Chapter 14 / 51 · 4 min

The Second Death

The girl touched my finger and said, in a voice almost too soft to hear, “Phalanges!”

Then she began counting the phalanges. Two in the thumb, twelve across the other four. She checked them against the book, and a beautiful smile spread across her face. They matched. There were supposed to be fourteen.

Her test was over. I passed all of them. She hadn’t taken a loss buying me for thirty thousand taka. I was perfectly fit, a flawless skeleton, a hundred percent intact.

The girl’s father came into the room. Hair gone grey, clean-shaven, thick-framed glasses. Even in this cold he wore a thin undershirt. Maybe there was a heater in the room. With nothing but bones I can’t feel anything. Not cold. Not heat. When the leaves fall, it’s winter. When the rain comes, it’s monsoon. When the flowers bloom, it’s spring. That’s how I go on living, even after death.

The father ruffled his daughter’s hair and said, “Is everything in order, dear?”

“Yes, Father. I’ve checked it all.”

“Put on your apron. Let me take a picture of you with your skeleton.”

The girl put on the apron. Everyone does this. Over the last twenty years I’ve changed owners three times. Every one of them photographs me first. It makes me ache. When I was alive I tried so hard to buy a camera and never managed it, so apart from one passport-size photo, not a single picture of me was ever taken.

When the photo was done, the girl folded me up and laid me in my new box. I lay there quietly, my head resting on my arms, my legs, my spine, the bones of my chest.

I died twenty years ago. I killed myself. Living without Yasmin felt meaningless to me. I couldn’t marry Yasmin, but that wasn’t Yasmin’s fault. Nobody gives their daughter to an unemployed man. Same-age relationships don’t last. That’s why.

The decision to die was the right one. The method was wrong. Instead of jumping off a bridge in the dead of night, I should have sat in my own room and slit my wrists. Hanging feels effeminate to me. Or I should have gotten hold of a pistol, come to the front of Yasmin’s house, and shot myself in the head. That would have been far more dramatic.

Maybe Yasmin would have called off her wedding, spent her whole life without marrying. Even in death, I’d have lived on as the hero of a love story. Dying like a thief in the night got me nothing.

To my relatives I’m a missing person. To the doctors I was first an unclaimed corpse, then a skeleton, just a skeleton. The sum of one skull and one trunk, nothing more.

The girl has her viva tomorrow.

She holds my femur in her hand and reads, matching it piece by piece. Which muscles attach to this bone, which nerves run along it, what each nerve does. Then the phone rang. She picked it up and said, “Didn’t I tell you not to call me anymore?”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to be in a relationship…”

“You said yes two days ago!”

“Now I’m saying no.”

“You think I’m some toy in your hand? Yes one minute, no the next?”

“Look, Ratul, we’re the same age. Same-age relationships are never successful. And this is just a passing feeling for you. It’ll take you ten years to get established, and those ten years…”

The girl keeps talking, louder and louder. The two hollows of my skull stare at her. The moment I hear the words “same age,” darkness clots inside my skull. Love, Yasmin, failure, despair, sin, the bridge, the water, breath, oxygen. The memories spin and spin. If my hand hadn’t been separated from my body, I would have clutched my head. I can’t bear it anymore. No peace, even in death.

“Who are you talking to?”

“No one. Go away, Mother.”

“Give me the phone.”

I stared at that grave, angry face with bulging eyes. I stopped hearing what they were saying. Yasmin. I am the skeleton Yasmin’s daughter bought. This is how fate cheated me.

After a while things between them cool down. The girl buries her face in her mother’s chest and cries. A little later the father comes and pulls them both close. The girl and her mother both rest their heads, in complete trust, on the chest of the man with the grey hair. The man I could not become, the reason I drowned for lack of oxygen in the depths of a river twenty years ago.

Now I remember my mother. Who knows, maybe my old mother still stares out the window with clouded eyes, still sits with the rice served, waiting for me.

Or maybe my mother is dead, lying peacefully in the earth as a skeleton.

Surely my mother never imagined that, carrying all the unrest of the world inside my bones, I lie on top of my own bones inside a box of thick cardboard.

Faded, ugly, filthy, this harsh reality makes me want to weep. But there is nothing left in my body now, not even a lacrimal gland to shed a tear and ease the weight. I want to die one more time.