He Doesn't Live Here Anymore

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There comes the train again!   Bina, sitting on a chair at the dining table located in the living cum dining room, was fighting hard not to doze off. She had a long day. Woke up at dawn to say her morning prayers, drove early to work to avoid heavy traffic on the highway, and returned home late afternoon following a tense day at work in her customer relationships job. She had taken a shower, ate a small meal, and took position here, at the dining table, as the evening slowly rolled into late night, then into early morning. The staircase to the upstairs bedrooms was located beside the dining space, providing a clear view of anybody going up or down. Regular wooden stairs with dark hardwood on top matched the cast iron grills with wooden handrails. Moni had his mind set on having a staircase just like this. He had lived in a small apartment on the fifteenth floor of an apartment complex all his life, through broken elevators, sweltering summers, insufficient space to even place a decent table, the decaying floors, and balcony turned into a poop bucket by the hundreds of pigeons that made the area their home. He dreamt of a nice house in a decent neighborhood. Since he graduated, as an engineer, he had a hard time finding a job. The market was slow, too many job seekers, and compensation was horrible – months had gone by before he finally landed something. Nothing spectacular, but better than none. He worked hard. He dreamt of moving up. When you struggle all your life, you have to have some dreams tucked into your mind. Bina understood when he rushed into buying this house. A decent house in a decent neighborhood. A two-storied twenty-year-old house with a staircase with dark hardwood steps and cast-iron grille with wooden handrail. He couldn’t wait to get out of the apartment. That’s all Bina could have afforded. A stinking tiny apartment.  Alone she raised the kid. A job with mediocre pay. Helping out financially challenged parents back home, in a village, two hours from Dhaka. And then there was the husband. He needed help too. He had a hard time keeping jobs. Living in Dhaka wasn’t cheap. Bina couldn’t just ignore his calls for help. He was her husband, Moni’s father – distance or not.           There it was… the train. The train!           The encroaching jolt of sound, the vibration that can be easily felt, and the whistle quite loud – the container train moved right through the heart of the town. Every night. Early mornings. She looked at the clock hanging on the wall. 1 AM. Just what she knew it would be.           Ah, all the fantastic memories of trains! The Baluchistan Express cut across West Pakistan, carrying a group of war prisoners to Fort Sandaman, a prison camp. That was 1971. The East and West Pakistan were locked in a war. Her family were taken prisoners from Karachi, where her father worked. He dreamt of going to war. Instead was bundled into a train and sent to somewhere far.           War or not, those days on the train were memorable! She was just a little girl. Her brothers little bigger. They had a blast.           The container train moved slowly within town limits. The vibration on the ground continued like ripples of water in Lake Ontario just a kilometer to the south. She could feel the rhythmic movement that you experience sitting in a moving train…first, it feels good, then like a lullaby it works to put you to sleep, but not exactly into deep sleep, rather in between the real and dreamy world where the land outside with all those trees and houses and mountains just keep running past you…           The whistle goes off again. She jumped off from the momentary doze, fully alert. Her eyes darted from the staircase to the main door, worried, unsure. Her ears were keen, listening beyond the overwhelming sounds from the moving train.           She hesitantly left her chair, took several steps toward the main door, a double-panel wooden door with glass panels on the top portion, focused on the doorknob and then the lock latch, relieved that it was locked.           Now her attention reverted to the staircase, looking up she gazed at the part of the corridor that could be seen from where she stood. There were three bedrooms up there. In one of them slept Moni. A very tired, overworked, disturbed Moni. Her poor child. He had suffered so much already in his young life. As a mother she failed. Didn’t she? Did she? A cloud of confusion suddenly flew in, drowned her with a strange feeling of being in the middle of a water body – drowning but rising, from fluid to fog, she felt wobbly, wanted to just crash on the floor, just go to sleep…           There was a sound. It wasn’t the train…not the vibrations, not the whistles…a different kind of sound…She tried to remember what it resembled. And finally, it occurred to her. The phone. Her cellphone. Where was it? On the table. She had put it down next to her when she sat on that chair. It’s 1 am! Who calls at this time?           She scrambled to take the call, a glance at the call display showing a series of long numbers – international. Must be Alam! Her husband. The man who didn’t want to accompany her to Canada twenty years ago, the man who thought he would become the Mark Twain of Bangla literature and all he managed to do were a few novels that nobody heard of, the man who after all these years now wanted to join his wife and son, the man who kept on pushing his son to sponsor him as she wouldn’t … the despicable nationalist who in his old age suddenly found a new meaning of life – family.           She took the call. Distant but not gone. They spoke occasionally and discussed stuff. She was angry for many years but time had healed her resentment. He tried to rise as an author but went nowhere, the patriotism and inspiration had waned away. He wanted to come home – to his wife and son. Canada won’t issue a visitor visa.           “Hello, Bina?” He spoke first.                       Bina had taken the call and waited for him to talk, as always. She felt a sweep of anger, but couldn’t figure out exactly why. Something had happened, recently. She just couldn’t get her mind around it.           “I am listening,” she said, curtly.           “Isn’t it past your bedtime?” Alam sounded calm, voice soft.           “Why are you asking?” Bina snapped. “You know why. Moni sleepwalks.  I am too afraid he would walk out and get run over by a car or something. We are right next to the main road.”           There was a long pause. “You should go to bed, Bina. He’ll be okay.”           “No, he won’t be okay. You stayed away busy with your little experiments half the world apart, how would you understand? Just leave us alone, okay? Don’t keep calling Moni and badgering him for sponsorship. I asked him not to do it. You didn’t want to come, remember? Stay where you are.”           Alam sounded patient when he spoke. “Where is Moni?”           “In his room. Sleeping. Since evening. I came home, he was locked in his room. Must have had a bad day. Things aren’t going well at work. Management giving him a hard time. The girl he liked won’t respond to his calls. There’s you nagging. No money in the bank, deposit for the house ate up all the savings. I got mad the other day. Was it yesterday? … the day before? I get mixed up with days sometimes. I made him breakfast and he said he was not hungry. I made all his favorites and he says that to me! I screamed at him. He was stressed…I knew that but how could he ignore me? I shouldn’t have done that. You know. I could see him hurting. He quietly ate, all of that. Then hugged me before leaving for work. I come home and he is locked in his room. I don’t call him. He sometimes goes to bed very early, when he didn’t have a good night’s sleep. I didn’t want to bother him. I ate my supper and covered his food on the table…he usually woke up later in the night and ate. But last night he didn’t eat.  Uh! It probably wasn’t last night. Maybe the night before…”           “Bina!” Alam called, in such a soft voice that Bina almost didn’t hear, the train was still moving away, the sound and vibration receding but still there.           “What?”           “I have just sent you a text. Read it.”           Bina took her phone off her ear and checked her text messages. It showed 1 new message. She clicked on it. ‘He doesn’t live there anymore’ it said.           “What do you mean?” Her voice quivered as she spoke on the phone.           “It was the train, Bina, the train.”           And then it dawned on her again, the same way it had done the last time or the time before…           Her body shaking, head pulsing, she slumped on the ground, her phone thrown on the floor, holding her face inside her cupped hands, she broke into a revulsion of sob, then screamed, louder and louder, as if to chase down that 1 am train and grab it by its tail and slam it on the track again and again until it dissociated, broke, a dead snake on dark ground, where if you looked little harder, with a flashlight or maybe under moonlight, you could see the spatter of red, on the iron, on the wood, on the dirt and the bushes.           The train could have stopped. Or she could have not gone to bed. She must now pay, she must now sit here all night, watching for Moni.           There comes the train again!