Shimul

There is an old saying in Bangla, "আলোর নীচেই অন্ধকার". The nearer the church, the farther from God. Mrittika had been close to both, living directly next to an old mosque, under the watchful eyes of her fairly religious parents. But her faith was faltering. She lived in Dhaka after all, a place that made faith difficult to sustain. 

Her beloved Dhaka, a beautiful, luminous, chaotic city. A suffocating, devastating demonic city. It had her bound, not bewitched, but she did love it most ardently. After all, she was built to; she was made of the same things as it was: a cacophonous traffic of thoughts that raced through her head, her skin as soft as the petals of the dolonchapa that bloomed in the heavy monsoon and as warm as a mid July afternoon. The twinkle in her eyes that rival the glint of the sun gleaming over the ripples of the waves in the Bay of Bengal and her tears salty like the water into which fishermen threw their nets in hopes of catching some ilish or rui. 

It was mid-March. Winter was leaving hastily after failing to impress the inhabitants of the city, their thick shawls and cable-knits left unfolded still. Mrittika was late for an afternoon class she didn't want to go to. She rushed downstairs, hailed a rickshaw and got on. 

But the rickshaw-wala didn't take the usual route. Not exactly.

At first, the cracked sidewalk lined with scattered shimul flowers and bustling passersby seemed maddeningly familiar. The flowers covered the sidewalks–fallen, like the spoils of a war which could never be won–only to be blown away by the wind. There were days she romanticised these sights and smells, nauseating as some of them were, to avoid going insane. But on that day, the familiar soon turned foreign. The sky had swiftly gone from pink to orange to crimson to a violet that blended into a deep demure navy, further up the sky. The lower end was streaked with a bright flash of silvery-golden light and soon the entire road was bathed in that unseasonably warm glow when a sudden, sweeping gust of sand started to swirl around the rickshaw. Mrittika clamped her eyes shut, confused and stricken by the sudden sandstorm that seemed terribly out of place. But it only lasted for one errant heartbeat. 

And then silence. 

When she opened her eyes again, the entire street had emptied. Her grey haired rickshaw puller had also disappeared, and her heart pounded with a kind of fear that she recalled only experiencing as a child. Back when the unknowable and the incomprehensible were still the norm. She got off the rickshaw. The silence felt too silent. It rang in her ears violently when the ringing of a phone cut through. Mrittika looked at her hands but it wasn't her phone that was ringing. So where did that come from? It rang once again and only then did she turn around to find the source of the sound that broke through this disquieting silence.

There, at the end of the street, where her rickshaw now stood abandoned, was a girl. Relieved at finally having found another sign of life, Mrittika rushed over to the girl who was now fumbling with her phone. 

The girl seemed fairly ordinary, like any other Mrittika might have come across at her university. She was dressed in a light blue sleeveless blouse and a pair of jeans–the fit of which Mrittika immediately found herself envying as none of her own dresses ever seemed to fit equally well around her waist and thighs. Her hands were covered in chunky silver oxidised bangles and she wore a tip on her forehead. She smiled, apologetically. 

The light seemed to get dimmer where they now stood, swiftly getting darker. As if night fell only over this particular 10-square-foot space of the street. Mrittika smiled back, equally as apologetic. 

"Excuse me, do you have any idea what just happened?" She asked the girl. The girl stared back at her and asked a question that made Mrittika's heart beat faster. "Don't you recognise me?" 

"I'm so sorry. Do I know you?" Mrittika asked, hesitantly, as the khichuri from her lunch now churned in the pit of her stomach.

"Of course you do." She smiled a smile that exuded a kind of sadness Mrittika knew too well. The kind she was born with, that was built deep inside like an emergency shelter into which her life often forced her to retreat into. It was at once strangely comforting and deeply unsettling. 

She reached out a hand to touch Mrittika's wrist. It was ice-cold.

Almost as suddenly as the silence had fallen, it vanished. The girl said something, almost desperately, trying to be heard over the gust of the forceful wind. 

"Apni koi jaben?" ("Where will you go?") At least that's what she thought the girl had said. It was nearly impossible to hear over the rumble of the wind that had picked up its speed, sending dust everywhere as Mrittika once again closed her eyes. 

"Koi jaben?" 

She opened her eyes. The rickshaw wala looked at her, impatiently waiting for an answer, mouth set in a scowl as if he had had just about enough of daydreaming 20-something-year-olds. 

Mrittika looked around. Everything seemed to have gone back to normal, she thought. She wasn't sure if it ever had been abnormal to begin with. She wasn't sure of anything at all.

She got home a little after 6 PM that evening. When she walked into the living room, her mother was reading the morning news, as she often did in the evenings. 

She was ranting about something in the news that Mrittika paid little mind to, until something caught her attention. 

"...so they just killed her", she heard her mother say. 

"What?" Mrittika said, snapping out of her daze and grabbing the paper her mother was holding. 

It was a small article, accompanied by a black and white photo of a girl. Somewhere in the south of the city, a young girl was killed by her husband early this morning. Apparently, she had been married off to a man about 15 years older than her, something that was supposedly a norm in her religion. The man had forced her into covering herself from head to toe and tortured her relentlessly for all of 18 months of their marriage. And finally, this morning, when he discovered that she tried to record the events with a hidden phone to show people her experience, he killed her. At his confession, he had simply admitted, "I tried very hard to turn her into a woman of God but I failed. So I sent her up to Him." 

Mrittika turned her attention to the black and white picture. She recognised her immediately. It was the same girl she saw that afternoon. The article said her name was Shimul.

Disoriented, Mrittika went into the bathroom to freshen up and her hands shook ever so slightly as she ran them under the water. She looked up into the mirror. A large red flower petal was nestled into the collar of her shirt. As she picked it up, it slowly dawned on her and a nagging, familiar sadness took over. She recalled the girl's face again. It came to her often since that day, not quite like a nightmare but more like vivid memories of lived lives that manifested into recurring dreams at dawn. 

Of course she knew her. She had always known her. 

After all, Dhaka was full of shimul flowers.

Montaha Absar is a contributor.