Short Story: Promise

Debasish Banerjee shares a poignant tale narrated on the periphery of life and death, swinging between the desire to live and the need to die.

And all and sundry in the house were looking at the old man lying listless and crippled across his throne, a wobbly sal-wood bed. The quilt, wrinkled in a thousand places, was the old man’s absolute counterpart to faithfully hide most of his livid skin and shrinking muscles. He was coughing and coughing behind his cloth mask, worn too tightly so as to make the tip of his nose blunt. He was looking at the rest. who were all sneering at him, as if he had committed a heinous crime. The more he coughed, the worse the looks from his family became, triggering a gossip of humiliation. 

“Now, what’ll happen, God knows!” exclaimed the eldest son of the family, Bimal, a slightly grey-haired man in his forties, shooting his brows up. Sunanda, his wife, nudged him to gesture something with her raised brows and twitching lips. At this, Bimal retreated one or two steps from the threshold of the chamber where his father, Gouricharan, the old man, huddled within his only trusted companions— the wobbly sal-wood bed and the sagged quilt.