Laila

One gentle morning when she was stroking her eyes with charcoal kohl, she paused and leaned against a mirror with a desire of being seen, heard, held and understood. An amputated crow sang on the edge of the window grid, unaware of her desires. She kept comprehending her thoughts for a while and then decided to let it go off like a season.

Years ago, during a heavy monsoon when days were short and cold, someone enquired her about her full name and the place of origin. They told her that they are some government workers who are working on the census of the area, which they would submit to the central government for some trade affairs. She went robbed at this rare enquiry and somehow managed to pronounce her name as’ L A i laaa, not Majnu’s lover but’ she added the pun, ‘ Laila from nowhere’; Officials annoyingly dismissed her later information and proceeded.

She was dying for a long time slowly. She has chosen emptiness, no matter how many seasons came and went. No neighbor knew the truth except for the newspaper boy. The newspaper boy read her the highlights of the Mumbai mirror in English first and then translated it to Hindi when he had some spare time. She would ask him about politics and food recipes. Everybody knew about her growing pain, premature aging skin, hollow pride that she carried and the unspoken loneliness.

The newspaper boy once told us that ‘Laila has lost her last home in a fire that took away her father’s poetries, her newborn child, her photo album and her beloved Persian carpet. And now, no amount of happiness could replace those losses for her because that was all she had’

Laila would sometimes stand in the balcony, swaddling the washed laundry and sing songs of despair and hope. We could see her praying to all forms of God with no differences, head down and hands resting on her heart with perpetual glance at the shrine, asking for only God knew what.

They say ‘We can not cover the pain of losses because one struggles whole life learning to exist without them’. Some loses are irreversible like poetries that are born out of the ghost of brokenness, a child that is born from the pure womb then sometimes also the carpet that is born out of yarns and scissors, and may be sometimes unspoken reality that is born out of desire of being seen, heard, held and understood .

I wish people would learn to die before they learn to live.

By,

Neha M

( Neha.M is a Mumbai based writer who create fictional characters in the form of writings. She frequently blogs on various societal misogyny in an emotional & satirical patterns. She believes words can cause reforms in the world if conveyed well)