A Moment of Eternity – Bhabani Bhattacharya
The prisoner was awaiting her verdict. The judge yelled “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. Then she smiled at him. As the judge cried, 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 involved death. It was meant to make the judge look like Yama. The convict pitied him for his problems and loved him for his tenderness. There was pity 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 when a drowning person takes his last breath. Perhaps the convict was not going to drown in the river neither in tears nor in passion, but in mercy. But mercy wouldn’t come after all. The judge’s hands groped for the black cap. It meant that the convict, Sona Mona’s mother, should be convicted.
It is in this moment of eternity that the life story of the doomed woman, Sona Mona’s mother, is shown before her eyes. Sona was a small girl, no more than four feet tall, who happily bathed in the water from the wall tap. Mona was younger. Mona was a girl whose name had no meaning, but it was supposed to rhyme with Sona, which meant gold. The woman had these two little daughters.
Her husband was a shrunken man, with dark circles under his eyelids. I used to be insomniac from worry. He had not wanted to marry except because his grandmother had encouraged him to tell her that one day he would be a Supreme Court judge with her knowledge and that he would not find it difficult to feed one more mouth. But sadly, he lost the clerical job 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. I had a fever. Suddenly, he started coughing and vomited blood. For a second he thought about the nice things he would buy with his monthly pay and the free health care he would receive. But the disease was galloping inside. He had to be transferred 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 raised her husband from the dead. But Sona Mona’s mother couldn’t be Savitri. Her husband passed away.
Then he thought of a form of suicide. There was a supply of opium in the house that Grandma used to drink. He gave her two children. Resting took herself. His two sons died. But she lived. He thought about losing his sanity. But there was no way he could lose his sanity. He thought of various other forms of suicide. Drowning, fire but in vain. Mona had sucked death from her breasts and Sona had taken it from her hands. It was now presented for the judge’s verdict. She was charged with two cold-blooded murders and attempted suicide. She did not claim insanity. She confessed that she had done it with full conscience. She expected death as the punishment of the law.
But to his amazement, anger, and disappointment, the verdict was that he was going to live. She would be imprisoned for four years. The moment of eternity came to an end with the phrase. He was a victim of the old man’s mercy. He prayed for the madness, but it didn’t come. The resounding voices of his two daughters whom he had killed echoed in his ears.
This story is a pathetic story of poverty. They are the afflictions of a helpless woman and of a mother. What he had done was save his 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 image of poverty and hapless motherhood.