A lover's spat

She left as soon as she finished saying what she had come to say. He leaned against the railing of the roof and lit up a cigarette, wondering how life had been unpredictable to him, bringing its surprises like a harsh sea dumping its garbage on the shores. In the gathering darkness of a miserable night, he assessed that his life was reduced to a shadow of the past.

She insisted that he stayed for dinner, but he had already made up his mind that he wasn't going to listen to her again. He refused to stay and she kept asking, her face showing no sign of the cruelty with which she had ruined his day. He couldn't close his eyes that night as he recounted in his mind how the same woman who had done him a murderous mischief asked him to stay for dinner.

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When he woke up in the next morning, the burgeoning rays of a bright sun had filled the room. He opened his eyes with a void in his heart, his face contorted in reaction to the light creating cover for the anguish of his grieving soul. He felt like a man who had lost everything, who had survived shipwreck and washed up to the shore, left with nothing but the memory of horror.

He had trusted her and pinned his hopes on her like a stake in gambling. Indeed he had gambled his life away on her, always believing that she was truthful to him. He lived on that belief, which brought him the strength to face each day like a man who squanders his savings on the racetrack, hoping that the next bet would win.

That day he didn't go to work, his mind deflected by what had happened in the night before. He lazed through the day, going out of the house only when he needed to buy cigarettes. There was a throbbing pain somewhere in a corner of his soul, the pain which revived every other pain he had buried in his bones. He was despaired like a shopper who had waited long hours for a purchase, only to arrive at the counter to be told that the shop was closed.

He resented what had happened to him and how his whole life was wasted on a bluff. She called him in the evening, insisting that he should try to understand her situation, that what she had said last night didn't mean she didn't loved him any more. He screamed on the phone, stomped on the floor like a frenzied monkey and threw his arms in the air like a man whose mind was on its brink. She pleaded with him for calm, wept on the phone in the hysteria of a woman, who was faced with interminable grief.

He was convinced that it was just one of her tricks and hung up the phone. Women use tears to defuse men, and whenever he fought with her in the past, she shed tears, which dissolved him like salt in the water. He ignored the warnings of friends and relatives, who told him that life was too short to go in pursuit of an absurd dream. But he never thought it was going to end like this, that she would just quit one evening by uttering a few words before the sun went down.

For the next few days he walked around like a zombie, his mind afloat in the sea of sorrow. He went to work, visited friends and met with relatives, but his conversation mostly centered on morbid subjects like death, separation, desolation and betrayal. She called him at work and home and he hung up at the sound of her voice, she sobbed on the phone when he picked up and he sobbed right after he put down the phone.

On Friday morning she showed up in his house, right after his family had finished breakfast and each member started to drift away with a cup of tea and a section of the newspaper. He was flustered when he saw her, the quizzical looks on the face of his parents giving him a sense of annoyance at her injudicious behavior. She insisted that he talked to her, and he insisted that there was nothing to talk about after what she had said to him under the coconut tree before the sun went down.

She accused him of being arrogant and insensitive, someone who possessed all the vices of the male race. She blamed him for being selfish and inconsiderate, one who forgot that love was about caring for each other and not being bogged down with the bookkeeping of gains and losses. She also said to him that she had come to tell how he was rude to her, how she was convinced over the last few days that she had given her love to the wrong man.

He swallowed every word she uttered like a lump that choked him in the throat. He argued that if love was about caring, how could she tell him what she had said before the sun went down. He said she had hurt him enough to cost him half his longevity, the stress and strain of the last few days were about to kill him. His body shuddered as if the apparition of what he had just uttered in words was looming before him. Love, he concluded, was the worst amongst ailments, one that had the symptoms of addiction to drugs, creating ecstasy when it was taken, and distress when withdrawn.

All that time neither had looked at the other. He looked outside through the window, and she fixed her gaze on the floor. The servant brought tea and sweets in a tray, and left it on the bed when the people in the room showed no interest in his presence.

An uneasy silence weighed in the air until he opened his mouth, talking as if he was addressing someone outside of the room. He asked her to have some sweets and tea, and she replied that she had a filling breakfast before she came.

When he repeated his request, she reminded that he had refused to have dinner that night although she had asked him so many times. He said he had lost appetite after she had given him the fright of his life, and he had done nothing of that sort for which she should refuse to have tea in his house. She said that at least she had looked at him when she talked to him, and that no guest would feel welcome if the host didn't look her in the face.

He turned around and faced her like he did that night before the sun went down. She had already put half of a sweet into her mouth, her teeth sinking on it like the jaws of a cutter closing on an object. She took the other half and offered to him, tears welling up in her eyes as he hesitated to receive it in his mouth.

As he chewed on the sweet while she wiped her tears, he felt that once again love had caught him in its net.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.