Shua Chand Pakhi

jahangir and his moon

shua chan pakhi - (my resting moon-like bird)

When Jahangir first saw Noor dead in the ICU, he found relief in knowing that love has an end to it. Noor didn’t die only because of that parasite in her stomach, but also because of the wound Jahangir had insisted must persist. She died of the knowledge that pain born of love always tainted one more than the other; and she could never be the one with the deepest cut. In every lifetime, she died knowing Jahangir would be the one with sympathy.

Jahangir had always had a leaking heart: he would bleed on his shirts, on the bed of their nuptials, even on the altar where they exchanged their vows. Noor did not love him; to be fair, blood nauseated her. Her heart was sealed shut like a shell.

“Noor?” Jahangir would call, and she would flutter her wings, twirl, maybe lay down, but never retire within the same four walls. It wounded him. She loved the wound in him. “Shikol bhenge ure jabo ekdin, dekho” — I will break the chains and fly away one day, you’ll see — she used to say, with a smile on her face, while she would make their bed, sit down with a huff and caress her swollen stomach, maybe more because she knew it would hurt him. She loved that he could be held together by glue and candidness; fixed by some miraculous medicine or God’s grace. Sometimes all it took was a playful wink and sweet nothings she knew she could never mean. She loved that she could not love. It was the parasite in her.

Her cause of death was not just the joyous parasite but an inward worm that fed at her heart and lungs. It made her vile. Yet she was always placed at the end of every admiration, her presence muttered in secrecy; kept behind guarded walls. She was a barb-wired beauty. Still, all her prayers were for him, for his recovery, though he wasn’t ill in the way she wanted him to be. He was wounded by the army of the world; not just woes, but the bullets kinsmen aim at.

Noor, can you hear him?

And Jahangir — he didn’t love Noor, not in the way a man should love the woman he once loved. He loved her only in the way one can love someone they know will never love them back. They both had craters in their hearts, both bled easily, blood clogging drains, flooding floors, seeping through walls. But Noor hated that in herself; her feeble heart, her spine cracked with disuse, her bolts rusted. She hated the peeling of her skin that Jahangir had once loved.

Perhaps the first time he bled was when he saw her pale, moonlit skin and the way her eyes lit at the mention of nikaah. Emerald against her silver trapped her like a cage. Noor never knew she was loved; that was the only tragedy. Jahangir knew she had loved him once, before everything turned into prayers. She would kneel and wish for his wellbeing without once holding his gaze. She served him poison while wishing he lived. And, oh, she smiled.

It must have been the parasite.

He used to call her Chand-Pakhi; Moon Birdie; for the way she glowed at dusk, like dust clinging after rain, like hail after a month of sun. She was the silver that hung from the night, stars cascading, always close enough to see yet never to touch. A small reach and she would fly to the nearest grave. That was when he learned he could bleed from desperation alone. And, perhaps, there was nothing nobler to a man than to yearn for his wife.

Chand-Pakhi. That was the reason she chose the grave over the sky.

Noor, can you hear him?

“Noor?”

Perhaps this was the moment; the lone second in a millennium when he might finally touch her arms. Not a symbolic touch; not the ghost of his fingertips grazing a sari as she passed by. But her — her true arms, her flesh, the cold weight of her existence pressed into his palm. The thought seeped into him like slow rain into old earth.

He stood still, as though moving too quickly might startle the air and drive her further away into whatever shadowed garden she now inhabited. Her arms lay outside the sheet, pale as moth wings abandoned in a glass case; the skin thin, almost translucent, threaded with faint blue lines like rivers drawn on old maps. They led somewhere he had never been allowed to follow. His gaze lingered until the edges blurred. His fingers twitched at his sides. He wanted to reach out; he didn’t. He wanted to stop wanting; he couldn’t. The space between them was not measured in inches but in years; the width of every missed embrace, every abdaar without eye contact, every conversation that ended before it began. Closing that space felt like trespassing a locked garden whose key had been buried with its maker.

She was sky-high, beyond reach.

He lifted his hand a few inches and stopped. The air thickened, slow and heavy, as if it had been watching him all along and was now deciding whether to let him through. He could almost feel her though he hadn’t touched her yet; the kind of almost that leaves a burn. In his mind, he tried to guess her temperature; marble cold or the strange, trapped warmth of stone bathed in moonlight. The match hovered over the wick. He did not strike. His lips trembled with everything he had never dared to say. If he kissed her fingertips, would she recoil in spirit? Would she remain stiff under his palm? Would she forgive him for touching her when she had not allowed it in life? The room seemed to tilt. His pulse sounded louder than the hum of the machines. Somewhere far away, someone coughed, but the sound could not reach this moment. He thought of the years her hands had been denied to him; how they had lain folded in her lap, knotted into the fabric of her dresses, always moving, always slipping away. Every hand she had extended to him had been a farewell. Now they were still, surrendered by death or by something quieter. His hand moved again, slowly, as if pushing through water. Gravity seemed stronger here; perhaps it was only the weight of what he was about to do. The tips of his fingers hovered just above hers; the cold came before the contact — an aura of absence, a halo of frost. Noor, tomay ami dakchi, tumi ki shunte pacho? It was planted inside his heartbeat, waiting for her to hear it wherever she had gone.

“Noor?” He should perhaps call out. “Noor?” Perhaps this was the moment, the second in the millennia that he could perhaps touch her arms, her true arms and hold her freezing palms close – close enough to place her between his breaths. Be that moment of hesitation the only time they could share the same air. And, maybe he will hesitate, his lips will quiver at the anticipation of the forbidden — could he finally kiss her fingertips? He feared the performativeness of it. The moment the thought crossed his mind, he had already ruled out the reactions of everyone that could curl their noses upward. But what good was their judgement? Only God stands between his wife and him. Should he? Should he hold her gently, tell her softly: “Noor, tomay ami dakchi, tumi ki shunte pacho?” All he wanted to ask her all this while was if she could hear him. For the past three years, did she ever hear him.

Noor, did you hear him?

He would reach for her arm: cold. Perhaps that was better, for, the other alternative was warmth, and Jahangir did not deserve warmth. You cannot hold a cup of warmth to the man from the morgue. Maybe that was the easiest way out, for Noor to be dead. His dripping blood would no longer bother her. And that was better. To leave her untouched.

You cannot hold someone you worship. The reason God stands invisible and out of reach is because he is God. Worship and yearning barely meet together. Hence, maybe if he could live apart and kept his need to bleed away her shroud – that is the nearest love he could offer. His last act of love would be self-deprivation. His last act of love would be worship.

He gets up to leave the altar.