Nurul Islam was a day labourer. The people of Satani village pejoratively call him Nuru. He has been living with his wife, two sons, and his widowed mother-Shivani Bewa. Shibani is not the birth name of Nuru’s mother. Hearsay goes that Nuru’s mother used to secretly visit nearby Mothurapur monastery after her husband’s sudden demise from poisonous snake biting. Gradually and sub-consciously once an illiterate Firoza Bewa now became devotee of Shiva-the influential god of the Hindus.
However, she did not disclose her inner conversion to the villagers least she should be ostracized. But, she began to carry a scepter in hand as a symbol of her devotion to the deity. The upper part of the rod was wrenched to give a downward crescent shape. The falcate staff was made up of an alloy of eight metals to believably balance the influences of astronomical bodies upon the earthly creatures.
Firoza, at her early eighties, began to develop senile complicacies. Her body developed some bumpy scars. People could not throng around her due to the bad smell from the scars. Therefore, she was forced to reside in her small dark chamber all along. But hardly could she shun her devotion to Shiva.
She secretly made an idol of Shiva. But where could she preserve it? Or how could she offer adoration to the deity of her fondness? In a Muslim dominated village she could not, of course, lay it open to the eyes of people. She became almost restless but did not give in either to her illness or to anxiety. “I must champion my deity, I must offer adulation to my divinity beyond the knowledge of the villagers”, she muttered. But how?
She pleads to her only son Nuru to bury the idle of Shiva close to her bedchamber and make a mazar over there. Nuru, being instructed by her mother, piles up some earth on the marked area. He engineers the shape of a mazar of some two feet height from the ground, three and a half feet long and two feet wide. After giving the final polish, Nuru covers the sacred (!) mazar with a long red laced garment.
Nuru, at his mother’s advice, succeeds in circulating and eventually convincing the uneducated and gullible villagers that a mazar has mounted in his mother’s bedchamber while leaving his mother insane. Firoza’s feigned insanity serves a good purpose. Her insanity justifies her worship of the mazar. The local mouluvi sahibs won’t take the issue seriously; they will just skip the issue humorously as the ‘shirok’ act was done by an insane, firoza thinks much complacently. Now Firoza assumes the name Shivani carrying the falcate staff in hand as a source of mystery and clandestine power.
To be continued…
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