Chapter 46 / 51 · 2 min

Kirin's Killer

Translated from Bengali

“Tushan, can you ever truly forgive me? For killing your son like that?”

I let out a long sigh. Nayeera was talking about this exact day, three years ago. The day she accidentally dropped him from the roof of an eighty-one-story building. From that height, the eight-month-old baby’s brain had spilled across the street. Nayeera hadn’t screamed even once. She had only stared, struck with astonishment. That brain had been built inside her womb. With a little warmth and a great deal of love.

I held Nayeera tightly and said, “Kirin was your son too, Nayeera. It was an accident. Don’t blame yourself.”

Nayeera kept crying, helpless. I almost told her a final truth, then stopped. A truth I’d tried four hundred and eighty-one times to make someone believe. What was the point of saying it.

Nayeera kept sobbing. A fierce anger rose in me toward the designers of this world.

The day people stopped aging, this drama began. Every three years, our memories are reset. For some strange reason it has never once worked on me, which is why I sit here carrying one thousand four hundred and forty-three years of real memory and thousands of years of false ones.

I know there is no one named Kirin. There never was. Just my wife this season, Nayeera, and a fragment of a novel deliberately inserted into my brain. When I see this guilt living inside Nayeera, I want to wrap my hands around the throat of that novel’s writer and kill him.

Why couldn’t my life have just been ordinary? I only wanted to be born, marry a girl in my youth, grow old with her, and die in the most natural way. I never wanted to play a thirty-five-year-old in four hundred and eighty-two novels.

Nayeera is crying. Let her.