He returned to work after forty days of mourning for the owner of the house, who had abruptly died in the middle of a night. But since this morning he couldn't concentrate on his work, thinking of death as he took out the auger, hammer, crimper, bench vise, handsaw, awl, screwdriver, plane and chisel from his tool box, and then laid them out on the roof. From time to time he shook up with a start, as if the dead man was standing next to him and supervising the work.

When he took the first bite of bread, it tasted watery and bland and he wished he had more sugar to put in the water. He has been eating this diet of sugar water and bread everyday for lunch, except when asked to eat in the houses where he goes to work. But he could never buy enough sugar to sweeten the water. His father told him it was a tragedy of life that one could never get enough of one's choice.

After the lunch, the carpenter lighted a cheap cigarette, one that brews a deadly storm inside his chest every time he inhales the smoke. Soon a cloud of smoke hung over his head, and he swept the air with his head and then started to cough with the sound of a long-drawn sneeze followed by jittery hiccups. He eyed the roughly-hewn pieces of wood which were lying in a pile of wood shaving and sawdust. They reminded him of the dead man who had commissioned him to do this work.

He held his hands in front of his eyes and then turned them to see both the front and the back and said to himself that carpenters were like morticians. The living tree is felled and chopped, and then scaled and chiseled, grooved and hollowed out as if to embalm its body limb by limb. In his life he has made countless furniture, the skin of his palms and fingers thickened like the leather strop used by barbers to sharpen their razors. His hands have held the tools so many times to prepare tree after tree for burial.

The summer wind swept like the wailing voice of thousand spirits and dispersed sorrow over the roof. The carpenter felt drowsy in the sweltering heat as the angry sun burned above his head, and spread his legs straight on the roof while leaning his torso against the railing, overcome by a sudden sense of lightness as if the limbs had fallen off his body. His eyes burned in the rising vapour and tears welled up when he tried to remember the departed souls, how they left one by one, leaving a lengthening trail of memories, people who walked on this earth with him, loved him, fought with him, sang and danced and then disappeared like shadows at the burst of light.

The carpenter remembered his parents, his first wife, friends, neighbours and acquaintances, familiar faces which shuffled and marched into the gorge of death. He wept for all of them, because it seemed that their loss had peeled away his own life. He lowered them to the grave, mates of life wrapped in white shroud like merchandises unloaded from a cargo ship. His wife sat next to him and said that death was such a departure from life that those who went away never returned.

But of all deaths, this one death devastated him most. It hurt him more than it would if he were to mourn his own death. A vacuous gurgle came out of his mouth which sounded like suction of air and then a spurt of saliva drooled out of his mouth. The carpenter felt numb and heady as the heat soaked through his skin, but the sound of footsteps on the stairs knocked him out of the drowsy spell and he calculated that his lunch break was over.

The widow of the dead man had come up on the roof, carrying bundles of wet washing in her hand and she threw them across the rope one by one before spreading them out like curtains in the wind. The woman in her mid-fifties looked older than her age, her face shriveled and puckered with locks of wispy hairs hanging around it. She walked with a stoop, unaware that the hem of her petticoat, hanging below the carelessly fixed sari, was dragging on the floor.

She ducked under the rope and crossed over to the other side and asked why it was taking so long to make one piece of furniture. The humorous slant ringing in her voice embarrassed the carpenter and he opened his mouth to explain that he had started only three days before her husband died and then the work was held up for forty long days. But then he took pity on the woman who had only recently lost her loved one and controlled his emotions.

Then the carpenter begged her leave to ask a question and while craning the neck over the railing she told him to go ahead. He cleared his throat with an emphatic cough so that what he was about to ask was loud and clear. She turned around when he asked his question and then walked towards him before pulling a piece of wood from the stack and sat on it.

She narrated the last hours of her husband when doctors had pronounced him three-fourth dead, his arms and legs were numb and cold, his body turned inert right up to the chest where his last breath was trapped like a bird in the cage. Tears rolled down her cheeks as the stupefied carpenter looked her in the face. Her husband was a brave man she said, who buried their three grownup sons and then lived to see their only daughter go insane.

He often said that the mural artists planned it out when they started painting a picture. They paint it section by section, each day's completed work being called a giornata. The showcase was his last wish where he wanted to put the mementos of their children as if to gather all them in one place once again. The world should know that what he painted was quickly erased.

She would spend the remainder of her life dusting and arranging the showcase. It would be her giornata to remember everyday what she would like to forget. The carpenter returned to work, and tried to think if he should put more sugar in his lunch tomorrow.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.