MBarq
A Short Story
Dr Mushtaque B Barq
She was wrapped in a torn blanket, next to a tin filled with papers and prescriptions. People who stopped there had a cause. Some would poke their greedy eyes through the blanket to satiate their hypocritically gentle looks, while others would drape the blanket over her shoulders, and a couple would wrap it around her thighs. She would watch every pregnant mother enter the hospital and every infant in their arms leave. It was customary for everyone who gave birth to a girl to leave the prescription in her tin. And she’d flip the tin upside down to let the faint flame out right after dusk to taunt the falling sun. Her icy womb would hide the cries and mourning of the women laying on labour room couches between the two flames, one that touches the sky and the other that keeps the pulse active. She had stationed herself at the gate of Lal Ded Hospital beneath the official board reading: Lal Ded Maternity Hospital, attributed by a verse interpreting: latan hund maaz laaryom vatan. ( I am tired of myself.)
“Give me a matchbox,” she requested.
“I don’t smoke,” I responded.
Her cheeks seemed to be flirting without her will, and she gave me a razorsharp glance that ripped away the wall of my chest.
Someone tossed her a matchbox, and she lit the tin and offered flame to the setting sun. Papers and prescriptions turned to ash in a flash once more, and she adorned her forehead with the ash as she always did.
Her brow resembled a temple, where numerous prescriptions had been dedicated to the goddess of fire. Her forehead was flooded with plots to be translated into pathos. It was a crematory with so many skulls left unburnt; it was a graveyard with so many sins buried; and it was a mirror broken into bits by ugly faces.
“Why should Sita alone prove her loyalty? Rama can no more be silent.”
“Sita, who is this Sita?” I pretended ignorance.
She stared at me like an arrow aimed to scatter the skull into bits. I lowered my gaze, and she laughed, mocked, and made ill faces.
“Sita is a holy flame that runs through me; I am whirling in it like a chip of wood trying to find a way to Rawana. He is vast and magnanimous; my flame is feeble, but… she stopped.”
A bitch came running and sat calmly at her feet. She patted the animal and then drew it away.
“I was sculpted out of your rib in heaven’s ‘Private Room,’ you know.” She drew my attention to it.
“I nodded in agreement.”
“Why are the sons of Adam displaying my limbs in the delivery room when I was created under a strict divine supervision?”
She kept me quiet for a reason, and I let her distorted words go by. She and I were two ends of the same river, separated by depth and width.
“A lady defends her chastity throughout her life but freely stretches on the couch in front of strange eyes, exposed and anguished, and waits until her ears hear a cry. A cry that soothes her own ripped open abdomen and either sends the prescription to my tin or fetches a package of sweets to sweeten the malice.”
I discovered that I was unsuited to decipher her words. Her locks had trapped my feet, and I was forced to stay.
“You know, what the eyes are?” she enquired.
I was already blank and just stood there waiting for her gaze to release me. Several suns were spinning around in those eyes as obligation, and I was merely a speck. She charred my entire ribs, cranium, and limbs.
She pulled the blanket over her head and let the lustful gazes of passing pedestrians torment her skinny legs. Right on the doorsteps of Lal Ded Hospital, she was looking for a scorching oven to light herself up in order to let her ash be set on the ways of her owner, who had left her on the doorsteps of Lal Ded Hospital to mark the attendance of human lust. But there were only eyes—human eyes, animal eyes that would burn her layer by layer as on a pyre to vanish the mortal frame, and the eyes that would only find their calm in the choicest recesses. As a result of her meditation, I slipped away from the scene. She seemed to be a citizen of an unexplored country beyond my stretch and study.
The following morning, a mob had encroached on her territory. I pushed my way through the human barrier to see her. I nearly died when I saw:
Two baby girls wrapped in plastic bags hung around her breasts, dangling lifeless like figs, and a bitch resting on her abdomen, facing the sky with her tortured nipples well exposed, and from the tin, a faint column of smoke struggling to breathe its last to turn my eyes into lifeless buttons of shame.
