# Still Waiting / Three The old house stood at the edge of the town, where the road dissolved into fields. It had once belonged to someone important—a zamindar, people said, though no one quite remembered his name anymore. The walls were the color of rust, the paint peeling like old skin. Crows nested in the corners where the eaves had crumbled. Ruma came here every afternoon at three o'clock. She would push open the gate—it hung crooked on its hinges and groaned—and walk through the overgrown courtyard to the back room. No one asked her where she went. Her mother assumed she was at a friend's house. Her father had stopped asking about her whereabouts years ago. The back room was small and dark, with a single window that looked onto an abandoned garden. A bench sat beneath the window, carved with initials and dates of people long gone. This was where she waited. She waited for a letter that never came. She waited for a voice calling her name from beyond the wall. She waited for the day when time would fold itself like a letter and return to her what it had taken. It had been three years since Arjun left for the city. Three years of monsoons and summers, three years of the same bench, the same light slanting through the window, the same smell of damp and decay. He had promised to write. He had promised to return. But promises, she had learned, were like the plaster on these walls—they could crumble to nothing without warning. On this particular afternoon, a boy entered the courtyard. He was perhaps seventeen, dark-eyed, with the uncertain gait of someone who didn't quite belong anywhere. He stopped before the ruined fountain at the center of the courtyard, looking up at the house as if trying to read its history in the cracks of its walls. Ruma watched him from the window. She recognized the look—she had worn it herself once, that expression of searching, of half-remembering something just out of reach. "Are you lost?" she called out. The boy turned, startled. "No," he said. Then, after a pause: "Yes. Maybe." She came out and stood in the courtyard. The afternoon light was turning gold. It made everything look like it existed in memory rather than in the present moment. "This house used to be something," the boy said. "My grandmother told me stories about it. About the people who lived here." "It's empty now," Ruma said. "Only I come here." "Why?" She didn't answer. How could she explain that waiting was its own kind of existence, that she had grown so accustomed to absence that the present felt like an interruption? "My name is Vikram," the boy said. "I'm visiting from Calcutta. My mother's family is from this town, but I've never been here before. She wanted me to see where she grew up." Ruma felt something shift inside her—a small, painful movement, like a door opening onto a room she had sealed shut. "There's nothing here," she said. "Everyone leaves." "Not everyone," Vikram said. He was looking at her with an intensity that made her uncomfortable. "Some people stay. They stay in the places they leave behind." She turned away from him and walked back into the house. She expected him to follow, but he didn't. When she looked back from the window, he was still standing in the courtyard, examining the dried fountain as if it might tell him something important. He came back the next day. And the day after that. He would sit on the steps of the house, reading, or he would wander the overgrown garden, pulling weeds as if trying to restore something lost. He never asked her questions. He seemed content simply to exist in the same space, in the same quiet of the dying afternoon. One day he brought her a book—old, with water-stained pages. Poetry. He placed it on the bench beside her without speaking. "Why?" she asked. "Because you're waiting," he said simply. "Because waiting is easier if you have something to read." She opened the book at random and found a verse underlined in faint pencil: *Time, that old magician, shows us our own faces in the mirror of what we have lost.* She closed the book. Her eyes had filled with tears, though she couldn't say why. Weeks passed. The monsoon came early that year, and Ruma stopped coming to the house. She thought Vikram would be gone, returned to his city, to his real life. But when the rain cleared and she returned, he was there, sitting on the bench, waiting. "You came back," he said. "I said I would." But she hadn't. She had never said anything of the sort. "Not to me," Vikram said. "To the house. You came back to the house." She sat beside him on the bench. The rain had cleaned the air. Everything smelled like earth and growing things. "Arjun was going to come back," she said finally. "He said he would. He said it was only temporary—just until he found work, until he had enough money. Then he would come back and we would—" She stopped. She couldn't finish the sentence. Vikram didn't speak for a long time. Then: "Sometimes the people we wait for are waiting for us to stop." "That's not fair." "No," he agreed. "It's not." The sun was setting. It turned the ruins of the house into something beautiful—all gold and shadow, like a painting of a time that had never really existed except in the imagination. "I should leave," Vikram said. "Go back to Calcutta. I've been here too long. I have work, studies. A life I'm supposed to be living." Ruma felt the familiar ache rise in her chest. This was how it always happened. People came, and then they left. The only thing that stayed was the waiting. "Then go," she said. But she didn't mean it, and he seemed to understand that. He stayed three more days. They didn't speak much. They sat together in the old house, in the back room, watching the light change, watching the shadows grow long. It was enough. It was almost everything. On his last evening, Vikram took her hand. It was a simple gesture, but it felt like a kind of answer to a question she had been asking for three years. "I'm coming back," he said. "In six months. Maybe sooner. Will you be here?" She wanted to say yes, to make the promise that might reverse the arrow of time, that might return her to the moment before Arjun left, before she learned that people could vanish into the future as completely as if they had never existed at all. "I don't know," she said instead. "That's alright," Vikram said. "I'll wait too. Just like you. We can wait together." After he left, Ruma returned to the house alone. The bench was cold beneath her. The window showed her only the darkness of the garden, the shapes of things she could no longer quite see. But something had changed. The waiting felt different now—not like an interruption of life, but like a kind of life itself. And for the first time in three years, she found she could imagine a future that wasn't made entirely of the past. She opened the book he had left behind and began to read.

 
Anyway, after my first relationship fell apart, I stayed away from romance. In 2016, I joined a Facebook group called Rangtuli. There was this boy who used to post absurd comments constantly. Whether he was trying to grab attention, I'm not sure, but he'd wreck the group's vibe. The members were fed up with him. He'd go around deliberately stirring up fights, posting ridiculous things. I found it interesting. His Facebook ID was "Wolf of Darkness." I sent him a friend request. His profile said he was a BCS Health Cadre officer—a year senior to me. After I sent the request, he commented on one of my posts. My post was satirical. The title was: Ten Tips for a Marriageable Man, Plus One Free! In it, I'd written something like this, a bit desperately: I want to be my crush, Rizvi Bhai's ideal woman—someone who'll keep in touch with his relatives on his behalf, because he's always forgetting to check on family! Rizvi Bhai is an ASP in the police force, very active on Facebook, everyone knows him. I was fond of him back then.


He commented on that post—a strange comment. When I read it, I was blown away! My friends reacted strongly too. His comment was something like this: I want a wife who can climb a coconut tree in one jump, catch fish with a cast net, has all her vaccinations, can sing every song, knows how to cook everything, can recite the multiplication table from one to twenty, can name all the US presidents in one minute, can pull a truck with her teeth…it was this massive comment! I later heard that piece went viral. Reading it at midnight, I laughed so hard tears streamed down my face! One day he posted something about Khana's sayings on Rangtuli. I commented with a saying of my own: "Don't cut banana leaves while they're unripe—in them you have cloth and in them you have rice." He commented to provoke me: "That's slum language!" I didn't need to argue back, though I did, and other members piled on him too. That day, for the first time, he messaged me in the inbox saying, Sister, that guy called me a sheep in the comments. Why don't you hit him twice on the jaw and comment something? I said, He called you a sheep, so you call him a ram. Why should I hit him? He said the group had blocked him, so he couldn't comment anymore.


That's all we said in the inbox. He never messaged me first. Neither did I. Only when I really needed to ask something. He'd just say yes or no. He didn't chat much in the inbox. I really liked that about him. It seemed to show good character. Those men who accept a friend request and immediately send "Hi, hello" messages for casual chat seemed characterless to me. I also never initiate conversations with strangers. So we'd argue in the comment sections instead. We'd fight. He'd post misogynistic things, I'd post misandric ones. People post good, noble things on Facebook wanting others to like them. He posted ridiculous stuff. Maybe he was seeking attention by presenting himself badly to people. And for exactly these reasons, I found him fascinating. He was clearly talented, creative. I was drawn to him. I'd read all his bizarre posts and funny comments. My real profile name was "Naughty Vinodini."

I’d provoke him now and then in the comments. He’d fire back at me too, calling me names—village Binodini, country Binodini, cheap Binodini—spitting out crude replies meant to get under my skin.

There was nothing affected about him. He made no effort to appear decent; if anything, he went out of his way to come across as a bad sort. And I liked him for it. The boy had a touch of madness to him. Brilliant people are always like that. But I had to keep my liking at a distance. I had no right to love him. He was a distant star! A BCS cadre officer, and I was a failed BCS preliminary candidate, unemployed, scraped through from a public university. So wanting him was my own delusion. I’d never have him. All I could do was touch his posts on a virtual screen, like a prisoner. In front of him, I was beneath notice, unworthy. That’s what I thought then.

I changed my profile name to Antahpurbashini—the Cloistered One. A metaphor, really. My life was still darkness. I hadn’t yet seen the light. The day I’d see the sun, the day I’d get a decent job, and the day when…(never mind, I’ll tell that later)—that day I’d put my real name on my profile. One time when I went to comment on his post, some random guy showed up and questioned my name. He wrote, “Only those with inferiority complexes hide behind pseudonyms.” The boy agreed with him. I’m the emotional type—I cry at the smallest hurt. I got angry, felt insulted, and blocked him. He stayed on my blocklist for a long time, but somehow that block disappeared. He’d comment frequently on my friend’s posts. (Since he posted funny things, I’d been the one to ask my friend to send him a request.) By then, from commenting on his posts so much, I’d become fairly well-known among his Facebook friends too. Even some of his doctor friends were sending me requests. So even after I blocked him, I noticed I could still see his comments on my friend’s posts. We started arguing there too.

One of his mutual doctor friends—he was a BCS doctor too—would often message me to test my general knowledge, since I’d told him I was preparing for BCS. He was married. I called him Bhaiya. One day he told me a lot about that boy. Some of it I asked out of curiosity, and some he volunteered. Let’s say the boy’s name was Rumi. Bhaiya told me they’d mainly known each other through Facebook. Then he went through a lot of trouble to get Rumi transferred to his own workplace so they could study together. Rumi was the psycho type. Stingy as hell. He’d suspect his mother of giving all the property to his brother. They’d made a lot of money. He’d take up to a lakh a month from pharmaceutical companies. He’d take money from various middlemen. He’d order unnecessary tests for patients. Because of all this, journalists had written reports against him many times. Bhaiya showed me the newspaper clippings.

Wherever he works, because of being psycho, he gets into trouble with seniors and juniors alike. But he’s brilliant and very good in his field, so many doctors seek his help with course-related matters. They keep punishing him for his behavior and transferring him away. And yet I’d fallen in love with him thinking he was an honest, poor village doctor! Of course, all this information didn’t diminish my attraction to him one bit. If anything, it grew stronger! A kind of fantasy took hold of me. The desire to know him up close became irresistible.

# But I Didn’t Have the Courage

But I didn’t have the courage to approach him that way, or to expose myself like that. One day I sent him an inbox message with a newspaper clipping. I told him, this has caused me so much pain! He replied, the guilty and the accused are not the same. Someone paid a journalist to do these things. After that, over the course of our conversations, I sent him a friend request again. Like eight or ten others, he remained on my friends list. On inbox we exchanged Eid greetings now and then, and on posts we occasionally took jabs at each other. I never let him know of my weakness for him. I kept him always, silently, in the shrine of my quiet heart.

2018. The year of the greatest crisis in my life. After that, I gained and lost so much, and what I lost, I never found again.

January 31st, 2018. Exactly one month after the 38th BCS exam. The night before, I was sitting with Father watching television, and we were joking around like a father and daughter do. After Mother and my eldest sister died, the distance between Father and me had been slowly shrinking. Before that, Mother and I used to sit together and chat. Father always kept his distance. So I hadn’t really opened up to him or become entirely at ease in his presence. Gradually, we were breaking the ice. That night, after watching television, we went to sleep. Every morning at Fajr time, Father would come to our room first and call me before the others to go to the mosque. But that day I had fallen into such a deep sleep that I didn’t hear his usual dawn call. I woke at early dawn to the sound of someone pounding on the collapsible gate. The aunt who looks after the house, does the cooking and the shopping, rushed downstairs. A visitor informed us that the elderly man of this house has had an accident! I and Shaheda Auntie ran straight to the main road.

On the main road, I searched for blood—blood! But there was no blood anywhere. We ran to the nearest hospital. They told us they had brought an elderly man here, but he’s been taken to the Army Hospital. Nothing serious, they said, just pain in the lower back. After that, we went home, got ready as best we could, and at seven o’clock, Shaheda Auntie and I set out for CMH. My middle sister stayed home. She had sprained her foot a few days earlier and had it in a cast. At CMH, in the ICU, I saw Father wracked with unbearable pain. Again and again, the thought came to me: why wasn’t Allah releasing Father from this agony more quickly! I placed my hand on Father’s forehead. I told him, you’re going to be fine. There wasn’t a scratch on Father’s entire body. He was just delirious, repeating *O Allah, O Allah*, and telling us how he had tried to stop a truck coming from one direction by raising his hand to cross the street, when another truck came from the opposite direction and hit him. The truck ran over his hand. His hands and feet were in excruciating pain.

The doctor arrived. He did X-rays. He kept asking me again and again, who do you have? Don’t you have a guardian? Do you have a brother? I set my jaw hard and said, no! He asked, do you have a mother? I said, no. I had two sisters, now I have one. Colonel Hafiz said, your father’s chest—four or five ribs are broken. There’s also a fracture in the lower back. There might be internal bleeding in his head. Because of his diabetes, he’s not feeling the chest pain, he’s only talking about the pain in his hand. I just listened, my face set firm. With clenched jaw, I looked the doctor in the eye and asked, will my father live? How long will he survive like this? To this, he said, arrange for blood. We might need four or five bags. I called my friends. I forced myself to give one bag. Because my hemoglobin was low, the doctors wouldn’t take from me anyway, so I insisted. After giving blood, I went back to Father. Father was still crying out *Allah, Allah* in terrible pain.

They didn’t let me stay long. They drove me out. The ambulance waiting outside was being readied to take me to Dhaka.

After some time, I saw it turning back. Father was nowhere to be seen standing in front of the ICU door. A little later, the doctors and nurses came running from all directions and surrounded him. I watched from a distance. Just as my mother had died at around ten in the morning on that particular bed, Father too slipped away on the same one. The aunts, the relatives—they all came. His body would be washed right there. Aunt Sejo kept collapsing against my shoulder, weeping uncontrollably. I held her up. Aunt Baro was crying out loud. I kept pleading with her to stay calm. Everyone was crying—everyone! Only I wasn’t. Nothing in me responded to death. People crumble under small sorrows; under immense ones, they turn to stone. I had turned to stone. And I knew this was my irrevocable destiny written in time itself. I was born for this. The people around me kept saying, *Make her cry, make her cry! The girl will die holding it all in.* Two lady doctors were walking past me; they barely noticed me, speaking between themselves: *How mentally strong the girl is! So strong!*

Even the final shadow above my head had vanished. There’s a limit to being an orphan! There’s a limit to how many loved ones can die! And yet, it all fell to my share. What sin had I committed? Now whose chest would I lay my head on to cry? Whose arms would I cling to? If Mother had lived, she would have comforted me. If one of them had survived, I could have held the other and sought solace. Even the elder sister—who wasn’t fully a person, who was less than human—I could have clung to her at least, sought some comfort. But she was gone too. There’s no one before me who loves me. And yet I must live through this. What won’t people have to live through!

Three months before the thirty-sixth BCS exam, Mother suddenly died. Six months before the thirty-eighth, my elder sister, and a month later, Father died in an accident. In just two and a half years, the dearest people in my family, the ones I loved most, left one after another. My friends couldn’t even find the words to console me. They kept saying, *God has been unjust to you!* They thought I was so strong, so resilient. If they were in my place, they’d have gone mad. I said nothing in return, just listened. What’s the point of saying anything! Meanwhile, I kept taking the BCS exam, exam after exam. Nothing came of it. Friends said I was intelligent, that I could write well, but I wasn’t channeling my ability properly. They thought that if I could just scrape through the prelims, the written exam would be easy for me. But even getting through that first barrier was proving impossible! For one thing, I couldn’t do math. I wasn’t great with science-related subjects either. What I could do was memorize—bookish knowledge. Anything practical wouldn’t sink into my head. And on top of that, I couldn’t resist the temptation to guess at answers. Meanwhile, the science students were racking up perfect scores in math and science. When I competed with them, I fell short right there.

Anyway, just two days after Father died, I had an exam for a good school under the Defence Ministry. Only one part-time position. Thirty-two candidates. Many were from my department. A few days later, by God’s grace, somehow my written exam went through. I was called for the viva. Three candidates for the viva. My viva went well. I got through. I kept hesitating about whether to join or not, then joined anyway. Everything was going quite well.

# The Problem

The only problem is I have to teach in a saree. Every day, traveling back and forth all that distance in a saree is exhausting. On top of that, private sector jobs come with all sorts of restrictions. I’d always dreamed of becoming a college lecturer. After that, I’d do an M.Phil, a PhD. I searched all the colleges in my area. None of them offered History. History as a subject is so rare in colleges. Everywhere it’s just Islamic History. Then I came across an advertisement for a degree college in Old Dhaka.

They were opening a new History department. They were hiring six people. I applied. I cleared the written test. In the viva, there was Mejbah Sir from Dhaka University. Six of us got selected. They called and asked me to bring documents. I went. Everything was in order. The Principal ma’am said that since it was a new department, it would take time to get approval from the National University. For now, they could only hire two people. So I waited. And waited. A year passed, but no word came. Suddenly the Principal ma’am called. She said she wanted to take me on as her Personal Secretary. I told her I’d think about it. Back then, I was still working at that school.

Six months after joining, I took the written test again for permanent employment. I passed. My viva was scheduled first thing in the morning. I was a bit nervous. The viva didn’t go well. I was rejected. Meanwhile, everyone at the college refused the position of Personal Secretary. I had applied for the lecturer post—why would I take the PS position? One day I went to that college. When the Principal ma’am saw me, she humiliated me completely. She had wanted to show me charity or pity, because I have no mother, no father, an unmarried girl. But because I didn’t accept her kindness, she punished me by removing my name from the lecturer selection list itself. I fell apart completely. For a whole year I’d been holding my breath, hoping to become a lecturer at that college. Later I heard that the newly hajj-returned Principal lady had taken substantial bribes from the other candidates.

After my father died, my elder sister was pressured by relatives and various people to marry. She married her school colleague’s brother-in-law’s friend. My brother-in-law is a senior lecturer at a private university. Sister and brother-in-law live with us at home, since I have no one else.

After I lost that job, I fell into a deep depression. Sister and brother-in-law would leave early each morning for their work. The maid who does our shopping was hardly ever around. And I was alone in that huge house. No one to talk to. I’d sit at my study table with my BCS books in front of me and scream and cry. No one saw. No one heard. The unbearable pain of having no one to talk to—there’s no way to explain it. For someone with no one to speak to, staying sane becomes nearly impossible. That’s when I developed this mental habit. I talk a lot now. Whoever I see—friends, anyone—I just pour words out endlessly, without giving anyone a chance to speak. I go on and on. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m saying myself. I don’t listen to the other person, don’t understand them. I don’t even try to understand. When I can’t talk to someone, I’m in tremendous pain. I can’t breathe. I feel restless. That’s when I write. Writing frees my feelings. It eases my pain. So I’ve created a whole world for myself on virtual platforms. I write whatever comes to mind. Most of it is humorous. I don’t like writing sad things. My friends are tired of listening to me. But they also say that I’m alive precisely because I talk. If I couldn’t talk, the suppressed pain would choke me to death.

# After Father’s Death

After my father died, my sorrows took a different turn. That ache in my life, that sharp pain—no one outside really knows much about it. The truth is, except for the person who experiences it, it’s impossible for anyone else in the world to truly understand what suffering actually feels like. Whatever others say or think about someone’s pain is nothing but conjecture, guesswork, assumptions dressed up as opinion.

In our society, unemployed boys my age face a constant barrage of questions—but girls face two. I don’t even go to my department anymore, out of fear. And then it strikes me: the cruelest question in the world is the one familiar teachers ask when they run into you—”So what are you doing these days?” When the answer comes back, “Nothing really, sir,” the second question follows—”Still not married?” (And the way it’s asked to girls! As if boys can just marry whenever they feel like it, that marriage is something that *happens* to them whenever they want, while girls get *married*. Yes, married! When? When some boy, out of pity, deigns to marry the girl—that’s when she gets married!) People from every level of society, relatives and all, they’re no exception. “Why haven’t you found a job yet?” “You’re getting older, why isn’t there a wedding?” When society hurls these questions at you like this, a broken girl like me—shattered and helpless—starts to think: marriage must be everything! Marriage is the only escape! The cure for all problems. The weapon that silences people’s mouths. An unmarried girl’s job is to swallow society’s barbs and keep on living. Let her have nothing, wear nothing—she still has to endure people’s crooked stares! And yet if that girl ever finds herself in real trouble, those same people won’t be there beside her.

My mother used to say, “The too-grand lady finds no home, the too-beautiful girl finds no groom!” My mother never found a home, and my middle sister married after our father died, when she was in her forties. As for my life—it’s still uncertain. I have my own philosophy about marriage, and I want to share it. I’ve always wanted to marry for love. I’ve never had any interest in an arranged marriage. What I’ve always wanted is to find someone—like-minded, nearly my age—and make them my life partner, not just a husband but a friend-husband! Unfortunately, I wasted all my university years on the wrong person, someone who hid his education and family background from me for years while we were together. After that, a few friends came along, but I didn’t feel that way about them, nor they about me. The ones who did approach me that way—our temperaments just didn’t match. Honestly, I’m terrified of marrying a complete stranger. I’ve always wanted to marry someone of my own choosing. Two things about marriage have deeply shaped how I think.

First, there’s what Sarat Chandra said: “To marry off someone to just anyone is not marriage! If hearts don’t match, marriage itself is wrong.” And second, in class nine or ten, I read Sameresh’s *Saat Kaahan* at my mother’s insistence. In it, Deepaboli’s foreign Black friend from the hostel says to her: “You Bengalis, your marriage is such a disgusting custom! You enter the body first, then the heart. But we love someone, give them our heart first, *then* give them our body.”

Those words really struck deep with me.

Four or five months after my father died, when I was utterly depressed about jobs, loneliness, everything else, it was then that my middle sister’s friend brought a marriage proposal—for me and her cousin. One day she just suddenly brings the boy home. A short, young man. Director of some company.

# The Boy

At first glance, you wouldn’t say his beard has come in properly—he looked boyish, almost childlike. I didn’t find him particularly manly that first time, but there was something friendly about him. A few days later, he sends me a friend request on Facebook. A message. I respond here and there. As we talk, I learn he’s a book lover. He reads voraciously and loves to travel. He’s a year older than me. In most ways, exactly what I’ve been looking for. But my family wasn’t on board. His father was a chief engineer at the PDB. The boy doesn’t measure up to that. He did an MBA from a private university and bought shares in a real estate company with money his father gave him—a crore or so. On that account, he has no real income of his own, no independence. He lives off his father. Besides, property companies are bleeding money these days.

Slowly, I find myself enchanted by the flattering things he says. I begin to forget the sorrows of the past. I start dreaming of clinging to someone, of love. This house has always been a place of death—never of weddings. I feel a deep longing to be a bride. It stays with me, that image—the red sari, hands full of henna. I dream of losing everything and building a home anew. I have no past pulling me back, no fear of losing anyone anymore. Whoever comes into my life, I want to give them all the love I’ve stored up. I want so badly to hold someone I love and cry—really cry—just once. I’m carrying an ocean of tears in my chest. I need someone I can hold and weep with. I want to take their sorrows, and I want to give them mine. The world offers plenty of people to share happiness with, but no one wants to share the pain. Of course, wanting to share sorrow with just anyone is foolish too. So I’ve learned to keep my sorrows hidden.

He praised my eyes constantly! “Those big, dark, wet, fathomless eyes! There’s such a longing in them!” That’s what he’d say. He loves to travel—absolutely loves it. Through his father’s government posting, he’s been to about sixty, sixty-two districts. He plants dreams of travel in my eyes. I’ve never been able to roam the nooks and crannies of Bangladesh. I dream of traveling all over the country, hand in hand with my husband. He dreams of taking me to Sajek—high up in the hills, close to the clouds. But not alone; he wants to take his wife there and talk softly, privately. The image forms before my eyes. I think, if nothing else, I should marry this boy just to go to Sajek. His family is modern, liberal. His mother is gone. One day he came to our house with his father, his uncle, and aunt. My uncles were there too. Nothing about marriage was discussed. It was just a meeting.

The next day, his father sent word that they liked the girl. That evening, the boy’s aunt called. A quite progressive woman—wears a big bindi, studied music at Shantiniketan. Doesn’t sing anymore. Doesn’t work either, because her husband forbids it. Right off, she asked if I could cook! They need a homely, domestic girl. From her mouth came what the boy’s father had instructed her to tell me, and I was shaken right from the start! They have plenty of money, so it won’t matter if I don’t work. If I really want to, they can get me into a school somewhere. I was astonished at this kind of behavior from supposedly progressive, educated people! They didn’t want a wife—they wanted a maid! I told her no, I want to work.

I’ve struggled through all this education not to sit at home idle. I’m trying to find work—the rest is in God’s hands!

After that, they stopped contacting us for a long time. Though the boy kept up with me on Facebook. I was left hanging in that limbo for months. Meanwhile, when other marriage proposals came to the house, they were turned down because talks were supposedly ongoing here. After many days, the boy’s father had his fiancée call me again. He said that since I was going to become their daughter-in-law, I would have to take on all the household responsibilities. If I worked, I’d come home from the office and, come what may, slip out of my clothes and head straight to the kitchen. Only when I finished everything at night, whenever I found time, could I write or read if I wanted to! And if I took a government job, I’d be posted far away. How would I run the household then? So a government job was out of the question. There were a thousand such conditions! I told them to give me time. The 40th BCS exam was coming up in a month. I’d let them know after that. They were furious. But I stood firm in my decision. On the other hand, I was so captivated by the boy’s charming literary talk that I couldn’t bring myself to give him up either! After taking the BCS exam as expected, I reached out to him myself and we met. I told him, I will try my best. But I cannot promise to take on all the household responsibilities.

(To be continued…)