# The Wound of Devotion The letter arrived on a Tuesday, sealed in an envelope the color of old bone. Sudha recognized the handwriting at once—those careful, leaning strokes that had once filled the margins of her chemistry textbooks, written in pencil, so she could erase them if her mother came looking. Twenty-three years. That's how long it had been since Ashok left the city, since he boarded that train with two suitcases and a resolve that had calcified into silence over the decades. She held the envelope without opening it, as though the contents might scatter if she wasn't careful, might blow away like ash. Her daughter Priya found her sitting in the kitchen, the letter still sealed. "Bad news?" Priya asked, setting down groceries with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd learned to read her mother's moods the way sailors read clouds. "I don't know yet," Sudha said. "That's the problem." She'd married Ashok's cousin Vikram instead—a sensible match, arranged through family, blessed by both households. Vikram had been kind, reliable, the sort of man who built a life the way one builds a house: methodically, without flourish. They'd had two children. He'd died eight years ago. And Sudha had become the kind of woman who watered her plants on schedule and slept on her side of the bed, forgetting, occasionally, to notice she was sleeping alone. That evening, after Priya had gone home to her own house, her own husband, her own careful life, Sudha made tea and sat by the window. The letter lay on the table, still sealed. Outside, the street vendor was packing up his cart, folding the canvas shade that had sheltered him all day. A boy chased a ball across the street. A woman in a green sari hurried past, her dupatta trailing behind her like a question. Sudha opened the letter. The handwriting was the same, though the hand that had written it was clearly older—the letters less even, the pressure uneven. Ashok had always had beautiful handwriting. Even in chemistry class, he'd written up his experiments with the care of someone recording something sacred. *Dear Sudha,* *I don't know if this letter will find you, or if you'll want to read it if it does. I've written it a hundred times, and each time I've thrown it away. This time, I'm sending it before I can change my mind again.* *I'm dying. Cancer. The doctors give me three months, maybe four if I'm lucky. I've never felt lucky in my life, so I'm assuming three.* *I think you should know why I left.* Sudha's hands trembled. She set the letter down and stood up, walked to the window, came back. She picked it up again. *You were going to choose me,* the letter continued. *I knew it. I could see it in how you looked at me when you thought no one was watching. We were going to run away to Delhi, remember? You were going to study medicine, I was going to write. We were going to live in a small flat and eat dal and rice for a year until I could get published.* *But I saw your mother's face that day—do you remember? When she found us at the library, when you hastily shelved that book I'd put your hand on. I saw the way her lip trembled. And I realized something that your love for me had prevented you from seeing.* *You were her only hope.* *I don't mean this as romance, Sudha. I don't mean it in the lyric way we would have said it then. What I mean is: you were the one thing she had that was entirely hers. Her sacrifice, her investment, her future. In our time, for our people, that was sacred. And I was nothing—less than nothing. I was a boy with a notebook full of half-finished stories and no money, no prospects, no family connections of any value.* *If you had left with me, you would have become the girl who threw away her life for love. And she would have become the woman who lost everything. And we would have been happy for perhaps six months, and then you would have begun to resent me. Not consciously. But it would have been there, in the morning light, in every small hardship. You would have seen your mother's sacrifice in my inability to provide, in the life you'd given up.* *So I did what I thought was noble. I left without saying goodbye. I thought it would be cleaner.* *It wasn't.* *I left this city and I went to another city, and another. I wrote books that were rejected. I translated poetry. I taught English in schools. I lived in small rooms and watched the world through windows. I never married. I had lovers, but I never loved them—not the way one should. Because I was always thinking about the girl in the library, the one with the careful hands and the ambitious heart, and I was always telling myself that I'd saved her.* *But I've realized, these past weeks, that I didn't save her. I imprisoned her in a different way. Because she still loved me, didn't she? Even after she married, even after she had children. Even now.* *I can feel it in the fact that this letter will reach you. That you'll open it.* *I'm not writing to ask your forgiveness. I don't deserve that. I'm writing because I'm dying, and there are so few true things to hold onto when you're dying. And one of the true things is that I loved you. And another true thing is that I was a coward.* *Both things are true at the same time, and I've spent my whole life trying to make them untrue, separately, by turns. But they're both still true.* *I'm going to die in three months. You're going to live, I hope, for many more years. And here's what I want you to know: that love wasn't wasted. Mine wasn't wasted on you, and yours wasn't wasted on me, and Vikram's—I knew him a little, you know, in those last years before I left, we used to speak at the bookshop—Vikram's love for you wasn't less because you loved me first.* *That's the thing I'm only understanding now. That devotion doesn't work like money, where if you spend it here, you have less to spend there. It multiplies. It deepens. We loved you, all of us. And you gave your love to the one who was staying. And it was the right choice, even though it felt, at the time, like a wound.* *I hope your life has been good, Sudha. I hope you became the doctor you wanted to be. Or if you didn't, I hope you became something else that was worth becoming. I hope you've had moments of such joy that you forgot entirely about the library, about the book I touched, about the boy who left.* *I hope you've had a life that was entirely yours.* *It's too late for me to tell you this in person. And perhaps it's too late for it to matter. But I'm telling you anyway, in the dark, in the city I've been hiding in all these years, in the last clarity I'll probably ever have.* *I loved you. I left you. And I'm sorry—not for the leaving, which I think might have been necessary, but for the silence that came after. For letting you wonder. For letting you build a life on top of a mystery, when you deserved to know the truth.* *The truth is this: devotion leaves a wound. It has to. Because it's the mark of something real.* *I hope yours heals well.* *Ashok* Sudha read the letter three times. Then she put it back in the envelope and sat in the dark—she didn't turn on the lights—until the streetlamps came on outside, illuminating the street with their sodium-orange glow. Priya called at nine. "Mom? You okay? You didn't call me back." "I'm fine," Sudha said. "I'm fine. Just tired." "Do you want me to come over?" Sudha thought about this. She thought about the tea cooling on the table beside her, about the letter folded in her lap, about the chemist's careful handwriting and the doctor he'd imagined her becoming. She thought about Vikram, who had waited patiently while she loved someone else, and who had been loved in return, eventually, in a different register—a love that had its own depth, its own value. "No," she said. "No, I'm going to sleep. I'm just going to sleep." After she hung up, she sat for a while longer in the dark. And then, slowly, she began to cry—not with the fresh tears of grief, but with the old, deep sobs of someone who has finally understood that a wound, if it's real, never quite closes. It scars. It shapes how light falls on the rest of your life. But it also marks the place where something true once touched you. She kept the letter. She didn't show it to anyone. And she didn't attend the funeral when word came, three months later, from a distant cousin in the city where Ashok had died. She simply sat with the knowledge of it, the way you sit with an old injury on a cold day—aware of it, but not crippled by it. Aware, instead, of all the strength that had grown around it.

I am the daughter of a respectable family. At home there’s my father, mother, my younger brother, and me. My father teaches at a government college, and my mother keeps house. By God’s grace, we live quite well. We’re not particularly wealthy, but there is peace in our hearts. I often recall the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Yes, ours is a happy family. We don’t have much money, but our home overflows with joy wherever you look. It’s not just the four of us who share this story. Our relations with extended family are quite warm too. When one of us does well, the others are glad; when someone struggles, we all feel it. Since childhood, I’ve been raised with great affection by everyone at my paternal and maternal grandparents’ homes.

From early on, I was a serious student. Wasting time when there were books to read simply wasn’t in my nature. Growing up watching everyone in my household study so intently, I absorbed their conviction: to amount to something, you must study. This maxim became the creed by which everyone in our family became who they are. That same spirit took root in me from childhood. My father, uncles, cousins—all highly accomplished people whom society respects. This family legacy made me genuinely committed to my career from the start. Yet, if we’re honest about results, I’m the dullest student in my entire family. We have a friend named Soham who is six feet one inch tall. When someone compliments his height, he jokes, “Yes, I’m the shortest male in my family!” My academic standing was rather like that.

I studied a great deal, but perhaps my method wasn’t quite right. So the results I got didn’t match the amount of work I put in. Still, though I fell behind in academics compared to others, I was ahead of them in manners and comportment—and precisely for this reason, everyone in my family showered me with affection. Because I was quiet by nature, I was valued somewhat differently from the others in our household. Being the youngest among my cousins, even after completing my honours degree, I remained “the baby” in everyone’s eyes. They all seemed to think I was just a child, incapable of understanding anything serious. Everyone forgave my many mistakes with a smile.

Last year I completed my honours in pharmacy from the State University. My CGPA was good too. I’ve been in Dhaka for five years now. Leaving home was difficult—I’ve been through considerable struggles—but all things considered, life has gone rather well. Friends, hangouts, wandering about, studying. Five years have passed in quite wonderful fashion. During this time I’ve mixed with many people, had plenty of laughs. I was quite the goofball. Whenever my girlfriends spotted a handsome boy, we’d all tease each other, critiquing this feature and that, laughing ourselves silly—though we’d forget it all again later. I had mostly girl friends; I barely had any male friends at all. There was never even a stranger on my Facebook friends list. Not that I was particularly conservative; I just knew how to look after myself.

It happens in third year. A friend of mine from university, Muntaha, has a senior friend named Suhan who studies at North South University. One day, Suhan sees me on Muntaha’s ID and tells her, “I really like Hridita. Ask her to be my friend, will you?” Muntaha tells me that Suhan will send me a friend request, and I should accept it. I said okay. I waited, but no request came from him.

The next day, Muntaha tells me again that there’s some problem with Suhan’s account settings or something, so he can’t send the request. She asks me to send him a request instead. When I hear this, I lose my temper and start shouting. After that, for some reason, I end up sending Suhan a request anyway. He accepts it almost immediately.

That’s all there was to it. Now and then Suhan would text me on Facebook, and I’d reply. He was interested in me—he’d mentioned something like that to Muntaha. But I was never interested in Suhan. He was much better-looking than me, and he was also a better student. I studied at a state university, and we were so far behind compared to North South. I was only average-looking, so I never developed any real interest in him. I’d chat with him, but I never took him seriously in that way.

After completing his BBA at North South, Suhan was doing an MBA in Finance at the IBA of Jahangirnagar University. Anyway, early in fourth year, Suhan tells me one day that he wants to meet me. Although we’d been talking for a long time, we’d never actually met because of how busy things were. I found various excuses and avoided it. But the chatting continued. In the middle of fourth year, he calls again one day and asks to meet. I couldn’t meet him that day because I had an exam.

I never had any deep friendship or anything like that with him. He worked on a UNICEF project. His job often took him abroad. One day in this country, the next in another—that’s how his work was.

Meanwhile, I finished my honors degree. I went back home from Dhaka, spending time with my family. Suddenly, I see a message from him on Facebook. At some point in our chat, he says he loves me, he wants to marry me, all that sort of thing. I thought he was joking around. So I started joking back with him too. Actually, I’d never really thought about him in any serious way. So I wasn’t taking what he said seriously at all—just bantering back.

I came back to Dhaka for my internship. And there’s his text again! He asks if I have Viber. I give him my Viber number. But the internet was so slow that day that we couldn’t really talk at all. Before that, I’d spoken to him on the phone only three times. Everything else had been on Messenger. Anyway, our conversations were never really comfortable. There were always problems—internet issues, being busy, that sort of thing.

But this time he grew quite serious about me. He went abroad and started calling me on Viber. We talked. Nearly every night we’d talk after that. The conversations were brief, but they happened regularly. One evening at seven, he called and told me to come out—he wanted to meet me. Something urgent. I told him it wasn’t possible to go out in the evening, so I said no. Then he said, what about tomorrow morning? I agreed. The next day, just as I was getting ready to leave and meet him, he texted to say urgent office work had come up and he couldn’t make it. He was very sorry. That night he called again, apologizing profusely, but I was furious and told him I could never meet him again. Then, on the first day of spring, suddenly Suhan calls! He wants to meet me. He’s already set out toward my house to see me. I should get ready, he says.

It all started last February. Anyway, we met. For the first time in my life, I sat next to a boy in a rickshaw. I was terribly nervous. The mischief in him was beyond description! He was quite depressed at the time. He’d failed a course subject and lost a year because of it. On top of that, there were job troubles. We talked a lot, wandered around, ate together. After spending a few hours like that, he arranged a rickshaw for me, and I rode home. That night he messaged me on Facebook asking if I’d marry him. I replied, you’re insane. Why would I marry someone like you? I don’t know why, but chatting with him that whole time, I couldn’t stop laughing. After some more conversation, eventually we both logged off and went to sleep. After that, no word from him. Phone’s off, which means he’s left the country now. Yet the night before, he hadn’t mentioned anything about going abroad. That night he called me again on Viber asking if I’d marry him. I told him, come back to the country first, then we’ll see. He’s absolutely mad!

He came back to the country three days later. But after returning, he never asked me about it again. For my part, I found myself drawn to him in a way I couldn’t quite explain. His words kept circling in my mind, and his face wouldn’t leave my eyes. It wasn’t that he was handsome—though he was—that made me feel this way about him. The truth was, my university life had ended, and I was drowning in loneliness. My friends had no time for me anymore. Everyone was caught up in their own careers. I had no older brother, no one I could really talk to about jobs, about life’s direction. There was simply no one.

I kept thinking how good it would be to have someone beside me during this time. Girls are like that, you know. It’s not that we can’t walk alone—we can. But we want someone to tell us which way to go, which path to avoid. Once the way is shown, we can walk it alone. We have our limits when it comes to making decisions on our own. Even when we’ve already made up our minds about something, we still want someone to say to us: yes, go ahead with that decision.

A few more days passed like this. He didn’t mention marriage again. One day I called him myself and asked, are you really serious about this? He said yes, he was serious. That was it. In the meantime, I called Muntaha and casually mentioned what was happening. Muntaha said, it’s your life—you think it through. He was quite the playboy in college and university, she reminded me. He’d had quite a few girlfriends, and I’d heard he’d gotten close to some of them. I told Muntaha, the past is the past. Whatever happened before is done. What matters is that things are good now. And anyway, he’s finished his studies now, he’s working, taking professional courses. He’s past all that. Then I called Suhan. In the middle of our conversation, I told him: listen, my life has no past in it. There’s nothing in my life that I need to hide from you. I’m completely clean. You’re the first man in my life. Think carefully about whether you can have me in your life or not. I won’t judge your past, but if you marry me, you have to be a hundred percent loyal to me after the wedding. I don’t need anything else. We’ll be completely honest with each other in everything. There won’t be any walls between us about anything. If after marriage I ever find out that you’re involved with someone else in any way, I won’t take even a moment to leave you. That’s too much trouble. I don’t want that to happen. So I’m making my position and my philosophy clear to you now, so you can make your final decision with all the facts. Take your time if you need to, but don’t do something that will make both of us regret it for the rest of our lives. I’m saying this because I’ve thought it through carefully, and I won’t budge from this mindset under any circumstances…………After hearing everything I said, he replied, yes, you’re right. I agree.

It’s true that ours wasn’t like other relationships. He was an odd sort, not particularly caring. He kept everything locked inside his head, bottled up. He didn’t really share much of anything. I wanted to care for him, to give him all my time, but he was always busy. We’d fight about it, and when we did, he’d turn deadly serious about the state of our relationship. I was the one calling all the time. He didn’t do that. On the phone he spoke like a machine. Not a word beyond work. And so it went. But it’s also true that Suhan was constantly trying to change himself. He was improving, bit by bit. Our relationship was chugging along fairly well.

There was this peculiar thing. Whatever our relationship cost—the outings, the meals, the celebrations, all the little expenses—I paid for everything. He never paid for anything. I never asked him why. He never pulled his wallet out of his pocket. I can’t remember him even paying for a rickshaw ride. We never had a single argument about it. It didn’t even bother me. I did what any girlfriend would do—and in that one year, I did just as much for him. His MBA still isn’t finished. When he was abroad, I went all the way from Dhaka to his university campus in Savar to fill out his form because the deadline was passing. I bought his semester books. Getting his transcripts, taking him to doctors, arranging his tests, collecting his medical reports—I did it all. Every single bill went on my account. Yet whenever I needed even the slightest support from him, he was always busy. Still, I’d tell him, I can manage everything if you’ll just be there for me, be okay. Things were going well. Whenever he had free time, he’d take me out, we’d spend beautiful moments together, then each of us would go back home. We’d talk regularly on the phone too.

One day I saw a girl named Swagata comment on his profile picture, calling him ‘Jiju’. When my friend Moumita saw that comment, she asked Swagata why she was calling Suhan that. Swagata didn’t reply. My friend had always liked Suhan anyway. I told him about it. Suhan said that when his previous relationship ended, Swagata had caused him a lot of trouble. Now that he’s with me, she’s doing it again. When I brought it up with him, he got angry and said, I have an exam tomorrow, I don’t have time for this petty nonsense with you. Right after that, he deactivated his account and disappeared.

That night I told my friend to get that girl to talk to me. A while later, she messaged me. I told her, what are you doing? Please, don’t cause trouble. I’m in a relationship with Suhan. What she said next nearly drove me insane! She claimed she’d been with Suhan for eight years. But I knew she was lying, because Suhan hadn’t hidden the relationship from his first year—why would he hide this one? Besides, she said Suhan had spent the whole day with her two days ago, when I knew for a fact he was with me. I didn’t believe that either. She kept spinning more and more stories. But then she mentioned certain secrets about Suhan—things she absolutely shouldn’t have known. I was completely confused! Meanwhile, Moumita was texting me all night, taking screenshots of my conversation with that girl, insisting she wasn’t lying. She said she’d dug up more information from others too. If I confronted Suhan with all this, he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. It was madness, pure madness! I couldn’t sleep that night. At 3:30 in the morning I called Suhan repeatedly, woke him up, and told him everything. He denied it all. But Moumita kept calling me. She texted from another number, saying if I’d bring her on a conference call with Suhan, she’d present proof that would silence him forever. When I told Suhan, he point-blank refused. So following Moumita’s lead, I told him: give me your Facebook password right now. I want to see what you and Swagata talked about. The moment I said that, he hung up and blocked my number.

All of this made me terribly ill. Two days passed without a word from Suhan. Then I went away to Rajbari. A week later he called. He admitted only that he used to talk to Moumita sometimes, and they’d met occasionally, but it was nothing like a relationship. He said the girl liked him, which is why she’d left those comments on his profile picture, but there was nothing between them.

Another week of effort and she managed everything, smoothed over all the trouble with her clever ways. Meanwhile, my father asked me if I was seeing anyone. He was thinking about my marriage. I told him about Souhan. Then my father gave me six months and said that if their family sent a proposal within that time, the rest would follow once Souhan got completely on his feet. I was thrilled and told Souhan what my father had said. But she didn’t seem happy at all—if anything, her anxiety got worse. I kept telling her she didn’t need to take on any responsibility, that I could manage my own expenses, but still she became restless with tension! I went back to Dhaka. Around that time I read two posts on Facebook—one called “Before Distance” and another called “The Tale of the Doll’s Wedding.” Reading them drove me mad! Then I told her again: you have to come clean with me. You can’t keep me in the dark like this. I can’t take this pain anymore………Despite saying all this over and over, she had only one thing to say—she would explain everything to me, but not now, she’d tell me in six months!

I became even more unsettled. I couldn’t understand—if she was clear about things on her end, what was her problem in being clear with me? If she truly loves me, why does she need all this privacy from me? Why can’t I check her phone? Why can’t I look at her messenger? How can I wait six months like this? What if she says no to me then? I’ll die! I told her this, but she had only one thing to say: that she couldn’t handle all these troubles right now, her job was contractual, and she was under a lot of stress trying to find permanent employment!

And then there was yet another story! Souhan messaged Moumita about me, and then Moumita messaged me from her younger brother’s account asking me to unfriend her. When I asked why she texted from her brother’s account, she said Souhan could apparently access her account. Then she said no, no, I was just joking. She refused to say anything more. After I unfriended her as Moumita asked, I saw that I got about five or six friend requests from people I didn’t know at all. When I asked them in the inbox who they were, they each said they were Moumita’s friends and that Moumita had told them to send me requests. When I called Moumita to ask about this, she said they were Souhan’s friends! Seeing all this made me feel like I was losing my mind. What was happening, why was it happening—I couldn’t understand any of it.

The next morning, when I ask Suhan about it again, he says Maumita is mentally unstable, that she wants our relationship to fall apart, that she’s a psycho and there’s nothing to believe from her, and so on and so forth. When I refuse to accept this, he says, fine, okay, I understand. Should I talk to Maumita’s mother about this? What is your daughter starting all this for? I’ll even bring it up at the conference with you. But then I say no, forget it, there’s no need. If the two of us are okay, what does it matter what outsiders say? You clear everything with me. I can’t keep my mind straight anymore. Why would something so strange happen to me? He just keeps saying, be patient, everything will be fine.

Then he goes abroad again for work. When he comes back after a week, I start pressing him. I tell him, either you explain everything to me clearly, or you won’t have me. If I have to wait month after month like this, I’ll go mad. He says, okay, on the 25th I’ll tell you everything. I’ll show you all of it. Hearing this, I calm down. I think, well, it’s only nineteen days left, they’ll pass before I know it—I’ve been patient this long, I can hold on a little longer!

At half past eleven on the night of the 24th, he texts me: I can’t show you anything, and I can’t give you any explanation either. If you can accept things the way they are, then stay; otherwise, go your own way. I call him and start crying hard. I say, why did you do this to my life? What wrong have I done you? I didn’t force my way into your life—you kept calling me back again and again. So why are you doing this? Where is my fault? He says, if I show you the conversations on my messenger, you’ll cry even more. You might even kill yourself. Hahaha. I said, if you can’t be loyal, how can I spend my whole life with you? Why are you doing this to me? Why didn’t you tell me about this confusion you have about me before? I asked you so many times. Why didn’t you say anything then? After getting assurance from you, I even told people at home—and now you’re—He says, okay, calm down. I have an exam. Let me study a bit. If I do badly in my results, you’ll be responsible for it!

I think about everything I’ve done for him in this one year! Whatever he needed, I’d have it ready for him before he even asked. He has gastric problems, so I’d cut up ginger, make juice, bottle it, and bring it to him. I’d take his dirty clothes home in a bag, wash them, dry them, iron them, and bring them back to him. I’d often cook food and take it to him in a tiffin carrier. During his exams, I’d stay up all night and pray. Is this the reward for all that? What am I supposed to tell people at home?

Yes, I used to get so angry with him, because he couldn’t give me time. He works five days a week, gets one day off, and spends one day in MBA classes. Whenever I got angry, he’d always say sorry and smooth things over; I understand, everything’s fine, but on this one thing he’s absolutely stubborn—he says even if he dies, he won’t show me his phone conversations!

He’s never fulfilled a single wish or whim of mine. I’d go mad just wanting to talk to him, but during the day he’s always impossibly busy, and at night he’s asleep the moment his head touches the pillow. There are thousands of things like this that are destroying my life! I don’t know what I should do, I can’t understand anything anymore. All my friends know about our relationship, my family knows, I’ve told my father so much about him… and now he’s doing this to me!

He says it hurts him to see me cry, that he can’t bear my pain, that he could give his life to make me happy—he tells me all this. When I hear it, I can only laugh. He says so much with his mouth, but he can’t even give me two minutes of peace. This is his idea of love! He’s confused about his own loyalty; how can I be sure? I’ve helped him so much, sacrificed so much for him, I love him so deeply… and this is the reward he’s giving me! My whole life went so beautifully, and now at the end I’ve destroyed my career for the wrong person! I can’t tell anyone about how he behaves. I just sit alone with it, drowning in the pain.

His mother and sister apparently don’t like me. The other day he casually tells me, why don’t you just get some job. Quick! I need money badly. I’m in a real crisis. The way he said it felt wrong somehow! And now he’s saying he can’t manage anything, that everything’s fallen apart for him. His job’s going to fall through too. He says he can’t continue this relationship with me anymore. I asked him, what do you mean by all this? I settled everything with you at the start. You agreed to everything I said, which is why I agreed to be with you—otherwise I never would have! He says there’s no point dragging up the past; just live in the present. I don’t understand anything. When I started this relationship with him, his honors degree wasn’t even finished yet—he didn’t even know if he’d finish it. I never spoke to him in a blaming way, never made digs or thrown things back in his face, because I went into this with my eyes open. I used to tell him all the time, whatever you have, that’s enough for me. If you can’t eat, I won’t eat either. If we live, we live together; if we die, we die together. I’ll never leave you because of money; if I ever do leave, it will be because of how you’ve treated me. You’re my first love and my only love. I’ll hold you close like this my whole life. I could give my life for your happiness!

I have always been entirely faithful to him, given everything I had to keep him well, and yet he has destroyed my life like this! All those dreams I wove—of spending a lifetime holding his hand, of happiness—they torment me now with an unbearable weight. It is terribly hard to endure the relentless pull of dreams! I never want my name, Suihan, to sit beside those other two—Amit and Monier—in those Facebook stories, those tales of success. Yesterday at this hour, I couldn’t have imagined, not for a moment, that I would be suffering like this today. The fiercest pain gives no warning. How strange life is!

I am now a failed man. I have lost! Let someone come and scold me. There is a certain satisfaction even in being rebuked by someone successful. Who will listen to my pathetic complaints? Why would anyone give me their time? Who am I? I am nobody. I must rot away alone with my pain. This is my fate. In this world, I am misplaced, out of step, unworthy of a seat at the table.

Ah, once I was the whole world in someone’s eyes! Now, in those very eyes, I am not even worth three and a half feet of earth!