[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.]
From morning until evening, Sneha sat in solitude; alone, with herself, after many days. After certain events, a person’s life never quite returns to what it was, or perhaps it never manages to touch that thing called "normal" again. Sneha thinks she will probably have to spend whatever remains of her life exactly like this, locked inside a closed room, playing with needle and fire. Beyond this, she can't seem to do anything else anymore. Rain is coming again. Suddenly a storm wind began to blow, like something out of Baishakh. She had come and sat on the balcony floor just before dusk to watch the sun go down, and she is still sitting exactly the same way. Both knees folded up. Both arms running along either side of her legs, hands balled into fists just short of touching her chin, reaching forward instead.
Once the rain starts, getting out of Bashundhara would turn into a struggle, but she doesn't feel any particular urge to leave this place or go anywhere either. After those heavenly 46 hours and 42 minutes spent with Abir, she hadn't been able to stay alone in any flat for long. Even in Amma’s house at Niketan or her own flat in Aftabnagar, closing her eyes alone brought suffocation. Through that period, night after night, she had relied on Filfresh and Rivotril, waiting for sleep to arrive. Three months later, more out of compulsion than choice, she had to give up the Aftabnagar flat. Twenty-eight thousand a month in rent, three thousand on top of that for service charges. And yet she couldn't stay in her own flat, because of the intensity of one person’s memory. Anyone hearing this would call her insane. Though she is, Sneha thinks.
So many people had called her paagli in her life- with love, with tenderness. Abba used to say it all the time, pulling her close: Areeeh… amar paaaaglita! How long it has been since she last heard him call her that, she wonders. She will never hear it again. No one calling her mad had ever bothered Sneha, but every time Abir called her that, it pierced her. She would get violently triggered. Sneha closes her eyes for a moment, trying to bring back the sound of Abir’s voice, and suddenly his face surfaces before her- heavily drunk, back in Rajshahi.
In that moment, he hadn't looked like Abir at all. He had looked like someone else entirely. Someone Sneha didn't know, as if she were seeing him for the very first time. That man’s eyes didn't carry Abir’s tenderness. They held a fierce, consuming rage. Was there hatred, too? She couldn't bear that version of Abir then, and she still can't. She tried to stop the vision, but it won't leave. Even with her eyes open, she could see clearly that Abir was sitting inside the car, screaming at her: You are insane! You need medical help! Whenever Abir called her mad, it was always out of anger. It hurt Sneha terribly. It still does.
The first drops of rain fell with another gust of wind. Sneha hadn't turned on the light in her room, nor did she go inside from the balcony. The window was open; the curtains flew wildly. A sudden flash of lightning, then the electricity went out. Her already darkened room didn't need to become dark anew; instead, she watched the flats in the nearby buildings go dark one by one. She wanted to stay in this darkness for a while. But she knows that within minutes, the generators in every building will roar to life and flood everything with light again. How desperately a person can crave darkness, the way they crave solitude sometimes. In this moment, that darkness feels absolutely necessary to her. Any flicker of light might reveal Abir’s face, not the real Abir, but that stranger living inside him. And maybe he would scream at her again with rage: You need medical help!
Strange! Sneha looked around at the neighbouring buildings and noticed that not a single generator had come on yet. The already quiet I-Block was growing even more silent in the darkness. The houses here doesn't stand pressed against one another; there is a comfortable distance between each building on this road. That is exactly why Sneha had rented this studio apartment. It's not as large and open as her Chandrima Model Town flat, but the area is relatively quiet and tidy. That is the reason she had paid the advance money instantly when she came to visit this place on the very first day. Her Chandrima flat had been huge, nearly 1450 square feet. It might not sound like much for a family, but for Sneha alone, it was essentially a football field.
Sneha had lived there in blissful solitude in the year 2023–2024. It was there she had first met Abir. From that flat came their first phone calls, their first video chats, their first date, and Abir’s first night under her roof. By the time she left Chandrima, she and Abir had temporarily lost contact. She would never have left otherwise. So many memories had accumulated there. Though more have gathered since then at Enchanted. She had to vacate because the landlord had sold that apartment and she was given barely fifteen days' notice. The landlord knew she had her family home in this city, so he felt that even if he asked her to leave in a day, she at least wouldn't end up on the street. Though he had called and politely apologized repeatedly for that inconvenience.
The man had probably been pressed for money and sold the flat in a hurry. She had spent some of the best and some of the worst chapters of her life in that flat. Light and air flooded in from every direction on the seventh floor. From the balcony, she could see the Turag River. She used to walk along its bank in the evenings quite often. The day she moved out, after the laborers had carried everything down and left, she stood alone in the empty rooms and wept. It felt as though she was leaving behind the memories of her first days with Abir, abandoning them there.
The same happened when she left the Aftabnagar flat. Abir had come there only once. During the day, for a few hours. He had simply slept and woke up after noon, when Sneha had forced him to wake and fed him. Then she had gone to the pharmacy to buy Napa Extra for him. After she came back, they talked for a bit, and by evening they had headed to the airport together. Yet those few hours bound the flat so tightly to his memory that she could never stay there alone again. The memory of Abir would return with such force; day by day, a crushing loneliness took hold of her there. In the end, she had no choice but to force herself to leave. When she left that one too, she cried like a little baby- uncontrollably, struggling to stop herself. Even though it was only a handful of hours, those hours belonged to the same heaven of forty-six hours and forty-two minutes. That is why it hurt as much as it did.
Outside Kingfisher, there were so very few places where she and Abir had spent time together. Leaving those flats felt as though she could never go back to those places to search for him in her memories. Whenever she missed Abir badly, she would go to Kingfisher and imagine Abir beside her, mixing Red Bull and lemon into her whisky glass, about to clink his glass against hers and say, Cheers. She had spent countless afternoons, evenings, nights, even midnights there, just to feel him beside her. That is her own kind of madness, she thinks. That is her fate, and she had always known that she would have to survive on these collected memories of Abir. That thought made her try hard, in every way she could, to keep storing them up. They were all she had. There was a time when even the thought of never seeing Abir again suffocated her. And now...
Sneha will probably never see Abir again. Not "probably", there is no room for "probably" or "maybe" here anymore. It's certain now. In all the narrow lanes and forgotten corners of this tiny world, Sneha and Abir will never meet again. Not in this life. For a moment, she accepted it calmly, but the calm didn't last. The ache set in. And this particular ache is not the kind that can be explained to anyone. It is something else- pain, sorrow, grief, a sense of desolation, and a terrifying emptiness. The thought of a separation as final as death makes something happen inside Sneha’s chest. She feels a dreadful weight. In her chest, in her head, all the way down the right side of her body. And even as she feels that weight, she thinks: at least Abir is better off because of this distance. He no longer has to live in fear of Sneha. He no longer has to endure her anguish, her rage, her stubbornness, or her wounded pride. He is free now!
By that logic, should she not feel even a little less pain? But the heart... does she have any power to bind her heart to the rules of what should and shouldn't be? That is the one part of herself she is helplessly captive to. Sneha thinks of where Mandakranta Sen wrote: “The heart is a disobedient girl; punish her if you will.” And next to that, Sneha is nothing. Utterly small, utterly ordinary. This grief, this ache of knowing she will never see Abir again, never see his smile, never hear his voice, never hear him call her name, never have him exist in her world again, and she will cease to exist in his. They will both be alive on this earth, but never again...These thoughts tormented her constantly. Each time they returned, a mountain pressed down on her chest.
How many days from now, how many more sleepless nights, how many ways of keeping herself distracted with numbness, how many times of screaming when the pain becomes too much, how many times of breaking down in tears when she can no longer keep up the performance for herself, before this becomes normal? Sneha keeps wondering. Pain endured long enough does eventually become bearable. Is that not what people call the “new normal”? She remembered the term from the pandemic, when abnormality becomes ordinary. When would her own “new normal” arrive? Years? Decades? Before death? It hurts so much, so unbearably much, she is tired of it. She feels tender toward herself. Lately, when she sees herself like this, so helpless, she wants to be gentle with herself; she wants to hold herself softly for a moment. Sneha finds herself wanting to go back to childhood these days. To become so small again that nothing in the world would require her to think anymore.
And then, in the middle of all this, she suddenly asks herself: does Abir hate her now? Does thinking of her fill him with rage? This thought makes her chest tremble. She wonders, is this how the rest of her life will be? Living as someone hated in Abir’s eyes? But then she thought: hatred requires love first. Both are intense emotions; one can't exist without the other. When love ends, what comes is indifference, not hatred. Abir had always been indifferent. Where there was never love, how could hatred exist? Sneha can't find the answer. A conflict stirs inside her. She feels that many things Abir had said, even on the last day, weren't entirely true. She can't think clearly anymore. She only wonders: was Abir’s hatred really all she had ever deserved? Perhaps…
Still, no light shows in any of the flats in the distant buildings. Does everyone out there secretly want darkness right now, like her? Tonight she does not want light anywhere. Light means Abir- not Abir himself, but that other man living inside him. The drizzle suddenly gives way to a full, pouring rain on the open balcony. Sneha stays sitting exactly as she was. Lightning began flashing rapidly across the sky again. Even that light frightened her.
Soaked through in the downpour, she recited aloud, three times: “La ilaha illa anta, subhanaka inni kuntu minaz zalimin.” The fear of seeing that other man inside Abir eases a little. Though the anxiety inside her hasn't entirely lifted. A restlessness, a kind of helpless fluttering, something in her won't settle.
She lay down on the balcony floor, legs folded, arms wrapped tightly around them. Trying to breathe slowly, she realized her whole body was trembling. The stranger’s face inside Abir blurred, faded, and slipped away. But then she sees: Abir has returned. Abir as himself, stepping out of the darkness to sit before her. And the moment that other man left him, what tenderness came over his face! What softness settled there! Sneha watched him for a while, and then it feels as though Abir is saying to her, in that gentle, affectionate voice of his: Mathay haat rakhsi. Ghumao (I'm placing my hand on your head. Sleep). Sleep like a baby. Don't think about anything else right now. Just sleep.
A faint drowsiness comes over her, but she could still see Abir there before her. And looking at him, she thought: he'll never actually place his hand on her head and say that again- Mathay haat rakhsi. Sleep! Had music been playing on the Bluetooth speaker inside all this while? Sneha tries to remember. She can't. But it is playing now. Still lying there, soaking in the rain, she listened as Ustad Ghulam Ali sang to her with all the ache in the world-
Chori Chori ham se tum aa kar mile the jis Jagah
Muddatein Guzarin par ab tak wo Thikaanaa yaad hai
Ham ko ab tak aashiqii kaa woh zamaanaa yaad hai...