[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.]
The Telegram ringtone went off, and Sneha turned on the room light before answering. And there he was. Abir, half-reclined on the bed, wearing a white sleeveless undershirt. Something like a tornado was tearing through her chest, yet she managed to keep her face composed. With a contained smile, she said, It’s been fifty-three days since I last saw you! Oh my God!
Abir looked a little embarrassed. That’s very weird. Embarrassing, too. You shouldn’t count days like that. A hint of embarrassment touched Sneha’s face as well. She tried to turn it into a joke- Well… I don’t do this deliberately, trust me! I just can’t forget a few things. That’s just how I’m. The last time I saw you was December 15th. I didn’t deliberately remember it; it just stayed in my head. What’s today? It’s past the sixth, almost the seventh. That means fifty-three days! I was terrible at math, but somehow this was something I could remember without even trying. What can I do?
Abir smiled. And that smile seemed to give her all the charge she had been running out of for the past seven days. It felt like a source of power- almost like a private power station. She had been telling him how much she loved that smile from the first or second day they met. Abir rarely smiled, but whenever he did, there was something genuinely innocent in it. Maybe that smile was another reason she had fallen for him.
While they were talking, Abir picked up another phone, played Blue Touch’s “Chhaya,” and started singing along. At first, he sang softly, almost under his breath: “Shongoto karone tomay ar ami bhaobashte parini...tomar proshner proti uttore kichhu likhte parini.” Then he moved to the next lines: “Chand kingba tomar alo amar boddo lage chokhe, mrittur coffin amar mure diyechhi tomar arale.” Right as he sang that line, he suddenly clapped a hand over his eyes and just broke down crying.
Sneha was not ready for this at all. Abir was crying hard, almost sobbing. Even though her own chest twisted in pain, she didn't try to stop him. Sometimes crying gives people relief. He needed to cry for some reason; let him cry it out and lighten his load. But that weeping was absolutely tearing her insides apart. Watching him crying like that for too long became impossible. She couldn’t take it. When she finally looked away from the phone screen, she had to be careful not to let the tears come to her own eyes. She kept herself composed, almost deliberately alert. Abba used to say that two people should never be vulnerable at the same time. If one person broke down, the other had to hold themselves together, no matter how much it hurt. That was exactly what she was trying to do. Abir kept crying. He just couldn’t stop. His smile was as innocent as kid, and his crying was exactly the same.
Sneha could sense that something was there- something underneath it all- but she couldn’t be sure what. The lyrics. The crying. Put the dots together and they could mean a hundred different things, if she wanted them to. But she didn’t want to. Still, one thing was becoming painfully clear- Abir seemed to be trying to say something, but for some reason, he had postponed saying it through his tears. Eventually, Sneha couldn’t take the crying anymore and said, Stop. It's done. Don't cry anymore. What happened? Why are you crying like this? Tell me... did something happen? It's hurting me. Stop. You've cried enough.
Abir finally stopped and shook his head, signaling that nothing had happened. After so long… seeing your face… I couldn’t control myself. I’m sorry. But right after that, he broke down crying all over again. By then, Sneha’s brain was running a million calculations. Whether the math added up or not, she knew the brutal truth- sooner or later, she would have to walk out of Abir’s life. Maybe all of this was just a series of little tragedies happening before the final goodbye. Whenever Abir pulled a weird stunt out of nowhere, no matter how calm Sneha acted on the surface, she was always internally paralyzed by the fear of losing him- right up until their very last day. Watching him cry and bracing herself for an inevitable goodbye made her feel like someone had dumped a massive, heavy boulder right onto her chest.
Seeing him weep without a pause, Sneha spoke up again: Abir, look at me. Look right here… what’s wrong? Do you want to say something? Just tell me what happened. Come on, please don't do this. Stop crying now. Trying to pull himself together, Abir replied, I'm sorry. Sneha asked, Why are you sorry, baba? Between broken breaths, he said, After my mom, you probably love me the most... but I can't reciprocate. I’m sorry. He started sobbing again. Sneha had no idea what to say. Abir had just said something enormous. She wasn’t even sure whether he understood the weight of what he had said himself. Was he drunk? He didn't look like it. Then what?
If he was saying all this sober, then he was saying exactly what he felt. At least, that was how Sneha used to think. She had always believed that people told the truth most easily when they were drunk. But Abir had spent the last two years proving so many of her calculations wrong. Still, Sneha understood something else by then. She wasn’t always wrong. Sometimes the things Abir tried to establish as absolute truth were only his own conclusions- shaped by the contradictions inside him, by reality, by circumstances, by everything he was trying to survive. Those things could contain truth. But they were never the whole truth.
She felt a deep tenderness and a profound sadness for Abir. A man crying in front of her, trying to explain how helpless he felt about not being able to love her. But not being able to love someone and not loving someone were two completely different things. The thought pulled Sneha slightly away from the moment. This Blue Touch song, for example- it had the wrong concept altogether. The first line wasn’t giving the right message. It said, “Shongoto karone tomay ar ami bhalobashte parini” (For unavoidable reasons, I couldn't love you anymore).
That "anymore" is problematic. What does it mean? You loved me before, and now you dropped it? Were you forced to, or did the feeling just die? It’s not clear. Either you love me, you don't, or you never did. What's the point of saying "couldn't anymore"? What exactly was this trying to communicate? Helplessness? But if helplessness was the point, why not explain what made you helpless? Instead, the reason had been posted like some school notice: Due to unavoidable circumstances, all classes scheduled for today have been suspended. Fine. Classes were suspended, but wouldn’t it have been useful to say why? Or at least make sure the reason was clear to everyone concerned? Surely the people involved had some right to know.
And there was something even more ridiculous about it. You had loved someone once. Even if it had been only for a moment. Yet, you had decided you would never say it yourself. Instead, you sent out different signals at different times, like some classified operation, and expected the other person to decode them. Could everyone really be expected to understand sign language? To Sneha, everything about Abir felt like that. Blurred, incomplete and wrapped in some private mystery.
Even if the words were unclear, she could read his eyes and had figured out things a long time ago. But why did Abir always try to prove that understanding wrong the second he was about to leave after a good time? Why did he have to dump his guilt onto her right before leaving? Out of guilt? Morality? It hurt her. It pained her. Yet knowing this, for two whole years, at almost every goodbye, Abir did the exact same thing. If he had put even a fraction of that effort into accepting the relationship normally and staying normal himself, things wouldn't have been this worse. This doesn't mean Abir was the only one creating problems and Sneha was just a helpless woman suffering in silence. She knows and admits it- she has never caused anyone more pain than Abir in her entire life and she has never loved anyone more than Abir, either.
Those two lines from the Blue Touch song had been bothering Sneha in the most irritating way. Again, the same questions started circling in her head. Either you never loved me at all, or you consciously chose not to love me. But what did “couldn’t anymore” even mean? You loved me but didn’t want to? Or you wanted to, but couldn’t? Human psychology and relationships are so fucking confusing!
The video call lasted 45 minutes and 27 seconds. Abir spent almost thirty-one of those minutes crying, stopping every now and then, trying to pull himself together before breaking down again. But the thing he had actually wanted to tell Sneha never got said, or maybe he simply couldn’t say it. Abir had never been able to say the things that needed to be said, clearly and at the right time. He probably never would. But when it came to things he shouldn't say, he blabbered them multiple times at the worst places and the worst times while wasted. Sneha was thinking about all of this as she paid the Uber bill and got off at the Fakirapool bus stand.
She switched her phone to airplane mode, walked up to the Ena Paribahan counter, and asked which bus was leaving first. Finding out a bus to Sylhet was leaving in five minutes, she bought a non-AC ticket for 550 taka and boarded that bus. The bad smell of cheap cigarette smoke blowing from the helper's mouth at the door made her stomach turn. It wasn't like she couldn't afford an AC bus, but at that exact moment, she just needed to get the hell out of Dhaka as fast as possible. So, without a second thought, she just grabbed that ticket.
Sneha had been born and raised in Dhaka. Outside this city, she had no home of her own, neither did Abba or Amma. Both sides of the family had their ancestral homes here. She had always believed that no matter which paradise anyone took her outside Dhaka and she would be back in this hell within three days, homesick as ever.
A city choking on pollution, drowning in noise, crowded with lies and hypocrisy. Strange faces hiding behind stranger masks, pretense everywhere. Illusions everywhere. Hours disappearing into traffic jams. And yet, this is her city, her very own! The one she loved most. The one that belonged to her in a way no other place ever could. But that night, even that city felt impossible to bear.
She badly wanted to reply to Abir’s texts. He must have been terribly worried by then. But her ego rose again and somehow managed to suppress that pull—the soft, stupid urge to reach back toward him. Not for long, though. Soon enough, that ego started getting swept away by abhiman like a river carrying everything in its path. Sneha noticed something about herself then: abhiman was far deeper, far more intense than her ego.
But what right did she even have to carry that abhiman with her into a strange city in the middle of the night? And for whom? She was leaving Dhaka without knowing where she would go, or what she was really looking for. It felt as though she was becoming one more, even larger nothingness inside an already endless nothingness. And somewhere inside that emptiness, Sneha was losing her way.
A little while after boarding the bus, Sneha left thirty-eight behind and stepped into her thirty-ninth year. The moment 12:01 appeared on her phone screen, she wished herself: Happy birthday, the saddest lady in the world! By then, the middle-aged woman sitting beside her had fallen asleep and was leaning heavily against her shoulder. The thought that she probably wouldn’t be able to tolerate this bus ride for very long suddenly triggered something stubborn inside her. Probably the urge to torture herself. She decided right then that she would carry the weight of the woman’s sleeping head on her shoulder and stay on that bus until the very last stop. She would get off only after everyone else had left, becoming the absolute last passenger to step down. Where that last stop in Sylhet actually was, she did not have the slightest idea. The thought made her twist her mouth in irritation- Wherever the hell it goes, what does it matter anyway?
Why overthink where or when it will stop? Who is out there waiting for her anyway? She had nowhere left to go, and absolutely nothing left to do. Who was supposed to come close to her? Who would ever come close? She mourned the lack of a soundtrack, wishing someone like Kabir Suman was there, for whom she could sing those lines: “Ei fatkabajir deshe shopner pakhigulo benche nei…O gaanwala arekta gaan gao…amar aar kothao jawar nei…kichchhu korar nei…”
Within a few minutes, the lights on the bus were turned off. Most people were either asleep or half-asleep. The helper lit another cheap cigarette by the door, and that same foul smell made her stomach do flips. Then, to make things perfect, the driver cranked up Kumar Sanu on the speakers. Mashallah! Sanu Babu was singing: “Tu pyaar hai kisi aur ka, tujhe chahta koi aur hai… tu pasand hai kisi aur ki, tujhe mangta koi aur hai…”
Paa-thhe-tic! After listening to that painfully pathetic Sanu–Anuradha track from the ’90s for a while, Sneha finally let her irritation out a little louder. It didn’t make the slightest dent in the sleep of the middle-aged woman resting peacefully on her shoulder. Was she drugged by some Malam Party gang or what? How the hell did people sleep this deeply? Sneha glanced at the woman’s face. God, she looked so comfortable. Maybe there really was no happiness in this world greater than sleep. Maybe there wasn’t. She couldn’t remember the last time she had actually slept properly. This is also paa-thhe-tic!
The ridiculous way she had pronounced the word twice- exactly like Saifuz Sir used to, finally brought a smile to her face despite everything. She had heard that pronunciation countless times during her first semester at university. Saifuzzaman Sir had been absolutely obsessed with it. He taught English 101 at IUB. For the first time in almost twenty years, his cartoonish face suddenly floated back into Sneha’s mind. Anyone who came late to class could expect the same ritual: one eyebrow raised over the top of his glasses, that cartoonish face fixed in mild disbelief, followed by the inevitable: “Paa-thhe-tic.” Though, to be fair, arriving late wasn’t the only thing he seemed to find pathetic. Possibly everything in existence felt pathetic to him. Which, Sneha had to admit, was pretty much how the entire world felt to her right then. The torture coming through the bus’s shrill speakers, however, didn’t let her stay distracted by Saifuz Sir for very long.
The song had changed by then. But only the song had changed. Sanu and Anuradha were still there. In fact, the next track was even more horrifying than the last. What on earth had Indian lyricists been consuming in the ’90s to produce this kind of material and unleash it on an entire generation? The male singer was practically screaming, “Bin tere kuch bhi nehiiiiiiiiiiii main…” (Without you, I'm nothing…). Calling it singing would have been generous. It was more like a full-blown scream. Then he started making all sorts of ridiculous promises to his beloved- “Ho dushman zamana… mujhe na bhulana… main khud ko mita dunga… teri chahat mein…” (Even if the whole world turns against us, don't forget me… I'll erase myself in your love.). And the idiot girlfriend, apparently taking him completely seriously, happily answered, “Main har gham utha lungi, teri chahat mein…” (I'll bear every sorrow for you, in your love.).
For God’s sake! At that moment, Sneha wished she had the lyricist’s number. She would have called him right away and said, Kitni zindagi tune barbad kiya aise jhooti lyric sunaake, meri bhai! Tujhe koi jahannum mein bhi ghusne nahi dega! (How many lives have you ruined with these fake-ass lyrics, my brother! Even hell won't let you in!). Well, look at that. She actually spoke pretty decent Hindi. The thought made her smile again. But then she remembered how these cheap, fake-promise songs from the ’90s had been blasted at street corners, salons, VCR shops, cassette stores- everywhere, and had somehow managed to infect an entire generation with a fantasy of love. And suddenly, she wanted to call those lyricists by the same hilariously wrong pronunciation people used when they first saw the Bengali spelling of the name Machado, the Nobel laureate.
The victim of these exact lyrics was none other than the Muhtarma Es-neh-haa herself- crossing into an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night with a stranger’s sleeping head resting heavily on her shoulder, with no destination in mind whatsoever. All this because she had entered someone’s life where she had technically never been invited, and then, with remarkable sincerity, cultivated an abhiman she had absolutely no right to have.
At 40, none of this was supposed to feel adventurous. It didn’t feel adventurous to her either. But, thanks to bad luck, she had practically grown up listening to those songs. She was still representing a generation that had gone off to kill itself over failed love- even at this age! Somehow, her age was still stuck at twenty-one. Just a little while ago, instead of turning thirty-nine, she had apparently turned twenty-one all over again.
People who were both poets and lovers- there couldn’t possibly be a more miserable species on earth. After thinking it through, that was the conclusion she arrived at. A poet falling in love meant they had to fail. These people had no right to expect love in return for love! If poets ever succeeded in love, who would write all those poems about heartbreak and separation? For the first time, she felt genuinely furious at her own poet-self. For nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing, she suddenly said to herself: Who the fuck becomes a poet in this world and what do they even get out of it?
She had no personal irritation with poets as a community, nor was she particularly annoyed with any specific poet. She was annoyed only with herself. But on that lonely birthday night, perhaps she just wanted to dump all the accumulated irritation she had with herself onto the entire fucking community and feel a little lighter.
Being a poet, lover, and journalist all at once meant something even worse- spending an entire life as a walking symbol of misery and poverty. That was the next conclusion she arrived at. She had no regrets about being financially poor, though. Money was like dirt on your hands- no… she thought about it for a second. That wasn’t quite the right comparison. Some kinds of dirt didn’t wash off that quickly; whether you wanted them to or not, they stayed in your hands for days. Better to compare money to the speed of light.
Yes! Money came at the speed of a tortoise and disappeared at the speed of light. There was money today; tomorrow there wouldn’t be. If it wasn’t there tomorrow, it would come back the day after. Whatever! Compared to this kind of material poverty, she felt that living without love was a much more miserable way to exist. She immediately decided that she had absolutely no interest in becoming a great martyr to this particular kind of poverty.
None of these thoughts, however, could bring the screeching sound from the bus speakers down to anything remotely tolerable. At that point, putting in her earbuds and listening to something decent felt less like a choice and more like a mandatory duty. There was a playlist called Amon on her Spotify account. By then, it had 386 songs archived in it. The moment she pressed play, Linkin Park’s “In the End” came on. As the song played, Sneha thought about how, that same month the previous year, she had lost Abba. That year, she was losing herself. Next year, would Abi...!!
Before she could finish the thought, she felt her breathing tighten. No. She was not going to let that spiral get any bigger in the middle of a midnight bus journey. She forced herself to focus on the song instead:
I tried so hard and got so far
But in the end,
It doesn't even matter
I had to fall to lose it all
But in the end, it doesn't even matter...