# The Thorn in My Throat
I had a terrible, burning need to see what my daughter looked like. How sharp her mind would be, the way she would speak, what her eyes, nose, mouth, hair would look like—I was seized by a ravenous hunger to see her.
I named my daughter Swarnalata. And yet Swarnalata does not exist. Strange, isn’t it?
You won’t find it strange, I know. But it strikes me as extraordinarily strange.
I wanted her so badly. Just thinking of her would send a kind of orgasmic joy through my head.
The thirst to see her was as raw and relentless as the thirst I’ve carried all my life to see my father, who left before I was even born.
These two monstrous thirsts are like thorns lodged in my throat, and one day they’ll choke me to death. Everyone will say I had a stroke, that I killed myself, that I died of some terrible disease. But no one will ever know that I died with a thorn in my throat.
How the smallest, most ordinary longings can become the sharpest thorns, choking the very breath from us—isn’t that the truth?
You didn’t keep me. I wanted Swarnalata so badly, and you were always saying no. You stay in your world—your home, your wife, your children, everything going along just fine. But I have neither you nor Swarnalata. So what is a person supposed to live on if you give them nothing at all?
If I had my Swarnalata, everything would have been fine. I only wanted to be your right hand and Swarnalata’s mother. I only wanted to be a writer! Only you could have awakened that writer in me. Such a precious part of myself died so easily, and you couldn’t even hold onto it!
I’ve never had a soul-connection like the one I had with you, anywhere in this whole world. I could see how you understood what I wanted to say before I even said it. You thought exactly the way I thought. This connection was heavenly.
Why were you trying to hold me back then?
No, it doesn’t work that way, my boatman. The boat has come to the shore to take me away, and I must return to the banks… to the house, to married life.
Literature doesn’t happen in domesticity. All that happens there is cooking and prescribed sex in the dead of night. Literature is not born there. What you’ve lost, you’ve lost from the very beginning.
The days we had are truly, completely gone.
This is what haunted me so much. This business of being taken for granted. Stay if you’re here, leave if you’re not! Ours was a careless kind of love.
You know how many battles I fought—against society, against family, against everyone close to me—just to be with you? You know how many people I simply removed from my life, told them to go, just so I could be with you? I never told you any of this. Because I was happy even fighting for you. But some things kept turning over and over in my mind.
I had started writing my diary as a surprise gift for our fifth anniversary. I knew you loved nothing in this world more than writing itself.
But the day I realized that while I had plans for the next five years with you, you didn’t even have plans for the next five days with me—that day, everything shifted.
The day I managed to burn that diary, I understood that I could leave you too, that I could even kill a person.
I didn’t want to say all this. I’m heading to Dhaka on the night bus, sitting at the ticket counter now, the bus leaves at midnight. Suddenly a ghost is pressing its head into mine. That movie, “A Moment to Remember,” has possessed me, gnawing at my insides.
Suddenly I thought: I’ll wait here at this bus counter for hours and hours for someone who doesn’t exist. No one will come, but still I’ll wait.
This winter I’ve been sitting at the counter from half past five in the evening. Bone’s house is just ten minutes away from here. And yet I sit here.
You know betel leaf is something I’m terribly fond of? You don’t. Now you do.
There’s so much else you don’t know about me.
I often go out in the evening and walk alone, chew betel, drink tea, sit for hours at the small tea stall with the rickshaw driver.
You don’t know that I have absolutely no desire to talk? If I had my way, I could spend my entire life without uttering a single word. I don’t pick up calls from most people, don’t call anyone, because I dread having to say too much. I haven’t spoken to my mother in two months. She talks too much, you see. I don’t call her either.
You don’t know I’ve refused to eat fish and meat since I was very small because it means killing. I stopped believing in God from class three. I’m not a householder by nature at all.
You don’t know I have a terrible aversion to technology. I have nothing but Facebook and WhatsApp. One reason only—they require less technical skill. I tried so hard to learn to type Bengali on a laptop. It was impossibly difficult.
I even enrolled in a computer course in Mirpur, paid two and a half thousand taka, but didn’t go more than a week. All that Word, Excel… that rubbish doesn’t pull at me.
Strange, isn’t it? People think I’m quite smart. You don’t know I don’t even remember my own Facebook password.
I won’t buy a new phone because I’d have to learn new things on it. I’m stuck with this dying one.
Only a few things in this world truly pull at me. Literature. Writing. Poetry. Philosophy. Psychology.
I’m slipping away… I’m losing everything… you’re losing everything… I can’t bear to look at you, at myself—it hurts so much!