THE portly woman of middle age, who was the mother of two grownup daughters, started to walk in the morning after the doctor told her that she needed to watch her weight.

She teamed up with other wives in the neighbourhood, bought herself a pair of walking shoes, chalked out the route and then set out on the mission one day after the morning prayer.

When the morning breeze swept her in the face, she whispered to one of her companions that ever since she was married she had almost forgotten the taste of fresh air.

Soon she would find that she and the other wives talked more than they walked, that if words were steps then their tongues roamed the world by the time their feet covered a distance of few blocks.

She would return from the daily

walk like someone whose belly is bloated by flatulence, bringing all the gossip from the neighbourhood and disgorging them at the breakfast table.

Most of the gossip revolved around a stranger who had started to live on top of the open sewer in front of the old doctor's house, and whose earthly possessions comprised of nothing more than a bundle of newspapers, a loincloth, one worn-out tin plate to eat his food and a chipped glass to drink his water.

The stranger became a subject of household discussions within a short time, as the stories of his eccentricities traveled from mouth to mouth.

Those who listened often felt amused, but occasionally frowned upon the shocking details, which included how he walked stark naked in the middle of the road, ate his own excrement, made obscene gestures at passing women and uttered filthy words like a gun spitting bullets.

It was agreed amongst all that

the man was a mental wreck.

The band of walking wives changed their route which now included a detour around the old doctor's house, so that they could catch a glimpse of the man who would dominate their conversations for the rest of the day.

But they would never find him in the shack, although his personal belongings rested on a wooden plank covering the drain between the road and the house, stacked against the wall.

The old doctor's daughter-inlaw vouched that at night the weird man was never seen in front of the house.

The eccentric stranger would be sighted on streets and alleys, in different locations at the same time and in the same location at different times.

Neighbours would hear him sing at night, and the textile merchant's wife claimed that one night she and her husband heard him singing under their window.

When they opened the window and looked down, they saw him

sitting under the lamppost across the street. Then her eyes would be ready to pop out when she would swear on her children before narrating rest of the story.

The man vanished like a spiriting phantom right under their noses.

The homeless man was placed in every home where friends and families talked about him, children flocked to see him after school, and parents remembered to send him food during religious and national festivals.

The tiny, skinny, two-legged thing, with his skin plastered with filth and dirt, his shaggy hair and scraggy beard knotted by the squalor of time, turned into the patron saint of the neighborhood.

The residents believed that he was some holy spirit who had chosen to bless them with his earthly moments atop an open sewer in a dirty shack.

Husbands told their wives, parents told children and neighbours told neighbours that the

half-naked man, who lived on the street without earthly possessions, who ate what others gave to him, who sang to them and walked around their houses night after night, had descended on earth to teach how to live without hankering after worldly things.

His shack turned into a shrine and people came to drop food and clothes, often spending long hours waiting for his audience.

Until one day the walking wives discovered during their morning round that the man was not coming to his shack any more. This is how it happened while the ladies would argue who amongst them should get the credit for noticing it before others did.

The watchman in the old doctor's house was removing goods from the cardboard shack, and the manner he was doing so made the ladies suspicious of him. They caught the thief when he was loading the goods on a rickshaw, and getting ready to leave the scene.

That is when the entire neighbourhood learnt for the first time that the elusive man, who was the talk of every house, had vanished in the thin air.

The middle-aged woman decided to give up walking and told her daughters that the burden of remorse had become too heavy to bear.

There was someone she had lost, someone who disappeared after she had got married, and the people in the village said that a fairy, who must have been smitten by his good looks, had taken him away.

The stranger reminded her of that person. The man didn't look like him and it never crossed her mind that he should, but there was something about the man which gave her hope.

He had come from nowhere, no name, address, identity, lineage as if a victim of some selfish fairy had dropped from the sky after she had exploited him.

For as long as that lunatic was around, she was convinced that there was a mysterious world out there which occasionally returned what it took, that one day the man, who relinquished his familiar world because a young girl had betrayed him, was going to return.

She told her daughters that they should learn to keep what is precious, because life is too short to look for what is lost.

When she died three months later, the doctors couldn't diagnose the cause of death. The neighbours blamed it on the evil wind. The daughters said that the fumes of remorse had choked her to death.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.