How long she had been lying there on the balcony, soaking in the rain, Sneha hadn't kept count. She estimates it must have been more than two hours. It was the unbearable cold of her wet clothes that finally pulls her back into the reality of the world. For all that time she had been inside a different place entirely had the shivering not reached an intolerable pitch, she could have stayed there much longer, perhaps the whole night through. Even now, rising from that place, she felt the haze hadn't quite lifted.
Can human beings truly experience magic realism in real life? As she lifts herself off the balcony floor, a flood of questions about the journey of the past few hours began surfacing in her mind. She isn't going to chase their answers or explanations right now. Her sense was that as long as the questions remained scattered, the answers wouldn't find their way home either. For now, she decided simply to give them space, to let them land properly inside her, in their own time.
At the same time, Sneha finds herself in a strange double state: calmer than before, yet restless in equal measure. Walking in to turn on the light, she reels a bit. Her first instinct is earthquake, but one glance at the ceiling fan is telling her the tremor isn’t in the earth, it’s in her head. Still, dizziness doesn’t earn much of a place on her priority list. Far more pressing things are already lining up in front of her, one after another. What she needs to do first, she decided to shower and free her body from the weight of wet clothes. She just turns toward the washroom when her phone begins to ring. Perhaps it had rung before. she hadn't noticed.
For hours she hadn’t thought of her phone. Since Abir's leaving, there was rarely any reason to keep it close. How many days she hadn't gone to the office, whether it had spilled into weeks or weeks into months, she wasn't keeping track of that either. The world had stopped keeping up with her and she had stopped keeping up with the world. That at least was how it had been for the past two months. Only her mother’s illness had forced her to remain tethered to reality, otherwise she might have cut herself off completely- she is thinking of this as she reaches for the phone on the bedside table. Her world had already detached from her and walked away. What was left for her to stay connected to?
That thought is just rising into a long sigh when the memory of that journey through the rain returns to her. She stops the sigh before it can escape, holding it in. It wasn't Amma calling. She glanced at the screen and began walking toward the washroom. Right now, in this world, Amma was the only connection she needed to. Illness had granted her that exception. To anyone else, Sneha owed nothing. Sneha doesn't take long in the shower. She steps out quickly, pulls the writing pad from the bedside drawer, and begins writing carefully, deliberate letters one by one, in order:
1. Gonna staying in Bashundhara tonight.
2. Dizziness is likely from falling blood pressure, need to eat something.
3. Rivotril, Filfresh and Olianz are in the bag; need to get Max Pro, Prodep and Baclofen from the pharmacy. No Rivotril or Filfresh tonight, could trigger adverse reactions.
4. Call Delowar Bhai, ask him to parcel more sweets urgently by bike to Bashundhara.
5. After everything the body has taken today, appetite ruined; eggs, banana and dates should be enough for quick energy. Eggs and dates are in the fridge. Need to go downstairs and look for bananas. Alternative: two boiled eggs.
6. To avoid mishaps in the journey of sweets, need to buy two spare 3ml syringes and four twenty-taka lighters.
7. Drink water. Even if there's no desire for it, keep the bottle nearby as a reminder.
8. Once the outside chores are done, need to call Amma calmly, preferably video call. Must have to tell her that thesis work is keeping her here. Remember: do not start talking continuously or excessively.
Folding the paper, she thought of calling Delowar bhai. Just then, her phone rang again. Her boss. He called every day. Before being her boss, he is someone close, someone who didn’t need formal explanations. The reason she wasn't answering didn't need to be dressed up in professional language. She doesn't think Helal Bhai is calling with his boss-hat on. Sneha is sure about that; he is calling because her disappearance from the world is disturbing him. He was disturbed by her withdrawal from the world. Those who knew her closely didn’t need explanations. Of course, there were those who had come even closer than most and still understood nothing. And in the end, Sneha had gone and proved every one of those misreadings right, hadn't she? So how could she now, with any conviction, put the blame on anyone else? She turns it inward instead and says to herself- No. It's fine. Accept reality: you are the root of all ruin, accept and carry it- the rest of your life will be one long turmoil.
The flash of self-directed anger almost explodes, but she holds back it. She can be angry at herself later. Right now, if she doesn't call Delowar Bhai and place the order for sweets, delivery from Geneva Camp to Bashundhara won't arrive before midnight. Waiting in matters like these is its own particular kind of suffering. Reminding herself of that she smiles after a long time a smile comes to her face. Faint, but genuine, coming from inside. And suddenly, in the middle of all of it, she thinks of Abir's impatience. On those rare occasions when Abir had to wait somewhere for her, he would send text after text- where are you, how far, how much longer? He grew restless himself and made her restless too! Messages after messages arrive like small, panicked birds. And every single time, Sneha had to reply I don’t have a helicopter to fly over. This is Dhaka, man! Almost there, just a little more. And if she ever made the mistake of setting the condition that he couldn't start drinking until she arrived, God help her! Every few minutes he came with his words on Sneha's phone screen: This is kind of torture. I'll just have one peg. Sneha would write back in large letters: NOOOOOO! And poor Abir would write instantly: How much longer?
The sigh she had stopped herself from releasing earlier, she lets it go now. Something twists inside her chest for Abir. Not because she has lost him, perhaps forever in this lifetime, the right and the ability to feel his presence by any means other than magic realism. But because of freeing him and herself, she had to leave him in a terrible place. And because for two years, clinging to him to survive, she had made him her entire world. She closes her eyes. After her father's death, Abir had become the centre of her love, anger, stubbornness, and grief. And so there were times she acted like a spoiled child. She screamed, said terrible things. Hours and hours of it. Not once did it occur to her that the man was absorbing all of it, day after day, in silence. Out of fear, perhaps. Or perhaps because he understood her pain.
She can't hold it back anymore. Her chest cracks open and she weeps for Abir. She doesn't try to stop it and lets herself cry. This crying is not for her, not for her own pain or her own suffering. This crying is for Abir. For what he endured, for what he is enduring now, for what he will carry the rest of his life. And for the fact that the cause of all that suffering is her. Between the sobs, she keeps saying it- she will never get the chance to tell him what she did, she did because there was no other way out. That without putting herself through this guilt, she would have kept hurting him like this, again and again. And he would never have been free of it either. But even having done this has she truly managed to step out of one person's shadow and into her own? Has she? Will she ever?
She remembers her HSC board exam in accounting. Her journals, ledgers, trial balance- everything had matched correctly. But when it came to the balance sheet, the debit and credit columns refused to reconcile. Some accounts in this world, no matter how hard you try to balance them, they simply will not or can't. Calling out Abir's name, Sneha cries every last wail out of herself into the hollow of this empty flat: Abir… Abir… Abir… until the breath becomes painful to draw, until his name screamed over and over into the void, has flooded her entirely and her chest has nothing left to hold.
During the evening rain, lying on the balcony, Sneha had returned from a world where she and Abir had a long, unhurried conversation. The strange thing was they hadn't fought. Neither had blamed the other, made accusations or held anything against anyone. They had simply talked, the way they used to before his posting to Rajshahi, when he came to Dhaka and they used to sit together for hours. Sneha was quiet, gentle, as she always was when Abir sat beside her and today was the same. After a little whisky, Abir had opened his whole treasury of stories the way he always did. And as always, he hadn't forgotten to mention about his Chinese girlfriend, with whom he used to dated when he was in China for 6 months. After the long conversation, the goodbye had been gentle too. Sneha hadn't insisted he stay longer or hadn't sulked or puffed up her cheeks in protest. And Abir hadn't said anything nonsense before leaving, which can hurt Sneha either.
Sneha took two puffs from her inhaler, drank some water and settled. When her phone buzzed with a WhatsApp notification, she picked it up and found a message from Abrar: “Apa, are you okay? I've been trying to reach you for days and I can't get through. I'm worried. I don't know how you've been since that day. I still can't understand why Abir bhai did what he did. No one with even a minimum of feeling or attachment ends things that way. I was surprised you weren't saying anything. I don't know how you're dealing with this alone. If you ever need to talk, please reach out. And Apa- no more drugs, please. It will kill your real emotions. Take care.”
Sneha read the message and started to reach for the memory of their last conversation, then stopped herself. She didn't want to go there. That conversation was what she had been burning herself down with for all these days. The suffering that God has written into someone's fate arrives regardless, like a receipt that reads must be delivered to the customer upon demand- it will come, no matter how hard you try to hold it off. She had thrown both herself and Abir into indefinite turmoil. Perhaps no one could have closed it better. She reminds herself: Abir wasn't an angel. He was a flawed human being like any other. She smiles a little and said to herself- no, actually a slightly more donkey-ish variety than the average.
On their last day, she had deliberately asked him nothing. She knew questions would only worsen the bitterness of an ending that was already ugly enough. She didn't want that conversation to live anywhere in her memory, not even in its furthest corners. Sitting there, Sneha discovers that it was the only memory of Abir she wanted to Shift+Delete permanently. All the rest she would keep, carefully, like a cow chewing cud bringing them up again and again, turning them over in her heart.
She guessed Abir’s state of mind that day- rage, perhaps even hatred, and he had been defending himself from inside it. But reality is something different. We can defend ourselves to others with a thousand arguments or deny everything altogether. But there is no escaping the self. Sooner or later, we all have to answer to our own conscience for what we have done. There is no other way. Sneha thought she could have silenced him with so many numbers of things that day, she could counter every word with logic. What would that have achieved? She had have won the argument and the pain would have stayed exactly where it was in both of them. Sneha didn't understand everything, fine, she is willing to accept that, but she knows clearly the difference between fear and care. Neither she nor Abir could justify themselves as purely white or purely black. They both belonged to the grey.
When all of this began, both of them had been in a profoundly vulnerable place. Neither had the condition to reach past their own pain and feel the other's. But Sneha believes now, it would have happened anyway, if not then, later. Some things are so intense they can only end in destruction. She sat quietly for a moment. Then the thought came: if she told Abrar about this evening's journey, he would give her a clinical explanation by calling it a chemical reaction, and a hallucination caused by excess substances entering the system. He will analyze the entire conversation through the lens of reality or medical terminology. Thinking about this, Sneha feels like Hajime. So, had Abir come to her today as Shimamoto? She laughed loudly, genuinely.
The first book she had ever given Abir was South of the Border, West of the Sun. She remembers how much it had upset him when the story ended the way it did. They had talked about it for hours. Shimamoto’s existence was pure magic realism. Tonight, Abir’s presence was the same. He had entered her world like Murakami’s heroine. She laughed again. Rakib was right, she had always played the hero in the story. Then she stopped herself. No. Wrong. In the end, she had become the villain in Abir's story. The accounting never balances easily here either.
Sneha decided she wouldn't tell Abrar anything about this evening's journey. The madness she had reached, the Junoon was always going to end this way, she kept feeling now, again and again. And this evening's journey or whatever continuation of it lay ahead, this was the stage she used to mention to Abir, the one that always made him uncomfortable. This is actually Faana. Though Sneha used to call it by its other name when she wanted to tease him- Maut. She realizes she had dissolved with his departure, whatever life remained before the body followed, she had had to live it through journeys like this evening's. Had the pain lessened for anyone? Had any account been settled? No- she shook her head. That never worked out even in the HSC exam. But the pain Abir had given her knowingly, deliberately, even on that last day? She smiles.
The delivery had arrived in Bashundhara a long time ago, foil paper had been sitting in front of her this whole time while she had cried halfway to the next world. Now she pulled out the foil paper, lit the needle’s tip and told herself: “Young lady, do you really think it ends here? Nope.” She inhaled in one long breath, then opened Spotify. Hemanta Mukhopadhyay’s voice filled the room:
Taar aar 'por nei
Nei kono thikana
Ja kichhu giyechhe theme
Jaak theme jaak na…
Mone rekho amio chhilam
Chhotto jibon aar joto hashi gaan
Ami tomake dilam
Aamio chhilam mone rekho…