The house was redolent with the scent of incense and rosewater, reminding her of the smell of death, which was still roaming in the air. She was not so much aggrieved by the death of her husband as she was by the condition in which he was laid to rest. Death was inevitable in life and she had seen many in seventy years. Now it was her time to prepare for the end, and where could a death row prisoner find the heart to mourn the execution of a cellmate when she knew her turn was next?

The smell grew stronger as she thought of death. The fragrance of losing the loved one, the most intimate man of her life, settled inside her stomach with a gut-twisting sickness. She did not feel like doing anything else, but remembering her dead husband, moment by moment, from beginning to end. She wondered how it happened like a magic trick, how it all happened and how it all vanished! What is memory if not the fleeting smoke that comes at the end of life consumed by the fire of living! She could feel that fire burning inside her, her flesh and bones melting in its raging flames, slowly converting her existence into the gutted ruins of a life that was going to be no more.

Today she wished someone had talked to her about her husband, about what he liked, about what he disliked, about his habits, about what he ate, what he wore, songs he listened and movies he watched. She felt like a child who wanted someone to tell her a story, tell her how this man lived, how he talked and what he thought.

She wanted to lie down and close her eyes, weighed down by the memories of how she aged with him like two blazing flames consuming each other. She felt like an amputee, haunted by the ghost of her lost limb, as if death had suddenly sawed off half of her body, leaving it wounded, hollow and aching. She stretched her hand and glossed it over the side of the bed where the living, throbbing body of a man once rolled until he was taken by death. There, right next to her, that man used to lie down on his side to face her, resting his head on angle of his arm propped up like an upturned pyramid, and tell her the stories of the day. It pricked her like a thousand needles that this man was not there any more, that she could not give him a proper repose and left him floating in the muddy water of a grave.

Her children, friends and relatives flowed in and out of the room and she watched and heard them as if through a daze. They all looked grief-stricken in their faces, some shedding tears when talking to her, others sobbing without saying anything. Human life was such a shame, she said to herself, because it could never reconcile with what it was-- a blink of an eye, a flash in the dark, always asking for more, hoping to live beyond its allotted time. In her seventy years, she could never tackle the issue of death, preparing to die every moment, yet preparing to live every moment, torn between these two extremes in the irony of someone who missed the show while tuning his television set.

She pulled up herself with the help of someone and sat on the bed. She felt thirsty and asked for water, which reminded of her dead husband who was drifting alone like an inanimate thing. Yet life roared in this man until few hours ago, until this man died in his sleep, right there in the empty half of the bed. He did not have time to say a word, a whine or whimper, let alone a formal goodbye to the woman, who cooked for him, made love to him, washed his clothes, talked to him, comforted him, nursed him, raised his children and who was sleeping next to him.

How quickly people discard their bodies in death as if a band of gypsies are in hurry to go to the next place. And how people take care of this body, do so much for its pleasure, for its comfort, for the satisfaction of its urges to keep it strong, beautiful and healthy. Yet how this body betrays its resident and threatens to evict him, never telling how long he could stay in it. How she spent her life with a carcass, never knowing who lived there, never understanding the life force that moved it, never realising how soon she was going to lose it.

She choked on the water when she looked at the empty space in the bed, desolate and dreary without its rightful occupant, depressed in the middle by the weight of the body that spent year after year lying across its length. The bed would have been still warm with his smell unless the bedspread and the pillowcases were changed this morning after his body was shifted to the burial cot. She could not see him again, until his body was cleaned and washed, wrapped in the burial shroud, that also through an opening, which only showed his face. She gulped down the water with great strength as the lump of sorrow stuck in her throat and left her gasping for breath.

From stranger to stranger, what did fifty years of marriage bring to her? It all seemed like one long night of courtship, when she woke up in the morning to find that her lover was not there. Her husband once told her that according to legend, a leprechaun always has a pot of gold hidden close to him and he must give up his treasure to anybody who could catch him. But it was difficult to catch a leprechaun, because this sly little fellow would fool anyone and quickly escape into the forest.

She swelled and shriveled with a man for fifty years, who took his meal with her, helped her take the medicine for the night, switched off the television, lied down next to her, closed his eyes, snored a bit and then vanished into the night. This man never woke up to look for his glasses, brush his teeth, go out for walk, ask for his omelet, and read the newspaper. Instead he escaped into the dense forest of death, while his body got thrown in a ditch filled with water, buried like the hidden crock of leprechaun's gold.

Her eyes filled with tears as she said to herself that life was leprechaun's story told again and again. Every man was hidden in the enigma of his own existence, and she knew why one could never catch a leprechaun and get his pot of gold. It was illusion created within illusion much like the man who died and whose body was buried. Death merely separated the smoke from the smoke, while the fire remained a mystery.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.