Chapter 13 / 51 · 3 min

Blue Naphthalene

Translated from Bengali

My Story

I think I really did love Nila. I just couldn’t understand it twenty years ago.

If I had understood, I would never have told her, “I’m leaving. The boy’s decent. Marry him.”

I still remember the pale look on her face that day.

Looking away, hiding the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes, Nila said, “I knew it, Subrata. I knew this was exactly what you’d say.”

“You knew?”

“Yes. You never loved me. If you had, you wouldn’t be letting me go today. You’d tell me to wait a few more days. That you’d find a job soon.”

I tried to smile. How simple the arithmetic of life is for women.

“These things only happen in novels, Nila. Go on. Leave.”

The lines of her face hardened.

“I’m going. Take back your letters full of lies. All those flowery words about love you used to write.”

Seeing the letters in her hand, I felt something. For some reason I wanted to take her hands in mine and say, don’t go. I really do love you. Maybe not very much. But whatever love I’m capable of, it belongs to you alone.

I didn’t say it.

I said, “Throw the letters away.”

Nila cried. Nineteen letters. She threw them down and left.

She never came back. I never called her back, not out loud.

I called her in my mind. Even on the day I married Sania, I called her. Then, slowly, I forgot. I grew busy with wife and children. Nine-to-five office, dropping the kids at school, checking on their studies, taking Sania out now and then, buying her this and that to keep her happy.

Ah, what an ideal husband and father I was.

But today, twenty years later, on this ugly evening of thin drizzling rain, exhausted under the weight of typical responsibilities, I can’t stand Sania anymore. I search for Nila inside Sania. I never find her. So I call her again, in my mind. I want to scream and cry. Why did I tell her to leave? What would it have cost me to wait one more year?

I think about the letters a lot. By now they’ve decayed, neglected, dissolved into the earth. The same letters that once knew the touch of a beautiful, conservative, first-year university girl named Nila.

Nila’s Story

Twenty years is a long time.

Nila had memorized all nineteen letters. In the beginning she read them every day. Her husband, Sabbir. She had tried many times to love Sabbir as a wife should. She couldn’t. Today Nila loves Sabbir, as much love as the father of her children deserves. That much.

Nila’s love is stored in a secret box in a secret place in the bedroom. Nineteen letters, covered with a few mothballs of naphthalene.

Love comes once in a life, or never at all. The white naphthalene kept the nineteen letters from rotting.

And the blue naphthalene kept one blue emotion from fading, for twenty years.