# Uncle Mujtaba's Household The first time I saw Uncle Mujtaba, he was standing in the lane outside his house, watering the plants with an old hosepipe that leaked at three different places. Water sprayed everywhere—on his shirt, his lungi, the ground—but he didn't seem to notice or care. He was humming something in Urdu, a film song perhaps, his face tilted slightly upward as if listening to music only he could hear. "Come, beta, come inside," he called when he spotted me. "Your Aunty has made khichuri. She's been waiting for you since morning." That was Uncle Mujtaba's way. He spoke as if he'd known you all your life, as if your arrival had been the thing he'd been anticipating since dawn broke. There was no formality in him, no distance. Just an immediate, uncomplicated warmth that made you feel like you belonged in his house the moment you crossed the threshold. Aunty was in the kitchen—a small, dark room that always smelled of cumin and turmeric and something else, something like old wood and patience. She was stirring a large pot, her dupatta loose around her shoulders, her bangles making soft music as she moved. "Ah, there you are," she said, without turning. She always knew who it was by the sound of footsteps. "Wash your hands. The food is almost ready." The house itself was an old, rambling structure that seemed to have been added to haphazardly over the years. Rooms led into other rooms at unexpected angles. The furniture was worn but clean, and every surface held something—a framed photograph, a vase with dried flowers, a stack of old newspapers. It was the kind of house that had lived in it, that bore the marks of decades of existence. Uncle Mujtaba had lived there for forty-three years. He'd bought it when he was a young man, fresh from Dacca, with money he'd borrowed from everyone he knew. That was what Aunty liked to tell people. "He had nothing," she would say, with something like pride in her voice. "Not a pice in his pocket. But he had dreams. Big dreams. And look at us now." Now they were old. Uncle Mujtaba's hair had turned completely white, and his back had begun to curve slightly, as if the weight of all those years was finally settling on his shoulders. Aunty's hands were spotted with age, and there was a tremor in them sometimes when she was tired. But they still moved through the house with purpose, still tended to things, still expected people to arrive and to be fed. The rooms upstairs were rented out to tenants. There was a young couple on the first floor—he worked in an office, she taught at a school. There was an old man on the second floor who had lived there for so long that nobody remembered when he'd moved in. There was a widow and her son on the third floor. The house was full of lives, all of them somehow connected to Uncle Mujtaba and Aunty, all of them part of the household's daily rhythm. In the afternoons, Uncle Mujtaba would sit in the front room, reading the newspaper. He read slowly, moving his lips, sometimes stopping to puzzle over a word. His glasses were always slipping down his nose. He would push them back up with one finger, continue reading, and five minutes later they would slip down again. "Mujtaba, your eyes are getting worse," Aunty would say from wherever she was. She could sense these things from the other room. "No, no," he would reply. "The newspaper print is getting smaller. They're doing it on purpose, I'm sure of it." He had opinions about everything. About the government, about the neighborhood, about the price of vegetables. Most of these opinions were wrong, or at least Aunty seemed to think so, because she was always correcting him, her voice rising slightly to carry through the house. "You don't know what you're talking about, Mujtaba." "I know perfectly well what I'm talking about." "You read one article in the newspaper and suddenly you're an expert." These conversations never went anywhere, but they seemed to be a necessary part of the day's structure, like breakfast or the afternoon prayers that Uncle Mujtaba performed with great regularity, rolling out his prayer mat in the corner of the front room, his movements slow and deliberate. The kitchen was Aunty's domain. She moved through it with the authority of someone who had spent half a century in that space. Everything had its place. The spice jars were arranged in a particular order. The cooking vessels hung on the wall in a specific sequence. She knew where everything was without looking, could reach for the salt or the chili powder in the dark if she had to. She made food with a kind of love that went beyond mere nourishment. A simple dal wasn't just dal—it was infused with her attention, her care, the particular way she fried the mustard seeds and the asafetida, the precise moment she added the turmeric. When you ate her food, you were eating her devotion, her years, her presence in the world. Uncle Mujtaba would sit at the small wooden table in the kitchen while she cooked, talking to her, commenting on what she was doing. "A little more salt, I think," he would suggest. "I know how much salt," she would say, not even looking at him. "Just a pinch more. For taste." "The taste is already perfect. You just like everything oversalted." He would be quiet for a moment, then start talking about something else—about the tenant upstairs who hadn't paid rent on time, about the pigeons that were getting into the courtyard, about a memory from thirty years ago that had suddenly come back to him. She would listen while she cooked, sometimes responding, sometimes not, her hands moving steadily through the work. There were no children. This was a fact that hung in the background of their lives like a piece of furniture everyone acknowledged but nobody mentioned directly. Sometimes visiting relatives would bring their children, and Uncle Mujtaba and Aunty would dote on them in a way that suggested a long, careful practice of this particular kind of devotion. "Come, beta, eat more," Aunty would say, piling rice onto their plates. "Your Aunty makes the best food in the city," Uncle Mujtaba would tell them, his voice carrying absolute conviction. The years had arranged themselves around their household in particular patterns. There was the rhythm of the seasons, the rhythm of prayer times, the rhythm of cooking and eating and sleeping and waking. There were festivals that came around like old friends, and they would prepare for them weeks in advance, planning menus, buying special ingredients, cleaning the house with particular thoroughness. During Eid, the house filled with the smell of meat cooking and sweets being made. Uncle Mujtaba would bring out his good shirt, the one he saved for special occasions, and Aunty would wear her finest saree. They would sit in the front room, receiving visitors, offering them food, speaking of old times and lost friends. "Do you remember Siraj?" Uncle Mujtaba would ask someone, and the memory would unfold like a story, full of detail and affection and the particular melancholy that comes from remembering people who are no longer alive. The neighborhood had changed over the decades. The lane where the house stood had become narrower and more crowded as new buildings were constructed. The trees had grown taller. The shops had changed hands multiple times. But Uncle Mujtaba and Aunty remained, constants in a changing landscape, anchors for the people around them. Neighbors would come to them with problems. The widow upstairs whose son had gotten into trouble with the police. The young couple downstairs who couldn't seem to have a child. The old man on the second floor who had fallen ill. Uncle Mujtaba and Aunty would listen, would offer what help they could, would sit with people in their difficulties. "What can we do?" Uncle Mujtaba would say to Aunty after someone had left, as if the question contained its own answer. "We do what we can," Aunty would reply. "And we pray. And we hope." In the evenings, they would sit together in the front room. Uncle Mujtaba would listen to the radio, old songs and news bulletins mixing together. Aunty would do handwork—mending clothes or making lace, her fingers moving with automatic precision. They wouldn't necessarily talk, but there was a companionship in the silence, a sense of two people who had been together so long that words were no longer entirely necessary. Sometimes Uncle Mujtaba would reach over and squeeze Aunty's hand. She would look up, give him a small smile, and go back to her work. These small gestures contained entire conversations, entire lifetimes. The house was full of objects that told the story of their life together. Photographs on the walls, faded now, showing a younger Uncle Mujtaba and Aunty in various configurations—at weddings, at family gatherings, in front of the house when it looked slightly different. Books on the shelves, some of them read so many times that the spines were broken and the pages were loose. Vessels and decorative items that had been gifts from relatives, from friends, from people whose names had long been forgotten but whose objects remained. Every object had a story, and Uncle Mujtaba knew them all. He could point to a particular vase and tell you about his cousin who had bought it from a shop in the old city forty years ago. He could identify a book not by its cover but by the particular way it felt in his hands, by the smell of its pages. The household continued. Seasons changed. Money came and went. People moved into the upper rooms and moved out again. The neighbors' lives intersected with theirs in various ways. But the essential fact remained unchanged: Uncle Mujtaba and Aunty were there, in their house, in their routines, in their quiet devotion to each other and to the life they had built together. When I think of that house now, I remember less the specific events that occurred there and more a feeling—a sense of continuity, of purpose, of a life being lived with intention and care. I remember the smell of the kitchen, the sound of Uncle Mujtaba's voice reading the newspaper, the way Aunty's hands moved as she worked. I remember the feeling of being inside their household, which was like being inside a particular kind of shelter, a space where time moved differently, where the present moment was honored and preserved. Uncle Mujtaba would sometimes stand in the courtyard in the early morning, before the heat of the day set in, looking at his plants. He had grown old along with them. Some of the plants were younger, newer additions. Others had been there almost as long as he had. "This one," he would say to me, pointing to a particularly gnarled climbing plant that had wound itself around a wooden frame, "this one was a cutting from my mother's house. I brought it here when I was a young man." It survived. It grew. It became part of the household, part of the landscape of that house, part of the accumulated history of Uncle Mujtaba's life in that place. That was what the house was—a record of survival, of persistence, of a life being lived with patience and care. It was not a grand house, not a notable house, not a house that would appear in any history book or be remembered for any particular achievement. It was simply a place where two people had lived, had loved, had worked, had created a space of warmth and hospitality that extended outward to everyone who entered it. And it continued, season after season, year after year, the quiet pulse of Uncle Mujtaba's household beating on, steady and sure, like a heart that had learned the rhythm of time itself.

 
Those days, I lived in the village with family. Our grandfather's house was densely packed into the neighborhood. Many houses clustered around a large courtyard in the middle—this house, that house, and so on all around it.


One uncle lived in the house right next to ours, his name was Mujtaba. His family consisted of two brothers and three sisters. Uncle had gone to Bahrain when he was barely grown—eighteen, nineteen at most—to take up the weight of supporting them all. From that tender age, the burden of the household fell on his shoulders. The family's survival ran largely through him. Among his siblings, he was the second eldest—the eldest was a sister. It fell to him to marry off his sisters, look after his younger brother, and bear the financial responsibility for the entire family.


And so the days passed in this way.


In the village, there was a custom: the younger you could marry off a girl, the better. An unmarried daughter growing older became a dishonor to her family. So after the eldest sister was married off, the younger ones were already growing up, meanwhile Uncle had to take his younger brother to Bahrain to find him work, manage endless needs and demands from all quarters—a mountain of responsibility resting on his shoulders alone. Though their mother lived, their father died when they were very small. By village custom, all family duties fell upon the eldest son. No matter how weak a man's character, he cannot shirk the weight placed upon his shoulders. Take a petty thief—if you look closely, he steals not for himself alone. Often, crushed under the burden of family responsibility, he finds himself helpless but to steal. Perhaps his mother hungers, or a sister, or a child of his own. To put rice in their mouths, to free them from want—so he slips from the mainstream of respectable life into the parade of the desperate. No one becomes a thief for pleasure. Everyone dreams of sitting on a throne and eating their fill in peace. It is only when life's demands become unbearable that one falls away.


So Uncle took his younger brother to Bahrain, married off his sisters, and together with him built a single-story brick house with four rooms. By then Uncle's own years had multiplied greatly, yet his responsibilities only grew heavier. The age for marriage had come and gone, but the weight of obligation pressed harder and harder on his shoulders. Usually, the elders in a family cannot escape their duties or shirk them—the younger ones climb up using the older ones' backs as stepping stones, reaching upward effortlessly, while the elder, like an ox yoked to a mill, remains bound to the grinding wheel forever, lifeless, spiritless, and yet dutiful. It is his fate to carry sorrow in his heart while smiling through his work for the family. Everyone misunderstands him, causes him pain, sometimes denies him even the smallest gratitude, and yet he cannot weep—for if he wept, he could not fulfill his responsibilities.


In the meantime, the younger brother came back home and married. Who in this world waits for anyone else? Meanwhile, Uncle still had not married. Slowly, everyone else's wedding was done, and now it was his turn—he was already past thirty-five by then.


He found favor with a girl. The first thing he liked was her hair, long, past her waist. No, he would have no other—if he must marry, it would be this one with her long hair, otherwise he would return to the gulf again. He said this plainly, without hesitation. And perhaps fortune smiled at last. The girl's family made inquiries and learned that if you were to list the ten best men in the world, Uncle Mujtaba's name would sit at the very top. They could marry their daughter to such a man without the slightest doubt.


The wedding day arrived in a flurry of celebration, and the whole neighborhood came.

# The House Transformed

Decorating the house, henna ceremonies, a stage built on the roof, guests arriving from all directions, everyone cooking together, eating whatever they pleased, dancing and singing however they wished—and so much more besides! The neighborhood became a paradise! It was as if the very gates of heaven had broken open, and drops of divine nectar came pouring down into that room. I was only a child then. I remember how Uncle Mujtaba stood on the rooftop stage in his wedding finery, and the glow of happiness radiated from his eyes and face in all directions.

Ah! The blessed beginning of married life—that most revered of earthly bonds—for a truly good man shackled by the disciplines of the world. Together now, through life’s span. The covenant to walk together through joy and sorrow, through rise and fall, through all the mundane laws of existence that bind two people as one. A new bride would come into the house. For a faithful man worn down by the weight of duty, this was the first time in his life that happiness had appeared in his face—happiness that had nothing to do with obligation.

And so the long-haired bride entered the house. All the children ran about, jumping and shrieking, eager to see her. The elders joined in too. No one cared much whether she was fair or dark, tall or short—the only whisper that went around was this: *Look, look at the bride’s hair! Like a fairy’s! How beautiful!*

Uncle Mujtaba stood in the courtyard, sometimes laughing out of shyness, sometimes hiding his face, sometimes trying to appear composed. Yet a light flickered in his eyes and features, as if he were saying to himself over and over: *I have her. I have won her.*

A few months passed in laughter, joy, singing, and merriment. Three months after the wedding, Uncle Mujtaba’s six-month leave—which he had taken for this—came to an end. He had to return to work, and now his responsibilities had multiplied. He left, leaving behind his family, his new bride, and the hope of a child to come.

Two years later, he returned to the country. As a gift, he received a lovely little daughter, fairy-like and radiant. He named her Faiza. Six months passed in contentment. Abundant happiness, floods of laughter, boundless love. It was as if the whole world had become a paradise!

After six months, he left for Bahrain. In the meantime, another child was born. This time a son. He named the boy Durjoy.

The son now walks on his own. Yet father and son have never met.

Then, suddenly, Uncle’s body grew weak. Some illness or other. His sponsor in Bahrain gave him another six months’ leave and told him to go home, see his wife and children, consult doctors there, get properly diagnosed and treated. *I will bear all the expenses.* Uncle returned home. It was the second time he saw his daughter, the first time he saw his son. Ah! What a world of joy—as if two divine children had simply tumbled from heaven into this house. The rooms overflowed with happiness, yet responsibility settled heavier on his shoulders, and alongside it all, that mysterious illness. The illness kept growing. The house was full of joy, but disease kept multiplying in Uncle’s body.

Three months of this doctor, that doctor. Running here, running there. But no doctor seemed able to identify the disease. Meanwhile, six months were nearly up. His wife was pregnant again—four or five months along.

Many tests were conducted. Now came the time to hear the results. His leave was extended from six months to a year. At last the report arrived. Uncle Mujtaba’s illness had been diagnosed. Brain tumor. And it had reached the final stage. The doctor explained: if a brain tumor is caught early, surgery can cure it, but at the final stage, surgery cannot be done—the risk to life is nearly ninety percent.

# The Hours Counted

There was nothing left to do now but count the hours until death. Uncle had learned the truth—his death was near. With that knowledge, he had to go on living for a few more days.

The house filled with weeping. The flower-laden garden seemed suddenly seized by a whirlwind. Standing in the courtyard, telling others of his illness, Uncle broke down completely. Today, for the first time, he desperately wanted to live. Today, for the first time in his life, he wanted to be happy. Sitting there in the courtyard, he pulled his children close and cried out like a helpless child, his body shaking with sobs.

From the next room, Uncle’s mother’s weeping was as if the sky itself were collapsing onto the earth. As if, could the heavens only tear open and bring a petition before God’s throne for her son’s life to be extended! She wept again and again, fainting in turns. His wife’s smiling face—from that day forward—turned dark as a moonless night. She was barely five or six years into marriage. So little time to taste life… as if the sun had set in broad daylight, long before evening should have fallen. How could one accept this? What sin brought such punishment? There was no one in our village as good a man as Uncle Mujtaba. Why did this have to happen to him?

A few months later came the birth of their third child. This time too, the father named him. Vijay. Standing at death’s door, wrestling with death itself, he named his son Vijay. One death bought another victory.

Time moved on. The doctor had given Uncle Mujtaba certain instructions—to walk every day, eat regularly, continue his medicines. And Uncle followed the doctor’s advice faithfully.

But alas, every letter of fate’s script seemed inviolable.

Slowly Uncle’s pace grew sluggish. Soon he needed a walking stick. He had to lean on the stick to move about. His hearing was no longer sharp. His speech grew unclear—half-formed words, a tangled mess of sound. Even asking for a glass of water became a struggle of stammering syllables. His eyesight too was failing. Everything blurred before him. Before everyone’s eyes, a warrior of life was gradually being erased.

Months later, Uncle could no longer walk even with the stick. Only if someone shouted could he hear. The half-formed words he once struggled with had long since vanished. His eyes saw nothing. Only if someone stood directly before him could he register that it was a person—nothing more than that.

Everyone watched as one side of Uncle’s body went completely numb. Now he couldn’t even sit up. Once, if someone supported him, he could still reach the bathroom. Not anymore. Now he had to remain lying down. Lying down, he attended to all his bodily needs.

Our house stood directly across from Uncle’s.

Sometimes, waking in the middle of the night, I would hear him weeping—a low, mournful sound. Uncle would lie awake the entire night, unable to sleep, while everyone else around him slept peacefully. Only he found no sleep. It was as if all the world’s sleep—every last bit of it—conspired against him, stood in opposition.

Not being able to sleep, sleep refusing to come—these two things are no less cruel than death itself. People do not ordinarily take sleeping pills day after day without good reason. Those who warn against such pills often don’t realize how desperately someone suffers, how they sink into dependence on sleep medicine just to escape such torment.

During the day, visitors came to see him. There was a time when Uncle would gesture, trying to say something, but soon even gestures became impossible. His entire body was paralyzed. When someone spoke to him, or when he felt the touch of a familiar hand, tears would roll silently down Uncle’s face.

Some would wipe away his tears. Ah, this man—who from childhood had set aside the entire world and become the strength on which so many depended, bearing the weight of his whole family upon his shoulders alone—today, that very man could not even manage to wipe his own tears with his own hands! What cruel irony life is, what an inescapable script fate has written!

The baby, just learning to sit, would crawl close to his father and touch him again and again, giggling with that wondering innocence of infants. When the child’s small hands found him, tears would flow down Uncle’s cheeks—tears that seemed to confess a million, a billion years of unforgivable crime: the crime of never once being able to hold his own son.

One evening. Dusk was fading. Uncle Mujtaba grew restless, strange and taut. Tears kept flowing from his eyes. I was nearby. I ran to my mother and told her, “Ma, Uncle Mujtaba seems strange, like he’s in such pain.” Mother understood something in that moment. She hurried to his bedside and called for his aging mother, his wife, and his sister. She said he was in his “chokrat”—the death agony. My mother had witnessed many deaths herself; she knew this sign. I sat beside her, staring straight into Uncle’s eyes. Suddenly, in a voice barely audible, he said, “When my daughter Faiza grows up, marry her to Bilur, Bandhan’s boy.” Bandhan was Uncle Mujtaba’s younger sister.

Only my mother and I were present when he spoke those words. The others were somewhere in the next room, busy with other things. That was Uncle’s last utterance. Slowly he began to fade. I watched as his eyes ceased to weep, and a certain hollow silence descended upon him. By then many had gathered.

A wail rose from all around.

Uncle suddenly gasped for breath, his mouth opening slightly, his eyes fixed upward. His body convulsed for some moments. In those spasms, in that desperate, failing breath, were bound together countless unfulfilled longings, words left unspoken, dreams shattered, desires that would never be completed.

I sat with unblinking eyes, and then—suddenly—Uncle stopped. He drew no more breath. His eyes no longer moved. His lips no longer trembled. Across his entire body spread all the silence of the world, and he departed this life. Against his silence, the sounds of others’ wailing and weeping only grew louder. Even a silent death gives birth to countless clamors.

My thoughts scattered suddenly. Though death seemed simple enough, that day I truly understood for the first time how excruciating death’s agony could be! I broke down crying. One memory after another flooded back—Uncle at his wedding stage, the moment I was eating cake, his shy gaze when dressed as a groom, the way he lavished affection on his children, lifting them high, the way he teased me, calling me Babri, Lakri, and other names, the way his gentle hand would stroke my head. Such strange, vivid scenes! I could see the living moments of Uncle’s living life in sharp relief, sitting here before his dead body. Suddenly I felt it—my chest had become hollow. Again and again the thought: something is missing, something is missing!

I cannot cry in front of people.

Yet my eyes kept filling with tears. I had no choice but to run into our room, shut the door, and weep for a long time afterward. I sobbed, I wailed, I cried out. Why did I weep? Who was he to me, after all? Why couldn’t I bear this death? Why was my heart breaking so?

No, he was not truly anyone to me, and yet in this very moment, it feels as though he is everything.

I think if Uncle would only stand up once, speak, laugh, walk, tease me. Just once—let this constant truth called death turn out to be a lie. Let it be a lie that Uncle Mujtaba is dead.

I began to weep again. Without the ability to cry, survival would have been impossible!

Weeping spread across the entire neighborhood. Uncle Mujtaba was dead. A faithful man, a man of the earth, a truly good man—Uncle Mujtaba was dead.

Bouma (that’s what we called Uncle’s wife) sat with her mouth hanging open, staring at Uncle’s expressionless face. She wasn’t speaking, wasn’t crying at all. With her youthful beauty still radiant, she had become a victim of life’s cruel indifference, rendered motionless. Who would say Bouma’s husband had died? Who would say all the happiness of Bouma’s life had simply faded away? Looking at her, it seemed this beautiful woman had barely come of age for marriage, as if all the colors of life had withered even before the henna on her wedding hands had dried. Instead of a red-colored sari, today she had changed the end of her life into the folds of a white one. The man who had been lost in the length of Bouma’s hair was no longer here.

The body was washed, wrapped in white shroud, and laid in the open room in front. Everyone came to see one last time, wiping their eyes as they filed out one by one. Mother and my sisters kept slipping in and out of consciousness at intervals.

No mother in the world has the strength to bear the sight of her dead child. No mother has ever been sent into the world with such strength.

But alas—a mother who carried her child in her womb for ten months and ten days, who showed him the light of this world, and now that very child had turned his face away from that light before her? What kind of mockery is this from the Creator? A mother who couldn’t bear even a mosquito bite on her child’s skin now had to bear her son’s death! Is there any torment worse than this?

The man who had been crushed under the weight of responsibility his entire life now lay so peacefully in death. Now was his time for rest. Nothing of this world weighed on his shoulders anymore. There was no trace of suffering on the sleeping Uncle’s face, no responsibility, no duty, not even a mark of bodily pain. He was free from all worry and thought now! Free—completely free from everything! But no freedom procession ever brings joy. Only processions of suffering.

Around the corpse, everyone sat in a circle with the Quran, reciting. Incense burned, and its smoke reminded everyone that every path has an end, that one day the train of life would pull into the final station and stop. One day rust would eat through the wheel of meaningless life. None of this arrangement would go with us; we would have to leave everything behind and depart.

Faiza sat beside her father, looking at him, crying ceaselessly. Faiza, who had only just begun to understand life, was asking God some question that day—we never knew what. Dujoy simply stared blankly, crying now and then from fear, keeping pace with the others, though he didn’t quite understand why. He didn’t even know the real reason for his own tears. He was still too young to know. Bijoy was playing with other children in the lane outside. He had encountered death for the first time before he even understood what life was.

The commotion grew. Bouma’s only brother had arrived. Now Bouma stood up, ran to him, embraced him, and began to cry with a shattered voice. Her brother couldn’t bring himself to look into his young sister’s eyes, couldn’t figure out what to say while holding her.

# The Afterlife of Memory

Sister-in-law threw herself against her brother’s chest and cried out, “My home is shattered, brother, my garden is ruined, everything is lost!” We all watched as the stones in her chest fell away, one by one.

After noon, Uncle was carried on a stretcher. He was laid to rest beside Father. Mujtaba Uncle, who had once walked beside him. Everyone, in their turn, must walk the path Father walked.

A man’s final goodbye. A simple-hearted man of earth returned to earth.

Now all of us wondered: how would this family survive? How would they endure?

Uncle’s colleague kept careful watch over their affairs. He announced that until the daughter was married, until the son could earn his own bread, the family would receive ten thousand taka every month as financial support.

Meanwhile, the question hung unresolved: would sister-in-law marry again? With three children depending on her, she chose not to. She was still in the bloom of her youth then, beauty still flowering from her. Proposals arrived from here and there. But sister-in-law, thinking of her children, held firm in her resolve.

The days passed. All sorrow transformed into strength. Death itself could not stop the current of life. Faiza, Durjoy, Bijoy grew taller. Money came each month from Bahrain, and Uncle’s brother also provided what was needed. The family knew no want. Life did not pause. It flowed on.

After Uncle’s death, his mother—whom we called Grandmother—nearly lost her mind. She did not laugh or eat. She spoke to no one. She stared, blank-eyed, at the ground or at whoever passed before her. She would sit in the doorway, mouth open toward the sky, perhaps remembering the life she had shaped with her own hands, now dust scattered on the earth. How her son would laugh with delight and call for her, how he would leap into her arms, clutch her and kiss her—it all came back to her, memory after memory. When he was hungry, he would ask his mother for food. Now, she wondered, did her son feel hunger still? How many days had he gone without eating? How was he?

Grandmother’s illness grew worse. A year after Uncle’s death, she died. She was buried right beside her son’s grave. The mother who had wailed for her son in the midnight hours now slept beside him. Like her son, all her weeping, her grief, her pain—all of it has stopped forever. Now she is silent. Now she rests. Even the most restless soul becomes, in the end, impossibly still.

Three figures sleep side by side as they once did in childhood—Father, Son, Mother. Father and Mother still hold their son tenderly between them.

Many years passed. I grew. And still, in the middle of the night, I weep for that man, that ordinary man. I think how the pain of a truth that refuses to disappear is as hard as death itself. The sight of life from so close to death returns to me again and again. I understand that even now, many weep for people like Uncle Mujtaba in this world—those pure-hearted souls. Some memories do not fade, even in death. And then, the next moment, another thought arrives: When I die, will anyone in this world hide somewhere and weep for me?

Sometimes certain death-defying people remain alive even after they die—bodiless, yet present. In someone’s love. In someone’s undying memory.

Faiza is growing. Like her mother, Faiza has become radiant as an apsara. Uncle’s last wish was to marry Faiza to Bilu, the son of Aunt Badhan. But Bilu and Faiza were only a year apart in age. Aunt Badhan, with her two daughters and one son, had lived in a small house beside her father’s home since her own marriage.

Aunt didn’t accept the groom’s family’s terms after the elopement. So Uncle remained a son-in-law living in the bride’s father’s house. They built a separate dwelling beside the main house and settled there. This arrangement meant Bandhan could visit her father’s home every single day.

Though Uncle spoke of Bilu and Faiza getting married, the two were like oil and water—constantly embroiled in quarrels. The moment one laid eyes on the other, it was nothing short of a third world war breaking out. The older Faiza grew, the more her beauty flourished. Fareed, the son of Uncle’s middle sister, was considerably older than Faiza. He hadn’t studied much, and his looks were unfortunate. As the days passed, Fareed’s attraction to Faiza only intensified. Finding Faiza incompatible with his plainness, he threw himself into managing every chore of his mother’s household. Sending this to Faiza, sending that to Faiza, checking if anyone bothered her, whether she faced any discomfort—he kept tabs on everything. Yet despite all his efforts, he couldn’t win her affection. When Fareed visited their house, Faiza would find excuses to disappear. She’d avoid his presence. Somehow, she simply couldn’t bear him.

When Fareed’s family broached the subject of marriage with Faiza, she refused outright. Fareed then plainly declared that without Faiza he would kill himself—no question. Meanwhile, Faiza was equally clear: if anyone so much as mentioned marriage to Fareed, she would take her own life, and they would all be held responsible.

A few years earlier, Aunt had shifted to the city to enroll her daughters in university and get Bilu admitted to college. Now Bilu and Faiza didn’t quarrel like before, but neither had they developed the kind of bond that leads to marriage. With such a small age gap between them, the question of marriage never even arose. Bilu was about to sit for his intermediate exams. Faiza was in her first year of intermediate. The age difference was merely one year.

Meanwhile, Faiza fell in love with a cousin from the neighboring house. Their ages differed by three or four years. Their affair proceeded in secret. No one knew where it would lead. Bilu showed little concern for Faiza’s affairs. When they did see each other, there were still occasional squabbles, just as before. Whenever the chance arose, the two would hurl abuse and trade blows. They kept insulting each other. Bilu looked like a prince, certainly, but not every prince is tolerated by every princess—which is why nothing came of it between them. The truth is, love never truly awakened in either of their hearts. Love doesn’t come from thought or deliberation; you can’t summon it through words. Even with the greatest effort, love simply won’t come.

Fareed, meanwhile, grew desperate to marry Faiza.

On one side stood her choice: Mamun. On another, her father’s choice: Bilu. On yet another, Aunt’s choice: Fareed. Who would win, who would lose in this three-cornered struggle—only the Creator knows. The Creator stirs love to life for some, setting the world ablaze, while for others He mingles indifference, leaving their accounts perpetually unbalanced. Nothing seems to fit. Love cannot be born from calculation and careful thought—at best that makes business! So many accounts of life refuse to follow any formula. Sometimes we must settle life’s equations through mere judgment. Oh, life—you eternal unsolved riddle! Your final accounting forever uncertain!