Chapter 7 / 51 · 2 min

6.023 × 10²³

I could have lived my entire life without meeting Moumita again.

She had changed completely.

Back at university she was ordinary, the kind of girl you barely noticed except on Thursdays when she dressed up.

But today she looked different.

Elegant.

Refined.

Beautiful.

The middle-class girl I once knew had vanished beneath expensive clothes and cosmetics.

She stood holding another man’s hand.

Sabbir’s hand.

Exactly the way she used to hold mine.

And suddenly the spaces between my fingers tingled with old memories.

We had studied engineering together.

Our relationship had started naturally.

No formal proposal.

No ceremony.

Just two people falling in love.

I still remember sitting on the campus stairs after a Data Structures lab.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“Do I really need to say it?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. I love you.”

“How much?”

I grinned.

“6.023 × 10²³.”

She frowned.

“Only that much?”

“Do you know how big that number is? That’s Avogadro’s Number. Enough grains of sand to cover the Earth twice.”

She laughed.

“Still not enough.”

My love may have been finite.

But it wasn’t small.

It remained constant.

Hers, however, slowly shrank.

Then disappeared.

At the end of third year she got married.

Before the wedding she came to see me.

I was in the hospital recovering from an accident.

She wore a blue sari.

The same color she loved.

Tears filled her eyes.

“Forgive me.”

“For what?”

“My marriage is fixed.”

“I know that. But I don’t know if you’re actually going through with it.”

Her sadness disappeared.

A hardness replaced it.

“I can’t go against my family.”

“His name?”

“Sabbir.”

Four years later I saw them together in a shopping mall.

They looked happy.

Maybe happier than she would have been with me.

Something tightened in my throat.

I couldn’t swallow.

The pain was unbearable.

Apparently, 6.023 × 10²³ units of love don’t disappear so easily.

Leaning on my crutches, I turned away.

There was no point envying someone else’s happiness.

Though I couldn’t decide whether I was angry at Moumita…

Or at the crutches.