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.]
Something about a certain time seems to be stuck somewhere inside Sneha, or maybe it’s her desperate need to keep that time from moving, that still doesn’t seem to be pushing her hard enough toward suicide. At least, that’s how it feels to her. The clock is at 3:17 a.m. now and the parcel from Geneva Camp is keeping her brain awake, keeping it alerts enough to do what it’s supposed to. A month and a half of experience has taught her that, for now, this journey through smoke is the only thing that can keep the sharpness of worldly pain at a distance, along with all the arguments and reasoning that keep running through her head. Otherwise, why would someone who is already completely empty inside, someone whose existence has practically disappeared, keep living with this kind of unbearable ache? What reason is there? What is she even holding on to? The thought is enough to shut her up for a while.
Abir’s absence hasn’t only made the whole world horribly empty right now; it has completely wrecked her life. Before this complete cut-off, Sneha had never known emptiness like this. Never even touched anything close to it. Abir was her paternal transference. After Abba was gone, something inside her had unconsciously turned Abir into a replacement for the enormous hole he had left behind. And over two years, Abir became everything. Her whole world. Now that world is broken into pieces. Her entire existence feels empty- horribly, violently empty. Inside and outside, there’s nothing left but a deserted wasteland. Soul, heart, self-respect… she lost them one by one. And after losing all of that, the final goodbye begins to look like the only freedom left to a human being. She is sitting here waiting for that freedom, almost celebrating her own destruction. The thought pulls a tired, faded smile across her face.
That fierce love she had for Abba. That fierce sense of having a right over him. That instinctive need to find her own existence in him and only him. Somehow, without knowing when or how, Sneha had started finding all of it in Abir. She does not think it happened consciously. It wasn’t planned. Abir is a father to a daughter himself, and sometimes Sneha could see Abba reflected in the way he treated her- the tenderness, the fussing, the soft little ways he showed affection. Maybe that tenderness, those little affectionate, almost fatherly ways of treating her, were the main reason the paternal transference happened in the first place.
Sneha believes Abba was the only person in this entire world who loved her unconditionally. No one else had ever even come close to giving her that kind of love, affection, warmth, or the way he used to spoil her or accepted her flaws. Maybe no one except him had ever truly loved her at all. Something inside her cries out. She had been fighting her way through different kinds of pain since she was very young, somehow getting through life. But while Abba was still there, she knew there was at least one person in this world with whom she could be completely spoiled, completely at peace. After he was gone, Abir became that safe home for her. But now, that warmth, that peace, that human connection, that shelter… everything is gone. There’s nothing left for her anywhere.
Abba’s cancer was found too late. Way too late. In 2022, he spent a month in Ramu and Ukhiya for an NGO project. The fever and cough had already started there, but he brushed them off as seasonal flu. A few days after coming back to Dhaka, the coughing got brutal, and then there was blood. That was when he finally understood this wasn’t something to ignore and went to a doctor. After a series of tests, they said it was TB. He came home from the hospital that day and followed every single instruction like a good, obedient boy, but it made no difference. The coughing kept getting worse. So did the blood.
Another fifteen days passed before, after endless pleading and convincing, they finally took him to another medicine specialist for a second opinion. That was the first time someone suspected cancer. But the biopsy report showed no signs of it. So, Abba went through another fifteen days of TB treatment. Then they decided to do another biopsy and a PET scan at Bangladesh Specialized Hospital. By that point, almost two months had already been wasted treating the wrong disease. The reports from that hospital finally showed that he had lung cancer. But by then, it wasn’t just in his lungs anymore. It had already spread through several other organs. As soon as the report came, they were told that it was the last stage.
With all the anger, frustration and disgust over the country’s medical system, they took Abba to Tata Medical Center in Kolkata within a few days. And from April 2022 to January 2024, that man fought cancer like a fucking fighter. Last stage or not, countless chemos, immunotherapies, endless hospital runs- nothing could break his mental strength. Six months into treatment, the cancer cells in his body were gone. Completely gone. Then they came back in early 2023. By December, Abba’s body started giving up for real. By then, the cancer had already taken over his vital organs one after another. When it reached his brain, he had a stroke in early January. After that, everything started collapsing- his mind, his body, his brain, the whole system. Within a matter of days, he started forgetting things. And then, slowly, even Sneha’s name disappeared from his memory.
Abba left on February 24, 2024. What a fucking cruel joke fate played on her. Her birthday was just three days later. He left behind a month that would never be just her birth month again. February became a permanent tragedy. A legacy of grief she can’t escape. After that year, birthdays simply stopped meaning anything. Anyone who hasn’t spent a huge amount of time beside a cancer patient has no idea how devastating the pain of this disease can be. And even if you stay beside them every day, you still only see the pain they show you. The pain happening inside their body? You can’t really understand that unless you have been through it yourself. In the middle of the night, Sneha suddenly remembers Abba’s unbearable pain. Whenever she goes to him, he will somehow try to smile through it and say, Everything is fine. She knows better. Nothing was fine. Nothing was ever going to be fine again.
Abba’s death aged her sense of responsibility by years within just a few hours. She didn’t even get the luxury of crying properly for her father. Didn’t get the time to sit somewhere quietly for a few minutes and understand what the hell it meant to suddenly become an orphan. From the morning of the 24th, Abba was in unbearable pain. He had already stopped eating four days earlier. Amma still thought that if they could somehow take him back to Tata, maybe he would fight again, maybe he would get a little better. That hope was why they took him to Kolkata again around the middle of February. But this time, hope didn’t save them. They kept taking him to the hospital for three or four days, but there was nothing left to do. Early on the 21st, while they were getting ready to take him to the hospital again, Sneha received an email when they were only a few minutes away:
As of now, he is not fit for further systematic therapy.
He will need palliative care only.
Take him back to Bangladesh and continue palliative care.
Best wishes.
Dr. Arnab Bhattacharya, MD, DM
Consultant Medical Oncologist
Tata Medical Center, Kolkata
The morning lost all its light the moment Sneha read the email. She knew what it meant. Goodbye was coming, and there probably wasn’t much time left. Amma saw it on her face. Even Abba seemed to understand. But knowing that someone is going to die and accepting that they are actually going to leave you, are not the same thing. Accepting it was the biggest trauma Sneha had ever faced. They returned to Dhaka with Abba on the 12:30 p.m. flight on February 21. After that, there were only the 22nd and the 23rd. For those two days, Sneha kept appearing at his bedroom door every now and then. She would stand there quietly, watch him for a while, then leave without saying anything.
On the night of the 23rd, Abba adjusted the pillow beside him and called her over with a small gesture. He hadn’t spoken for almost a month. There was no need to speak now. Sneha understood. She went and lay down beside him, and Abba wrapped his arms around her tightly. It was almost the way a child holds their mother when they’re small, trying to fall asleep. He closed his eyes. Maybe he known there wasn’t much time left. Maybe he just wanted, one last time, to find the warmth of a mother in the touch of his daughter.
Sneha kept stroking his head and quietly sang, “Dheere dheere aa re badal, dheere dheere aa, mera bulbul so raha hai, shor-gol na macha…” Abba had sung that exact song to her when she was a child. That night, she sang it back to him. The next morning, the pain became unbearable. His whole body was burning, and even the clothes against his skin had become impossible to tolerate. By noon, his condition deteriorated further, so they took him by ambulance to Japan-Bangladesh Friendship Hospital. On the way, Sneha still held on to the simplest explanation. He hadn’t been eating. He was weak. Maybe a couple of days in a cabin, some saline, and he would be better enough to come home. She was still holding on to that thought when they brought him out of the ambulance. The emergency doctor immediately said he needed the ICU. Sneha went to the reception to complete the paperwork and pay the admission bill. Treatment could not begin until the formalities were done. Her hands were shaking as she filled in the forms. Then, while she was still sitting there with the papers in front of her, the message came: they needed to put Abba on life support.
More paperwork. More signatures. As the family’s responsible authority, Sneha had to sign everything herself. And there was another problem- the life-support treatment would not even start until the payment was cleared. So, she ran to the ATM booth downstairs at Shimanto Square, withdrew the money, then ran back to the reception and deposited it. But before the formalities were even over, the duty doctor called her into a small room outside the ICU on the second floor. He pushed a consent form toward her and went back inside. Sneha stood there reading it, trying to understand what exactly she was being asked to consent to. The doctor came out again and told them to be prepared for anything. Downstairs, Amma was sitting with her tasbih. Relatives had started showing up by then. People were coming, talking, asking things—but Sneha couldn’t process any of it. Nothing was reaching her anymore.
She stared at the consent form for five long minutes before signing it. Then the doctor came to take her inside the ICU so she could recite a final dua beside Abba’s ear. He was covered in tubes, some running through his nose and mouth. The sight was almost impossible to bear, but Sneha couldn’t break down yet. She had to stay strong. The monitor kept making its mechanical beep, beep while his blood pressure and oxygen levels slowly, relentlessly dropped. She placed her hand on his forehead. It was already getting cold. She leaned toward his ear and recited the Kalima Tayyiba several times, then Surah Yaseen once. It was the night of Shab-e-Barat. A few moments before the Maghrib azan, they told her they had decided to remove the life support. Before she could process the words, before she could even cry, another piece of paper was placed in her hands. The death declaration.
The responsibilities didn’t stop with the death declaration. There was still Abba’s ghusl, janaza, burial- one after another, decisions kept landing on Sneha’s shoulders. That night, they kept Abba in a freezer ambulance parked inside the garage of the Niketan house. Sneha stayed busy until around 3 a.m., making sure the relatives had food, somewhere to sleep, whatever they needed. When some people finally fell asleep and others were sitting around doing dua and zikr, she quietly went down to the garage. Around his nose, she noticed patches of dried blood, darkened almost to black. Maybe they were from the life-support tubes. She didn’t know. Small beads of water had gathered across his forehead from the ice. Sneha stood there with one hand against the ambulance window for a long time. Then, barely above a whisper, she said, Forgive me, Abba. I am your failed child. I couldn't give you anything but pain in this life. You have not slept in ages. Now sleep peacefully as long as you want.
The next day, after the Zohr prayer, Abba’s janaza took place at the mosque next to her paternal home in Mirpur. Then, he was buried in the Kalshi cemetery, right next to his mother's grave. After the burial, Sneha went back to the Niketan flat with Amma, although she was living in Chandrima Model Town at the time. She took a shower, walked into the bedroom, and had barely sat down when Abir’s text arrived. It was probably the longest message he had ever sent her, and maybe the only one that felt completely real, completely unguarded. At the very end, he reminded her of verse 286 of Surah Al-Baqarah: “Allah doesn’t burden a soul beyond what it can bear.”
After reading the entire message, Sneha finally had the strength to cry. Nearly twenty-four hours after Abba’s death, she broke down with a scream that carried all the grief she had kept locked away, finally making herself understand what her mind had refused to accept- Abba was gone. He was gone from this world, and she would be fatherless for the rest of her life. Love-less too, perhaps. The one person who had loved her without asking for anything in return had left her alone. It was Abir’s long, unexpectedly beautiful message that finally pulled her out of the shell of responsibility she had been hiding inside and gave her space to grieve the loss of her father. Maybe that was where her dependence on Abir quietly began, somewhere deep in the unconscious mind. Their relationship wasn’t even very deep then. After some earlier bitterness between them, they were still mostly formal with each other.
She didn’t know yet that she loved him. That realization would come much later, after many more things had happened. But from the very beginning, she had been intensely drawn to him. He was different from the men she had known, almost instinctively different. His personality, his tenderness, that strange softness in him- she couldn’t find a reason not to fall under its pull. So even when the relationship went through its ups and downs, the basic attraction never really disappeared. Now, two years, one month, and five days later, remembering that message in the middle of this night, Sneha feels gratitude rising from the deepest part of whatever heart she still has left. And there are far more things she is grateful to Abir for than just that one message.
Thinking about all these little moments, Sneha realizes something. She does not even know when or how she had replaced her biggest anchor with Abir after Abba died. Around Abir, she could be so many versions of herself. Sometimes she was just a little child. Sometimes a restless, playful, stubborn girl. Sometimes a wild teenager. Sometimes a forbidden lover. And sometimes a woman as tender and caring as a mother. Abir was the only man in the world who, through one incredibly intense journey, had somehow made her experience all the different ages of herself at once over those two years.
Sneha could have a thousand complaints about Abir- from his emotional illiteracy and behavioral patterns to all kinds of other things. Abir surely had a thousand complaints about Sneha too. But until the moment she dies, she will remember him with complete respect, and she will openly acknowledge and remain grateful for one thing: after Abba, Abir was the only person in this world who put up with all her madness, anger, stubbornness, and mood swings. She also knows that after Abba, Abir was the only person who was genuinely concerned about her career, her life, the way she lived, and her well-being. Just like Abba, Abir used to run his hand through her hair to show affection and kiss her forehead. A man shows gestures like that only toward a woman he genuinely likes.
If Sneha has one regret before she dies, it will be the regret of Abir’s hand no longer resting on her head. Abir had never knowingly wished her harm, not even for a moment, and he had never wanted her to suffer. She knows that very well. But what people want does not always find its way into what they actually do. Or maybe sometimes they simply cannot make it happen because of their own limitations.
At thirty-six, single, and pregnant, Sneha knew that in a country like Bangladesh, there was barely any room to think about anything except an MR. She wanted to keep Abir out of that burden because she knew she was equally responsible for what had happened. If anything, at that point she felt her own responsibility was greater than his. That was why she told him nothing. On the night of March 8, 2024, the pregnancy test came back positive. The next morning, she went to Marie Stopes in Dhanmondi. The ultrasound confirmed the thing she didn't want confirmed- the tiny life inside her already had a heartbeat. She walked straight out of the ultrasound room and locked herself inside the washroom. Turned the tap on. Kept throwing water onto her face again and again. Tears and tap water mixed together and vanished down the basin into some unknown drain. She didn't want to know which was which. Didn't want to give herself even one more reason to fall apart.
The next few hours at Marie Stopes, from afternoon into evening, passed like some strange, unreal journey. Not long after the anesthesia was given, Sneha slipped into some kind of haze. She felt like she had fallen inside a huge, thick pipe. She was rolling down and down through the darkness, unable to stop, unable to see where the hell it ended. There was no bottom. No edge. No way back up. Nothing to grab. Nothing to hold on to. And she could feel it- something inside her being dragged out, torn out of her, like something was being ripped away from somewhere deep inside.
When she finally came around, Sneha found herself lying on a cabin bed under the AC. It didn't take long for her to realize she was bleeding heavily. Even after using three sanitary pads at a time, the flow wasn’t slowing down. And she was still thinking the surgery probably hadn’t even started yet. She had no idea how many hours had passed. The anesthesia kept fading, and her mind- restless, guilty, completely overwhelmed- was already trying to escape that Marie Stopes cabin and get back to Chandrima. But the doctor came in and said they weren’t taking the risk of sending her home that night. She’d had severe bleeding during the procedure. An IV was running into her body while blood was still pouring out of it. So, March 9 disappeared somewhere inside that clinic, most of it spent in a drugged-up haze. She had gone through all of this alone. And the only place she could put the whole thing was on paper. She didn't want to blame anybody. Didn't want to make anybody responsible. Didn't even feel the need to tell anyone it had happened.
Three days later, Abir texted her asking to meet. He had no idea what had happened at Marie Stopes. Sneha had made sure of that. She didn't want him to be scared. Didn't want him drowning in anxiety. And she sure as hell didn't want him thinking she was using the incident to trap him or blackmail him- the way some people might expect a woman to do in a situation like this. By then she'd understood something she couldn't really run from anymore. What she felt for Abir wasn't some harmless little like. It was love. Real, ugly, consuming love. And that was exactly why she wanted to keep this entire mess away from him.
A couple of days later, Sneha met Abir. He told her he needed to move on. He loved his family, his daughter. He wanted to be free of her. Sneha still hadn’t fully recovered from what her body had gone through three days earlier. Her body and mind were both exhausted, wrecked. And hearing Abir ask for his freedom made her feel strangely tender toward him. She almost smiles at the word freedom. Can one person really free another person? Is that even possible? People are born imprisoned in one way or another. Before death, no freedom is really permanent. She didn't say any of that to Abir, just smiles and answered his request for freedom with one simple sentence- You're free from me.
That night, when Sneha returned to the Chandrima apartment, she deleted her Telegram account. It had been the only thread connecting her to Abir. Abba was gone. A new life had grown inside her, and she hadn't had the courage to bring that little life into this world alone, so she’d had to send it away like a criminal. Then Abir left too. And suddenly the whole world felt like it had frozen. She still went to the office. Still came home. Still moved around and did the basic things a living person was supposed to do. But inside, there was nothing. Just this long, numb stretch of time where everything felt pointless. The emptiness kept eating into her until she started questioning the existence of the person living inside her own body. Depression closed in from every direction. There was no outlet. No one she could tell. And she couldn’t even tell the truth without exposing Abir, so his privacy became another cage she willingly locked herself inside.
About a month later, one night, she sat down and wrote a piece of fiction in a single sitting, drawing from everything she’d been through. She titled it Married, Here for Fun. The story was published on an online platform the following morning. She had no idea that during that entire month of silence, Abir had still been stalking her social media. So of course, the story reached him. He read it closely, and it didn't take much for him to understand that he himself was part of the story.
It was Ramadan. Sneha used to leave the office at 4 p.m. and go straight home. That afternoon, just as she was about to freshen up after getting home, a message from Abir came in- this time from his direct phone number: I need to talk, can you knock me on Telegram? He sent the exact same message from his official number too. Nothing about it was expected. After that afternoon at Kingfisher, when Abir had asked to be free and walked away, Sneha had slowly settled into the idea that this was it- that she would live out the rest of her life holding on to whatever memories they had left behind. And then, out of nowhere, that message arrived and broke straight through the life she had already begun accepting.