Somewhere near the peripheries of Sundarbans, a ninety-five-year-old widow rocks back and forth under her grey mosquito net. Beetle leaves crushed between her teeth, her tongue red, confused and mildly accusatory, questions God, “Why have you kept me alive this long? What’s your secret intention behind my unending life?”
On another bed, under another mosquito net, in the same room, her daughter watches this all-nighter episode. Her mother’s body swaying as though inside a cloud. Mosquitoes roam outside both their nets, playing a resentful orchestra of some sort. The daughter sighs thinking how in this land of Eighteen tides, under the reigns of Bonbibi and Aranyani, both women – fatherless and husbandless are used to being the decider of their own fates, until moments arrive when the inaudible mouth of God plays Truth or Dare with them, and both, almost always, choose Dare. She wonders if it might be the influence of the nearby wilderness, mangrove forests, where adventures win over confessions, and everyone anxiously and fiercely wrestles plights.
Lately though, the plights had subsided for both of them. The ninety-five-year-old, whom the villagers call Nanu, still has long jet-black hair without a trace of grey. Nanu recites poetry and sings old songs. She can roar like a Sundarbans’s tigress and binge watch shows she loves. But then this trouble arrives out of nowhere, taking away three nights of sleep from her, which Nanu finds unnecessary and unfair.
Her daughter, Bela, a woman who lives mostly on the other side of the world, has returned to Bangladesh recently for a long visit. Unlike her mother, Bela’s hair has greyed, and she wears it short. The latest trouble came along with Bela’s visit, while she was adamantly sorting out official documents for Nanu.
Bela finds out, with all the recent ongoing changes in Bangladesh, everything has to be squared and sorted especially for the average. Being a believer in law and order, Bela promptly gets to work. As she inches down the lengths of some government red tape, she realises a few of Nanu’s important documents are missing – the birth certificate sacrificed to a heavy monsoon’s wrath, and the national ID lost in the pockets of past caregivers. Everything has to be done anew and so begins the search.
“How old are you, Ma?” Bela asks.
“Eighty-three,” Nanu answers promptly between taking nibbles of her early supper’s banana-milk-rice.
“This cannot be. When was I born?” Bela holds back her impatience.
“1956,” Nanu says, sharp as a whip.
“And how old were you when I was born?” Bela now close to proving her point.
“Twenty-eight.” Nanu strikes back again, pleased with her memory.
“Let’s do the math, then.” Bela pulls out a notepad and adds the numbers and dates and tallies them in her phone’s calculator. The long equation equals up to ninety-five and that’s when Nanu’s heart momentarily wants to stop.
“Where did these extra twelve years come from?” Nanu gasps.
Seeing her mother’s flabbergasted face, Bela does not feel like gloating in her tiny triumph. She worries instead that the news of these mistakenly forgotten twelve years might rush in too fast at Nanu. Bela tries to take the paper with the long equation away from Nanu’s hands, but Nanu won’t let go.
That’s when the sleepless nights and the overconsumption of paan and chewing tobacco along with a sing-song quiet rant begins.
“I am not an intellectual, nor a philanthropist. I am not rich, nor an altruist. I am a woman who has an ordinary life, a life unstable and stable, there is no great purpose I found in it except to secure the things I define as comfort, to claim them, acquire them, keep them. I have quarrelled, been mean, been kind, but really, there is nothing extra-ordinary about me …then what is the purpose of this long life?”
Nanu’s forever-eighty-three turns into dust along the long lifeline of her palm. She stays up all night enacting the drama of the missing years. Nanu is unsure if she needs to label those years as twelve years of solitude or if it has all been some version of Groundhog’s Day.
“Didn’t my cousin pass away at ninety-two? And your paternal uncle at ninety-nine?” Nanu confirms the ages of various deaths of people who also suffered long lives. Bela nods to validate that her mother is right.
“Then maybe I am not the only one outliving others, maybe this is the norm these days?” Nanu vigorously chews her paan and sada pata convincing herself that it is possible to be absolutely ordinary or irrelevant or practically useless and still live on without guilt or purpose for a very long time.
As Nanu rants away, Bela runs from government office to office to sort out the official details.
“Everything has to be digitised Madam,” the government clerks finally tell her.
By the time all papers are sorted, old IDs found, and new ones renewed, Nanu asks, “Now tell me what I have missed in the last twelve years?”
It’s late in the night, and the village outside sleeps and wakes. YouTube channels that only small towns know to discover, play on in someone’s ears, sermons or songs whatever feeds their momentary needs. Bela shuts the front gate, she is exhausted.
“That’s a lot to think about Ma,” she tucks the ends of Nanu’s mosquito net and furtively glances at her almost-packed bags at the corner of the room. Tomorrow, Bela will leave.
“Still, tell me what I have missed?” Nanu whines like a little girl.
Bela turns on the dim light in the room, then rushes to get under her own mosquito net, hurriedly tucking all corners so that the buzzing vampires don’t sneak in too fast.
Bela recalls, “Twelve years, let’s see.” She thinks back to 2013 and rewinds the world’s history in her head, the world that she is aware of. Several wars have broken out, a dozen refugee crises. There is artificial intelligence’s persistent take-over, earthquakes, #MeToo, black lives matter, many dead children and wildfires. There was Covid, monkeypox, plane crashes, new monuments erected, some old ones demolished. The dollars and pounds have fluctuated, and the depreciated Bangladeshi Taka is waiting for new faces to be stamped on her chest. A few revolutions and a few shocking revelations, money laundering and people stuck in outer space. Attempted assassinations and some successful ones. And in a more micro-level, Bela’s own retirement, the death of a pet, surviving cancer, celebrations of small and big achievements of her children who live in different countries now.
She opens her mouth a few times to answer Nanu. But each time she edits her words. And so goes the night and the rioting mosquito war. Then when she finally prepares a good first sentence to deliver, a digestible dose of a decade to her old and strong mother, Bela notices, Nanu has stopped rocking on her bed, she is not chewing her paan nor ranting. Instead, she is lying sideways, facing the window which trails down to a river that touches the edge of the Sundarbans, where one of the last Bengal tigers takes a few sips of moon-drenched water and tries to howl at the moon then remembers that it is not a wolf but a tiger. Realising so, it retires silently into the lonely forest, thoroughly uninterested in tomorrow and its forthcoming antiques.
In the morning, Bela wakes first and cautiously checks on Nanu, afraid her mother’s night’s sleep was the kind of peaceful which forever closes one’s eyes.
Nanu wakes with a smile on her face. She looks at Bela and grinning with her paan-stained teeth, she tells her daughter that she will make her favourite breakfast, the season’s last bhapa pitha jaggary-coconut and rice flour buns, winter’s final morning calls for a proper goodbye.
Bela watches the spring in her mother’s cadence. Nanu’s long black tresses swing along her back, she grabs a hold of them and makes a loose knot while squinting at the morning light.
Observing the sprightly Nanu, Bela asks, “How old are you, Ma?” This time her question holds awe and suspicion. And while she is certain that Nanu has forgotten her actual age again, Bela now feels uncertain about her own findings, she questions the equation of life.
“Eighty-three of course, and it’s good to be alive,” Nanu confirms Bela’s hunch while turning on the stove. She starts preparing a Bengali winter’s final dish and lets spring tiptoe into her being, once again, without a fight.
