Story

 “A Shallow Dish”

Suman Bhattarai

My final exam was nearing. This semester was surprisingly short. Teachers were supposed to take 32 classes each but they were able to take hardly 25. That is why, they were unable to complete the course assigned to them. Consequently, we students had been burdened to work harder than other times.


In the mean time, my dad got sickened by diarrhea. He was working in the rice field and mom used to serve lunch at the site he was working. It was perhaps the food that was contaminated by the bacteria available around the field. In the evening, he arrived home having his face weak and bleak. Suddenly mom started sobbing when dad told, “I have got diarrhea since the afternoon.” Due to poverty and persistent labor, he was already a thin man with low stamina in his body.


Mom came to me running restlessly, “Hari, please visit the health post and call the doctor to come.”


I rushed to the health post. It was 45 minutes walk away from our home. When I reached, I found it locked. A neighbor, Samser Dai, informed me, “The doctor hasn’t come to the health post since so long,” and he added “as I heard the doctor wasn’t willing to stay in our village because of its remoteness. So, he left.”


I asked about the CMA madam. He hesitatingly said, “She has gone to participate in a marriage ceremony of her cousin sister.”


“When will she come back? Do you have any information?”


He answered, “I heard the marriage ceremony was today. So we can speculate and expect her arrival not within more than two days.”


I was puzzled for a moment about my doing. ‘What can I do?’ I returned home and informed everything to mom what I had been informed by Samser Dai.


The condition of my dad was worsening. We kept on giving him the water time to time. But he wasn’t getting any better. Now he had become too weak even to go to the toilet himself.


Despite our disability to serve him with doctor and medicine, mom brought ‘a shallow dish’ near bed where dad was lying down. We ended up sleeping near the bed of dad that night. In such fettle, another day also spent. We couldn’t find any doctor or the helper at the hospital the whole day. And I happened to bear the bereavement as I lost my father.

Since that day on, my mother became the widow but the villagers started to assume her as a witch that she ate her husband to death, they would say rigidly, and also they blamed her she haunted people. Whoever died around the village after then was thought to be dead because of her wandering evilness.


It’s less hurting to forget the pain my mom and I tolerated in the aftermath of my father’s death.

.....

Now I have become the doctor and willingly been working in the same locality where my villagers live. My mother has been the ‘Doctorni Aamoi!’ And we often wait for our dad to come home lighting candle every night although we know he won’t come back from where he has gone. We hope he won’t call us as early as he went there untimely.