[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.]
It was already a non-AC bus, and on top of that, it was Ena. The bus was flying down the highway like tu-fa-n! After two in the night, it finally stopped at Bhairab for a fifteen-minute break. Sneha wanted to get down and walk around for a bit, but there was one small problem: she had no idea how to remove a sleeping person’s head from her shoulder without causing an international incident. Thankfully, perhaps out of sheer mercy, the Almighty Himself woke the woman up with nature’s call within a few minutes of the bus stopping. On her birthday night, that felt like a gift from the Almighty.
Downstairs, after walking around for a while and taking a few puffs from her vape, the break-ending horn went off. Back on the bus, a few empty seats caught her eye right at the very back. As she walked toward them, she told herself: No more burden for tonight. Have a relax, young lady.
But her mind had absolutely no intention of relaxing. Hours had already passed. Abir must have been getting seriously worried by then, seeing that she still hadn’t replied to any of his texts. The thought kept making her restless, but that night, Sneha wanted to think only about her own pain. She wanted to stay with herself- to handle herself however she wanted, in whatever way she thought might make the pain a little easier to bear.
She didn't end up sitting in the back after all. A young pair of lovebirds were occupying the corner seats of the very last row. Since she wasn't wearing her glasses, she hadn't noticed them from a distance. Damn! She had just walked right up to them and, quite possibly, ruined whatever private little world they had been inhabiting. The embarrassment of having to sit there for the rest of the journey suddenly felt unbearable. Her irritation with herself rose to another level. With no choices left, she sat right back in her old seat.
As soon as the bus started moving again, the lights went off and another pointless ’90s song came blasting through the loudspeakers- “Baaas ek sanam chahiye… aaa… aashiqui ke liye…” [All I need is one beloved… for love…]. To protect her sanity, she jammed her earbuds back in. She cued up the "Amon" playlist, and right on cue, Shafqat Amanat Ali started singing this track that was supposed to comfort her on this random midnight escape: “Main lakh jatan kar haari, lakh jatan kar har rahi... mora saiyyan mo se bole na...” (I have tried a million ways and failed; I keep trying a million ways and failing... my beloved will not speak to me...).
With her soul, the song wet her eyes too. About a month later, on a rain-soaked afternoon, inside a parked car on a deserted road in Rajshahi, that same song would once again leave two pairs of eyes wet for a long while, with the unspoken pain of a possible separation sitting between them. Sneha tried to understand how long a person could hold on to anger and abhiman after reaching Junoon in love, or did those feelings only become more intense? She felt an unbearable tenderness for Abir. So much tenderness. Maybe everything at this stage came with that kind of intensity.
Between those thoughts and the aching pull in Shafqat Amanat Ali’s voice, one of her eyes turned into the Surma, the other into the Kushiyara. The two streams rolled down her cheeks and met beneath her chin as the Kalni. They didn’t stop anywhere. They kept flowing, straight toward the Bay of Bengal inside her chest, adding a little more weight to it.
Even her own crying was being narrated in her head as if her entire life were one giant dark comedy. Whenever Abir read something, she had written, he would usually say, It’s dark! Too dark! Sneha would laugh and reply, My whole life is dark. Abir would suggest, Write something cheerful. Give some light to others. Give some hope.
She could never quite understand how a life full of sadness was supposed to produce something cheerful. If a life was made mostly of darkness, how exactly was it supposed to give off light? People mostly wrote themselves. Their own lives, their own surroundings. Not every life was a fairy tale.
Sneha feels that people only pretend to understand other people’s pain. Nobody really does. At best, what we call “trying to understand” means comparing someone else’s suffering with our own and saying, “I can feel it,” or “I can understand.” In reality, it’s total bullshit. Deep down, people just use various excuses to justify their own pain as greater than anyone else's. After overthinking and weighing up her situation against everyone else's, she hooks onto the ultimate conclusion: My situation is the most difficult one. My pain is the greatest pain in the world. Someone else might be painful, sure, but a little less. A little smaller. Not quite as bad as mine.
Nah... there is no way to cross the Pul Sirat with this needle tonight. She had started with Mehdi Hasan, trying every possible trick to tame the needle’s wild jumping. Since then, he left, and Fateh Ali Khan took over, dropping warnings for a while: “Tumhe dillagi bhool jaani padegi, mohabbat ki raahon mein aa kar to dekho...” (You will have to forget your playful games, just come and step onto the paths of love and see…). Yet, the needle keeps jumping out of place. The thought of having to go downstairs again in search of another needle was already giving her a headache. She decides to just focus on Fateh Ali’s next lyric instead.
Ah...she actually loves the next line. It feels like another matching topic on her life syllabus, and it sounds completely logical. He’s singing: “Tadapne pe mere na phir tum hasoge... kabhi dil kisi se laga kar to dekho.” (You won't laugh at my agonizing torment anymore... just try giving your heart to someone once and see.)
On the surface, the line sounds like the classic phrase “walk a mile in my shoes,” but that’s the reality. If you’ve never lived through something yourself, you can’t truly feel what it is like for someone else. You can understand the words. You can listen. You can even try to imagine it. But feeling it from the inside is different. There’s nothing wrong with not being able to fully understand something you’ve never experienced.
Some people do genuinely try. They listen, they think, they try to place themselves in someone else’s situation. But their own lack of experience still leaves a distance between them and what the other person is actually going through. No matter how hard they try, they can’t quite cross it. And even that, in itself, isn’t the problem. The problem is when someone doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to understand, makes no effort to understand, and still feels entitled to judge.
To sit outside someone else’s reality and decide where they went right, where they went wrong, what they should have done, what they shouldn’t have done- such strange people and such a strange world. But the brutal part is this: somewhere in life’s turns, they may end up standing in that exact same place themselves. And only then do they understand.
From outside the door, it had been so easy to laugh at that situation. So, it is easy to judge the person trapped inside it. But once they find themselves standing on the other side of that same door, they realize it isn’t nearly as easy as it looked. Thinking about all these strange little knots of the world, she pressed the replay button and listened to Fateh Ali Sahib’s logical point two more times.
The moment that ghazal ended, Begum Akhtar began to sing, as if she had taken all the grief sitting heavy inside her heart and replaced her entire voice with it: “Ami to rakhini tare bedhe, shudhu bhul korechi bhalobese… chupi chupi chole na giye, se keno biday nilo na hese?” (I never held him captive, I only made the mistake of loving him… instead of slipping away in secret, why didn’t he smile when saying goodbye?).
Allah alone knows who Begum Sahiba was making that painfully sad complaint to. Maybe Allah Himself. But whoever the complaint was meant for, Sneha is certain of one thing: Allah must have made that person suffer in the exact same way. She believes that when pain reaches all the way to someone’s soul, the Creator doesn’t simply let the person responsible for that pain go on living peacefully.
As for Begum Sahiba making a mistake by loving him- Sneha has absolutely no doubt about that. Love is, after all, one enormous anthology of poems written out of mistakes. But the next line feels a little confusing. Her complaint is basically that the person she loved left quietly. Why didn’t he smile and say goodbye before leaving, right? Isn’t that what she means? She tries to figure out whether she’s still on the right track. Seems like she is.
The people who are meant to leave always slip away in secret like that. Do they really care about giving a clean, beautiful, smiling farewell? In cases involving thieves, liars, cheats, and frauds, or people who have simply lost all interest, warmth, and emotion for a relationship- the goodbye always looks exactly like this. What difference does it make if they stay or go? What difference does it make whether they stay or go? Why even cry over their leaving?
But the kind of love Malika-E-Ghazal is talking about seems like a different case. Junoon, or perhaps something close to it. And in that case, goodbye basically means separation. For any mashuk or mashuka in this world, smiling at the person they love and walking away at the moment of separation must be one of the hardest things imaginable.
Begum Akhtar is sitting right in front of Sneha. At least, that’s how she has begun to imagine it. She is now deep in a serious conversation with the empress of melody about the philosophy of separation. She keeps talking to the empty room, waving her hands as if Begum Sahiba is actually sitting there listening: “If there is ishq in someone’s heart, can they ever smile and say goodbye to their ashik or mashuka, Ustad? Can they? It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do. You need a massive kolija for that.”
Sneha knows for sure now, after meeting Abir, that she doesn’t have that big a kolija anymore. And yet Amma had said so many times in her life- your entire body is made of kolija. Of course, she never meant it as a compliment. It was always negative. Or, in plain Bangla, a taunt. She used to say it whenever Sneha came home a little late. If Sneha did anything against her wishes, same dialogue. How many times have she heard that line in her life, over how many different things? Ah, Amma. All of a sudden, she missed her terribly. It felt like some empty region inside her chest had suddenly gone hollow.
There were so many reasons she had been annoyed with Amma. So many times, she had left home just because she couldn’t stand listening to her. She had spent years living alone, here and there, however she wanted. And now? What if Amma went away too, like Abba? Let her throw bitter shade, let her weaponize insults, let her scream until the atmosphere turns unlivable- at least she would exist. Once she exits this life, the theater of their conflict dies with her, leaving an absolute silence. A devastating, suffocating grief for Amma claims her consciousness; it cuts intensely, deeper than she can bear.
She curls up into a tight ball right there on the floor, pulling her arms and legs close, as if she desperately wants to crawl back inside her mother’s womb. As if she’s begging Amma to tie her up with the umbilical cord and keep her safe inside forever, so she never has to deal with this brutal world again. If Amma dies, who is she even going to complain about, saying “this woman tortured me my entire life”? Why the hell does God kill His own people with a devastating disease like cancer? Putting them through so much suffering, so much pain. She always assumed her own number would be called next after Abba. She still believes that.
Abir always used to say, I’ll go before you, you’ll see! I’m older than you, so obviously I’m supposed to go first. But Allah brings people into this world according to His own calculations and takes them back according to His own. Only He understands that arithmetic. Abir was older than her by exactly two months and ten days. Yet the way he talked, you’d think he was some great old murubbi. Every few days, at least once, he would say, We’re getting old. And every single time, Sneha would immediately say, You, not me!
Who gets old at forty? And a man, at that. The Prophet himself received prophethood at forty. Life practically begins after that. She understood the subtext of his "getting old" card perfectly, it was a tactical withdrawal. It was his way of telling her they were past the stage of high-school’s Nibba-Nibbi. He was trying to warn her: Don't pout. Don't be so hungry for affection. Don't expect a fairy tale. Because in the end, I…
Sometimes she would figure out Abir’s unsaid words on her own. Sometimes she got them right; sometimes she didn't. To her, this lack of clarity felt like the root rot of their entire relationship. Overlooking it was the reason why… whatever! She didn't want to hit rewind on her memory like a taped track just to relive those ugly moments right now. Instead, an old proverb drifted into her head: The days gone by were good, the days ahead are worse. That only ticked her off more. Sitting up straight on the floor, she snapped, Fuck that! My past was trash, and my future is going to be even worse!
Instead of dragging herself through the toxic sludge of the last two months, remembering that night from a year ago—the journey to Sylhet—feels comparatively less painful. At that time, she actually stayed on until the very last stop in Sylhet city. After every other passenger had cleared up, the bus helper called out to her, Apa, last stop! Where are you getting off?
The place was Kadamtali. The sleepy bird who had been sitting beside Sneha, meanwhile, reached her destination, lifted her head from Sneha’s shoulder with surprising grace, and got off two stops early. People really have zero sense of gratitude. That’s exactly how Sneha felt the moment the sleepy bird vanished. She was a thousand percent sure that, in her entire life, that woman had never once had a boyfriend who let her use his shoulder as a pillow all night long.
Does Sneha really have any gratitude either? She understands Abir’s issues. Keeping Sneha in his life while keeping up with everything else is difficult for him. And, in many ways, risky too. Still, within whatever limits he has, he tries. Sometimes he texts just to give her a little time, a little presence. But the problem was never time. It was timing. It was the way Abir understood their relationship. It was the lack of clarity. The problems were complicated, but they were never impossible to solve.
If she puts all of that aside, there is still the one thing she can never deny: whenever Abir was actually beside her, he gave her a feeling she could have been grateful for all her life. And she is grateful, she really is. Take away the bullshit he says before every goodbye, and Abir is truly a genuine gentleman. There is no doubt about that. But how terrible does a gentleman’s sense of timing have to be to spend forty-six straight hours with someone in a time so intense, so terrifyingly beautiful, and then, right before leaving, say, “I love you”, and immediately follow it with, “We will never meet again!” What the hell is that!
If they don’t meet again, fine. If it’s not going to happen, they’ll deal with it when it happens. Why keep saying these things every single time he leaves? Why leave a person in this much pain right at the moment of goodbye? And the strangest part is, he doesn’t even realize he’s creating something painful while he’s doing it. Later come the thousand apologies. Then the same thing happens again and again and again!
He did the exact same thing the day Sneha was leaving Rajshahi. For two years, every goodbye has made Sneha go through this pain. There has to be a limit to what a person can take. If someone keeps going through this kind of trauma at every goodbye, and eventually starts reacting to the smallest things, or if the trauma of every previous goodbye gets triggered at the next one and starts affecting their behavior- how fair is it to ignore the reason behind those reactions and simply call them insane?
Sneha lets out a long sigh. Who is going to answer all these questions? She had been forcing so many questions down her own throat, keeping them quiet. She wanted to spend the rest of her life holding on to Abir quietly. Even from a distance, she thought she could live this one life with the feeling that he was still beside her. Why couldn’t even that be written in her fate?
Abir’s crying during that February 6th night video call completely wrecked Sneha. She could tell he wanted to say something but just couldn’t pull the trigger. He couldn't bring himself to cut ties completely, yet he also couldn't acknowledge their relationship in any clear form. That man was just burning alive inside his own doubts and conflict. But he never wanted to talk openly about it, probably terrified of the restlessness, or maybe he just lacked the guts. He wanted peace, and so did she. But instead of talking it out and finding common ground, everything died in Abir’s vagueness and silence. There was a time he called Sneha his 'peace of heart.' He practically requested her to stay in his life, saying, 'I need you!' Sure, he was completely wasted when he said it, but his eyes didn't lie; they backed up every single word.
Now? Now Sneha is supposedly the root of all the chaos in his life. They could have easily kept that inner peace alive for the rest of their days with just a little effort. Instead, everything went to hell. Who fucked up? Whose fault was it? These things are never that easy to separate and calculate. Who made the mess? Whose fault was it? These things are never that easy to separate and calculate.
After crying his eyes out that night, Abir casually tells her, If you’re ever around Rajshahi, let me know. We’ll grab dinner. Now, Sneha grew up on useless '90s Bollywood tracks like: Betabi kya hoti hai, poochho mere dil se... tanha tanha lauta hoon, mein toh bhari mehfil se... marna jaaaayu kahiiiin, ho ke tumse judaaaa... ('Ask my heart what desperation feels like... I’ve returned alone from crowded rooms... I might just die being separated from you...'); she had lost her innocence to that dramatic garbage as a kid. So, when Abir said, If you ever come around Rajshahi, she somehow managed to completely ignore the word 'ever' and take the rest of the sentence very seriously. Her betabi had already reached dangerous levels.
That very night, she booked a flight from Dhaka to Rajshahi for the following week on GoZayaan. Hotel too. The problem came a little later, when she had cooled down enough to rewind the sentence in her head and put that tiny, inconvenient word- 'ever' back where it actually belonged. And just like that- the thousand hesitations began.
It took four full days after booking the ticket for Sneha to gather enough courage to finally tell Abir she was going to Rajshahi. Four days of going from day to night and night back into day, arguing with herself about how to say it. What to say. What not to say. How many times to rewrite the same thought before finally letting it leave her. Thinking about all that now, she can’t help feeling a little sorry for the woman she had been then.
Once, Abir had told her about the music band he was part of back in his Cadet College days. He had even dug up their performance at the Inter Cadet College Literary and Music Meet on YouTube and made her watch it. Sneha had seen him play the guitar there. She had never heard him sing. Yet Abir often said, quite confidently, I was a good singer. Then he’d look straight at her to say- You don’t believe me? Seriously, I’m not lying! Sneha would only laugh.
So eventually, she used that old story as an opening. She texted him: How am I supposed to know you used to be a good singer if I’ve never heard you sing? Abir replied: Ha ha ha! I gave it up a long time ago. And I’m a shy guy, you know that, right? That was her chance to tell him that she was taking the afternoon flight to Rajshahi on February 13.
With that text, she added, If you can somehow find a few minutes to meet me at a restaurant, even from a distance, either to sing for me or just to give me that feeling that no matter how far apart we are, we’re still close, let me know. Even while sending it, she was already trying to protect him from the weight of what she was asking. She didn’t want him to feel pressured or want him to read too much into it. She didn't even want him to come back with some serious, emotionally loaded answer. So, she immediately wrapped the whole thing in a joke and wrote: If neither of those is possible, then what can I do? I’ll just go to Panchabati, find whoever’s willing to sing for me, listen to them, and fly back to Dhaka!
Abir took his time replying to that text. By then, Sneha had started to understand what his delayed replies usually meant, at least to some extent. He had to calculate every move. Everything had to be weighed, measured, considered. Their worlds were completely different- she understands that now. Sneha had always been a free bird and had enormous wings. But big wings alone don’t mean a bird is free to fly wherever it wants. Only when Abir was close could she let the wind catch beneath those wings and fly without thinking about where she was going.
Maybe she flew too far. Maybe too high. High enough to reach somewhere she had never really been meant to reach. And once she was there, she didn’t know how to find her way back, and perhaps beyond that height, beyond that invisible boundary, Abir simply didn’t have the ability, the desire, the freedom, or the strength to keep flying with her. So, in the end, both of them came down with broken wings. Who was more guilty? Who was less? It was never that simple. Not everything can be reduced to a binary.
Still, Sneha believes there was a chance to fix the small things they kept leaving undefined. Abir kept postponing those conversations, afraid of the unrest they might create in the moment. Without realizing it, he let every unresolved thing settle on top of the next one, until the small problems became something much larger. And eventually, they turned into a wildfire. A fire that left everything in its path burned to nothing. Someone lost a home; someone else lost the entire world.