[Disclaimer: The figures of power and the corridors of influence depicted in this narrative are born entirely of the imagination. While the shadows of the human psyche are real, the characters who inhabit them and the state they command are purely fictional.]
Middle of a spring afternoon. Sneha is sitting on the floor of her tiny studio apartment, both legs stretched out, fighting with the fucking needle. Behind her, a JBL Flip 7 sits on the folding laptop table, playing Ustad Mehdi Hasan:
Aap to nazdeek se nazdeek-tar aate gaye
Pehle dil, phir dilruba, phir dil ke mehman ho gaye
Rafta rafta wo meri hasti ka sama ho gaye…
But there’s a problem with this ghazal. Sneha has discovered it for the first time in all these years. And of course, she had to discover it right now. She’s forty now. Which means she has been listening to this track for at least thirty years. Since she was ten. Or maybe a few months after turning nine. She first heard it on Abba’s bilati gramophone. The exact timeline is gone from her head. But why the hell did the line “Pyaar jab had se badha, saare takalluf mit gaye” never feel wrong to her until now?
Now she has to stop messing with the needle and the lighter to think about this for a few seconds. All these stupid mechanical glitches when she’s just trying to score something sweet- it’s fucking unbearable. And this sweet little line from the Ustad is leaving such a bitter taste in her mouth that she could easily stage a full-blown debate titled Me Versus Me and just let both sides tear each other apart.
She hits rewind and listens to the lines again. Nah, it’s fine. These sugary romance tropes only belong in ghazals, novels, and movies. They aren’t real. Poetry feels a bit more honest. Poems are exactly like the people who write them—always miserable and sad for no damn reason at all. Spontaneously, she says the word takalluf out loud a few times. It’s a fascinating word, carrying a strange, aristocratic weight in its syllables. Stuck alone in this flat, Sneha plays both teacher and student, keeping the conversation going with herself. “Takalluf…” she mutters.
Urdu is such a sweet language. People here look down on it for political reasons without even trying to understand it, but the vocabulary is insane. A single emotion- love, and Urdu has a dozen different names for it. Ishq, Pyaar, Mohabbat, Ulfat, Chahat, Aashiqui, Junoon, Dilbari, Dillagi… and God knows what else. There’s a story behind this too, she remembers.
She had read somewhere once that all these words mean love, but not quite the same love. Pyaar means one kind of love. Ishq means another. Junoon takes it somewhere else altogether. Even love has different versions. And there are different words for each one. Can you fucking imagine? She mutters it while scratching her head.
Over the last few days, a lot of white hair has suddenly started showing up here and there like weeds. So now her scalp has started itching at random times. Pretty damn annoying. Then again, what the hell is there in her life right now that’s actually bearable? She tries to let out a long sigh, almost as a joke, just to see if she can think of an answer. Even the sigh doesn’t come out properly. What a fucking life!
Alone in the apartment, she suddenly shouts, ESNEEAAHAAA! Look at you! Even your sighs are betraying you! U-S-E-L-E-S-S! The almost empty room throws the shout back at her. It bounces off the walls and comes back loud. And that’s when she realizes- she hadn’t called herself Sneha. She had called herself Esneaaaha.
When Sneha was a kid, there was a maid at their house- Swapan’s Ma Bua. Her real name was Firoza, though. She wore a silver chain around her neck with a locket that had the name Firoza carved into it. Sneha still remembers it. She was probably just learning her letters back then. Whenever she climbed onto Firoza Bua’s lap, she would open the locket and spell out the name: F, R, O, Z, A... Fi-ro-za!
Her only son was named Swapon. That was the name she used to introduce him to everyone. But when introducing herself, she preferred to say, “Swapan’s Mao.” People from the Mymensingh-Kawraid area probably used to call their mothers Mao back then. Or maybe they still do. Sneha doesn’t really have any knowledge about this. But Firoza Bua used to say “Swapan’s Mao” with fierce pride. There was a raw satisfaction in that title. She was the one who had named her son, after all.
While she was pregnant, Swapan’s father abandoned her and vanished. Later, the man apparently married twice more, back-to-back. He lived in the same village with those two wives and their kids, never bothering to check on Firoza Bua or Swapon. Forget financial support- he wasn't even comfortable admitting the boy was his.
After Swapan passed his Dakhil exams from Sneha’s Nanajan’s madrasa, he started introducing himself as Shamim. Whenever someone called him Swapan, a look of pure irritation would flash across his face. He taught Sneha how to read the Qur’an for a while too, so she had to call him Shamim Huzur. If she ever accidentally called him Swapan Huzur, even once, it was like a sudden storm darkening his eyes.
Sneha figured out the mystery when she grew up. The name Swapan comes from the Sanskrit swapno, meaning “dream.” Not exactly a bulletproof concept. There is no guarantee that every dream will be a good one, and the world has no shortage of nightmares. Shamim, on the other hand, comes from Arabic and is widely used in Persian. It means “fragrance”, or more accurately, a "sacred scent." Probably during his madrasa years, some senior Huzur explained the origins of those two names to him. And just like that, he dropped the name his mother had given him. Naturally, religious authority carried more weight than a mother's choice!
It was Firoza Bua, mother of Swapan or Shamim Huzur, depending on who you asked, who used to call Sneha Es-neee-ha. She would drag out the “ne” for two full beats before the “ha,” like the name needed extra room to hold all that affection. On this dark, moonless night, Sneha suddenly misses her. Firoza Bua never quite got her name right. But she loved Sneha. Really loved her. Maybe people are just pathetic like that, always starving for affection. Once someone gives them some real tenderness, they carry that debt forever. Sneha closes her eyes and whispers under her breath, Oh Allah, the way Firoza Bua sheltered me with love when I was little, please hold her with that same mercy. Keep her safe. Ameen.
After the prayer, she tries to focus on the needle and lighter again. But right then, a heavy, ugly sadness wraps around her tight. Even if the whole world leaves, this sadness, apparently, has no such plans. “In the twentieth century, human grief lasts a year at most.” That is what Nazim Hikmet wrote. But poets write a lot of bullshit when they are emotional. She doesn’t really believe every poetic feeling deserves to be taken seriously. It is the twenty-first century now anyway. Did the lifespan of grief get any longer? Technically, it should have been cut down!
Failing to fit the needle into the ten-taka lighter, she gets ready to try her luck on the twenty-taka one. Suddenly, she remembers Vicky Kaushal’s Masaan. After his girlfriend dies in an accident, Vicky’s character sits on a boat drinking with his friends, drowning in grief, and says: “Saala, yeh dukh kaahe khatam nahi hota be?” This dialogue shows up constantly on her life's syllabus. The whole world isn’t going to have the same things on their syllabus, after all.
Just like that young lover in Masaan who lost his girl too soon, her grief is endless. It just refuses to stop. So, when Ustadji sings, “Pyaar jab had se badha, saare takalluf mit gaye,” she thinks- this line is about when love reaches its highest point and all the formalities are supposed to disappear. Here, takalluf means the hesitation, the awkwardness, the formalities that only exist in the early stages, when you're just realizing its love. The moment the feeling is confirmed by both sides, the bullshit disappears. What's left is just an endless loop of accusing and being accused. But does every pyaar that crosses the limit meet the same fate, Ustadji? That wasn't on my syllabus!
So many thoughts from one damn line. Like, how many people actually experience what this world calls "love"? Most of it is just a single-entry system- one-sided and incomplete. Which, in a way, is probably better. The pain of never having someone is still easier than the pain of having them and then losing them. That’s the trouble with entering the world of sweets. One little taste and your head fill up with crap. Thought after thought. Question after question. Every few questions come with their own little questions buried inside. After all these questions and answers, all this ghazal, poetry, songs, movies, and philosophy, her grief still won’t fucking end. Just like Vicky Kaushal’s character in Masaan.
If she were in a good mood, or even on a normal day, she would have been singing along with the Ustad by now. She has loved this ghazal for ages, but right now, every single line feels like poison. Maybe she's just testing her own patience, but she's listening to the whole thing way too intensely. For thirty years, she just heard it for the sake of hearing it. Today, she wants to rip it apart word by word. She wants to hit repeat; to keep listening until her insides burn out and she can't even feel the burn anymore. But then Abrar’s call comes in. Right now, she is in absolutely no state to sit through a counseling session and listen to a therapist explain life to her.
The needle keeps jumping out of the lighter and vanishing. She has to keep two lights burning just to hunt for the precious little thing. Along with her face, her right hand has started shaking violently now, too. Let it. Let everything fucking fall apart. What else is even left to destroy? There was a time when she hated seeing herself this weak and helpless. But reality is different now. Inside, she already feels like the ruins of the Twin Towers after 9/11. Though, they did build the tallest building in the US over there later, called One World Trade Center or something. It even has a nickname- Freedom Tower.
Damn! No one had ever given her a special name. Not out of love, not out of affection, not even out of contempt. And yet, even a fucking object has a nickname. Right now, she feels like a bigger piece of trash than any inanimate object. People do so much when they have money, she thinks, hunting for the needle. You just can’t buy people with money. No, wait, maybe you can. Doesn't Tommy Shelby tell his girl in Peaky Blinders- “Everyone is a whore, Grace. We just sell different parts of ourselves.” The thrill of another line matching her life syllabus makes her forget the misery of the lost needle for a few seconds. In that sudden burst of excitement, she screams out, Yes, Muhtarma! You are a kind of whore too! She has definitely sold something or the other in her life. Before she can even strain her brain, it hits her- self-respect. Damn! Then she’s the Queen of Whores!
Whenever she feels down, she comes to this tiny apartment in Bashundhara to get away. She came here very early this morning. Most days, the flat just stays locked. There was a time when Sneha actually liked being alone. In fact, she mostly lived alone anyway. A huge part of her life has been spent in a flat by herself, running a little household with no one but herself. Not everyone gets everything in life. Sneha accepted a long time ago that living with someone was probably just not written in her fate. Not that she ever desperately wanted to playhouse with anyone anyway. But once in a while, this sickening loneliness hits her out of nowhere. Because being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. When she can no longer enjoy her own company, loneliness slips inside her like a leech and stays there. Then comes the restlessness. And slowly, she starts sinking into a deep, dark place where the sadness seems to have no bottom.
Even if she digs through her deepest memories, she can't recall ever feeling this kind of loneliness before Abir entered her life. Her life was busy enough back then. Work. Hanging out with colleagues after office. An hour-long evening walk. Coming home and messing around with her plants, talking to them like they were real people. Listening to music. Reading. Writing. Then, while throwing together something quick for dinner, talking to Rakin on the phone about God knows what. She would put the phone on loudspeaker, finish cooking and eating while they kept talking, and then go to bed early. That was her routine on busy workdays. Weekends meant either hitting up Gloria Jean's with Rakin or Mita Apa or just lying around at home watching shows and movies. Good times. In between all that, she’d easily knock out the week's chores and cook something special for dinner, just to treat herself. Life was completely bindass.
She never really stuck her nose into other people's business anyway. And about two years before she started living alone, Alhamdulillah, she had completely stopped sweating over family drama. Keeping a respectful distance from everything and keeping everything at a distance from her- felt like peace. Whether it was actual peace, she can't say for sure now. But she knows there was a wholeness. Her soul and heart were right where they belonged back then. Now they're just displaced. The hard shell she had built around herself, slowly and over many years, completely shattered the second she met Abir.
A person who had spent years living alone in her own little world, happily by herself, now starts feeling like she can’t breathe if she stays alone for too long. Her self-confidence is so shot that even an hour alone makes her panic, thinking she might harm herself right then and there. But if Abir hadn't spent those two and a half days with her last year, this ugly loneliness probably wouldn't have this much power over her.
It's not like she blames Abir for everything in her life. She can say whatever she wants out of anger, but she knows the truth- no one can destroy you unless you let them. Lately, she thinks she actually liked Abir a bit too much as a partner in her own destruction. The problem is her own choice, then. What's the point of digging into someone else's trash?
Last year, right after dropping Abir off at the airport and returning home, Sneha felt a massive, crushing emptiness for the first time in her life. The moment she unlocked the main door and stepped inside; everything started to feel completely hollow. Walking through every single room of that 1200-square-foot apartment, she just kept repeating the same verse over and over to herself:
All of my rooms are now a hollow shell
Death suddenly kisses my forehead
Come back if you ever feel like it, come again
My world stands still in unrest!
That night, after dropping Abir off, Sneha stays in the airport parking lot for a while. Over the previous two days, out of six flights and two buses booked, Abir missed some, agreed to cancel some, and cancelled a few himself. This was flight number seven, and the very last flight to Rajshahi that night.
Up until the eleventh hour, it looked like he was going to miss this one too. Stuck in traffic right in front of the Regency, Abir finally called the NOVOAIR office. He was forced to pull rank and state his identity over the phone. He told them he absolutely had to get back to Rajshahi that night for an emergency and begged them to hold the flight for half an hour. Honestly, there was no other way out. The chief was scheduled to visit their station from headquarters the next morning. If he didn't make it to Rajshahi before that, it was going to be a massive disaster!
Sneha had already mapped out a backup plan while sitting in that traffic jam, just in case he missed this flight too. Since Abir had been staying with her during his days in Dhaka, she felt it was her responsibility to see him safely to his destination. There is absolutely no need to bring up useless references to ishq or mohabbat here. She considered this basic level of care a duty for any guest. Not that she viewed herself as some grand scholar of etiquette, but she always believed she possessed at least the bare minimum of decency. Until now, anyway. These days, her faith in even that is getting a little shaky.
Without telling Abir, Sneha makes a backup plan to get him to Rajshahi by road if the flight falls through. Abir is restless about everything. Instead of looking for a solution, he just keeps listing every possible problem, every possible way thing could go wrong. Then he gets more worked up himself, making everyone around him anxious, too. Sitting in the car, he takes a swig of whisky from a Mum water bottle one second, bites his nails the next, and keeps repeating: Sneha! I have to go tonight! They’ll kick my ass, no doubt! Trapped in a total anxiety loop, saying the exact same line over and over.
Sneha didn't give a damn. She just called an office colleague and told them to manage an emergency car, no matter what. She briefed them clearly: if the flight gets missed, he needs to leave for Rajshahi by road within the hour. She cut the call, then started texting for updates. Did they get a car? Abir stared blankly at her face for a while. Who knows what he saw or thought. Right then, she didn't feel the need to figure that out. The only thing that mattered was getting Abir to Rajshahi before dawn. No matter what.
If they had ended up going by road, Sneha had already decided she would drop Abir in Rajshahi and take the same car straight back to Dhaka. But none of that was needed. The flight was actually delayed by half an hour. No airline would hold a flight like that for a regular passenger unless they were a VIP or VVIP. She had never seen Abir use his real identity anywhere before. Then again, how many times have they actually met outside of a bar? That thought makes her a little angry. Not that she could always show it. Even when she did, she rarely thought it would change anything. So, most of the time, she simply swallowed it.
There’s a Tagore song. What’s it called? She tries to remember... oh yes! “Amar ei poth chawatei anando...” A perfect parody for Abir would be- Amar ei mod khawatei anondo… His joy is in this drinking. And who was Sneha to get in the way of that happiness? Abir thinks he spent two whole years living in fear all by himself. To Sneha, she was merely the opposite riverbank, constantly sighing and trying to hide her own fear of losing him. And after years of trying to keep that fear hidden, one tiny grain of fear somehow grew into a fucking nuclear bomb. And then- BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! Now both sides are in complete darkness.
Before heading into the terminal, Abir told Sneha to wait in the airport parking lot until he actually boarded. He was terrified he might miss this flight too. If that happened, Sneha was his only savior. Of course, even if he hadn’t asked, she would have waited outside until the plane took off anyway. You’re the heroine of the story, so why the hell are you playing the hero's part? Rakin often joked to pull her leg about this habit. Sneha never really let those comments get to her. Sometimes, just to keep things light, she would playfully tease Abir: You belong to someone else, you know. It's my responsibility to keep you safe and drop you off at your destination in one piece. As long as you’re with me, protecting you is on me. Can't mess with someone else's amanat! Every single time, though, Abir’s heavy sigh would kill the joke.
Since his call was taking too long, Sneha dialed the airline’s airport desk herself to confirm he had boarded. Feeling a wave of relief, she finally told the waiting Uber driver to start the car. But while she felt relieved that Abir had made his flight, a sudden pang of regret hit her. She felt disgustingly greedy all of a sudden. It was an awful feeling. She had never been greedy about anything in her life, yet her heart and brain had briefly locked onto a selfish wish- if they had gone to Rajshahi by road, she would have had him by her side for a little longer. Her birthday was the very next day. If they had gone on that road trip together, she could have spent the first few hours of her birthday with him. Frustrated by the missed chance, she lets out a heavy sigh.
Joy or special moments rarely ever happened in Sneha’s life. She claims she can count those specific dates and times on her fingers in a second. She also feels that whatever little happiness she did get was entirely centered around Abir or rather, it was a mercy from him. Now, those moments just feel like pure charity. Where will Abir be on this day next year? Where will she be? Where will their relationship be? Will it still exist, or will it just stop somewhere along the way? These thoughts make her eyes well up. As she raises the back of her right hand to wipe the tears away, Abir's call finally flashes on her screen. Her Uber is currently stuck in the queue at the Elevated Expressway toll plaza.
The moment she picks up, she says, “I heard you got on the flight.” On the other end, Abir’s voice is a panicked mess. Sneha... Sne... ha... Sneha... Sneha replies in a calm tone, I'm listening, go ahead. Do you really need to prove to the airline’s people that you're drunk? Abir carries on with the same frantic energy. Sne... ha, ei meye... I love you. Sne... ha... I love you... I love you. Hello? Are you listening?
By then, Sneha’s eyes have turned into two mountain streams. The tears keep flowing, washing through her whole body, mind, heart—everything she is. Abir calls out to her once more, Sneha... Sneha... Keeping her internal devastation entirely cloaked from the outside world, she speaks softly into the line, Alright. I hear you. I love you too. And then, almost immediately, Abir’s next words hit her like a howitzer shell, tearing straight through everything she had just felt safe in- Sneha... Sneha... we... we... we’ll never meet again.
A wildfire broke out inside her chest in an instant. She had been afraid something like this might happen. If he had just held a Norinco QSZ-92, or whatever pistol he was officially issued, straight to her chest and wasted a single bullet to end it all, she would have remembered that favor with pure gratitude until Judgment Day. Instead, he scorched her entire chest, turning her insides to ash.
That day was February 26th; the clock read exactly 8:40 PM. From 9:45 PM on February 24th to 8:27 PM on the 26th- they had been together for 46 hours and 42 minutes straight. Since her separation from Bipul nine years ago, this was the first time she had spent such a long, intensely chaotic stretch of pure insanity with anyone. And she loved him fiercely. She felt like she had never loved anyone the way she loved Abir. Yet, she also knew that this exact feeling was the root of her joy, agony, fear, and deepest, heaviest depression.
Sneha... I’m about to fly now. The network will go... Sne.....ha... His voice was right there in her ear. Yet somehow, she felt herself sinking somewhere impossibly far away. Far. Far away. Abir was slowly moving away from her. Sneha clears her throat and says- Have a safe journey, Abir. Text me when you reach.
She wanted to smash the phone against something and destroy it, but she decided to hold herself together until Abir reached safely. She couldn’t hold back the crying, though. Not anymore. The Uber driver kept glancing at her through the rearview mirror. He was an older man, and his face showed genuine pity. He probably held back from saying anything out loud just because he was on the job.
Pretty much every goodbye with Abir had been like this by then. And this wasn’t the first time he had done something this stupid. He did it again and again after that, too. Every time, Sneha would get hurt all over again at the moment of parting. Sometimes she would hide the tears. Sometimes she would just let herself cry her heart out. That day, after trying for as long as she could, she finally couldn’t hold it anymore. For the sake of Allah, she let herself go- Go ahead, cry... cry in the Lord's name! Let the chest pain out. But the pain never really went away.
At the traffic signal near the far end of Hatirjheel, she got a text from Abir: Ei meye... Sneha... Ma... you’re my Amma... More texts kept coming. One after another. Most of them made no sense. Sneha could tell he was still drunk. When she asked if he had reached Rajshahi, he replied: Just landed. Sneha wiped the tears dropping onto her phone screen and typed: Okay. Take care of yourself. May Allah fulfill your heart’s deepest wish from today. After hitting send, she switched off her phone and broke down crying all over again.
The Uber driver finally gave up trying to hide his sympathy. He slowed the car down a bit, pushed the tissue box to the backseat, and said, Aunty, crying doesn't change anything, but it makes you feel a bit lighter. Let it out, don't let it make you weak. He had heard the entire conversation from the house to the airport. There was no reason for him not to understand what kind of relationship they had. Sneha pulled out two or three tissues and tried to get herself under control but couldn't. The only thing she could picture right then was Abba's face…