s.story 7: Stillness

A sequel to Elsewhere

Part I

Saira stirred her tea counterclockwise, slow and soundless. The teaspoon never touched the sides. She watched the leaves spin like indecisive dancers, her face composed in that half-soft, half-blank way that revealed nothing. Light from the café’s high windows slid over her wrist like silk—warm, indifferent. Outside, Dhaka moved in its usual, worn rhythm: the churn of rickshaws in heat-hardened alleys, the low murmur of conversations woven into dust and motor oil.

Miran was late.

She didn’t mind. Not on the surface. He was always like this—arriving not quite late enough to be disrespectful, but always with just enough delay to signal that he was coming from somewhere else. Something else. Someone else?

She didn’t know. Not really. And that uncertainty had taken root somewhere behind her ribcage. Not a bloom. A stone.

When he did arrive, breath slightly uneven, shirt creased in a way that suggested either hurry or indifference, she smiled. She always smiled. It was part of her architecture—like her scent, or her silence.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” she said.

Miran didn’t deny it. “Didn’t feel like sleeping.”

She nodded as though he’d said something meaningful.

They sat in silence for a moment. The café around them moved in small, practiced gestures—someone ordering in hushed tones, a spoon clinking, the muted flick of a page. She traced the rim of her cup with her thumb. “You’ve been at Rayhan’s?”

He didn’t flinch. But he didn’t answer either.

She didn’t press. In some relationships, truth was an offering. In theirs, it arrived on delay—like the scent of rain reaching a courtyard long after the first drop.

They talked of mundane things. Her office had replaced the old water filter with one that gurgled loudly whenever someone filled a bottle. His building’s elevator had finally been repaired, though it now trembled at the fifth floor. They talked about a news piece on mango adulteration. Dhaka things.

Then came a pause, a longer silence that lingered between them—not strained, but expectant.

“I dreamt about my father again,” he said, finally.

“Oh?”

“He was younger than he is now. And taller.”

She waited. Miran was not a man easily drawn out, but sometimes, if you let the silence grow long enough, something bloomed.

“He didn’t say anything. Just stood by the gate. Looked at me like I was someone else.”

Saira reached across the table and touched the edge of his wrist. A fraction of a gesture. “Maybe you’re still becoming.”

He didn’t respond. Not in words. But she saw his shoulders lower slightly, as if something unclenched.

Over the following weeks, their meetings settled into a rhythm. Not every day, not quite predictable. But frequent enough to be noticed. Always casual—coffee here, a bookstore stop there, occasional dinners. Walks that ended with no conclusions. Saira didn’t ask for definitions. She simply made room. And in her silence, Miran softened, not into clarity, but into presence.

She learned how he took his tea depending on mood—milk when nostalgic, black when anxious. She noted the way he cracked his knuckles when unsure of a decision. The way he always looked at the ceiling before answering a hard question. These were not things most people noticed. But Saira noticed.

One night, in the lull of post-dinner stillness, they walked through the narrow streets of Kalabagan. The rickshaws had mostly vanished for the night. A streetlight flickered above them.

“I used to live in this lane,” he said. “Before the curated life.”

“You never told me.”

“I try not to remember it.”

Saira let that settle.

A pause. Then he added, “My room had bars on the windows. I thought freedom would look different.”

“And does it?”

He looked up at a rusted balcony, then at her. “It’s quieter than I imagined.”

A pause. He turned to her, then, as they reached the darker end of the street.

“Do you ever wonder if we build our lives around what hurts less?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice even. “But I think that’s okay. Sometimes the absence of pain is the closest thing we get to peace.”

He looked at her then—not past her, not through her, but at her. It was a look that stayed with her for days.

On another evening, she brought him to a tiny rooftop eatery in Dhanmondi. It wasn’t listed on Google Maps. The place served lentil fritters with coriander chutney and had mismatched plastic chairs that leaned ever so slightly to one side.

“This place is a disaster,” he said, laughing, balancing his cup of murky tea on a bent metal table.

“And yet,” she said, “it feels like something real.”

Later, when the sun dipped and the lights below blinked on like a scattered net, he said, “I envy how you move through the world.”

“How do I move?”

“Like you’ve made peace with not being understood.”

She smiled. “That’s because I stopped expecting to be.”

He looked at her again, that same long gaze from Kalabagan. But he didn’t reach for her. And she didn’t lean in.

They met at the art exhibit near Dhanmondi Lake one afternoon in July. She wore a Tangail Handloom sari, the kind that creased if you breathed too hard. He wore jeans, a white tee.

She studied the sculptures while he watched her.

“Do you think art should be explained?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I think the good ones explain us.”

At the final installation—a suspended frame of rusted iron and silk threads—he paused.

“It looks like a doorway that’s given up,” he murmured.

Saira stood beside him. “Or one that’s still waiting.”

He didn’t say anything else. But when they left, he walked closer to her. Not touching, but near enough for the edges of his shirt to brush her arm.

One evening, as the sun slid quietly down the buildings and cast long diagonal shadows across her balcony floor, she asked, “Do you think you’d be different if you hadn’t started all this? The posts, the attention.”

Miran leaned back against the chair, his fingers grazing the rim of his cup. “Sometimes I wonder what I’d be without the echo. Who I’d be if no one ever clapped.”

She let the silence settle before speaking. “I think you’d still be worth hearing.”

He looked at her, not with surprise, but something closer to fatigue. “It’s not about worth. It’s about needing to be seen to believe you exist.”

“You do exist, Miran.”

He didn’t reply. But something in his shoulders shifted, like a held breath released.

Once, she almost said it. Almost asked: Do you love him? Rayhan. Do you still?

But she didn’t. Because the answer didn’t matter, not yet. Because what mattered was that he hadn’t left. He still came to her when the city got too loud, when the world asked too much.

One morning, as they walked through the fog-laced paths of Gulshan Lake Park, he suddenly stopped.

“Sometimes I think I’m just tired of performing.”

She nodded. “Then don’t.”

He turned to her, eyes rimmed with sleeplessness. “But I don’t know how to stop.”

Saira reached up and smoothed a crease from his collar.

“Then let someone help you.”

He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just let her hand rest there for a moment longer than necessary.

And then, one day, after a dinner that ended with unfinished sentences and too much ginger in the tea, Saira lingered in Miran’s apartment while he folded laundry. It wasn’t new to her—the soft ticking of his fan, the faint scent of sandalwood that clung to the linen curtains. She’d been here before, many times. But that night felt different. He moved more slowly. Let her stay longer.

“You’ve changed the books,” she said, pointing to the new stack near the window.

“I rotate them,” he said. “When they stop speaking to me.”

She reached for one, thumbed through the margins. “And when do people stop speaking to you?”

He paused, mid-fold. “When they start asking questions I can’t answer.”

She looked at him then, fully. “I won’t stop asking. But I won’t rush the answers either.”

He offered her tea. It was bitter, over-steeped, but she drank all of it.

That night, he didn’t ask her to stay. And she didn’t offer.

But when she left, he walked her to the lift, and waited until the doors closed. His reflection in the chrome surface lingered, twin shadows parting.

And when she returned home, she wrote one line in her journal: The crack is growing. And light gets in.

Part II

The first time she followed him—not with footsteps, but with attention—it was a Thursday afternoon. He had told her he needed to catch up on work. But the algorithm did not lie. A reel posted from a rooftop bar in Banani appeared in her feed. The clink of glasses, the soft pulse of background music, a sunset filtered through amber tones. Miran wasn’t visible, but she recognized his voice, offscreen, saying something about the light.

She didn’t message him that night. She didn’t need to.

The next day, he came over with dessert from Shumi’s. Black forest pastry, her favorite. He handed them to her like a peace offering, already half-aware of the lie he had told.

“I thought you were working last night,” she said gently.

“I was. In my head.”

He smiled, but it didn’t land. She took the sweets and placed them in the fridge without comment. When she returned, he was staring out the window at a pigeon nesting between the AC unit and the window ledge.

“She comes back every year,” Saira said.

“Why?”

“Maybe it’s the only place that feels like home.”

He looked at her, then turned away again. She could see the tension in his jaw, the way his fingers traced the edge of the windowsill.

Their conversations grew quieter. Less performative. She stopped dressing up for their tea sessions. He stopped bringing curated updates. A subtle shift. But the heaviness of what lingered—between them and inside them—hung in the air like an unspoken question.

One afternoon, he asked, “Do you think comfort is a kind of love?”

She thought for a moment. “I think it’s the foundation of love. But not the whole structure.”

He nodded, almost absently. “Then I think I’m building with one kind of brick.”

That evening, he left early.The door clicked shut behind him, leaving her alone with the quiet.

One humid Friday, they wandered the shaded edges of Old Dhaka, weaving through alleys where time seemed reluctant to move forward. At a shop selling old clocks and forgotten radios, Saira paused.

“This one,” she said, pointing to a scratched wooden clock. “Reminds me of my nani’s house.”

“Did it work?”

“No. But she adjusted her day by light and Azan, not by ticking.”

He turned the clock over. Inside, a frayed wire dangled.

“Looks repairable,” he said.

“Some things are better left symbolic.”

They didn’t buy the clock.

Rayhan’s name came up less often, though his absence hovered like a watermark in the back of Saira’s mind. Once, during a power cut, Miran scrolled through old photos on his phone. She noticed the subtle change in his expression when he paused at one—a grainy image, dim but full of something soft, a smile that reached the eyes. He didn’t show it to her, just tilted the screen away, as though shielding something fragile.

“I don’t understand your friendship with Rayhan. What is it?” she asked, her voice quieter than she intended.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not a no.”

He didn’t argue. Instead, he sighed, a sound that felt too heavy to speak aloud. “I think,” he said, “some people arrive to show us who we are, not to stay.”

“And some stay to help us become that person,” she added.

They didn’t speak for several minutes. The fan resumed its rhythm once the power returned, as though nothing had happened.

One day, she found herself at a dinner with his friends—branding consultants, digital architects, one person who claimed to be a ‘story engineer.’ They smiled too much. Used phrases like “market presence” and “empathy as a design principle.”

Miran seemed at ease. Performing again, but fluently.

Afterward, in the rickshaw ride home, she leaned her head against the side railing.

“You’re different with them.”

“I’m different with everyone.”

“But you’re quieter with me.”

“Because with you, I don’t have to explain myself.”

She nodded, but a small part of her wondered whether that was intimacy or withdrawal.

They took a weekend trip to Srimangal. A short retreat. Tea gardens, misted hills, the slowness of green.

In the guesthouse, he stood shirtless at the balcony, cigarette in hand, the night pressing in from the trees.

“I used to think love was supposed to be transformative,” he said.

She lay back on the cane bed. watching the slow dance of shadows cast by the lantern light. “It can be. But it doesn’t always have to change who you are. Sometimes it just holds space.”

He turned to look at her. “You’re good at that.”

“Thank you.”

That night, they made love. Not urgently, but with the quiet intensity of people trying to both connect and escape. It was tender and full, but afterward, as they lay tangled in the cotton sheets, the air between them carried a question neither dared to voice. She traced the curve of his shoulder, and he watched the ceiling fan spin shadows into the dark. It wasn’t regret. But it wasn’t certainty either.

The day he first mentioned marriage, it wasn’t grand. They were eating shingara at a roadside stall.

“My mother asked about you again,” he said. “I think she suspects.”

“She likes me.”

“She does. She asked if I’d brought up the question.”

Saira raised an eyebrow. “And did you?”

“I said I was thinking about it.”

“And now?”

“I’m still thinking.”

She sipped her tea. “Let me know when the thinking is done.”

That night, she wrote in her journal: He keeps me close enough to matter. Not close enough to dissolve.

Later that week, they sat in the backseat of a friend’s car, stuck in traffic near Panthapath. Rain slid down the windshield like slow tears.

“If we do get married,” he said, eyes on the blur of brake lights, “would you mind if I still talked to Rayhan? I know you are not a big fan of my friends.”

Her fingers paused mid-text on her phone.

“No,” she said. “But I’d want to know that you were here. With me.”

He didn’t reply. But his hand rested gently on her thigh, an unspoken thank you.

They visited Miran’s parents again. His mother had made fish curry too spicy. His father barely looked up from the newspaper.

Miran’s mum asked, “Are you two finally making it official?”

Saira smiled. “Maybe.”

Mishal raised an eyebrow at Miran. Said nothing.

Later, on the narrow balcony, Mishal lit a cigarette. “You sure?” he asked.

“No,” Miran said. “But I’m tired of being unsure.”

Miran met Rayhan at a BHN electronic music event, a night that stretched on with the kind of heavy, throbbing rhythm that filled the air like smoke. They moved through the crowd, swept by the beats, the lights flashing in patterns they could barely follow. The night felt easy, casual—until, after some time, they took the Molly. The world around them blurred, senses sharpened, everything suddenly glowing with a warmth that wasn’t just from the lights but from within.

Laughter came easily, their bodies swaying in synchrony with the music, a euphoric current pulling them closer. The atmosphere felt like a dream, the music a constant hum that wrapped around their hearts. They danced, not just with each other but with the very air itself, intoxicated by the beat, the lights, and the presence of one another.

When the event ended, they made their way back to Miran’s apartment, still high, still full of that same, electric energy. Everything felt vivid—the hum of the city outside, the soft click of the door as it shut behind them. They were open, exposed, the walls between them thinner than they had ever been before.

Miran sank into his leather armchair, Rayhan settling opposite him, the space between them now charged, not with words but with the weight of what lingered unspoken. Miran broke the silence, his voice soft but inviting. “Come sit with me.”

Rayhan hesitated for just a moment, caught in the softness of the invitation, before moving toward him. Miran pulled him onto his lap, the contact immediate and intense, their bodies pressing together as if trying to merge into one. The kiss came quickly, full of hunger, like they were trying to drink each other in. It was urgent, tender, as if they could pull life from each other in this one moment, as if kissing could make everything right.

After a long moment, Rayhan pulled back slightly, his eyes searching Miran’s. “Did you ever love me, Miran?”

The question hit with the clarity of sobriety in the haze of their high. Miran looked at him, his thoughts momentarily distant, as if the weight of the question had summoned something he’d been avoiding. The air between them was thick with the intensity of their closeness, but also with an unspoken distance, a chasm that had existed far before tonight. He exhaled slowly, feeling the weight of the words that hovered in the space between them, like they were both waiting for something that would never come.

“I love you,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, thick with the truth he didn’t know how to give. “More than anyone in this world. But I don’t know how to show you.”

Rayhan’s gaze softened, but there was an edge of something deeper, something almost pleading. “Then why does my heart feel so empty when you ignore me? Why do you ignore me, Miran?”

Miran’s breath caught, a tension running through him like an electric pulse. He wanted to speak, to fix it, but the words felt like strangers. “I don’t know, Rayhan,” he murmured, his voice faltering. “I can’t control this… this thing I feel for you. It’s like I think about us every night, but when I wake up, it’s just… too much. I can’t… I can’t deal with it.”

There was a silence that followed, filled with all the things neither of them could say, all the feelings that had been put on pause for too long.

One night, after too much tea and too little food, Miran said to Saira, “Do you think people can live with two truths?”

“I think most of us do,” she said. “We just pick the quieter one to build around.”

He nodded. “And the louder one?”

“We keep it somewhere dark. Until it stops screaming.”

Miran didn’t sleep much that night.

And then one morning, while the city was still stretching awake, he turned to her on the terrace, both of them wrapped in the echo of a night with no arguments, no declarations, just quiet coexistence.

“I want to try,” he said. “To build something with you. Maybe it won’t be perfect. But I want to try.”

Saira didn’t smile. She just said, “Okay.”

And they sat there, two cups of tea cooling beside them, the sun climbing slowly, not urgently.

It was not a resolution. But it was a direction.

And that, for now, was enough.

Part III

The day they told her parents was unremarkable—gray sky, restless wind, the smell of traffic thick with monsoon dust. Her mother wore a worn blue shalwar kameez and tried to hide her satisfaction with disapproving frowns. Her father said little, but nodded twice, a subtle rhythm of reluctant blessing. No engagement photos were taken. No plates of sweets distributed to neighbors. It was all too early, still private, and still tender in its unfolding.

On the Uber ride home, Miran said, “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything this… rooted.”

Saira leaned into the curve of the seat, her dupatta tugged by the wind. “Marriage isn’t a declaration. It’s an agreement to try, over and over.”

He nodded but looked past her, into the blur of evening light reflected off shopfronts.

That night, Rayhan messaged him: Heard from Mishal. So it’s true.

Miran stared at the screen. Then typed: I thought you’d call me.

Rayhan replied: I didn’t want to hear your voice trying not to say what you meant.

In the weeks that followed, life moved in small adjustments. Saira began leaving a toothbrush at Miran’s place. A shawl draped on the back of his chair. Books borrowed and never returned. She didn’t move in, not officially. But presence has a weight that isn’t always measured by closets.

They began talking about logistics—what kind of ceremony, how many guests, whether to travel after. He avoided specifics. She noticed but didn’t press. Instead, she brought home-made mishti doi to his mother, who smiled in the knowing way only mothers do when they sense the shape of inevitability.

One afternoon, while reorganizing his bookshelves, Saira found a photograph tucked into a copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. It was small, square, blurred at the edges. Rayhan, holding a mango, mid-laugh, sunlight spilling across his collarbone.

She placed the photo back without a word.

Later that night, Saira asked, “Do you ever wonder if people settle because they’re tired of choosing?”

“I think we choose something stable so we can stop spinning,” he said.

“But what if the spinning was the only thing that felt real?”

He exhaled. “Then we learn to find reality in stillness.”

There was a rooftop gathering a week later. A quiet affair with soft lights, a few family members, some close friends, and the scent of Rose and cardamom hanging in the early evening air. A mullah recited quietly. There were no speeches, no fanfare—just an Akth. The formal, whispered bond drawn up in the open sky.

Afterwards, Saira noticed Miran standing apart from the others for a few minutes, his gaze turned toward the darkening horizon. She didn’t disturb him. She knew his silences had their own prayers.

Two days later, Miran surprised her with a visit to Rayhan’s.
“I thought it was time,” he said, his voice soft but steady, as though bracing for something neither of them had named.

Saira didn’t argue, though her chest felt tight, her breath just a little too shallow. She had never asked about Rayhan—not directly. But she had always sensed a depth between them, an undercurrent running too deep to touch. A history unspoken. A closeness she could neither enter nor fully accept, no matter how many times she told herself that it didn’t matter.

Rayhan’s apartment smelled of lavender and pages—of books old and new. The door opened with a calm smile, his eyes steady and unreadable, as if this was exactly how it was meant to be.

“You brought company,” he said, his tone neutral, a smile that didn’t quite reach the edges of his mouth.

Saira managed a polite smile, her words carefully chosen. “Miran often talks about you. Rayhan this, Rayhan that… his eyes gets bigger when he talks about you.”

Rayhan nodded, a small, knowing gesture that didn’t ask for anything.

The visit was brief, surface-level warmth. They had brought food—small peace offerings, neither of them hungry. The air between them felt dense, like something left unsaid was pressing against the walls, yet no one dared to name it.

Rayhan handed her a new copy of The God of Small Things. “It stays with you,” he said, his voice quiet, but there was an edge to it, a knowing weight to the words.

To Miran, he offered a small box. Inside, a bottle of perfume—woody, smoked amber. Familiar. Not just scent, but memory.

As they stepped out into the corridor, Rayhan’s voice was low, soft, like he was saying something for the last time. “Be kind to each other.”

Saira left for her apartment afterward. Miran returned alone to his. The space between them, now both distant and full, held them quietly in place. Neither of them moved faster than they needed to.

That night, they texted only once.

Saira: Thank you for today. It meant more than you know.

Miran: I know. Sleep well.

But Miran didn’t sleep.

He called Rayhan. The line crackled faintly, as though the distance between them was a static they could never quite shake.

“I just wanted to say—” Miran’s voice was barely above a whisper, thick with hesitation.

“You don’t have to say it,” Rayhan’s voice came through, cold and careful, like a wall slowly rising between them.

Miran swallowed, the words slipping out before he could catch them. “I do. You mattered. You still do.”

There was a long pause, the kind that stretched and pulled, filled with things neither of them dared to voice. Then, Rayhan spoke—his voice quieter, softer now, the hurt buried deep beneath the calm. “It’s okay, Miran. You chose. I just didn’t think it would feel like erasure.”

Miran’s chest tightened. He leaned back against the wall, as if the weight of those words could push him further away from everything he thought he knew. “It wasn’t meant to.”

The words hung in the air—heavy, useless, like they were never meant to be spoken. The space between them thickened. What he had done felt more like a decision made in the dark than anything meaningful. A choice, yes. But at what cost?

They talked until the birds began to sing, the night deepening around them.

The wedding was set for February. Not too hot. Not too close to Ramadan. Small, intimate. Mostly family. No fancy stage, no choreographed dances. Just a quiet affirmation.

Invitations hadn’t gone out yet when Miran’s father fell sick. Nothing serious, just enough to make him return to Mohammadpur more often. To sit by his father’s bed as his mother adjusted pillows and argued with doctors over dosages.

One evening, as they sat together over plain rice and mashed vegetables, his father looked up and said, “You’re marrying someone calm. That’s good. You’ve always been full of wind.”

Miran smiled, quietly. “She’s steadier than I am.”

His father grunted. “You don’t marry a map. You marry a compass.”

Days blurred. Some passed with ease, some with questions folded into the corners of casual sentences.

One morning, as they prepared to visit the tailor, Saira held up two fabric samples. “Which one feels more like you?”

He pointed to the softer one.

“Why?”

“Because it wrinkles less.”

She smiled. “A practical man.”

“Just an experienced one.”

She didn’t flinch. Instead, she reached for his hand. “Then let’s build rest into our plans.”

They took one last trip before the wedding. To a small resort in Mymensingh. The river was low, the sky wide. They walked without speaking for hours.

At dusk, they sat on the bank, their feet in the cold water. He turned to her.

“I won’t promise perfection.”

“I won’t ask for it.”

“I might still flinch.”

“I know.”

He reached for her hand.

And that, finally, felt like the real engagement.

Rayhan messaged him again. Are you happy?

Miran took longer this time. He hesitated, reread the message several times.

I’m honest. That feels like enough.

Will you miss me?

I do. Every day.

There was no reply after that.

The wedding took place in a modest hall lined with cream-colored drapes, white flowers and flickering tea lights. Saira wore off-white Saree with gold. Miran a simple designer off-white panjabi with a traditional jacket. Friends whispered how tasteful it all was. Mishal offered a quiet blessing. His father looked on, expression unreadable. His mother cried once, briefly, into the corner of her anchal.

Rayhan didn’t come. But he liked the post.

That night, as they returned home, the city pulsed around them—quiet, unglamorous, real.

Miran stood at the terrace door, a cigarette in his hand, while Saira removed her bangles one by one.

“Do you feel different?” she asked.

“No. But I feel present.”

She nodded. “That’s all I ever wanted.”
A pause. “You want some tea?”

They sat side by side on the floor, two cups of tea between them, steam rose into the room like breath held between them—delicate, unspoken. The soft glow from the streetlights painted half-shadows, softly across the wall.

It wasn’t cinematic.

It wasn’t dramatic.

But it was theirs.

And it held.

Even in the silence.

Even in the waiting.

Even in the pause between past and becoming.

And outside, the city hummed—a quiet murmur, not asking to be seen, just heard.

~ June 2025