It was January, the coldest greyest month of the year. The wind was really fast and freezing that morning. There was white snow everywhere, it had snowed all night.
78-year-old Hameed was not the one to be diverted from his daily routine. Like every day, he had woken up before the Sun and had gone out for his morning Namaz.
It was different that day for Hameed though. As he walked towards the vast valley beside the frozen lake, he felt his heart trembling, not out of fear, but out of grief. He had never gone to say the Namaz alone; as a child, he went with his Abbu, and then with his wife. He loved company, but he did not like to talk. He just liked to listen.
But now there was none to listen to, except the sharp of the wind, whispering death.
He reached the valley beside the frozen lake. He spread his blanket on the ice. He sat hunched on his knees. He felt his bones trembling. For the first time in life, he felt scared. He sensed his approaching demise.
He was not like this before. His wife would talk to him, or just walk silently beside him, and he enjoyed her company, her presence, her sweet perfume, the way she pressed his leg every day before going to bed, her soft touch would make him forget every hostility of life and he would dive deep into his ocean of dreams, which were never to be fulfilled, but still he liked dreaming, dreaming about his childhood ambition of rewriting the Quran, the way his grandfather and father interpreted it, but his dreams were left untouched and unnurtured due to the untimely death of his father and his childhood marriage that brought with itself the unavoidable burden of feeding his family, his family of two – he and his wife.
He opened his shivering palm in front of his face and closed his eyes.
He saw there, on a much younger morning, when he came to the same spot for the Namaz, the silhouette of a pretty girl, that brought coolness to his eyes against the heat of the Sun. She was the village doctor’s daughter, Nasreen. He knew her name a few days later when the doctor cam to their home to attend to him for his repeated stomach aches. His ears still played the doctor’s voice, “Nasreen, can you help him with the ointment?”
He lay there on the bed, with his bare tummy as Nasreen spread the ointment with her soft tender hands. He felt tickled. He smiled. She smiled back.
He opened his eyes wishing to see those same old days, the cooling silhouette of Nasreen against the bright Sun.
There was only white. White, white and only white everywhere. No colour, no smell, but white.
She talked to him every day, but they hardly ever conversed.
She had the unique talent of knowing what he wanted and needed. Every night he could feel her cuddling up beside him, he felt her warmth, but he barely ever touched her. An unspoken love prevailed between them.
“I love diamonds,” his wife once told him. “They look like pretty little pieces of glass, but they aren’t glass.”
He sipped his tea silently as she went on talking.
“I have seen them only once, on my mother’s eyes, on her deathbed.”
He looked out of the window.
“But as I touched them, they were not there anymore.”
She smiled. His eyes still looking vacantly out of the window.
“It’s an illusion. There is no such thing as diamond, right? They are just cute little imaginations, like fairy tales. What do you think?”
He looked at the old torn sofa, on which his wife sat, he somehow could not cast his eyes on her, he just kept looking down, at the sofa.
Hameed bent down on the ice-cold blanket after his Namaz. His legs were paining, his heart longing to hear someone speak to him. He felt a very sharp pinch in his heart, some strong surge of emotions, and he could feel his eyes getting wet.
He sat up and opened his eyes.
His heart gave a leap, he could see right in front of his eyes, they were there, a few small pieces of diamonds hanging from his eyelids. He screamed out in a whisper, “They are true, Nasreen, they are true”, his voice shivering in the cold, his throat parched, “They are not an illusion.”
His old skinny shivering arms reached for those diamonds on his eyes. He touched them. He looked at his fingers then, it was nothing, just water, no diamond, only some salty liquid.
He got up, tightened his sweaters, folded his blanket and walked towards home.
On his way back, his view was getting constantly blurred by the many diamonds that kept on appearing before his eyes. But every time he reached out for them, they vanished.
“Yes, it’s an illusion, Nasreen. You were right. But I have many such illusions with me now. Take them, take them all, take as many as you want. These diamonds are curved in my own heart for you, Nasreen. Let these be my only gift to you in our journey so far, the journey that ended only yesterday. But these diamonds are here with me now, and through them I can find you, find our love, that was there, again not there, at the same time, you are always with me, Nasreen, I can always have you by my side whenever wherever through these tiny little pieces of diamonds that you have given me.”
Comments