Silent Stench

She sits in the room while muttering to herself. The silent stench of despair lurking in every orifice of the small room. She does not notice her body’s decay or the tough leather skin she has acquired from decades of farm work. In her lucid dreams she is still just the young girl married off to her lover. She has just bore her children, the last one still suckling. Not yet has she lost her husband to small pox. Not yet has she been left with three 3 young boys to bring up on her own. Boys for which she has no means of taking care of. No idea how to give them a future. She has not yet worked the dry and dusty fields that her husband has left behind. Nor has she experienced the day in and day out of slaving under the hot Indian sun, wondering when she will finally be liberated from this vicious cycle.

Sagging breasts, callused skin, lifeless eyes. Proof of what this endless life has gifted her. Thought of as only a demented hag. Pitied by the many. No one wanted her. Her sons were sent off. Far far away. Needed a future. An education in an overcrowded city. Where the silent stench of poverty drifted into every crevice. She would survive.She would absorb the hot sweltering sun, melting away her humanity. All that was left were the broken memories of a life before. Before she could even remember.

You might catch her dreaming out loud at times. Hallucinations of being young again and having her husband by her side are tormenting her. His kind youthful face and smooth skin in her vision. Yet all is not lost. Her three sons caught a future in their eager hands. They went off to that place called. Full of brilliance and grandeur.
It might as well have been another planet for her. Her withered hands had barely touched her young boys and now they are already men. Men that don’t need her. Never needed her. She just sent them off. They caught scent of a better life and left her behind in the stench. The silent stench. The stench that consumes her. Eats away at her and leaves nothing but a shell. A withered body that services the dusty sun-baked land. A body that is padding along in the dust. A body that was so consumed by the overwhelming stench that it relied on muscle memory and got rid of any feeling.
How sad. She lost so much at such a young young age. Don’t over look those small watery eyes and toothless grin. She will not resign to despair. No, no, no. In her eyes, she is not the deranged ancient woman or the young lady she once was. She merely is. She only exists. She dresses herself in the ragged white sari that is worn by the widow. She eats her meager portions of rice and watered down stew. She resigns herself to the dry old fields she has worked all her life. Her cracked leather feet padding through her dusty delirious life while the silent stench of her past attacks her nostrils.

There is no point of trying to understand her way of life. You can not walk a day in her shoes for the simple fact that she wears none. There is only her tired ragged feet and that awful stench. She’ll honor this vicious cycle. She will be prey to that stench. She will marinate in the distant memories of her lost sons. Memories of her young husband. False memories of being happy. And of course she will sit in that stench. That god awful stench.