Exit the Void -MSF Sadib

She peered through the waiting room’s window. The window frame was dented. The shallow steel created an all-over hollow punch impression.
With a voracious appetite, pitch darkness had engulfed the entire place.
Zobaida bit her lips with teething anticipation. It had occurred again—an agonizing numbness. She contained the urge to magnify the intensified pain that was swelling inside her.
She didn’t throw tantrums anymore. Things have different meanings now. She has started to accept certain things. She scoffed at her fate. All her ordeals had sealed her fate.
Days turn nights, and nights they just flickers to further pushing days. As a result, one wormhole transfers her to another destiny.
She needed to maintain her composure. But her void still demanded more, like a never-ending tumor of hunger. It’s a point in time marked by massive circular punctuation.
Her phone rattled. Buzzing like a giant hornet. Zobaida made no motion for this. Her eyes settled on the distant street lamps that were still blinking. Was there anything beyond the lights’ scope?
The van was yet to arrive. It was behind the time again, as slow as the ticking clock itself. Time was unyielding, and so was she, with her unwavering patience.
Once the darkness wraps around everything, it becomes harder to recognize the van. But it’s the truck’s cold, dark steel chassis that gives away its silent entry.
“It’s here!” Rahman, Zobaida’s husband of fifty years, exclaimed. Her eyes settled into the far distance. Finally, the familiar moments started to pave their way.
“Where is the hotpot?” asked her husband.
“It’s in the waiting room,” she replied as she settled her veil. It was dropping frequently. She grabbed it and settled down for good.
A high-pitched shriek opened the gates, conveying a rustic greeting. The roaring engine gave life to the lifeless cobbles of the imminent, lifeless road. It moved through the stillness of the night.
An old-fashioned starless map wrapped around the sky. Clouds, trapped in parallel scents, dominated the midsummer nights. The fresh scent of newly bloomed jasmine flowered, beckoning a lash of loneliness.
Inmates in the van had remained silent. They had no way of hearing. Their voice, stripped of terror or horror, had made an unconditional connection with life. But if one listens closely to the van, they might have the illusion of occult talks, prayers to gods, and a domed universe.
The sentry guard was the first to leap from the van. Upon landing, he promptly struck the van chassis with his hand-held large stick, adorned with crisscross patterns similar to wafer rolls.
“come out!! One by one, in a line, he shouted at the top of his lungs.
After two more instances of shouting, the van shook, and the inmates emerged one by one. One by one. Their faces gleamed with the weight of their heavy pasts, though it was no moonlit night. Their deed had already sealed their fate, requiring no further words or actions.
As they lined up, the sentry gave the first inmate a firm push, a command—an order only justified by fate itself and through a society with sleepless vice. When God himself has abandoned them, where do they stand?
Zobaida peered with curious eyes. Her eyes followed the long line that was walking. As soon as she found her son, her eyes settled in. Her heart longed for his echoing name. How many times had she called him out? Can those numbers really justify her trembling and pronouncing his name at this very moment?
She saw his trembling body, the agony, and the mistrust in the careful steps he was taking.
“Mohin!” She called out.
He could hardly hear her muffled tone. Perhaps her immense solitude had drastically changed the way she called out to her, raising questions about the timber in her call.
She uttered no more; her silence lingered until her husband waved at her. She signaled that their entrance would be granted for a twenty-minute halt, just as they had done last month and in the months that followed.
It feels different every time. Zobaida wondered why. It’s just the way things work here. Although bound by law, emotions are always outbound. The walls are crumbling, and the wooden seats exude a mossy scent. One could barely hold their nerve when visiting places like this. The voices around me feel distant, and the place provides neither welcome nor slurs without apprehension.
“It’ll get easier,” she composed for herself. Her mind fumbled for an exact match to get used to.
“It won’t take long,” her husband consoled her. His short stature and bridged spectacles gave him the classic appearance of an easily forgotten side character in those novels.
How do parents imagine their children being locked up in a prison cell? Awkward felling or overwhelming? Is it a source of shame or a way to destroy one’s own life?
Zobaida fits neither of those criteria. The only criterion that stands out in concrete terms is that her “son” is out there, period. Vigilance and justification are rather more far-fetched than this logical statement alone.
She doesn’t understand why her son has been imprisoned here; the intricacy of laws and the societal apathy surrounding her have never led her to recognize the importance of crime over her mother’s love. It’s characterized by its purity and the profound depth of its empathy.
After a few moments, a gaunt-looking sentry approached them and informed them about their granted permission. The couple exchanged blank looks with one another. Their eyes were fixed, and their pupils were full of hypothetical consequences that would soon follow.
They followed the sentry. He had a prominent mole around his neck. Every time he turned his neck around, it appeared as if a third eye was watching behind his back to behold the events that went unnoticed to him.
At their fifty-eighth step, they reached their destined cell. The room was brightly lit. This is unusual for a prison cell. It had a small apartment for a single person. After all, there was an existing person to serve the role. Seated on the ground, Mohin wrapped his head around his crossed arms.
“Mohin,” she called him out softly.
Mohin lifted up his chin. He looked at her. For some moments, he didn’t respond. It took him a minute or more to kickstart his memory deep in the abyss. The human heart, like a bottomless tub, always aches for affection that attempts to fill it, unlike a mother who fills it with just one word.
“Mohin,” she called again.
This time, he crawled to the gate. Zobaida remembered his fragile childhood gesture. He was the sickly younger child among her three others. While her first one was stillborn, her second and third children could never topple the luck the first one had coined. They are now foreshadowing the obscure.
“How’re you?” she asked, knowing how vague the question was.
Mohin said nothing in return. He simply left out a muffled sigh.
“Zohra couldn’t come due to her son’s illness,” Zobaida said, drawing out the unwanted disclaimer.
Zohra is her second child and the only elderly figure. She has been married off to someone in a distant area of Gaibandha. After her marriage, she rarely returned, but her infrequent visits were always graceful. Everybody knows that she’d never come to such a mischievous, wretched place, but Zobaida made sure that her son never felt left out, thinking about the obvious.
“She said she would visit you after midweek.” She bore the fruit of hope and offered it to Mohin.
“She might not, if he receives the bail fairly quickly.” Her husband punched in
“It’s even better if she doesn’t.” He gave Zobaida a furtive look, saying, “Women are treacherous creations. One thing always leads to another when you involve them.” He had played a small game without causing any harm.
Mohin hadn’t uttered anything. He just looked at them with tireless eyes. He coughed like a senile person, and his forehead looked like a dry old chalkboard from all the week-long dirt that had accumulated.
“You’ll get 5 more minutes,” yelled the sentry.
Even during distress hours, time can be treacherous. How playful can times be! She recalls scaring Mohin when he was much younger by pretending to be a police officer. Ohh! How timid he would become when he heard Zobaida telling him that the police would come along if he didn’t do his chores. As sad as reality could get.
“Come along.” Her husband’s voice brought her to reality. He was dragging her by the hand. She was still holding the hotpot. It still felt warm. It was a calming warmth that helped ease her fascination with her mother’s coldness towards justice itself.
How justified is a mother’s love for justice? If a son receives a conviction for a more serious crime, as long as justice prevails, the human heart will always flourish with joy. But in a mother’s heart, there’s no greater justice than seeing her child live and breathe, watching them grow, and at some point losing them to oblivion.
Nobody knows if Zobaida was able to convey the hotpot or if her son is returning to his familiar place. People don’t know one Zobaida, but many Zobaidas.
Women with hotpots, women with solidarity—women in a world that finds voids still waiting for an exit.