It was the start of July, the hottest month of the year.
A house facing the central park stands isolated. The interior of the house is lit by the light pouring out of the fanlight with the chirping of birds traveling throughout the house. The weather is hot yet a calm and silent environment makes it somewhat bearable.
In all senses, an ideal Sunday morning.
A lady in her mid-thirties is working in the kitchen, getting the breakfast ready. She is a widowed mother of two.
"Jeff! come down honey, the breakfast is ready." She called her son.
"He always sleeps the whole day on Sundays. Why does he not go out to play with his friends? Does he have any friends? I shall take him to a park this evening." She kept talking to herself while eating. "Maybe he needs more of my attention, I hardly give him any time as I am always busy with my work. I should know what is going on in his life." After finishing the meal, she washed the dishes and started solving the daily crosswords puzzle but exhaustion overcame her and she fell asleep. She hadn't had a good night's sleep in about six months. So she woke up in a state of ecstasy.
"Oh! it's 5'o clock now, has Jeff woken up yet?
Jeff! Jeff!" She went upstairs, with the newspaper still in her hands, to check on her son.
She fell on the floor, unconscious, as soon as she opened the door. Jeff, her son, was hanging from the ceiling with a rope tied around his neck. In about 10 minutes, when she regained consciousness, she untied the rope with quivering hands, heart pounding violently out of the chest, and tears clouding her eyes. She rushed towards the hospital. Although it was clear that he had been dead for quite some time now, she hoped for a miracle. More than hope, it was the utter shock and disbelief that brought her to the hospital. When the doctor confirmed that Jeff had died, she reacted as if her son had been alive up till that moment. She went straight to the graveyard and buried her son the very day. There was no funeral.
She spent the night sitting on her son's desk, staring at the window which opened towards the park. "He had been suffering for so long, why did he not tell me? Why did he not tell me about his condition? His whole body was covered in infection." She randomly opened the notebook sitting on the table and started reading. Right there on the front page, it was written: "DON'T BE A BURDEN"
On the next page, a comparison was drawn between "Telling Mom" and "Not telling her". As she glanced, her eyes stopped at a particular point. "Be careful Jeff, we cannot afford a treatment." At this point, she burst into tears. Her son's death wasn't sudden at all. She wasn't aware of the build-up but it was there.
In the morning, she wrote a letter to inform her other son, who was abroad at the moment earning money for his widow mom and little brother. She wrote her heart out, telling him about the thought she had that morning, how she had planned to spend more time with him, about not conducting Jeff's funeral, and the things she read in his diary. With burdensome steps, she walked towards the post office to post the letter.
A fight had broken out on the street corner and people were being loud and violent. She, indifferent to all the nonsense and being stuck in her mind, walked past the mob without looking up. Out of nowhere, someone pulled out a pistol and fired it to disperse the crowd but people became more agitated and the situation escalated to a fistfight. Meanwhile, that bullet, fired to calm down the mob, had killed the innocent lady. She laid on the road with a puddle of blood surrounding her but people were too busy to notice her. A person who was coming from the other side noticed and ran towards her. When he reached the body, he realized that she had died. After a brief pause, he took the ring that was shining on her finger and put it in his pocket. He stayed there for a moment and before leaving he took her fancy-looking shoes with him too.
Humans are no different than vultures. We, too, prey upon the dead. Spiritually dead people get robbed by the sellers of faith, emotionally dead by the sellers of hope, and physically dead by these vultures. Her barefooted dead body was a testament to this.
And after everyone had taken his frustration out, they peacefully agreed on a compromise.
On the other side, the letter never reached her elder son. Unfortunately, someone found the stamp of the letter to be so valuable that it could not be left there. So, her elder son, James, was unaware of the calamity that had struck.
When he returned to his native country, after two months, on a planned break, he was boggled. He took a cab from the airport to his house. But throughout the ride, he constantly thought about her mother. James received weekly letters from her in which she shared the slightest of things going on in her life. But he did not receive a single letter in the last two months.
"Is everything alright there? It seems odd that she did not write to me but she might have been busy. She always mentioned that the neighbors were too violent and rude. She always wanted to shift to a better neighborhood. Yeah, it must have been that. Now she finally has the money to rent a better house and she wants it to be a surprise for me. Yes, she has moved to a better place now." He thought this, with a peculiar smile on his face. He was visibly excited but kept his emotions in control.
The taxi stopped in front of the house, he paid the fare. Stared at the building in amazement for some time. He stepped forward and knocked at the door. When no one responded for some time, he thought to himself: I knew they have moved to some better place. I knew it. Then he knocked at the next house. A bald man came out. James asked about the residents of the previous house. The bald man said with a tone of indifference: They both died. The kid killed himself and after that, the mother also died.
James did not believe him. "He must be mixing things up or might be insane." But he got the same reply from all the nearby houses.
James sat on the porch of his mother's house in disbelief. He spent the whole afternoon there, looking at the park where he spent his whole childhood. That park was the most beautiful memory of his childhood but today the park was nothing but a piece of land that he barely recognized. He sat there thinking.
"What now? Do I have to live now? Live for what? Can I even live?"
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