The blind grave-digger has now come to know that loneliness is not so lonely. It has silently covered his blindness like moss, along with his creasing old age.
The age-old burial ground has become his habitat since long. Now he can’t remember when Cynthia had suddenly matured into a grown-up lady tackling her clumsy motherless girlhood.
His blindness has now become his fondness for listening to the sounds of vision.
His spade works like assured hits of death on life. He digs graves with all his might; the spade thuds deeper and darker into the restfulness of the earth; the sound becomes grey to black, heavier down under.
One night the grave digger could hear the drops of moonlight dripping like melted butter on the crushing waves of the sea. But the moondrops froze the moment they touched the foaming waves.
That night, he was digging an emergency grave under the supervision of influential people and police. There was a scandalous murmur; Sound of some errant footsteps dissolved in the hissing sea-soaked sand. The unidentified corpse lay bare. No coffin could margin its relentless loneliness and silence.
After the grave had been dug hurriedly along with his team, he was asked to help them in dropping down the corpse into the overflowing emptiness of the grave.
When he uplifted the naked corpse, her thick curly clumsy tresses hung down and laced against his old wrinkled arms. He knew from the touch that those were clumsy curls, like wisps of smoke.
The mole on the naked back of the lifeless body, which his fingers got touched, was perhaps not so big when she, as a little girl might have run and chased dragon flies with uprooted bush in her little hands, merrily shouting, giggling and bouncing all her way.
©Kakoli Ghosh, 2020
Published in Glomag, May’20
Moon Drops creations 