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CROSS TALK

The cripple
***One of her friends has told her that the mind gained whenever the body lost. She has lost half of her body and her mind became twice as sensitive, as though the halving of the body has accomplished a bizarre calculus to double the capacity of her mind, which wants to roam to make up for the physical disability.***
EVER since the misfortune came upon her, she forgot how it was to stand erect on her feet. She has been a living dead for last three years, her body folded in the wheelchair by day and spread out on the bed at night with a monolithic weight holding down half of it below the waist. For last three years her body has been split into two different realms. One is numb below the waist, and another is sensitive above, as if the truck, which had crushed her legs, flushed the feelings from the lower portion of her body into the upper portion.
Maybe that is why, she wonders, she wishes to walk in her mind these days. One whole posture has disappeared from her life and she cannot walk, run or jump. She feels congested within herself as she tries to contain the energy of a full life inside one half of the body. All day she moves around in the wheelchair in the desperate motion of a depraved
soul that must constantly negotiate with the dilemma whether she is half-alive or half-dead.
She feels nothing below her waist, her femininity severed from her womanhood by a thin line of disaster. Sitting in the wheelchair she feels like a stone bust transported from place to place, her inert body aching with its heaviness while a peculiar hollowness roams within its cavity like the whirlwind in a gathering storm.
And it flashes in her mind from time to time, the fateful afternoon when the scorching sun dazzled her
eyes as she lay on the street in a pool of blood surrounded by faces, hanging over her like specters of doom. Then the sun slowly dimmed in front of her eyes and the faces blurred into a large blotch until it receded into an encompassing darkness. To this day it seems that it happened to her in a slumber into which she went as a beautiful fullbodied young woman and from which she woke up when half of her body had slipped away to numbness.
She finds it difficult to believe that her shapely legs, which could send thousand men to their deaths, have lost their strength. How she once used those legs to strut and fret with unwavering confidence that any man would want to bring the world to her feet to get her attention. Those legs are still attached to her body, which are neatly folded in the wheelchair every day like clothes after ironing and straightened in bed every night like wet wash stretched under the sun. She cannot do it without the help of her mother or a
maidservant, and there is no disgrace more painful than relying on others for the functions of one's body.
She will not be able to bear a child and no man would want to marry her in her condition. Her fate has impaired the body; one half of it suspended in the void of what the other half was missing. But her mind hardly wishes to stay within the confines of the body, the well of emotions of a spinster defying the misfortunes of a paraplegic. She
thinks about marriage, conjugal love, children and the whole shebang of what goes between a man and a woman, and then she resents that her wishes are as difficult to come true as the desire of a hunchback, who wants to lie flat on his back.
Then that dreadful afternoon comes back to her mind, and the strong sun in her face reminds her of that scramble between life and death. This is how she explains her condition to herself, that death had taken half of her body while life managed to snatch the other half
away. She doses off in the wheelchair from time to time, and wakes up many times in the horror of a nightmare when the speeding truck comes raging at her and the sun grows strong and blinding in her eyes.
That truck has not only crushed her body but it has also devastated her life, squeezing the future out of the past, and throwing her life into a stasis where she is as much alive as she is dead. God created souls long before he had created bodies, yet
the soul could become so tormented if the body relinquished it.
How far would she drag this halfbodied existence without marriage and without children? How far would she drag this curse to remember what she could have when she knew she could not have them anymore? She wishes every day a thousand times that the truck had crushed the upper half of her body instead of its lower half, that it had not left her in this sorry state of life to suffer in the tension between debility of the body and desire of the soul.
But then she resents the whole
thing for a different reason altogether. If she is paralysed in the half of her body, she regrets it because her body was crippled when it was time for men to appreciate her beauty. She compares her fate to a flame, which was snuffed just when it started to glow. She feels unfulfilled like a fruit, which has rotten before anybody could savour it. How can she cope with this futility, this dismal condition of a wasted life, which has failed in its very objective?
One of her friends has told her that the mind gained whenever the body lost. She has lost half of her body and her mind became twice as sensitive, as though the halving of the body has accomplished a bizarre calculus to double the capacity of her mind, which wants to roam to make up for the physical disability.
And it frequently roams around a place she could not reach that day when the truck crushed her legs. She thinks and rethinks about that place, how the worst day in her life cut into what could have been one of her happiest moments. She exhausts her mind trying to imagine how that day could have progressed if that misfortune did not happen. She would have gone to meet the first man in her life, talked to him, held his hand and made plans.
She often regrets that fate had to be punctual and that the accident did not take place after the meeting. At least she could live with the memories of a dream and rightly grieve her paralysis for something more than the loss of her legs. She believes that it could have ennobled her paralysis, elevating her plight above the emptiness, which is more crippling than loss of limbs.
She felt tired and wanted to lie down and asked her mother to move her from the chair to the bed, when she realised that her body was lighter than the soul.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.