was a dream that Swapan, the kite- seller had drawn in her eyes for the last eight months. She kept on rushing uphill towards the small station secluded at the crack of dawn and boarded the first train to the city.
She was gasping heavily for breath and flumped on the window-corner seat of an almost vacant compartment. The sprinted flight over such a long stretch was too much for her. Never did she run so fast in her life. Her heart throbbed badly. But she did not mind the travail. The strain was worth the cause after all. While wiping the droplets of sweat off her forehead with the corner of her saree she thought at last, at last, she could free herself from the clutches of her brutish husband. Ah, what a great relief! There were only countable strangers around, most of whom were hawkers on their way to the city markets. So, the apprehension of getting recognized by known ones could be side-lined, she felt. With the first feeling of liberty sinking in gradually, a sense of elation prevailed upon her, making her unable to sit quietly. She was just moments away from realizing her dream.
As the train moved forward her mind fast-tracked back tothe past when she was happy around her father and helped him in his grocery shop, in the southernmost tip of Bengal. Though not affluent, theirs was a family in which square meals thrice a day and wearing new clothes during the puja were a reality and in which she could dream of her father happily marrying her off one day. It was the ultimate desire of all girls born in this area, she reminisced. But luck had stored something utterly reverse from what she had thought as a
tropical storm snatched away everything, not even sparing her father's life and the shop, the fulcrum of all her optimism. She was just fourteen then.
The family had suffered the subsequent excruciating pangs of indigence with nothing the members could call their own except the famished faces of the four little children apart from the eldest one, Mukti. It was too much for the recently widowed mother to withstand for long. To offload some of the burdens from her shoulders she had to find a way soon and nothing was better and easier than marrying Mukti off without much delay. The latter, already in the bracket of marriageable age limit as per local standards, was by god's grace much healthier and taller than her age, reminiscent of a not-so-undernourished past in the care of her late father. So, she did not take much longer to get a groom than anticipated by her mother. He was the much older, much-married vegetable vendor of the locality. The marital union pleased the mother immensely by way of reducing the number of mouths to feed and also by reducing the weight of her anxiety with the sufficient material favor that she received from her well-off son - in - law. The latter, too, found the so-called marriagehighly beneficial as it gave him a skivvy in the name of a wife who would easily be badgered into accepting his addiction and erotic whims. The irony was, in this entire arrangement of life-long partnership, the complete loser was Mukti and the thing absolutely missing was marital bliss.
The dream of this tender soul to experience the first flavor of love from her husband was crushed on that very wedding night under the beastly might of a drunken cruel man. Then onwards her day began with the daily dose of physical and mental abuse on baseless suspicion of infidelity along with bone-breaking household work and ended with satiating her husband's unbridled lust, not to be excluded, the load of motherhood at fifteen. Her dream of a happy life with a loving husband slowly erased from her mind and spirit, her laughter faded from her face and what remained was a fragile figure and a browbeaten existence of loveless drudgery. Just when she started to concede this harsh reality as crafted by destiny, freedom from which seemed only death, a chance encounter with Swapan altered everything. It was during one of those rare trips permitted by her husband to visit her ailing mother that her son was into a sudden fit of loud convulsive cry twisting and turning with an uncontrollable scream and whimper for some unknown reason that children quite often are prone to. It was difficult for her to hold him tight in her arms. Suddenly a colorful kite appeared before his eyes and the toddler with great wide-eyed bewilderment stopped crying. From behind the kite peeped an amiable man with a peculiar oblique birthmark on the left cheek and a bewitching smile, holding the kite in hand. On seeing the young mother's helplessness in managing the hysterical childon the street, Swapan came forward with a colorfully patterned kite from his shop to her rescue and succeeded. There was such a bubbling conviviality in his approach that Mukti felt as if a welcome gust of fresh air blew over her entire being. For the first time since her father's demise as if someone close interacted with her with a smile, understood her problem, tried to unburden it, and above all treated her as human. From then onwards the frequency of Mukti's visits to her mother increased, the latter's illness being an easily digestible excuse. Initially, the skewed birthmark on Swapan's cheek elicited a weird feeling within her, sort of a question mark in her mind about his intention. Could anyone be so very nice to a stranger woman in such a short period? If she were so fortunate to meet such a man who seemed a god in the guise of a man! But the young man's humorous utterance, hearty laughter, and sweet surprises sometimes with a piece of jewelry, though cheap it might be, sometimes simply with a cone of ice cream, completely swayed
Mukti off her feet and restored her lost smile back to its rightful place. The casual interactions, little by little, paved the way for regular trysts. With bated breath, she waited for the rendezvous on her way to her mother's home, sometimes in the paddy field hiding in between the rows of leggy rice plants, sometimes in the train compartment camouflaging as co-passengers. She had to be highly creative to dodge the prying eyes, especially those of her ever-doubting spouse. Swapan's spontaneous eloquence envisioning a bright romantic future for the two of them far away from the complexities of their present location which bore the essence of honesty and sincerity had a great positiveeffect on Mukti. It brought back Mukti's trust in man, belief in love, and her conviction of not being ignored by destiny to have a better life after all. Her latent dream of living life with dignity and love buried under a bruised soul for years rejuvenated and yearned to soar high to the vast blue sky once again, unfettered by the fastening fear of social norms. With that dream in her eyes and courage in her heart, she alighted from the train on Platform No.6 of the city station as was planned by Swapan. By that time the sun was already in a regal mood in its glorious position somewhere in between the horizon and the zenith in the rain-washed sky in late September, keeping the warmth in the air in check. Mukti was initially gobsmacked by the cacophony associated with a railway station, especially in the rush hours, and almost got shoved away by the bulk of the crowd swarming the platform with every arriving train. She wobbled and then with much difficulty managed to stand firmly. The anticipation and excitement of embarking upon a journey that would concretize her dream of living life on her own terms were too much to pay attention to these distractions. The dream was not distant anymore, it was palpable, and she could easily feel the thrill of it within the core of her heart. She earnestly searched for the genial face of Swapan in the sea of heads, but no, she failed. Perhaps he missed the train, perhaps he fell sick, endless premonitions were flashing across her mind. Her confidence started to wane, she started to ask the passers-by about the time every now and then, who in turn looked at her with suspicion. She tried hard to appear as confidentas possible and hoped against hope that he would appear before her soon. But no??..
The diagonal shadows on the platform were getting more and more elongated testifying to the fact that the tired sun would bid adieu for the day from this part of the globe within a few hours and there was still no sign of Swapan. Mukti's long-cherished dream nose dived onto the ground like a line-broken kite. The pathetic feeling of a destroyed dream and a devastated trust rocked her entire existence and she felt motionless and numb. Her shaky legs were unable to bear her body anymore and she slumped on the platform. No, she would not return to the hell of a life. She was resolute. But the fear of turning destitute and spending the nights all alone under the open sky seized her, robbing her of the power to think with clarity. She looked blank. At first, she thought of going to her mother. Mothers are all-forgiving, she thought. Besides, her sick, bedridden mother would not smell anything wrong if Mukti told her she had missed her badly and came to tend to her. Again, she thought of her toddler, how would the innocent child survive without her? She even pondered over the idea of returning to her husband. Extremely on edge, all sorts of chaotic thoughts crisscrossed her mind and she felt like crying and cursed the day she had met the scoundrel of a man to be duped by him so very wretchedly.
" There she is." A familiar voice startled her. It was that of her stepson, a lad of her age. Earlier at dawn, the continuous wailing of the child on not finding Mukti around had alerted the neighbors who woke the husband up from almost an intoxicated comatose state.The futile search went on till midday when a call from a well-wisher informed them about a woman, similar to the one they were looking for, who had been walking aimlessly on
Platform No.6. The husband heaved a sigh of relief on finding his wife, an always-available hapless prey to his daily antics. On seeing her sobbing inconsolably, he smirked and hid his vulpine leer with an apparent show of empathy and blamed her stupidity for venturing into a visit to her mother without informing him and boarding the wrong train. He thanked the well-wisher who had called to inform him about her whereabouts.
At that very moment, ironically though, on Platform No. 4, just on the opposite side, across the skeletal railway tracks, the well-wisher leaped inside a running train back home to his wife and daughter. The sardonic smile on his face was as queer as the oblique birthmark on his left cheek. On her way home, Mukti, turning her back on all others, fixed her face firmly against the iron frame of the window of the moving train and looked outside at the horizon beyond the long stretches of paddy fields with tearful eyes. The sun had just left the sky leaving behind a trailing tinge of vermillion rays amidst the grey clouds allowing darkness to descend slowly. At the threshold of adulthood, Mukti, as her name suggests freedom, gritted her teeth and resolved behind the rolling tears down her cheeks to free herself from this bondage some other day, in some other way, come what may.
The taste of freedom, though sliced and transitory, was too inviting for her to forget.
" Ma, ma, ma".
Even the frantic cry of her son could not deter Mukti from escaping. She was fast heading towards savoring the first taste of freedom. It was dawn and the entire locality was enjoying the last lap of early morning slumber before bursting into daily activities. The time was just ideal for Mukti to break away from the shackles of round-the-clock humiliation and torture. Her drunkard husband was fast asleep. She bore all the brunt of his inebriated bellicose mood swings the previous night silently, pinning hope for a much-coveted carte blanche at the earliest daybreak. She tiptoed to the door, stealthily turned the latch, and opened the door partially to allow her slender adolescent body to pass through lest anyone woke up. Out in the open was she at last under the vast sky with a few stars still twinkling at one side while the other was gradually changing hue clearing the pathway for the sun to rise. She was about to feel the unique smell, a mixture of the dew-soaked earth and vegetation in the twilight air when the eerie stillness was broken by a shrill cry. "Ma...ma ...ma". It was her four-year-old not seeing his mother around. No, no looking back, never, the mom still in her teens thought. At first, she walked fast, then she ran and ran for her independence, for her life. Her feet, drenched with the dripping- in dew from the crushed grass, were slipping out from her sandals intermittently. She stooped time and again to press the toes forward to slip her feet in with an uneasy glance around lest anyone noticed her. But no, no one for God's sake was awake except for the chirping avian, getting ready for a busy schedule ahead much before the humans wereup. Just when Mukti was about to suppress her fear and sprint faster a stinging pain almost paralyzed her. The smallest toe in her left foot had hit the corner of a pellet jutting out from the path. She knew she was bleeding in her foot from the wet feeling in the area. Instantly, the age-old foreboding such hindrance might ensue came to her mind. Her heart sank. But the superstition was too insignificant in comparison with the dream she was chasing. It was a dream of breathing, laughing, and living freely. It was a dream that Swapan, the kite- seller had drawn in her eyes for the last eight months. She kept on rushing uphill towards the small station secluded at the crack of dawn and boarded the first train to the city.
She was gasping heavily for breath and flumped on the window-corner seat of an almost vacant compartment. The sprinted flight over such a long stretch was too much for her. Never did she run so fast in her life. Her heart throbbed badly. But she did not mind the travail. The strain was worth the cause after all. While wiping the droplets of sweat off her forehead with the corner of her saree she thought at last, at last, she could free herself from the clutches of her brutish husband. Ah, what a great relief! There were only countable strangers around, most of whom were hawkers on their way to the city markets. So, the apprehension of getting recognized by known ones could be side-lined, she felt. With the first feeling of liberty sinking in gradually, a sense of elation prevailed upon her, making her unable to sit quietly. She was just moments away from realizing her dream.
As the train moved forward her mind fast-tracked back tothe past when she was happy around her father and helped him in his grocery shop, in the southernmost tip of Bengal. Though not affluent, theirs was a family in which square meals thrice a day and wearing new clothes during the puja were a reality and in which she could dream of her father happily marrying her off one day. It was the ultimate desire of all girls born in this area, she reminisced. But luck had stored something utterly reverse from what she had thought as a
tropical storm snatched away everything, not even sparing her father's life and the shop, the fulcrum of all her optimism. She was just fourteen then.
The family had suffered the subsequent excruciating pangs of indigence with nothing the members could call their own except the famished faces of the four little children apart from the eldest one, Mukti. It was too much for the recently widowed mother to withstand for long. To offload some of the burdens from her shoulders she had to find a way soon and nothing was better and easier than marrying Mukti off without much delay. The latter, already in the bracket of marriageable age limit as per local standards, was by god's grace much healthier and taller than her age, reminiscent of a not-so-undernourished past in the care of her late father. So, she did not take much longer to get a groom than anticipated by her mother. He was the much older, much-married vegetable vendor of the locality. The marital union pleased the mother immensely by way of reducing the number of mouths to feed and also by reducing the weight of her anxiety with the sufficient material favor that she received from her well-off son - in - law. The latter, too, found the so-called marriagehighly beneficial as it gave him a skivvy in the name of a wife who would easily be badgered into accepting his addiction and erotic whims. The irony was, in this entire arrangement of life-long partnership, the complete loser was Mukti and the thing absolutely missing was marital bliss.
The dream of this tender soul to experience the first flavor of love from her husband was crushed on that very wedding night under the beastly might of a drunken cruel man. Then onwards her day began with the daily dose of physical and mental abuse on baseless suspicion of infidelity along with bone-breaking household work and ended with satiating her husband's unbridled lust, not to be excluded, the load of motherhood at fifteen. Her dream of a happy life with a loving husband slowly erased from her mind and spirit, her laughter faded from her face and what remained was a fragile figure and a browbeaten existence of loveless drudgery. Just when she started to concede this harsh reality as crafted by destiny, freedom from which seemed only death, a chance encounter with Swapan altered everything. It was during one of those rare trips permitted by her husband to visit her ailing mother that her son was into a sudden fit of loud convulsive cry twisting and turning with an uncontrollable scream and whimper for some unknown reason that children quite often are prone to. It was difficult for her to hold him tight in her arms. Suddenly a colorful kite appeared before his eyes and the toddler with great wide-eyed bewilderment stopped crying. From behind the kite peeped an amiable man with a peculiar oblique birthmark on the left cheek and a bewitching smile, holding the kite in hand. On seeing the young mother's helplessness in managing the hysterical childon the street, Swapan came forward with a colorfully patterned kite from his shop to her rescue and succeeded. There was such a bubbling conviviality in his approach that Mukti felt as if a welcome gust of fresh air blew over her entire being. For the first time since her father's demise as if someone close interacted with her with a smile, understood her problem, tried to unburden it, and above all treated her as human. From then onwards the frequency of Mukti's visits to her mother increased, the latter's illness being an easily digestible excuse. Initially, the skewed birthmark on Swapan's cheek elicited a weird feeling within her, sort of a question mark in her mind about his intention. Could anyone be so very nice to a stranger woman in such a short period? If she were so fortunate to meet such a man who seemed a god in the guise of a man! But the young man's humorous utterance, hearty laughter, and sweet surprises sometimes with a piece of jewelry, though cheap it might be, sometimes simply with a cone of ice cream, completely swayed
Mukti off her feet and restored her lost smile back to its rightful place. The casual interactions, little by little, paved the way for regular trysts. With bated breath, she waited for the rendezvous on her way to her mother's home, sometimes in the paddy field hiding in between the rows of leggy rice plants, sometimes in the train compartment camouflaging as co-passengers. She had to be highly creative to dodge the prying eyes, especially those of her ever-doubting spouse. Swapan's spontaneous eloquence envisioning a bright romantic future for the two of them far away from the complexities of their present location which bore the essence of honesty and sincerity had a great positiveeffect on Mukti. It brought back Mukti's trust in man, belief in love, and her conviction of not being ignored by destiny to have a better life after all. Her latent dream of living life with dignity and love buried under a bruised soul for years rejuvenated and yearned to soar high to the vast blue sky once again, unfettered by the fastening fear of social norms. With that dream in her eyes and courage in her heart, she alighted from the train on Platform No.6 of the city station as was planned by Swapan. By that time the sun was already in a regal mood in its glorious position somewhere in between the horizon and the zenith in the rain-washed sky in late September, keeping the warmth in the air in check. Mukti was initially gobsmacked by the cacophony associated with a railway station, especially in the rush hours, and almost got shoved away by the bulk of the crowd swarming the platform with every arriving train. She wobbled and then with much difficulty managed to stand firmly. The anticipation and excitement of embarking upon a journey that would concretize her dream of living life on her own terms were too much to pay attention to these distractions. The dream was not distant anymore, it was palpable, and she could easily feel the thrill of it within the core of her heart. She earnestly searched for the genial face of Swapan in the sea of heads, but no, she failed. Perhaps he missed the train, perhaps he fell sick, endless premonitions were flashing across her mind. Her confidence started to wane, she started to ask the passers-by about the time every now and then, who in turn looked at her with suspicion. She tried hard to appear as confidentas possible and hoped against hope that he would appear before her soon. But no??..
The diagonal shadows on the platform were getting more and more elongated testifying to the fact that the tired sun would bid adieu for the day from this part of the globe within a few hours and there was still no sign of Swapan. Mukti's long-cherished dream nose dived onto the ground like a line-broken kite. The pathetic feeling of a destroyed dream and a devastated trust rocked her entire existence and she felt motionless and numb. Her shaky legs were unable to bear her body anymore and she slumped on the platform. No, she would not return to the hell of a life. She was resolute. But the fear of turning destitute and spending the nights all alone under the open sky seized her, robbing her of the power to think with clarity. She looked blank. At first, she thought of going to her mother. Mothers are all-forgiving, she thought. Besides, her sick, bedridden mother would not smell anything wrong if Mukti told her she had missed her badly and came to tend to her. Again, she thought of her toddler, how would the innocent child survive without her? She even pondered over the idea of returning to her husband. Extremely on edge, all sorts of chaotic thoughts crisscrossed her mind and she felt like crying and cursed the day she had met the scoundrel of a man to be duped by him so very wretchedly.
" There she is." A familiar voice startled her. It was that of her stepson, a lad of her age. Earlier at dawn, the continuous wailing of the child on not finding Mukti around had alerted the neighbors who woke the husband up from almost an intoxicated comatose state.The futile search went on till midday when a call from a well-wisher informed them about a woman, similar to the one they were looking for, who had been walking aimlessly on
Platform No.6. The husband heaved a sigh of relief on finding his wife, an always-available hapless prey to his daily antics. On seeing her sobbing inconsolably, he smirked and hid his vulpine leer with an apparent show of empathy and blamed her stupidity for venturing into a visit to her mother without informing him and boarding the wrong train. He thanked the well-wisher who had called to inform him about her whereabouts.
At that very moment, ironically though, on Platform No. 4, just on the opposite side, across the skeletal railway tracks, the well-wisher leaped inside a running train back home to his wife and daughter. The sardonic smile on his face was as queer as the oblique birthmark on his left cheek. On her way home, Mukti, turning her back on all others, fixed her face firmly against the iron frame of the window of the moving train and looked outside at the horizon beyond the long stretches of paddy fields with tearful eyes. The sun had just left the sky leaving behind a trailing tinge of vermillion rays amidst the grey clouds allowing darkness to descend slowly. At the threshold of adulthood, Mukti, as her name suggests freedom, gritted her teeth and resolved behind the rolling tears down her cheeks to free herself from this bondage some other day, in some other way, come what may.
The taste of freedom, though sliced and transitory, was too inviting for her to forget.
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