A moment of eternity – Bhabani Bhattacharya

The Prisoner was awaiting his verdict. The judge shouted “Prisoner in the bar”. There was hesitation in his voice. There was a knot of trouble and palpitations in the old man’s heart. The Prisoner had to solve his problem. So she smiled at him. As the judge wept, he looked away, and the prisoner felt that he was like her father. There was a black cap waiting on the table for the judge. It implied death. It was meant for the judge to look like Yama. The inmate felt sorry for him for his trouble and loved him for his tenderness. There was mercy on the judge’s face. Maybe he wouldn’t wear the black cap. This was the moment of eternity. It was a condensation of everything that happened. It was the moment of a drowning person taking the last breath of it. Perhaps the convict would not drown in the river, nor in tears, nor in passion, but in mercy. But mercy would not come after all. The judge’s hands groped for the black cap. It meant that the damned, Sona Mona’s mother, was going to be damned.

It is at this moment in eternity that the life story of the damned, Sona Mona’s mother, unfolds before your eyes. Sona was a small girl, no more than four feet tall, who joyfully bathed in the water from the tap on the wall. Mona was younger. Mona was a girl whose name had no meaning, but she must have rhymed with Sona, which meant gold. The woman had these two little daughters.

Her husband was a shrunken man, with bags under his eyelids. He used to be sleepless from worry. He had wanted to marry only because of his old grandmother who had encouraged him by saying that one day he would be a High Court judge with his apprenticeship and would have no difficulty in feeding an extra mouth. But he unfortunately lost the administrative job that he had in the coal merchant’s office. His wife who wanted to help could not help in any way.

Then he got a job as a bus driver. But he was already sick. He had a fever. He suddenly started coughing and vomited blood. For a second he was thinking about the nice things he would buy with his monthly paycheck and the free medical care he would receive. But the disease galloped inside. He had to be taken to the hospital, but the beds were full. His wife took care of him. She thought of the story of Savitri and Satyavan and how Savitri had fought Yama and brought her husband back to life. But Sona Mona’s mother couldn’t be Savitri. Her husband expired.

Then he thought of a form of suicide. There was a store of opium in the house that Grandma used to take. She gave some to her two children. She rested herself. Both of her children died. But she lived. She thought about losing her sanity. But there was no way she could lose her sanity. She thought of various other forms of suicide. Drowning, Fire, but to no avail. Mona had suckled death from her breasts and Sona had taken it from her hands. Now she was presented for the judge’s verdict. She was charged with two cold-blooded murders and attempted suicide. She did not plead insanity. She confessed that she had done it with full conscience. She expected death as punishment from the law.

But to his astonishment, anger and disappointment, the verdict was that he was going to live. She would be jailed for four years. The moment of eternity came to an end with the sentence. She was a victim of the old man’s mercy. She prayed for madness, but it didn’t come. The echoing voices of her two little daughters whom she had killed echoed in her ears.

This story is a pathetic story of poverty. They are the evils of a defenseless woman and a mother. What she had done was save her children from extreme poverty. She had wanted to be Savitri. It reflects the condition of an Indian woman who is left without a husband. She is unable to fend for herself and has no choice but to commit suicide. It is a pathetic picture of poverty and hapless motherhood.