Life's Worth(Tahameem Sultana) Dusk was settling in, its darkness creeping through the still air, into crevices and shanty homes and dark murky gutters, on the stale rotis and leaking rooftops of the slum.
Men were walking back from work, the steel spoons in their empty lunch carriages clanging against metal and their tired footsteps spraying the mire on their worn out trousers in uneven and thick droplets.
Women were pulling back the washed clothes from the drying lines, still damp with moisture. Children were ending the day’s games, beggars counting down the rainy day’s earning.
Slum life got pretty unbearable during the rains. But in a way, it was a relief from the heat. Salam lifted his vest, blew out on his bare belly. For a ten year old, he was tall and lanky. He could get into one of the many factories in the city on the other side of the main road.
For a living, his mother cooked meals and sold them to workers of those factories. And Salam carried them in tall gleaming steel lunch carriers, crossed the impossibly dangerous main road and delivered them to the workers.
He would then wait until they ate, paid him, and cross the dangerous road back home. He played marbles and bunked school.
His mother Reshma cooked those meals in their little hut built over a flowing gutter with bamboo sticks, tarpaulin, jute mats, rusted tin sheets and other odd things.
Their everyday schedule was always this way, punctuated sometimes by monotonous rain, rising heat, irregular wind or smoky fog, scented with sour rotting smell. Salam’s heart longed for more excitement, color and things-to-do in life. The more he thought this, the more bored he felt. Playing with the slum boys was fun, until you got kicked and punched and robbed of your marbles. Watching the train thunder across the rails became too boring, and school was out of the question.

Salam knew there would have been a lot more to life, if his father had been alive. He used to weld iron rods for a living. Salam remembered climbing up on Abbu’s shoulders, wearing the skull cap with him for Eid prayers, learning how to make paper boats and trying to make animal shadows on the wall against the dim lantern light, just before being plucked away by sleep from the slum into the dreamy worlds of icicles, toffees and adventures in dark, dense forests.

One day, there was an accident on the main road, and he never saw Abbu again. His mother grew quiet then and tried her best to resist the intruders who entered their home, late at night, leering, sometimes even drunk. They were intruders whom Salam had never seen before, intruders who just came in sometimes, watched his mother fixing the lantern or doing something, just stared at him and her, and then left. It was all a little scary, but his mother always pretended she never saw them.
Salam thought she was being brave, but one night, when a man stood in their doorway, gazing at her, Salam saw her wrists trembling and her glancing in the direction of their kitchen knife.

Now Reshma hardly spoke to Salam and spent a great deal of time sleeping and cooking meals. The intruders were becoming more frequent now and when Salam asked about them to his mother, she simply advised him to never talk to them or look at them.
By and by, Salam grew accustomed to the intruders. He sold lunch every day, crossing and re-crossing the dangerous road. Sometimes, Salam imagined the scene. Abbu, tired and sweaty, soiled clothes and calloused hands, looking right and left, trying to cross the road, seeing a lorry approaching fast, thinking he could manage to cross the road anyways, or perhaps it was a drunk driver. Either ways, the lorry hitting Abbu and blood splashing on the windscreen. Or maybe the road stained with his flesh and blood.
No matter what, Abbu was gone. Salam would never learn how to weld rods together, or how to expertly fit the leaking tarpaulin roof of their shanty home. Or how to make mother smile again. Secretly, Salam knew he longed for her words of comfort, her spanks and her advice.

Salam never cried out or cuddled close to mother for comfort. He missed Abbu, but no matter what he chose to do, he would not get back Abbu or the hopes and aspirations once thrown to him by life. He would have to search for himself his identity, a job, a partner. He would have only his solemn and discreet mother to share his bliss and sorrow with.
Perhaps life had turned bland for her as well after Abbu’s death.

One day, just a little after he turned 14, Salam was crossing the road back to home when he saw a lorry approaching him fast. He knew not to cross, but let the lorry pass, but something inside him wanted to try out the scene. Or just die like Abbu did.
He stepped a little farther onto the road. Now he could hear the lorry driver honking. He dared to step a little more. People behind him shouted.
In his mind’s eye, he could see Abbu’s eyes, squinting against the brightest sparks of the welding machine like illuminating fireworks, as he welded two rods together, strong enough to last a lifetime. He heard Abbu’s voice, clanging and clear, his hands deftly flipping and folding paper to make a paper boat that would sail the slum’s waters. He saw flashes of little deer’s and cat’s shadows on the walls, Abbu dozing off to sleep before he finished off a sentence.
All along, he walked farther slowly, his vision blurred and fuzzy. A sharp screech of tires and a hard shove of metal and heat sent his body spiraling in the air. When he landed on the road with a hard thud, he felt slight pain in his right shoulder. His head was spinning.
People crowded around him.
“It’s a miracle,” someone said. “The boy survived!”
Salam sat up and moaned.
“Hey you, what were you thinking about?” Someone else shouted angrily. “Did you want to die like your father did?”
Salam looked up and recognized one of Abbu’s old friends. He sighed, but suddenly he began to sob. A grown up kid sobbing amidst a crowd, he thought.
But the tears were not for the pain or even for Abbu.

That night, when he cuddled close to his mother, he realized whatever was left for him in life, no matter how poor and bleak, was too precious for him to leave. His life was worth living. 'Mother,' he thought as he heard her sniffle. Then he felt her arm sliding over him comfortingly.

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