When Love Fades

We're going through our "nothing feels good anymore!" phase now, Shubhra. We're having a really, really hard time. Eating ice cream doesn't cheer us up like it did as children anymore, there's no more scrambling over that fizzy Sprite in glass bottles for ten rupees.

Now there's plenty of money in bags, wallets, tucked between book pages, but standing at the corner store, I can't figure out 'what would actually taste good.' The shopkeeper just hands me whatever he feels like. Even those "hidden-away clothes" Eids don't exist anymore. We don't hide clothes away anymore—we buy clothes to post photos on Facebook ahead of time. We buy so many, so very many clothes... so much that none of them stir any particular feeling anymore.

For us now, spending holidays means Facebooking or long daytime sleeps. Yet I wasn't like this before. I had very consciously mixed myself with rice and lentils and set myself apart on a steel plate. But when I became fried rice on a glass plate, I never realized it—no one let me realize it, really.

Amid all my illness, restlessness, and physical and emotional pain, I had only one joy—you. While posting photos of you day and night on Facebook and writing about love constantly, when our love got buried under likes and comments, I never even noticed.

Tell me, didn't you notice either, Shubhra? Why didn't you tell me? In my thirty-two years of life, apart from being able to love you, I don't have any other great achievement. I've learned to feel, that I am you and you are me. Who could I have entrusted such a profound realization to?

To Facebook? No way... impossible. It's a faceless book. It doesn't understand emotion, love, touch—it only understands some foolishly edited, perfected photos. Yet you were like perfume made from jasmine's fragrance to me; a tiny bottle but so precious. You were like Bibhutibhushan's 'Aranyak'—strange but wonderful. You were like my tears; hidden but sacred.

I love you intensely. I love you several times more now than I used to before. In this life, the next life, in every life you are mine; and I am yours too. Because all this grandeur, all these saris, jewelry, anklets, bindis, alta I'm putting on as I prepare—who is it for? For you, so I can spend the next life with you.

This precious thing—that I love you—I won't come to say on this cheap Facebook anymore. I'll go to the bamboo grove behind our village home and shout, "Shubhra, I love you!" so that it echoes back again and again with just one thing: "Shubhra, I love you!"..."Shubhra, I love you!"... "Shubhra, I love..."