# A Nightmare Made Eternal In the waking hours, we tell ourselves stories of escape. We say: tomorrow the fever will break, the debt will be settled, the wound will heal. We say: this is temporary, a passing storm, a test that will end. We construct our lives as narratives with arcs—rising action, climax, resolution. We believe in the three-act structure of existence because the alternative is unbearable. But what if time itself has become a loop? What if the nightmare does not dissolve with morning, but simply repeats, again and again, with such faithful precision that we forget we are dreaming? I think of the man who wakes each day to the same weight in his chest. The same letter unopened on the table. The same hour when his wife will not meet his eyes. He lives as though a door stands before him, and someday—tomorrow, or the day after—it will open. But decades pass, and the door remains sealed. The man grows old waiting for an ending that never comes. This is not a story. This is a condition. This is what it means to be haunted by the ordinary. The classical nightmare—with its grotesqueries, its logic of terror—at least has the mercy of strangeness. We know we are trapped in unreason. But the nightmare of repetition wears the face of normalcy. It speaks in the voice of routine. It offers the cruel comfort of familiarity. Consider the weight of ধ্রুব itself—that Bengali word meaning "constant," "fixed," "eternal." It is the pole star, immovable in the turning sky. It is also the name of the boy in Banabhatta's tale, the one who becomes fixed in his devotion, transformed through an act of will into something unchanging and permanent. There is nobility in such constancy—or so we were taught. But what becomes of constancy when it curdles into stasis? When the pole star becomes a prison? We live in an age of fragmentation, yet we are more trapped than ever. Information cascades, the world dissolves into a thousand pieces, and still we find ourselves locked in patterns we cannot break. The scroll endless, the argument recurring, the shame that returns each morning like a servant with a cold breakfast. We have multiplied our options infinitely, and yet the texture of our days remains unchanged. We are free to choose from a thousand paths, and we walk the same narrow one. The dream—the true nightmare—is not what happens to us. It is what we do to ourselves, again and again, with full consciousness, yet without the power to stop. There is a famous meditation in the Buddhist tradition: the contemplation of impermanence. All things pass. All formations dissolve. This was meant to be liberating—a tool to loosen the grip of attachment. But what if we have misunderstood it? What if the real terror is not that things change, but that some things never do? That in the midst of a universe of flux, certain states crystallize and become immovable—not like a mountain, which at least suggests grandeur, but like a stain that will not wash out, a habit that has calcified into fate? The nightmare made eternal is not a metaphor for a single, dramatic catastrophe. It is the description of a life in which one remains perpetually on the threshold, perpetually incomplete. The exam you must always retake. The apology that must always be rehearsed. The distance from the person you love that never closes. The dream in which you are always reaching for the door, and it is always locked, and you are always just about to understand why—but the understanding never arrives. We wake from dreams. The body stirs, the eyes open, and the nightmare scatters like smoke. But what of the one who wakes into the same nightmare? What of the man who dreams he is awake, and in that waking-dream, cannot distinguish between the rope of sleep and the rope of his own will? Perhaps the only gesture left is honesty: to admit that we do not know if we are awake. To stop telling ourselves that escape is imminent. To look directly at the repeating pattern and call it what it is—not a temporary condition, not a test, but a life. And in that admission, in that terrible clarity, something may shift. Not because admission is magic, but because a nightmare that knows itself, that is named and met without flinching, begins—perhaps—to lose its absolute dominion. The sleeper who realizes he is dreaming is no longer entirely asleep. He cannot wake, perhaps. The dream may continue. But he has found a thin thread of agency within the prison. He can turn his gaze. He can observe without surrendering completely to terror. This is not freedom. But it is not nothing. The pole star remains fixed. It will not move. But those who know it for what it is—not a destination, but a reference point in the turning dark—may at least navigate by it with open eyes. May at least understand that constancy is not the same as death, even when it wears death's face. The nightmare continues. But somewhere in its repetition, the dreamer begins to wake.

At the altar of my heart, I worshipped daily—made an offering of love itself—
Guarded with all of me against every wound and sorrow...
Each day I painted you on the canvas of my mind, with infinite care...
Took you to be the very force that kept me breathing in this life, held you in boundless faith...
And now—now this same one, in the name of love, has drained me dry in some cold accounting, left me utterly spent!
Now this same one has become the very reason I wish to flee from my own life!
Now this same one has turned all trust into mockery and revealed himself a consummate actor!
What shall I call you?
What shall I call you?
A deceiver?
A worthy god?
A great soul?
Or simply a demon?
What word, if I could speak it, might grant me some small mercy from this torment?
This is a terrible way to live!
This is unbearable agony!
Every drop of blood in my body now carries poison!
I am torn apart, inside and out.
I am slowly being erased!

O you unknowable force!
What mockery is this of yours!
To whom did you give me as a slave!
Who is he?
Who?
Demon? Great soul? Who is he?
I have lost everything and now sit hollow and destitute upon the road!
I cannot endure anymore!
O God, grant me the courage to go on living!
Give me the strength to bear this suffering, O Lord!
You have given me sorrow—I hold no grudge for it—
But now grant me the strength to carry it, Lord!

Only answers to some questions do I seek...
Why this mockery?
Why me...?
What punishment is this?
What sin have I committed?
What is the path to my freedom?
When will my better days come?
I wish to stand face to face with destiny itself!
Just once...

Why am I writing all this? Let me say it plainly. This is not poetry—it is merely the utterance of grief! The truth is, you cannot predict what circumstance life will thrust before you. Everything is so uncertain!
Of course, when existence itself hangs in the balance between seconds, other matters fade into the distance!
Yet in such an uncertain life, certain things do happen with strange certainty. These events may bring pain, or they may bring joy! And if fortune smiles or frowns with terrible force, you witness both versions of the same happening with absolute clarity—like the eighth wonder of the world. Yet that too is uncertain! In such an uncertain life, it is the occurrence of certain inevitable things—some things, a few things—that makes up this miraculous survival of ours! At least, that is true for me...

Oh, I am Rodesī. I am not truly a storyteller, nor a writer. But in this moment, I am a fickle-hearted rejected beloved. Once, if someone knocked, I thought him a rogue; if he did not knock, I called him arrogant. After I moved beyond that place, I received the greatest blow life can deliver.

I am an ordinary girl. Presentable enough in appearance, but nothing to marvel at. To speak truthfully—I have a certain sharpness about me, but no striking physical beauty. And in learning or talent, there is nothing remarkable enough to boast of either. Yet I have always found it deeply satisfying when I can achieve something, however modest, that exceeds what I am supposed to. I never imagined such a thing could become my undoing.

# A Stranger Called Love

An extraordinary person enters my life. We meet on Facebook. He is considerably older than me. And in accomplishment, far more so. Handsome too. Perfect, as they say. Never once did I dream that someone like this would become dear to me—and of his own accord, no less. Yet this impossible thing happened, like a nightmare made flesh.

But there was something else: our tastes aligned in so many ways. Literature, books, banter, the art of speaking with clarity and grace—these things we shared. Because of this, our conversations flowed easily enough. Though I didn’t understand it then, I came to see later that these shared interests remained only interests. Nowhere in them was I present. Nowhere at all.

And so the relationship deepened. Banter, affection, love—we floated on waves of endless joy and emotion until love itself curdled into milk left too long in the sun. Morning, evening, night—we spoke constantly, our words exchanged like currency. He made me feel as though I were a divine gift to his life, bestowed by providence itself. And I simply thought and thought: Can it be that happiness was written into my fate? Will I survive such joy to the end?

My beloved did not prove my fears false. I wanted to hold this man close with all the love I possessed and live by his side. Every moment spent with him felt like heaven itself. And I thought: Such men exist in this age! Now I understand—yes, they do exist in this age. How absurd. How terribly absurd.

Because I loved him, I wrote for him. Everything, only for him, out of love. I didn’t know that he would take this love of mine, every word I wrote to him out of affection, and put it on the auction block. That he would reduce me to an item in his ledger, nothing but a utility, a need to be itemized and accounted for.

In less than eighteen months, this man revealed himself in a form I had never seen. He became someone else entirely. Was this the same person who once abandoned all his tasks just to fall asleep when I needed rest? Where is he now? Now I lie awake night after night, and he doesn’t even ask once whether I am awake, whether I am eating properly, whether I am alive at all.

Through countless such transformations, he exposed himself to me—each revelation tearing me apart, unraveling me completely. That love could be acted with such perfect sincerity, that a lie could wear the mask of truth so convincingly—I would never have believed it possible had he not taught me.

His life no longer has need of me. I loved a deceiver, and the torment of it—only those who have loved deeply without deception can know what I endure. Now I understand: whatever we do, if we do it in the name of love, we will pay dearly. It is better to do things from simple affection than to do them for another’s sake wrapped in love.

He is fine now. Even if I lay dead on the roadside, he would not turn to look. He is that fine. As he left, he said I was never anyone to him, that I had only annoyed him needlessly. That I am greedily possessive, desperately selfish. Because I loved him so deeply, he called me a psychopath. I gave him no peace, he said. And there were other accusations too, other cruelties he pressed into my hands as parting gifts.

Yet it’s true that even for the sake of performance, she bore with me greatly. Ha ha ha…. She is doing very well now, I know that. In her eyes, I am a man mentally unbalanced. How strange, isn’t it!

And still, may she be well. I do not wish for any harm to befall her. My prayer is that she should never have to pay the price of even a single tear from my eyes. And whatever suffering she has caused me, may she never know such suffering, for she could never endure it! Such suffering cannot be borne.

There was so much more to say. I couldn’t quite arrange it all properly. But for me now, there is nothing impossible left in this world. Man is truly the noblest creature! From giving life to taking it away, everything is done by him!

No one has ever been as good to me as she has been, and no one has ever caused me such suffering as she has. I myself have never given anyone in this life such an opportunity. Man is a peculiar creature — when he gets the chance to cause someone suffering, he does it without hesitation! In this uncertain life of mine, that hell which happened with such certainty will perhaps make me weep for all my days.