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.]
Thinking about those horrible, unbearable days of 2024, Sneha didn’t even notice when night turned into morning. The sound of the Fajr azan reached her through the closed window, and for the first time in a long while, she felt like getting up for the morning prayer. But something had been keeping her stuck in the exact same place since last night. She tried several times to get herself up but couldn’t gather enough strength to prepare for namaz. The balcony door had been open the whole night. It still wasn’t fully daylight yet. The air was probably still cold from last night’s heavy rain.
In that strangely cold and quiet morning, she was still sitting on the same part of the floor, in exactly the same position where she had sat the night before to make her way into the world of sweets. A few times in between, she had only stretched out her legs or folded them back. That was pretty much the only movement. Begum Akhtar, Ghulam Ali, Mehdi Hassan, Coldplay, Linkin Park, Dream Theater, Bagdhara, Blue Touch, Highway, Indalo, Black, Imagine Dragons, Beyoncé, Pink Floyd, Anuv Jain and James had all played through the night. After the azan break, Warfaze’s Rupkotha came up on Amon’s Spotify playlist. The song started, and Sneha finally closed her eyes for a moment. Forty-eight hours without sleep. She wanted to feel every word of it-
Bolechhile khujo na amay
(You told me not to look for you)
Ami jodi kobhu hariye jai, jete dio amay
(If I ever get lost, let me go)
Elo shedin, tumi hariye gele
(That day came, and you disappeared)
Mone elo, bolechhile tumi hariye jabe je…
(And I remembered, you had told me you would disappear…)
Every word is hitting somewhere deep inside her, right in the heart and the brain. She keeps her eyes closed. When the chorus comes, she sings along right there, without opening them-
Mora kendechi eki dukhe, hesechi eki shukhe
(We cried over the same pain, laughed over the same happiness)
Kokhono bhabini tumi chole jabe
(I never imagined you would leave)
Ebhabe rekhe amay ekaki…
(Leaving me alone like this…)
Those lines are fucking different now. They are bringing back a lot. She opens her eyes, and just like that, her memory takes her back to November 2023. That’s when she met Abir on Bumble. She had been living alone for years. Sometimes the loneliness would hit, and she’d open a dating app, chat with random people, kill some time. Chatting with strangers. That was basically it. She could rarely keep talking to anyone for more than four or five days. At one point, she was so fed up with Bangladeshi men- their sense of humor, their flirting, their intellectual level, their manners- that she was genuinely done with the whole thing. In fact, about an hour before matching with Abir, she was already thinking about uninstalling Bumble. Then she matched with him and they started talking.
That same evening, Abir offered to buy her a drink and asked to meet at a bar in Banani. She somehow managed to avoid the invitation. She had only started talking to him that day, and now he wanted to meet her that same day. She had never been that desperate about men. She wasn’t going to just run off because some guy she had been chatting with for a few hours offered her a drink. Abba’s health had also started getting worse around that time. Sneha was living in Chandrima Model Town then, while her office was on Ring Road. She could only find one day a week to go see Abba. And whenever she came back to her own place from Niketan, her mind would still be back with him. So even with all that restlessness and sadness already going on, meeting some random man from a dating app after only a few hours of talking was never really her personality. Abir kept trying different ways to convince her to meet him until around ten that night. Even now, she remembers that conversation very clearly.
Around ten at night, Abir was still texting her: “Night is still young! You can come. I’ll drop you home, don’t worry.” Sneha avoided it again. Deliberately. Even after he got back from the bar, he kept chatting with her. Then she asked him straight up if the guy in his dating-app picture was actually him. She had already had a couple of bad experiences with people using someone else’s photos, so she had every reason to be a little suspicious. Still, she kept it polite: Don’t take it otherwise, is it really you in this picture? I mean, I’ve had some bad experiences with a few people. That’s why I’m asking.
Abir immediately asked if he could video call her. Even two years and four months later, Sneha can still clearly see his face from that video call, the smile on his face when he said, Yeah, it’s me! See! That smile was so innocent. Soooo fucking beautiful! She had barely seen a man with a smile like that in her life. Actually, she couldn’t remember seeing one. Abba had a beautiful smile too, like Abir. No. That comparison wasn’t right. Their smiles weren’t the same at all. They were beautiful in completely different ways, and neither one could be compared to anyone else’s. That video call was the first time they saw each other, even before meeting face to face. And Sneha is already gone on his smile from that moment.
There’s this idea that right before death, all the beautiful moments of a person’s life flash in front of their eyes for sixty seconds. Sneha has always thought that if she ever gets those sixty seconds, Abir’s smile will definitely be there. The very next evening, they met in person. And that was something. Something she would remember. November 5, 2023.
The day may have been memorable for Sneha, but Abir might spend the rest of his life regretting it. If that day had never happened, maybe his life wouldn’t be this fucked up today. But do people really get to control when, where, or with whom they will meet, connect, or cross paths? Is that always in our hands? These connections belong to Allah. So do the separations. Only He knows when He will bring someone into someone else’s journey, why He will do it, what the purpose is, why He will suddenly pull that person out and throw them into some endless fucking void.
Not even a nano-second of air moves in this world without Allah’s permission. Whatever happens, happens because it was supposed to happen. And deciding whether something was good or bad belongs to Allah too. He knows what is good, or what is bad. We can only stand there like the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and say, “Fair is foul, foul is fair.” Sneha thinks that’s actually life. One person’s good can be another person’s disaster. One person’s loss can be someone else’s win. Everybody’s good can’t possibly exist on the same line. Otherwise, Israel wouldn’t have been carrying out this hell in Palestine year after year.
To both Israel and Palestine, Jerusalem is much more than territory. It’s tied to faith, identity, and the question of who has the right to it. Israel took East Jerusalem in the 1967 war and later declared the city its capital, although that claim has never received international recognition. Palestinians, meanwhile, see East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. For Jews, the land is promised and sacred; for Muslims, Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem is the third-holiest place in Islam. So, this conflict isn’t simply about land. Religion, sacredness, and historical claims are all tangled up in it. Israel is a powerful state, while Palestinians have lived under oppression for generations.
So, from a basic human perspective, standing beside the oppressed feels natural. But when the question is about ownership of land claimed by both sides for centuries, it’s not easy to look at everything and say one side is completely right and the other completely wrong. Maybe Sneha’s relationship with Abir is like that too. The days that will probably remain among the most unforgettable of her entire life may be nothing but “mistakes” to him. So, who was right and who was wrong? That isn’t easy to decide either. Maybe it’s better to leave that judgment to Allah.
From the evening of November 5 until midnight, Sneha went through an incredibly intense few hours. Abir probably never had any reason to hold on to those memories the way she did. And now, there’s even less reason for him to. But for Sneha, that evening and night felt completely different from anything she had experienced before. At thirty-six, she somehow felt like she had just stepped into her youth again. At that dimly lit bar in Banani, Abir spent the night feeding her fruit from the platter in front of them, one piece at a time, with almost ridiculous care. Sometimes almost forcing it into her mouth, with that very Abir-like sense of claiming the right to do it.
A glass of vodka sat in front of Sneha. There was a time when vodka was the only thing she drank. She didn’t even like the smell of whisky much back then. Now she can’t drink whisky without Red Bull. That habit came from Abir. Even when they had different drinks, vodka for her and whisky for him, they always shared the last peg of whisky fifty-fifty. That was their signature ending drink. That evening, Abir carefully lined the rim of her vodka glass with lemon and added a pinch of black salt. Then, taking his time, he used a tissue to wipe off the sticky juice from the outside of the glass before sliding it back to her.
Somewhere in the middle of all that talking, they ended up holding hands. Sneha can’t remember exactly when it happened or what they were talking about at the time. That part is blurry now. But one moment she remembers perfectly. Abir leaned toward her ear to say something, their faces came close, and suddenly there was this fucking magnetic pull between them. The next second, they were kissing. Just like that. A long kiss under the bar’s dim lights. Who was watching- the bartender, the bouncer, the other customers- none of that mattered. Not even for a second.
After that first kiss, they pulled away for a little while, then lost themselves in another kiss, longer than the first. After some more vodka, whisky, and talking, it was getting close to midnight when Abir offered to drop Sneha home. On the way, both sides of the Uber’s Toyota Corolla windows were slightly open. The night air was coming in, they were already drunk from the evening, and they kept kissing the whole way. Somewhere between Banani and Mohammadpur, the two people in their mid-thirties somehow turned into two teenagers who had just discovered what it felt like to be young.
Neither of them noticed when the car went from Banani all the way to Mohammadpur. When Abir was dropping her off downstairs, Sneha invited him up to see her flat. They asked the Uber driver to wait for ten minutes and went upstairs at around 11:45 p.m. After a while, the intercom downstairs kept ringing and the Uber driver kept calling Abir too. It went on for almost an hour. Neither of them cared. For that entire hour, they were completely absorbed in each other, so deep inside that moment that nothing outside seemed important enough to interrupt them.
On the very first day they met, Abir told her pretty much everything about himself, except for one thing- his professional identity. He told her straight that he was married. He also told her that if that bothered her, if she didn’t want to keep talking because of it, that was totally fine. He’d respect her choice. By then, though, Sneha was already too fucking fascinated by him that she barely had room in her head to think about anything else.
And yeah, of course, her incredible luck had to show up eventually. After a few days of dating with this crazy, intense attraction, they were in the middle of an intimate moment at the bar when Abir suddenly messed with her head. He looked at her and said- Sneha, if I ever get lost, don't try to find me. This was right after he had told her with so much affection- If I had the power, I would keep you with me. In the middle of such an intense, beautiful moment, that sudden contradiction completely ruined the happy vibe she was feeling just few seconds ago. That buried fear of losing anything she really loved came rushing back up. She pulled herself together and said- I don’t like this kind of mysterious behavior, Abir. I really don’t. If you have something to say, just fucking say it directly.
And that was basically Abir for the next two years. He would struggle to say things directly every time. There were very few times when he could actually say things straight. And when he finally did say something, sometimes the words landed like arrows, hurting Sneha in ways that stayed with her. Other times, he would say the right thing at the wrong time, or express it in the wrong way, and end up ruining moments that had been genuinely beautiful.
Sneha can understand it now. It was probably a limitation of his personality, not something he was deliberately doing to hurt her. But she spent so many days being angry with him, hurt with him, holding on to resentment over it. Maybe that was simply one of his characteristics. Maybe that was just him. He had grown up that way. He dealt with people that way. And no matter how badly someone wanted him to be different, you cannot force a person to rewrite something that is deep inside them. Whether someone else gets hurt because of it or not.
From around that time, Sneha began to realize there were almost two different Abirs. There was the physical, uninhibited Abir she saw in the evenings, and then there was the sober Abir who texted her during the day. They felt like completely different people. Whenever he came back to his senses, the guilt seemed to catch up with him. He knew he could never take their relationship any further. He genuinely liked Sneha, but outside that bar, he had a whole other life waiting for him- a life that was already built, organized, and separate from whatever was happening between them. Maybe when the alcohol wore off, he remembered that life again. And perhaps that was why, within days, his behavior toward Sneha started becoming strangely unpredictable.
Even then, he couldn’t explain himself clearly. He couldn’t later either. Instead, a few days after they met, he kept telling her things like: You’re so different. I’ve never met someone like that. You’re not like those women I met before. You’re so soft, so pure, so sensitive. I miss you, your company. I’m losing my shit! It’s not good for me. I don’t want any commitment. Neither can I make one. You deserve happiness.