The Wood Gatherer and the Lion

I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. I was sleeping on my side, and for whatever reason, the idea of my own death was there in my head. What really overwhelmed me, what I couldn’t shake, was a powerful sense of nonexistence. I was nothing, I thought. We are only tiny specks in this universe, crumbs that will return to nothing, as they were before, while the cosmos will just keep on expanding for millions more years. But I felt deeply accepting of this concept, the idea of my own death; in fact, I felt it so strongly that I almost smiled at the intensity of it—this openness to my own disappearance, or my nonbeing. I didn’t feel any anxiety about it, nor even much curiosity. Nothing more than musing about how it would happen and perhaps what the timing would be; those questions about my own mortality did come to me, but even those questions soon were gone. I felt completely at ease, confident, composed, tranquil. Breathing deeply. As if I had come to terms with something. I went back to sleep.

As my grandmother was combing my hair and oiling it with coconut oil in the shade of the bitter orange tree, I asked her, “Why did your father throw you out when you were little?”

She finished plaiting my hair into two braids and turned me around to face her. “Zuhour, dear,” she said, “when the Lord takes something away from His servant, the Lord makes up for it with something else.”

“But if my father threw me out,” I said, “nothing could make up for it.”

She rubbed my head and said reassuringly, “Mansour? No, it’s not something he would ever do.”

I went to sleep on her lap, burrowed into her crossed legs. As I was falling asleep, she was telling me a story. “There was a wood gatherer whose wife tormented him. But he was a patient man, and he just kept going into the scrubland to gather his wood. Every time he had gathered just enough to carry back, a lion would appear, offering his back. The man put his load of wood on the lion’s bent back, and the lion carried it for him, all the way home.

“One day, the wood gatherer’s wife died. Now he had relief from her perpetual scolding. But after her death, when he went out to gather more wood, the lion did not appear. The man looked for him, looked and looked, but there was no lion in sight. Instead, he saw an angel from heaven appear before him. The angel said, ‘We gave you the lion as compensation, because you were so patient about your wife’s unceasing persecution, but now she has died and so the lion is gone.’”

When my grandmother died, the bitter orange tree died, too. Day after day, it withered a little more until it was completely dried out. In vain we watered it, each taking our turn, and my father replaced the dirt just beneath and around it with fresh soil. He bought fertilizer, and the Bengali who worked for us enlisted the help of his friends who worked on farms. They poured all their experience into the bitter orange tree, but it didn’t respond to anyone’s efforts. The narinjah had made up its mind, and before the soil over my grandmother’s burial place was dry, it had stopped sucking in water and air. It began to give off a smell of rot. The odor of goodbye.

Why did the story happen in reverse? Why, when my grandmother died, did the lion vanish even though she was my good sweet grandma? Did my grandmother know that the bitter orange tree she had planted with her own hands was the lion who would go away as soon as she had departed? But this story happened the wrong way around. The losses piled up, and there was nothing there to compensate for them. No compensation, Grandmother. Maah.