In a quiet village nestled beside the misty Teesta River, Arif and Ahana grew up as neighbors. Arif, the son of a struggling farmer, would climb mango trees to pluck the sweetest fruits for Ahana, while she, the daughter of the village schoolteacher, read him poems by Tagore under the banyan tree. Their love blossomed like the *champa* flowers in her courtyard—fragrant, delicate, and unnoticed by the world.
But when Ahana turned 18, her family arranged her marriage to a wealthy doctor in Dhaka. Arif, heartbroken, sold his father’s only cow to buy her a silver chain with a tiny chrysanthemum pendant—a symbol of their secret promise to reunite. On the eve of her wedding, they met one last time by the river. Tears mixed with monsoon rain as he whispered, *“ফিরে আসবো, আমায় ভুলো না”* (“I’ll return. Don’t forget me”).
Years passed. Arif left for Kolkata, working day and night to build a life worthy of her. Ahana, trapped in a loveless marriage, wrote him unsent letters, hiding them in a rusty tin box beneath her *nakshi kantha*. When her husband discovered the letters, he burned them, calling her “mad.” The only remnant was a single chrysanthemum petal tucked inside her diary.
One autumn, Arif returned, his pockets full of hope. But the village whispered that Ahana had vanished years ago after a mental breakdown. Desperate, he found her in a dilapidated asylum in Mymensingh. She sat by a barred window, humming Tagore’s *“আমার ভাঙা ঘরের ভাঙা চালাটির উপর”* (“Upon the broken roof of my shattered home”). Her eyes, once bright with dreams, were vacant.
“Ahana,” he pleaded, holding the pendant. She stared blankly, plucking petals from a chrysanthemum. “Who is Arif?” she asked.
For months, Arif visited, reading her old poems, replaying memories she no longer recognized. One winter dawn, he found her bed empty. The nurses said she’d clutched a crumpled letter to her chest—a fragment of her youth—and walked into the river. Arif knelt by the water, placing her pendant on a bed of chrysanthemums.
Years later, fishermen found his skeletal hand gripping a waterlogged diary. The last entry read: *“ভুলে গেছো ভালোবাসা, আমি তবুও অপেক্ষায় আছি…”* (“You forgot our love, yet I wait…”).
Their names faded into village lore, remembered only by the chrysanthemums that bloomed eternally by the Teesta.
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন
Human Verification