He looked around with wistful eyes, the apparition of a teenage girl in blue satin chemise and white pajamas configured in the air between the Banyan tree and the mango grove. She looked real and alive, hurtling down a spine-like trail, her milk-white nape flashing each time her tresses swung from side to side. He felt the firm pressure of a desperate pain, because he knew what was lost couldn't be recovered.

She used to come to this park every Friday in the afternoon, accompanied by her parents, two brothers and one sister. She was young, and her complexion reminded him of the colour of fresh milk squirting from udder. His friends often joked that she was too fair, that she was going to embarrass any man who married her because she would glow in the dark. He could hear the noise of melancholy inside his head, its clenched fist pounding on the walls of his heart, making him shudder in the bitter sensation of a futile life.

He used to watch her from a corner of the park, skipping and running like a sylvan beauty, her pliant body bouncing in swings and seesaws, then coming down the slides with her legs straightened together like a sabre charging straight at his heart. Many a Friday that saber ripped through his heart, sending him home with a wound that couldn't be nursed. Every Friday he returned to the park with all the strength of his desperation to tell her that he couldn't bear the pain of longing for her.

But then his courage melted at her sight in the manner darkness vanishes at the coming of light. Once she came to him to ask for time, and he told her about the weather. Another time she asked him for small change and he gave her large bills with trembling hands. He could never carry on a complete conversation with her, because his head would get agitated like an upset stomach and disrupt his thoughts. He would feel dizzy and nervous, his voice choked by an uneasiness that gathered like an angry mob.

She didn't come to the park for three Fridays in a row, and he remained in a state of dementia, sleepless at night, restless by day, appetite lost, tears in the eyes, a stream of emptiness convulsing inside him like a sea grown harsh. The park looked desolate to him, the streams of people appearing like silhouettes in a haunted house. The swings, the seesaws, the trail between the Banyan tree and the mango grove, everything was deserted and bleak, a sense of loneliness gripping him with cutting and dull hands, squeezing so hard that he couldn't breathe.

As he sat on the bench under the blazing sun hanging over his head, he thought of how life burned each day like a fuse, until one day the bomb went off. Memories were nothing but the lengthening trail of crumbling life. He started to sink into a delirium as if the heat of the midday sun was affecting his head, as if remembering too much for too long had made his head spin while he ingested the silence of the park, the silence which had absorbed the sounds of his life.

When she returned to the park after a month, her tresses were rolled into chignon, her hands coloured with Henna, earrings, necklace and bangles had transformed a restless young girl into a cautious woman. She avoided the seesaw and the slide, taking only the swing for a while, but mostly talking to a man, who was struggling to keep his composure. She introduced that man to him as her husband, and while he didn't know what to say, he forced a smile on his face in the most difficult performance of his life.

As he sat on the bench under the scorching sun, he could still sniff the smell of that sorrow circulating in the air of this park, the sense of desolation and abandonment, which pierced him, like thousand spears. How could love, the most profound and the purest form of man's emotions, condemn a man to burn in the hell of his own deprecation? For all these years that elapsed, he never wanted to visit this park, because he was afraid of being reminded that he was defeated in love.

The sun had already begun to descend in the western sky, the noise of people and birds filled the air with a sense of chaos that resonates with all things coming to end. A middle-aged woman with two children entered the park from its eastern side and sat down under the Banyan tree. Her saffron sari with black borders accentuated her lustrous complexion, her hairs neatly combed into a knot in the back of her head with stripes of gray running across it. She looked elegant in the diminishing light of the day, which reminded him of what his friends used to say. She lit up the air around her with the halo of her beauty that was not tarnished by time.

Old age brings the gambler's instinct to a man as his own sense of coming to an end gives him the courage to raise his stakes. He stood up and walked towards the woman, organising his thoughts in his head like an actor rehearsing his lines. By that time the woman had recognised him with a smiling face. He took a long breath and asked her what had brought her to the park after so many years and who were those children who came with her.

She replied that she had been coming to the park with her grandchildren ever since they started going to school. She said she looked for him every day she came and hoped she was going to meet him again. He asked about her husband, and she said he was still alive and that was all she ever cared to know about her man. Then she said women were like rivers where people threw anything they liked and assumed it was fine when the sheet of water on the surface restored its calm. Conjugal life, she added, was more habit than harmony because true love died on the altar of obligations when man and woman took each other for granted. She never loved the man whom she had married, she said staring at the sky.

He shored up his courage and told her how much he would have enjoyed being with her if he only knew that she was again coming to the park. She threw her head backward and unlocked her hairs with a few jerks, redoing them with magician's sleight of hands.

He told her that she looked like a fairy flapping her wings when she folded her hands behind the head to roll up the hairs. She asked him where was he all these years with his play of words.

The sun was now dipping in the west, smearing the sky with an orange glow that shone on the man and the woman who were facing each other. She said that if he had told the time and given the small change, when she had asked for them, she wouldn't have married another man. As tears rolled down his cheeks, he looked at the sun and held her hands. While she promised to love him for the rest of her life, he repeatedly said that he shouldn't have waited so long before he returned to the park.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.