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Shondeep, January 2004 Rumor has it that Meghna jumped in the well because her lover refused to marry her. Some say that four years earlier when she left the kidney-shaped village on the island of Shondeep to seek her fortune in Dhaka City, she was hired as a maid in Finance Minister Ishtiaque Rahman’s house. Some say Meghna was carrying his child. Many are, however, content with the explanation that a restless spirit possessed her to her ruin. They say it was adolescent madness – a fever that ripe city girls who cross the age of sixteen succumb to when their parents fail to find a fitting groom. Yet most enjoy the speculation that the seventeen-year-old girl had become a worker in the red light district of Old Dhaka City. This village, conceived in the malignant womb of rumored sorcery, entertains only the worst possibility. The weaver’s wife starts chanting her prayers backwards a quarter of a mile from the well. The sugar candy seller still refuses to tell his war stories if wide-eyed children ask about the well. And the children, of course, take a different route to school but keep looking back at the trail to the well as they balance their books on their heads. Motiur, the stationmaster whose shack is on the trail, cannot sleep. Motiur closes his eyes and recites verses of the Qur’an until the muezzin’s call for morning prayers floats from the minaret. But then, there is one rumor that still makes this dot of a village on the island of Shondeep shudder. It is a story that only grannies tell little boys as they tuck them in hand-woven quilts, their white rosaries dangling from their necks and rocking in the frozen sandy wind from the bay. This is a story for moonless nights when lightening burns trees and thunder splits the earth wide open. The hand was one-fifth the size of a thumb. The feet were found ripped at the toes. The miniscule body parts seemed crushed by a sledgehammer. It was a grown baby, they said, with jet-black curly hair strands soaked in blood. One can only guess if Meghna killed her daughter or if someone else did it for her, if she was the one to throw the remnants into the well before jumping in. People wonder. People talk. And they talk some more. And now, after a year, what bothers the villagers more is that they have not been able to use the well since.
Approximate Word count = 1618
Approximate Pages = 6.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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