# The Silence That Speaks
Many years ago. I must have been in class four or five, perhaps younger still. My mother was then a formidable warrior of life, walking the hard paths of the world alone. Her body and mind were in the fullness of struggle—breaking down on one side, building up on the other, tearing down what was built, filling in the gaps anew…like that. In my mother’s world there were two people: myself and my mother.
My mother never went anywhere without me; wherever she went, she took me along. So we were heading to my grandfather’s house that day. I got on the bus with her. Suddenly I noticed that she was speaking shyly to a gentleman sitting beside us. I watched as they began to know each other, gradually, word by word. Their conversation drew from every corner of life—the winding paths of existence, my father, my father’s murder, me, and so much more…everything, one thing after another, all of it. For the first time, it seemed my mother had found someone with whom she could open her heart, someone to whom she could speak of all her unspoken sorrows. I lay in my mother’s lap with my eyes closed.
Ever since my birth, I had seen my mother only crying or grave. I cannot recall the last time I saw her laugh. She would curve her lips as if to smile, but then somehow stop. Looking at her, it seemed as though the whole world had placed its prohibitions upon laughter itself—as if to laugh even a little, or to laugh too much, would bring down some terrible punishment. I longed so deeply for my mother to smile just a little. I would gaze into her eyes and wait, hoping she would suddenly break into laughter. How beautiful she would look if she laughed…ah! Yet she never did. When my father left, he took away my mother’s laughter with him. It angered me to think of it. Yet my heart would also say: foolish girl, why be angry at a man who was murdered? I would stare at my father’s photograph and say: Father, won’t you ask Mother to smile a little? Why won’t Mother laugh?
But that day, even with my eyes closed, I could clearly sense that my mother was laughing freely, speaking eagerly and often with that gentleman. I had never before seen her talk so much, so happily. A strange curiosity stirred in my small heart. Then, after some time, came silence. I felt my mother trembling. Later I understood: he had embraced her gently, wrapping his arm around her back with such tenderness. My mother neither resisted nor objected; she yielded to it, perhaps even longing for more. But then our destination arrived, and she had to get down, so his arm withdrew.
That gentleman held my hand and stroked my head with such affection that for the first time in my life, his tenderness felt like my father’s touch. I saw that he got down from the bus with us, even though his destination lay elsewhere. My mother laughed with delight at seeing him descend with us. I watched it all in silence. I remember how good it made me feel.
The three of us got into a rickshaw together. Mother took me into her lap. That gentleman sat beside us. Me, my mother, and him. It was the first time I felt truly, completely whole. The depth of that feeling in that moment—I cannot describe it in words. None of us spoke, yet in my consciousness there was flowing the finest language the world knows—that language called happiness—flowing in waves. It is true: all the noise in the world owes a debt to certain silences.
In the light of joy that shone from my mother’s eyes, her dark face grew radiant.
# In the Rickshaw
In the rickshaw, too, it seemed all the world’s silences came bearing down. The entire world froze on those three wheels. After some time, the man unbuttoned my mother’s burka and his hand made its way into her bosom. My mother’s breath grew heavy, and with it, the twilight’s darkness around us deepened.
What was remarkable was that I never saw my conservative mother annoyed for even a moment that day. She actually enjoyed the whole thing. I was sitting in my mother’s lap, and I understood perfectly well that the man’s hand was swimming across her chest because of me. The tremor of his uncertain hand reached my back, and my mother was holding me loosely, almost deliberately so. My mother—that woman for whom the world’s joys and sorrows are nothing, the same woman now being made happy by this man, whether he be transgressive, unconventional, immoral—toward him an infinite love arose in my heart. I wanted only to see my mother happy. I had neither the desire nor the time to wonder about the source of that happiness, for I had always seen my mother weep, and I had learned that besides me, there was not a single living creature in this world to wipe her tears. A world that cannot stop a person’s tears, yet rushes forth to stop their laughter with all manner of false and hollow duty—I had long since lost faith in such a world. To me, my sorrowful mother’s happiness was more true than the greatest truth of the world.
That day, the pale darkness around us grew steadily denser. All around, everyone hurried homeward. Everyone seemed burdened by some urgent business or the day’s fatigue, yet these two had no hurry to return—only fear in their hearts that the road would end. Some roads are more beautiful unfinished. Some moments are more sacred frozen in time. The most constant truth of the world—death—keeps only the reckoning of peace and solace, not of propriety or impropriety.
I heard the gentleman tell the rickshaw-puller to go slowly. Let time walk slowly today.
The rickshaw moved through the gathering dark. Suddenly, hitting a pothole in that uneven road, the rickshaw’s rhythm broke. My mother’s hand, which had held me loosely from the start, had grown even looser with time’s demands, and so I tumbled from the rickshaw onto the street. Now my mother was startled! With terrible urgency she was picking me up. I could hear her voice taking on the tone of a repentant sinner’s. Looking at my mother’s face, it seemed she had just returned from some other world, returned here, to this place. My mother had only just returned here.
That day, falling from the rickshaw, my knee hurt. Now I understand—some pain is profoundly beautiful, profoundly sacred, profoundly longed for. Some pain is worth waiting for across an entire lifetime. Without certain pain, life remains terribly incomplete.
There the man left the rickshaw and bade my mother farewell. As he went, he kept turning back, and my mother gazed after him with desperate eyes. In her gaze there was tenderness, there was gratitude, there was love. I pretended not to understand anything despite seeing it all, savoring that transformed expression on my mother’s face. There are times in life when pretense itself becomes the art of living.
All the way to grandfather’s house, sitting in the rickshaw, my mother smiled to herself. And with her smiled my heaven, my world.
That day, I saw my mother happy for the first and last time in this life. From the moment I gained consciousness until now, I have never seen my mother become truly happy from within.
Since that day, I have never seen my mother smile with her whole heart. Even when her lips parted in laughter, her eyes remained untouched by joy. That fleeting moment—the love, the touch, the transgression, the scandal—it made my mother truly happy for the first and only time. After that, they never met again, and I never saw her laugh that way anymore.
Alas, there are some sins we cannot commit a second time, and the ache of that impossibility does not fade even in death!
Now I think: if I could find that man again, if I could recognize him and meet him face to face, I would bow and touch his feet, I would clasp my hands and beg him to come with me to my ailing mother’s bedside. To make her laugh once more, truly and deeply. To give her happiness again.
I am older now. Now I understand—oh, how flawless that fleeting love was, what depths ran through that single touch! The whole world fell silent in wonder before that evening’s joy. If love—true love—comes even once in a lifetime, I would give this small, insignificant life to it without hesitation. Truly, I would.
These days—
how many people drown themselves in love only to live on loveless!
how many grow blind staring so long toward the light!
কিছু কিছু পাপ না করার দুঃখ মৃত্যুতেও ফুরায় না !!