Random Jottings(Part-4)
Ah-yee Tsoe's Boiled Beans
အရီးစိုး ပဲျပဳတ္
🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻
She lived alone. Did all her chores alone. She was a widow and both her sons passed away long before the great war. Even many of her grand children were dead and gone. Nobody in the village could tell us how old she was. But I got one clue. Once she told us her husband died while contributing labour for the construction of Mandalay Palace Complex and City. But even that clue did not tell us much because she did not know how much older her husband was or younger.
အရီးစိုးက တစ္ေယာက္တည္းေနၿပီး သူ႔ဘာသာသူ ခ်က္စား လႈပ္႐ွားစားေသာက္ေနတာပါ။ မုဆိုးမျဖစ္သည္သာမက၊ သားသမီးနဲ႔ ေျမးသံုးေယာက္ထဲက ႏွစ္ေယာက္က စစ္ႀကီးမတိုင္ခင္က ကြယ္လြန္ခဲ့ၿပီးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေျမးေတြေတာင္ တခ်ိဳ႕ မ႐ွိေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ကြၽန္ေတာ္တို႔ရြာထဲမွာ ဘယ္သူမွ အရီးစိုးရဲ႕အသက္ကို ဘယ္ႏွႏွစ္၊ဘယ္ခုႏွစ္မွာ ေမြးတယ္လို႔မသိပါ။ မေျပာႏိုင္ပါ။ ရြာရဲ႕ေဗဒင္ဆရာႀကီးလည္းျဖစ္တဲ့ လယ္သမား ေက်ာင္းဆရာႀကီး ဆရာရ ေတာင္ တစ္ရြာလံုး လူတိုင္းရဲ႕ ေမြးေန႔မွတ္တမ္း႐ွိေပမဲ့ အရီးစိုးရဲ႕အသက္ သူ႔ဆီမွာမ႐ွိပါဘူး။ ကြၽန္ေတာ္ ဆရာရႀကီးကို အရီးစိုးအသက္ေမးေတာ့ ေခါင္းယမ္း႐ွာပါတယ္။ သဲလြန္စတစ္ခုေတာ့ရပါရဲ႕။ အရီးစိုးက သူ႔ရဲ႕ခင္ပြန္း မႏၲေလးနန္းေတာ္ေဆာက္တဲ့ေနရာမွာ သြားၿပီး အလုပ္လုပ္ရင္း ကြယ္လြန္တယ္လို႔ေျပာဖူးပါတယ္။ ဒါကလည္း သိပ္ၿပီးအကူအညီမရပါဘူး။ သူ႔ခင္ပြန္းက သူ႔ထက္ ဘယ္ေလာက္ႀကီးတယ္၊ ဘယ္တုန္းကေမြးတယ္လို႔ သိရတာမွ မဟုတ္ပဲ။
Anyway, how old she was, how long she lived, in which year she was born are not important points. What is important is she lived a useful and productive life until she faded away. In fact, she never died. She simply changed from solid existence to fond memories. May her memory live as long as those who knew her remained alive. At least I will remember her as long as I live.
THANKS FOR READING
(Special thanks to U Than Pe - Tour Guide)
(Photo copied from google)