[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 picked up the glass from the floor and poured a bit more whisky into it. She went and sat on the bed, positioning herself as if Abir was still lying right there. Just then, she remembered him lying in that exact spot this morning, right before he nodded off after a light drink, telling her: Get a good job. I want to see you right at the top. Do you understand what I’m saying? And it’s both for us. Not only for you. Do you understand?
Truth is, Sneha didn't understand. She rarely got half the things Abir blabbered about. Whenever she tried bringing up those talks once he was sober, it clearly made him feel uncomfortable. So now, she barely ever talked to the sober Abir about what the drunk Abir said. When Abir drank, he spilled a lot of things, most of which Sneha just ignored. Drunk Abir and sober Abir were not the same bloody person. The bizarre thing was, over the last year and a half, Sneha had barely spent any time with him while he was actually sober.
Rakin called it a massive red flag. He was terrifyingly possessive over Sneha anyway. He never liked Abir from the start. Although he didn't say anything too serious to Sneha about it, he constantly tried to drop hints through banter and taking the piss. It wasn't hard for Sneha to see that Rakin hadn't taken this relationship well. He was only tolerating it because he was her best mate, a friendship spanning twenty years.
Sneha desperately wanted the two of them to meet. Rakin had no issue with it; all the problems came from Abir. If his life had been like any other ordinary civilian, maybe there wouldn't be so much bloody drama. Or who knows! Sneha wanted to understand Abir; sometimes she felt she knew him inside out, other times she thought whatever she did understand was completely wrong. Just like that afternoon, the moment another peg of whisky hit his stomach after waking up, Abir suddenly blurted out to her: Will you marry me? When Sneha shot back with, What??? Do what? Abir just muttered, No, nothing.
Sneha figured Abir said these things just to test her, or maybe the bloke was so out of it he doesn't even know what’s coming out of his mouth. Two weeks before this, when she went to see him in Rajshahi, a completely plastered Abir was standing by the banks of the Padma, saying, Let’s go to Teknaf. Sneha went, Teknaf!!! Why? Abir said, We'll cross the border from there and slip into Myanmar. Sneha, playing along, asked, And then? Abir fired back, No, seriously, I’m not taking the piss. If I tell them who I am, they’ll treat me like a bloody VIP. Sneha, still joking, asked again, And then? Abir said, What then? I’ll tell them I want to spend the rest of my life with this lady. Come on, let's run away to Myanmar.
Sneha laughed it off and said, Tat's enough! You've lost your mind. After that, they both went quiet. The air suddenly turned heavy, and to lighten the mood, Sneha said, If you're going to pick a country to run to, at least pick a decent one! Why fucking Myanmar, man? It's poor! She was laughing as she said it, but inside, her chest was ripping apart. She knew it was just the drunk Abir talking. Once the booze wore off, he wouldn't remember a single thing. Even if he did, he would get all anxious and guilty, spamming her with 'sorry, sorry' texts.
Sneha was pretty used to this side of him by then, so she tried to ignore his drunken rants most of the time. But Sneha was human after all, and a bloody lonely one at that! Finding herself madly in love with a gentleman at thirty-eight, she finally realized something- those seven stages of love towards the Creator in Sufism? They aren't just for God. You feel those exact stages when you love anything with that kind of raw intensity. After all these years, Sneha was finally feeling those stages for the first time in her life. Sometimes she would tease him over text, writing: I’m in the sixth stage- Junoon! Right after this comes Maut or Fana. Now, in Sufism, this 'death' means killing your ego to dissolve into the Creator's love, but Sneha was jokingly hinting at literal death. In reply to those texts, Abir would write: You're talking nonsense again!
It was half-past ten at night. Abir, his smell, the last words he had blurted out before boarding the flight; nothing was shifting from her head. Everything was spinning inside her skull, and Sneha’s restlessness was just spiraling out of control. She felt like the walls around her were closing in, crushing her from all sides. The ceiling fan was dead still, yet it felt like it was hinting at something. No fucking way! If she spent the rest of the night there, she would end up dying on her own bloody birthday- she thought, clutching her head. Though, this had always been a part of her dark fantasies. Ever since she had found out the Prophet’s birth and death fell on the exact same date, that fantasy had somehow crawled into her head. But right then, that fantasy didn't feel good at all.
She mixed a bit of whisky with water in a small Mum bottle, took a swig from her glass, and shoved the bottle into her backpack along with her charger. Grabbing a random t-shirt and jeans within arm's reach, she switched on her phone to call an Uber. Where she was going, she had no bloody clue yet. But she knew for a fact that staying the night there was absolutely out of the question. The moment she turned the phone on, Telegram notification sounds started blaring continuously.
Texts from Abir. It felt like someone was firing a bloody cannon- bang, bang, bang, bang, thirty-nine texts! OMG, escaped Sneha’s lips, but in that exact moment, she decided to ignore them. He was taking her for granted then, assuming she would always patiently handle his drunken antics followed by his sober anxiety. This wasn't good at all, Sneha thought. What did she even want from Abir? Just a few precious moments whenever time permitted; she would have happily stayed by his side for the rest of her life with just that. She had made that decision very deliberately and told Abir as much. Rakin, of course, called it a lunatic’s decision. Just like all of Rakin’s other comments about Abir, Sneha chose to ignore that one too.
She set her Uber destination to Fakirapool bus stand. Where she would go from there, Sneha had not decided at all, nor did she have a bloody clue. She just wanted to dump everything and run far away. She decided to make that urge her top priority right then. The city felt completely suffocating to her the moment Abir wasn't in it. But going to the city where he actually was neither possible for her, nor was it right. Deep down, though, Sneha could tell that this time, they really might not see each other for a bloody long time.
That was the first time she had gone to Rajshahi to see Abir. From the 15th of December to the 6th of February- for a solid fifty-three days, they hadn't laid eyes on each other’s faces. About a week before that, they had a bit of a falling out. They hadn't spoken a word for seven whole days. In a long-distance thing, this sort of rubbish was completely natural. They hadn't seen each other in ages, and there was no bloody clue when they would meet again. Sneha had never once asked Abir to meet up on her own until then. But because they hadn't met for so long, her mood was turning right sour. She started taking her anger out on Abir for no bloody reason at the time.
Abir had zero patience for most things, which Sneha knew from his behavior. But for some bizarre reason, his patience with Sneha was actually commendable at times. Still, everyone had their limits. That time, one thing led to another, and Abir suddenly texted her out of nowhere: I can't take this anymore. Mind you, Abir had to repeat those exact words to Sneha countless times after that. But that was where it all began. Sneha even remembered the date- the 30th of January! After that, total silence for seven straight days. Sneha didn't text, nor did Abir. Yet, Abir never missed checking her Telegram stories every single hour.
Sneha would lose her temper at times. A few times she clutched her phone, wanting to type: If you're not bloody talking to me, why the hell are you checking my stories every hour? But she reined in her anger. Her pride made that rage completely evaporate. Bowing down and texting him first? Had she lost her mind? After he said I can't take this anymore? No bloody way! Right from the start, Sneha never texted Abir first. Who could have known- that one day, just to survive, she would have to beg this same bloke hundreds of times, through every possible way, just to talk to her once!
Frustrated by her failure to make the lighter and needle play nice in the Basundhara flat, Sneha screamed out at herself, U-s-e-l-e-s-s! In that moment, the memory of begging made her mind taste more bitter than bitter gourd. She scratched her head, thinking, Oh, bloody hell! Why did I use the metaphor of bitter gourd here? I actually love bitter gourd! Scratching the middle of her head again, she sat there thinking- she genuinely felt like a proper, useless piece of rubbish at that exact moment.
There were five more sweets left, but this bloody war with the needle and fire was turning every single misery in the world as bitter as chirata's juice. Yes, chirata's juice was the appropriate metaphor for this. Sneha said out loud to herself, I hate chirata's juice. What’s the English for chirata anyway? She thought for a second and mumbled, Whatever! A childhood memory flashed back to her. Once, her mum had forced chirata's juice into her mouth, lying that it was apple juice, though she couldn't make her swallow it. Sneha had gone yuck-thoooo, spitting out the whole lot along with her saliva. For years after that, she developed a proper phobia of actual apple juice! She had loads of phobias as a kid. But after standing on her own feet, she had spent years building a tough armour around herself. Yet now, at forty, she was watching that coming apart, the way old plaster fell from a wall nobody had tended to in a long, long time.
Sneha drifted back to the 6th of February of the previous year. Out of nowhere, around ten that night, a text from Abir popped up on her Telegram: Wanna talk? Mind you, just an hour earlier, he had viewed her story- a photo of a whisky glass captioned with Bukowski’s famous quote, "I wanted the whole world or nothing." But seeing that sudden Wanna talk? made Sneha’s chest thump so violently that she felt her heart rate was faster and louder than Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello’s "Señorita" playing over the loud, chaotic music at Kingfisher. She actually felt like everyone in the room could hear her heartbeat. She felt a bit embarrassed by her own stupid thoughts. Reining in her excitement, she texted back: How are you?
Ever since the 30th, her soul had been dying to know just that one thing every single day, but she hadn't let that desperation win against her ego. If she had to suffer, she would suffer alone- why let someone else see it? She had to convince herself of this countless times from morning till night during those days. Even though, in her pure restlessness, she kept posting stories on Telegram every few minutes. And the second she posted them, Abir was right there, viewing them instantly.
After the first day or two, Sneha’s anger completely died down and turned to water. While during those first couple of days she had wanted to give Abir an earful for watching her stories, after that, seeing him watch them actually made her feel that at least they were connected somehow. Since he was watching, things must be alright. Let him be, let him stay exactly how he wanted to stay, as long as he just stayed.
Even so, it crossed Sneha’s mind countless times- didn't Abir ever think of her? Didn't he ever miss her? Realizing that hearing such things from a sober Abir was about as likely as wrestling prey from a tiger's jaws, she tried to shake the thought from her head. But over the last year and a half, apart from her office work, Sneha’s entire life had become completely centered around Abir. She compared her situation to those lines from Jibanananda's poem, Bodh:
pothe chole pare- parapare
upekkhya korite chai tare; morar khulir moto dhore
achhar marite chai, jibonto mathar moto ghore
tobu se mathar charipashe, tobu se chokher charipashe,
tobu se buker charipashe;
ami choli, sathe-sathe seo chole ashe.
ami thami- seo theme jay...
Abir texted back again: You wanna talk? Sneha typed: I'm in Kingfisher, will go home soon. Can I knock you later? Abir replied: Go home, it's late. On her way back home, she received a Spotify song link sent by Abir. Blue Touch band’s "Chhaya". Usually, when Abir sent a song, Sneha would listen and give feedback. But that was the first time that, after listening to just the first two lines of the song, she silently went back home, and instead of freshening up, she just threw herself straight onto the bed.
Sneha was pretty damn drunk that night. Even though she had told Abir she would knock him once she got home, she couldn't figure out what the hell to say. Since Abir had sent her a song, Sneha decided she would send him one right back. After thinking for a bit, she sent Abir Indalo’s song “1996” and started humming the lines herself: “tumi bhalobesho, amar bhalobasha, jokhno kokhono ami thakbo na.”
A moment later, Abir’s response popped up: Nice song. Home? Sneha typed: Hmm. Out of nowhere, Abir texted: Can I video call you, madam? Sneha was completely caught off guard once again. This kind of approach or request was totally unexpected coming from a bloke like Abir! Shoving her shock aside, she typed Sure and quickly sent another text: But I'm getting old and ugly these days. Seeing the text, Abir replied: Come on!