[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.]
Sneha picks up the glass from the floor and pours another peg of whiskey. She goes and sits on the bed, settling down in a way that makes it feel like Abir is still lying right there. Suddenly, she remembers something from that morning. Right before falling asleep after a little whiskey, Abir had been lying there, saying: Get a good job. I want to see you really high up. You understand what I’m saying? And it’s for both of us. Not only for you. Understand?
Sneha honestly had no idea what he meant. There were a lot of things Abir said that she didn’t understand. A couple of times, when he was sober, she tried bringing up some of those things. But whenever he looked uncomfortable talking about what he’d said while drunk, Sneha backed off. She never brought up those drunk conversations with sober Abir again. He talked a lot when he drank, and most of the time, Sneha simply ignored it. By then, she had figured out one thing: drunk Abir and sober Abir were not the same person. It sounded weird, but it was true. In fact, over the last year and a half, Sneha had barely seen Abir sober.
Rakin sees this as a massive red flag. He is already insanely possessive of Sneha. He never liked Abir from the start. He never says anything serious to Sneha about it, but he tries to slip in little digs and tease her now and then. Sneha isn't blind- she knows Rakin just can't accept this relationship normally. He's only tolerating it because of their twenty-year friendship.
She really wanted to make them meet once. Rakin never had a problem with that; the problem was always Abir. If his life was like a normal civilian's, maybe there wouldn't be so many issues. Then again, who knows- maybe there still would be. Sneha tries to understand him. Sometimes she feels she gets him. Other times, she feels like whatever she understands is completely wrong. Like that afternoon. Waking up from sleep, the moment another peg of whiskey hit his stomach, he blurted out: Will you marry me? When Sneha went, Huh??? What will I do? he just replied, Nah, nothing.
Sneha had a feeling Abir said these things just to test her, or maybe he genuinely had no idea what he was saying half the time. Two weeks earlier, when Sneha had gone to Rajshahi to see him, he was drunk as hell, standing by the Padma, and suddenly said, Let’s go to Teknaf. Sneha asked, Teknaf!!! Why? He answered with a completely serious face, We’ll cross the border from there and go to Myanmar. Sneha was amused. Okay! And then? Abir looked completely serious. No, seriously. I’m not joking. If I tell them who I am, they’ll treat me like a VIP. Sneha laughed. Then? Again, completely straight-faced: Then what? I’ll tell them I wanna spend the rest of my life with this lady. Come on. Let’s run away to Myanmar. Sneha laughed harder and said, Okay, enough! You’re fucking crazy. And then, silence.
The joke suddenly stopped being funny. The air around them seemed to grow heavier. Sneha quickly tried to pull the mood back up. If you’re gonna say these things, at least pick a better country! Why Myanmar, man? Pooooor! She laughed as she said it. But beneath the laugh, she could feel something inside her twisting itself into knots. She already knew how this worked. This was drunk Abir. Once the alcohol wore off, most of it would disappear from his memory. And if something did come back to him, the anxiety and guilt would follow. Then would come the texts. One after another: Sorry! Sneha had known that version of him well by then.
Sneha was human, regardless of how easily she usually brushed off his drunken bullshit. She was thirty-eight, single, and so deeply hooked on this man that she finally realized the seven stages of Sufi love aren't exclusive to God. Intense obsession triggers the exact same levels. For the first time in her life, she was actually living through them. She’d even joke about it in her texts: I’m already at stage six- Junoon. After that comes maut or fana. In Sufism, maut means the death of the ego, the nafs, through love of the Creator- the self completely dissolving into that divine love. Sneha, however, deliberately meant the other kind. The literal one. Abir never found that funny. Whenever she sent him those texts, his reply was almost always the exact same: You’re talking nonsense again!
It was 10:30 PM. Abir was still everywhere in her head. His smell, his voice, the last thing he had said before getting on the flight- nothing would move out of the loop. She felt trapped inside it. The walls seemed to be inching toward her from every side. The fan had stopped, but somehow, it felt like it was trying to tell her something. Impossible. If she spent the rest of the night like this, she’d die on her own birthday, she thought, holding her head. It had actually been one of her old fantasies. Perhaps after learning that the Prophet’s birth and death fell on the same date, the idea had somehow gotten into her head. But tonight, even that old fantasy she had carried for years felt unbearable. Nothing felt comforting anymore.
Taking sips from the glass, she poured some whiskey into the little Mum bottle and stuffed it into her backpack. Charger, a T-shirt lying within reach, a pair of jeans- she grabbed those too and turned on her phone to call an Uber. She still had no idea where she was going. She just knew she absolutely couldn’t stay in her apartment that night.
The moment the phone came on, Telegram started going off with notification sounds, one after another. Abir’s texts. The notifications kept coming so fast it felt like someone was firing cannons- dhai, dhai, dhai, dhai! 39 texts at once. Looking at the insane speed of the notifications, a shocked OMG slips out of her mouth. But she decides to ignore the texts right then. She has grown way too familiar to tolerate his drunken drama followed by his sober anxiety, and he has completely taken it for granted. This is not good at all.
What did she actually want from Abir, anyway? Just a few moments whenever time and circumstances allowed. That was enough. She could spend the rest of her life with just those moments beside him. She had told Abir she was willing to live with that, knowing exactly what she was choosing and exactly what it meant. Rakin, of course, called it a decision made by a lunatic. Like all his other comments about Abir, she duly ignored that one too.
The Uber destination was set to Fakirapool Bus Stand. Beyond that, there was no plan. No idea where to go, no idea what to do. She just felt this desperate need to leave everything behind and disappear. She let that urge take the wheel. Dhaka was choking her- the city without Abir felt suffocating. But going to the city where Abir wasn’t possible and wasn’t right, either. Deep down, she felt the ugly truth: they probably weren't going to see each other for a long, long time. That February trip was the first time she had gone to Rajshahi just for him. December 15th to February 6th. A solid fifty-three days without seeing each other. A small misunderstanding about a week earlier had turned into seven uninterrupted days of silence.
It was hardly unusual. Long-distance did that. Distance made small things heavier; it made seven days feel longer than they were. And here they were, already unable to see each other for weeks, with no idea when the next meeting would happen. Sneha had never asked to meet him before. Not on her own, anyway. But fifty-three days had begun to wear down whatever patience she had left. The irritation kept building, and Abir became the easiest place to put it-sometimes with a reason, sometimes without one at all.
Sneha noticed Abir was a bit impatient with everything. But for some weird reason, his patience with her was actually impressive. But everyone has a limit. After a couple of back-and-forths, Abir suddenly texted one day: I can't take this anymore. Though he ended up saying this exact same line many more times later, it started right then. She remembers the date- January 30, 2025!
After that, seven days of pure silence. Sneha didn't text, and Abir didn't either. But every hour, Abir was still silently stalking her Telegram stories. That silent surveillance started getting on her nerves. A few times, phone already in hand, she almost typed: If you don't want to talk, why the hell do you keep checking my stories every hour?
Somehow, though, the anger stayed under control. Her ego swallowed it whole. Text him first? After losing her self-respect like that? After he literally said, I can't take this anymore? Impossible! She had never been the one to text Abir first. Not from the beginning. Who knew that one day she'd end up begging him- hundreds of times, in all kinds of ways, through all kinds of channels- for nothing more than one conversation, just for one single word, just to keep herself alive!
Frustrated by her failure to get the needle and lighter to work together back in the Bashundhara flat, Sneha screams out: U-s-e-l-e-s-s! On top of that, the memory of all that begging made her mood bitterer than bitter gourd. Then, scratching her head, she thinks- Ah, fuck! Why the hell did I use bitter gourd as a metaphor here? I actually love bitter gourd! She scratched the middle of her head again and went back to thinking. For a moment, she really did feel completely useless. Five more sweets were still waiting to be taken, but this stupid war between needle and fire was turning every other sorrow in the world bitter- like chiratar rosh.
Yes! Chiratar rosh is appropriate for this metaphor. She said it aloud, almost to herself- I hate chiratar rosh! What’s chirata in English? She thought about it once before dismissing it- Whatever. A childhood memory about chiretta flashes in her mind. Once, Amma had tried to make her drink chiratar rosh by telling her it was apple juice. Sneha had taken one sip and immediately- YAAAAAK! THUUUUUUUU!- and spat the entire thing back out, saliva and all.
For years afterward, she had developed an irrational fear of actual apple juice too. She still doesn’t drink it. There had been plenty of other things she was afraid of as a child. But after learning to stand on her own feet, years of effort had helped her build a hard shell around her personality. Now, at 40, she could almost watch that shell peeling away- flake by flake, like the plaster falling off the walls of some old house left uncared for years.
The memory takes her back to February 6th of the previous year. Out of nowhere, around ten that night, Abir texted her on Telegram: Wanna talk? Just an hour earlier, he had viewed her story- a photo of a whiskey glass paired with Bukowski's famous quote, “I wanted the whole world or nothing.” But seeing that sudden text, her heart started pounding so hard it felt louder than the chaos at Kingfisher and Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello's “Señorita” blasting through the speakers. For a second, it genuinely felt like everyone in the bar could hear her heartbeat. The absurdity of her own imagination embarrassed her a little. She swallowed the excitement and typed back: How’s it going?
Since the 30th, her heart had been dying to know just that one thing, but she refused to let that desperation win over her ego. If you’re going to suffer, suffer alone. Why let the other person know? She had to remind herself of those countless times every day, from morning till night. And yet, the restlessness made her post Telegram stories far more often than usual. Abir would see them almost instantly.
After the first day or two, the anger slowly melted away. The first couple of days, she was furious. She spent them planning how to chew him out for stalking her stories while staying quiet. By the third day, the anger faded. She started thinking- Let him watch. At least we're still connected somehow. Let him stay. Let him stay however he wants. Whatever way feels right to him. Just stay. Even if that was all that remained.
She constantly wondered: Does he ever think about me? Even once? Does he ever miss me? Realizing that getting a straight answer from a sober Abir was like stealing prey from a tiger’s mouth, she tried to drop those thoughts entirely. But by then, the damage was done. Her entire life outside of office work had become completely centered around him. She used to compare her state back then to those lines from Jibanananda Das’s poem, Bodh:
Pothey chole pare- parapare
Upekkha korite chai tare; morar khulir moto dhore
Achhar marite chai, jibonto mathar moto ghure
Tobu se mathar charipashe, tobu se chokher charipashe,
Tobu se buker charipashe;
Ami choli, shathe-shathe sheo chole ashe.
Ami thami- sheo theme jay...
A short while after his first text, Abir asked again: You wanna talk? Sneha replied: I’m at Kingfisher, will go home soon. Can I knock you later?” He fired back in kind of authoritative tone: Go home, it’s late. On her way back, she received a Spotify song link from him. It was the song “Chhaya” by the band Blue Touch. Normally, whenever Abir sent a song link, she would listen to it immediately and give him feedback. But after hearing just the first two lines of that track, she stayed completely quiet for the first time, writing absolutely nothing back. She stayed completely silent.
Sneha was pretty drunk that night. Even though she had told Abir that she would reach out after getting home, she couldn't decide what to write. Since he had sent her a song, she decided to send one back. After thinking for a bit, she sent the Spotify link to Indalo’s “1996” and hummed the lyrics to herself: “Tumi bhalobeso, amar bhalobasa, jokhon kokhono ami thakbo na..." Abir texted right back: Nice song. Home? She replied with a short, Hmmm. Then, out of nowhere, Abir texted again: Can I video call you, madam? Sneha was stunned again. That kind of request was totally unexpected coming from him. She texted, Sure, but added another text right after: But I'm getting old and ugly these days. Abir shot back: Come on!