Rains had been pouring daily. It had been blissful to the
farmers as they danced and sang. They were getting good crop that year, the sun
though wasn’t out of the clouds yet it was shining at its peak for the
peasants. Rains had not been taking a single day for resting. They had been hammering
hard on the grounds. One day there was even hail and a hail- storm for some.
Vidaya in her little room was lying down. It was not a room in the premises of
the house. It was only a shelter she had formed by collecting vulnerable
thatches and some artistically crafted palm leaves. The shelter looked small
but an elegant piece of stay to the world but it was endlessly wet from inside.
Vidaya was shivering, while the peasants with their families enjoyed a warm
drink of milk back in their cemented homes.
Vidaya was a woman of silence; she never spoke to many; no
not even to some. She was believed to have many many faces. The peasants and
the families commanded their wives to stay back and away, they demanded a life
but too far from the elegant shelter in which Vidaya had been staying. She was
shivering inside, certainly not because of the fear of the people who had been
ignoring her to death and were ready to drag her out of the Chandrabhan
village.
There might have been endless reasons to explore behind the
distance that existed between the villagers and herself. Nobody cared. She ate
wild fruits when she was hungry while coconut water was enough to quench her
thirst. She never ran out for help, not once in the past eight years she had
come to that small elegant shelter. She wasn’t living a normal life, but then
it was only a belief. Nobody ever thought probably it was a life which she
chose to live. But, it was only an apparent thought. The villagers who ever
crossed her shelter heard her sing at times, the song was sung in Bengali, and
had its own pauses and ended at sad notes. The villagers got to see her seldom,
whenever she chose to leave her elegant shelter to catch some palm leaves. They
said she was strong built, tall and fair. She wore a cotton sari in off-white
color and wrapped around it in a city-lie fashion. They said she held her face
up that stood out vivid with her beauty. She had long black hair which were
sometimes tied like a bun or were open when it meant she just took a bath.
But, nobody ever approached her or asked why she was so or
why she never spoke to them for help. Perhaps, silence was weaving the
relationships in its own manner. There was a silence of eight long years
between Vidaya and the villagers. She was living in her enigmatic zone, in
which villagers were restricted and the cheerful lives of the peasants never
was meant to serve her as well. Until the day, Vidaya’s body was found numb and
senseless in her elegant shelter on a rainy day. Until that day, there was no
connection between her and the villagers. The villagers who still went across
the thatched shelter in which she lived now do not hear any sad notes.
Chandrabhan never blended itself into malady, the elegance of the shelter had
almost gone, no art was ever there before in the village to call it beautiful.
Vidaya held the power to make it so. But, now she was gone in silence.
