[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 didn’t keep track of exactly how long she was lying on the balcony, getting soaked in the rain. But she guesses it must be over two hours. The cold from her wet clothes became too much to handle, which finally brought her back to reality. She was in a completely different world all this time. If the shaking in her body had not gotten this painful, she probably would have stayed in that headspace much longer- maybe even the whole night. She feels like she is still a little spaced out.
Can people actually experience something like magic realism in real life? As she gets up from the balcony floor, tons of questions about her experience over the past few hours start to pop into her head. She isn’t going to look for answers or explanations right now. She figures that as long as the questions are messy, the answers won’t find their way out either. For now, she decides to just give her brain some space so these constant questions can land properly.
At the same time, she finds herself feeling a bit calmer, but also a bit restless. She walks inside the room and stumbles a little as she goes to turn on the lights. At first, she thought it was an earthquake. But she looked up at the ceiling fan and realized the shaking isn’t in the ground- it is inside her own head. Right now, she has way more important things to do than worrying about a dizzy head. So, she doesn’t care about the shaking or the dizziness at all. Her absolute first priority right now is to take a shower and get out of these wet clothes. She takes a step toward the bathroom, and right at that moment, her phone starts ringing. It might have rung before too, but she probably just didn’t notice.
She had completely forgotten about her phone for hours. Ever since Abir walked out of her life, keeping the phone nearby feels entirely pointless. She doesn’t bother to track how many days, or how many months- have slipped away since she stopped going to the office. Consequently, the world doesn’t hold any news of her, nor does she care to hold any news of the world. This numbness has lasted for at least the last two months now. Picking up the phone from the bedside table, she thinks that only her Amma’s sudden sickness had dragged her back to face reality against her will. Otherwise, she could have literally remained entirely detached from civilization for a long stretch of time.
The entire universe had already detached itself from her, after all. What connection is even left for her to preserve? She begins to draw a heavy breath to sigh, but the memory of her trance in the pouring rain flashes back. She intentionally strangles the sigh before it escapes. The screen shows that it isn’t a call from Amma. She stares at the display and turns toward the washroom. At this point in her life, she can survive perfectly well without a connection to any living person, except Amma. She has granted this ground to Amma strictly on the condition of her illness. She is under no obligation to grant it to anyone else in the universe.
She spent very little time under the shower. Moving quickly out of the washroom, she grabbed the notepad from the bedside table and began tracing a deliberate, step-by-step checklist in clear lettering:
- The decision is made to stay in Bashundhara tonight.
- The dizziness is happening probably because my blood pressure dropped. Must eat something.
- Rivotril, Filfresh, and Olianz are in my bag. Need to get Maxpro, Prodep, and Baclofen from the pharmacy for tonight. Can't take Rivotril or Filfresh tonight because they might cause a bad reaction.
- Must call Delwar Bhai and tell him to deliver some more sweets to Bashundhara urgently.
- Appetite is a total mess. Eating eggs, bananas, and dates will be enough to give me quick energy. Eggs and dates are in the fridge. Need to go downstairs and find bananas. Alternative- two boiled eggs.
- To make sure nothing interrupts the sweet-eating session halfway, need to buy two spare 3 ml syringes and four twenty-Taka lighters.
- Must drink plenty of water. Even if don’t feel like it, must keep the bottle close.
- After finishing the outside chores, need to calm down and call Amma. A video call, if possible. Must avoid talking too much or continuously.
She folds the paper. Just as she thinks of calling Delwar bhai, her phone rings again. Her boss. He calls every day. Technically, he’s her boss. But before that, he’s brother. And she already has a perfectly valid reason for not answering his calls. There’s no need to pick up just to go through the whole boss-subordinate formalities and explain herself. Helal bhai isn’t calling because he’s keeping track of some employee who has gone missing from work. At least, Sneha doesn’t think so. He’s calling because he’s worried about her disappearing from the world like this. People who stay close to Sneha, people who actually know her, don’t need every little thing explained. She knows that. Though, ironically, some people got much closer to her than these people ever did and still understood almost nothing about her. And in the end, she proved their worst assumptions right. So, what right does she have to keep shouting about how nobody understood her? The thought makes her say to herself- No. Fine. Accept the reality. You’re the root of all this mess. Accept it. Then spend the rest of your life dealing with the consequences.
She almost loses her temper with herself but manages to hold it down. She can deal with being pissed off later. Before that, she needs to call Delwar bhai and place the sweet order. Otherwise, getting a delivery from Geneva Camp all the way to Bashundhara will probably take until midnight. Waiting around for things like this is fucking painful, she reminds herself, and for the first time in a long while, a small smile appears on her face. Faded, but real. Suddenly, in the middle of all this, she remembers how restless Abir used to get. If he ever had to wait somewhere because of her, even by mistake, how many times would he text her- Koi? How far? How much longer? He would be restless himself and then make her restless too, one text after another. Every time she would reply, I don’t have a helicopter, okay? I can’t just fly over. Call whoever has one! This is Dhaka, man! Almost there, just a little longer. And if she ever made the mistake of telling him not to start drinking until she arrived, that was it. Every few minutes, another text would come- This is kind of torture! I’m just gonna have one peg.
Sneha would send back a huge, stretched-out reply- Naaaaaaah! Poor Abir would have no choice but to ask, How much longer? The sigh she had been holding back a while ago finally escapes. Something twists inside her chest when she thinks of Abir. No. It’s not because she has lost the right, or even the ability, to feel Abir’s presence in this life without magic realism. It’s because, in trying to free herself from him, she had to put him through a difficult situation. And because, for two years, while trying to survive by holding on to Abir, she had turned him into her whole world. She closes her eyes and thinks- after Abba died, Abir became the center of everything for her: love, anger, stubbornness, pain, happiness, all of it. That’s why she would sometimes behave like a spoiled, stubborn kid with him- throw bad temper, get angry, scream. There were so many times she had screamed like a mad person, said all kinds of stupid things, even abused him. Not once did it occur to her that the man had been quietly putting up with all of it, day after day. Maybe because he was afraid. Or maybe because he understood how much pain she was in.
She finally stops trying to hold it back. The tears break out for Abir, deep and helpless. This time, she doesn’t fight them and lets herself cry. These tears aren’t for her. They aren’t for her own suffering, or for the pain she has been carrying. They are for Abir- for everything he endured, everything he is enduring now, and everything he may have to endure for the rest of his life. She cries for all of that pain, and for the unbearable fact that she is the reason so much of it exists. Between broken breaths, she keeps saying that she will never even get the chance to tell him that she didn’t know any other way to get out. If she hadn’t chosen to carry this guilt herself, she would have kept hurting him again and again. And he would never have found a way out either. But even after all this, have they really escaped each other’s shadow? Or are they still trapped inside it? Will they ever truly get out?
She remembers her HSC board exam. In the accounting paper, she had matched the journal, ledger, and trial balance perfectly, but she could not balance the debit and credit sides on the final balance sheet. No matter how many times she tried. Maybe some things in life are simply like that. Some accounts can’t be settled, no matter how hard you try. In the empty flat, Sneha finally lets all of it out. Every scream, every piece of grief she has been holding inside, all of it spilling out through one name. Abir… Abir… Abir… She keeps calling him until her breathing turns difficult, until even crying becomes hard.
Then the memory of that other world returns- the one she had visited while lying on the balcony in the rain. She and Abir had talked for a long time there. Strangely, there had been no fight. No blame. No accusations. No old complaints dragged back out. They simply talked, for hours, just like those days when Abir used to come to Dhaka before his posting in Rajshahi. When he was beside her, Sneha could become quiet and soft, almost like a perfectly behaved girl. She was that girl again today. After a little whisky, Abir would always open up his endless store of stories, and he did the same today. Even now, he didn’t forget to mention his Chinese girlfriend, just as he always had. And when it was time to leave, even that goodbye was gentle. Sneha didn’t insist that he stay. She didn’t sulk or make a face because she was sad. Abir didn’t say anything careless or cruel on his way out, either- nothing that would make leaving even harder for her.
After taking two desperate puffs from her inhaler, Sneha drinks some water and forces herself to sit quietly. The sharp ping of a WhatsApp notification cuts through the silence. Lifting the phone, her eyes fall upon a text from Abrar: Apa, are you okay? I have been trying to reach you for days but can’t get through. I’m worried. I do not know how you are doing after that day. I still don’t understand why Abir Bhai did that. Nobody ends a relationship like that if they have even a minimum amount of feelings or attachment. I was also shocked that you were not saying anything. I don’t know how you are dealing with this alone. If you need to talk, please hit me up. And please, Apa… no more drugs. It will kill your real emotions. Take care.
After reading it, she almost starts replaying the conversation from their last day in her head. Then she stops herself. She doesn’t want to go there. She has spent enough days burning herself up over that conversation. Enough pain already. The pain Allah puts in your fate is like a delivery you can’t refuse- you have to take it when it arrives. No matter how hard you try to block it, it finds its way in. And Sneha had already put both herself and Abir through this endless mess, just trying to get out of that constant pain. After all that, maybe getting a better kind of closure would have been difficult for anyone.
Abir wasn’t an angel, anyway. He was a flawed human being, like the rest of us. She smiles faintly. Actually, nah. He was a little more stupid than the average person. That last day, Sneha had deliberately asked him nothing. She didn’t say anything either. She knew there was no point. Whatever she asked then would only make an already bitter situation even more bitter. The ending had been ugly enough as it was. She doesn’t want that conversation anywhere in her memory. Not even in some forgotten corner. In fact, she realizes that the conversation from that one day is the only memory of Abir she wants to Shift+Delete permanently. Everything else? She’ll keep. Carefully. Deep inside. Like a cow chewing its cud, she’ll sometimes bring those memories back out, turn them over one by one, and chew on them again.
She can pretty much guess what was going on in Abir’s head that day. He was angry as hell with her, maybe there was some hatred mixed in too, and from that place he was trying to defend himself. But reality doesn’t work that simply. We can throw a thousand arguments at other people to defend ourselves. We can even deny everything. But there’s no running away from ourselves. Sooner or later, we all have to answer to our own conscience for what we’ve done. Everyone does. There’s no way around it.
Sneha knows she could have shut him down that day if she really wanted to. She could have answered back with logic. Could have argued every single thing he said. And then what? She would have won the argument, maybe. Would either of them have felt less pain? No. There are plenty of things she doesn’t understand. Or thinks she understands. Actually, forget it. She’ll just admit that there are a lot of things she genuinely doesn’t understand. But fear and care? Those two are different, and she knows the difference. Neither she nor Abir can draw a clean white line around everything they did and call themselves right. And they can’t stand on a completely black line either. In the end, both of them have to live somewhere in the grey.
When this whole mess started, both of them were already in a seriously vulnerable place. Each was dealing with their own shit. Neither had enough space left inside to put their own pain aside and properly feel the other person’s. But now Sneha thinks it was going to happen anyway. Maybe not that day. Maybe the next time. Or the time after that. Some things become so intense that when they finally end, they don’t end quietly. They take everything down with them.
She stays quiet for a while. Then Abrar comes to mind. If she tells him about this evening’s whole journey, he will probably turn it into a clinical case in two seconds. He will say it was a chemical reaction. Too many chemicals in her body, brain started hallucinating. He will want to explain the entire conversation tonight through medical terms, reality checks, brain chemistry, whatever makes sense to him. Thinking about this makes her feel like Hajimi.
So, was Abir Shimamoto today? Ha Ha Ha…She laughs out loud. The first book she ever gave Abir was South of the Border, West of the Sun. He had felt terrible about the ending after finishing it. They talked about it a lot back then. Sneha thinks about how, in Murakami’s story, Shimamoto’s existence itself feels like magic realism. Maybe Abir’s existence was the same thing tonight. He had entered her world like the heroine from a Murakami story. She laughs again. Rakin was actually right- Abir had spent his whole life playing the hero. No. She stops herself. Wrong. In the end, in Abir’s story, she became the villain. The debit and credit still don’t balance that easily.
Sneha decides she won’t tell Abrar anything about tonight’s journey. Ever since the evening ended, she keeps thinking that after reaching that level of junoon, this was probably how it had to end anyway. That journey of talking to Abir after the rain, or whatever this journey becomes if it continues from here, is exactly that state she used to keep talking about until Abir got uncomfortable. This is actually fanaa. Though she used to call it something else just to pull Abir’s leg: maut. She realizes that the moment Abir left, she was finished too. She had completely erased herself. Whatever little life is left in her before she finally leaves this body, maybe she’ll have to spend it going through journeys like tonight’s, with Abir. But did anyone’s pain get smaller? Did the account finally balance? Nope. Sneha shakes her head. It didn’t even balance in her HSC exam. But what about the pain Abir knowingly caused her? Even on that last day.
She laughs again. The sweets had been delivered to Bashundhara a long time ago. All this time, she had been sitting there crying until the whole world inside her felt flooded, with the packet of sweets lying right in front of her. Now she remembers. She takes the foil paper out of the notebook, lights the tip of the needle, and looks at herself as if talking to someone else. Young lady, do you really think it ends here? Nope. She takes one long pull, all the way from one end of the foil to the other, without stopping for breath, then slowly breathes in. She opens Spotify and lets Hemanta Mukhopadhyay fill the room-
Tar ar por nei, nei kono thikana
Ja kichu giyeche theme
Jak theme jak na…
Mone rekho amio chilam
Chottor jibon ar joto hashi gaan
Ami tomake dilam
Amio chilam mone rekho…