I come from a middle class Bengali Indian Muslim family in Kolkata just my parents and me. Outwardly, we appeared modern and liberal. I had freedom of clothes, speech, and studies. But at home, my mother’s silent suffering painted a different picture. My father, who spoke I about women’s rights, often insulted and hit her. Watching that growing up, I built quiet walls around my heart. I promised myself I’d never give a man the power to hurt me like that.
So I never believed in love and stayed away from relationships. It wasn’t hard. Love, as people my age understood it, felt shallow constantly falling into and out of relationships, drowning in borrowed emotions and dramatic breakups. So I never fell in love. That changed in my college… In second year, I participated in a hackathon. My friend formed a team of four me, her, and two boys. He was one of them. A Bangladeshi Hindu boy with curly hair, messy code, strange accent, eyes too curious for their own good, and the kind of presence that filled every space he entered not with noise, but warmth.
He was similar and yet nothing like me. I was methodical, he was impulsive. I added comments to my code. He just wrote what worked and moved on. I focused in silence. He talked, even when nobody was listening. But something about him fascinated me, and I didn’t realize this back then. The hackathon blurred into midnight coding, sleepy laughs, deep chats. I didn’t realize it then, but something shifted. We started texting, bumping into each other at club meetings, slowly talking about god, guilt, and identity.
It was in these conversations that I realized how similar We were. We both were atheists living with ‘liberal’ moderately religious families. We were two people who had drifted away from faith but still clung to the warmth of their cultures. I still wore a hijab only during Eid because my mother liked seeing me in it. And he still touched his mother’s feet during Saraswathi Pooja because it made her smile. The fact that we were both Bengali by ethnicity connected us beyond the borders.
It seemed that I found someone who just gets me. We were different, yet alike. Our debates on capitalism, movies, tech, multiverses turned playful. He’d say, “You’re adorable when you argue,” and I’d forget the argument. At first, I found him loud. But then I caught myself smiling at his voice notes how he’d pause mid thought, rush to finish ideas. Was it really annoying, or did I love hearing him talk? And somewhere between all those conversations, he quietly slipped into my life. It wasn’t sudden. It was gradual like tea steeping slowly in warm water.
But those conversations were just the surface. What pulled me in was the comfort the effortlessness of being around him. Without knowing, we had started spending a lot more time together. Short walks after classes, and eating fuchka, jhaalmuri, momo or kathi rolls. Sharing voice notes at 2 a.m. that started with, “Just thought of something random…” and ended with, “Goodnight, I hope you sleep well.” There were no grand gestures. Just small, steady things. Like when I had a panic attack before a club presentation, and he noticed my fingers trembling.
He didn’t say anything, just reached out and squeezed my hand gently, like a whisper and kept holding it until my breathing calmed and then I rocked my presentation speech. This was the first time we ‘held hands’. No big moment. No music playing in the background. Just me, overwhelmed, and him, beside me. That’s how it always was with him. He never barged in. He showed up. Quietly. Consistently. Once, our coding club group had an educational trip planned to Santi Niketan, which is quite far from Kolkata, and after a lot of requests from me and my bestie, my parents agreed to send me there.
Everyone was excited, carrying DSLRs and playlists and a little too much energy for a 6 a.m. train ride. Upon reaching there, we all naturally split into sub groups and pairs, including my bestie who drifted away with her boyfriend, and somehow, we both ended up walking through the dusty red trails between the sonajhuri trees, our hands brushing occasionally. We stopped under a tree where apparently Rabindranath Tagore sat once.
Amidst our discussion on Bengali literature and art, I remember telling him about how my mom would slip me Rabindranath’s books, which I adore, from under the bed at night, careful that Baba never noticed, because of religious fanaticism. “She’s a bigger rebel than I’ll ever be,” I recall telling him. He agreed, and later told me about his mom’s little rebellion, as we were sitting on the steps of Visva Bharati’s prayer hall.
She used to make paayesh every Eid because for him and his childhood friends because, in her words, “Mishti jignesha kore na tumi kon debotar puja kore’ (A sweet/ mishti doesn’t ask which God you believe in.)” But his father stern, wounded by riots and neighbors who once betrayed him would sulk at the dining table. His dad would say, ‘Why celebrate the festival of the people who drove us out?’ And I was impressed by how our moms rebelled against our dads for us, on two sides of the border.
That night, I asked myself directly, “Do I like him?” And my heart said yes! But I didn’t know if I should go ahead with this because of my views on love i had held my whole life until then. So it was in these quiet moments that we found each other not through touch or fancy grand declarations but in shared understanding. Despite different religions and nationalities, we bonded through our shared experiences and beliefs. We never called it a relationship not out loud.
But love was there in the way he sent me playlists when I couldn’t sleep. In how I saved screenshots of our random texts because they made my day better. Once at the Indian Museum, we ran into each other by chance and ended up wandering the halls together. Outside, sharing jhalmuri on the marble steps, he said he’d found his special person, his forever soulmate across the border and I smiled through my tears, “Me too.”
This moment screamed love, thought it didn’t use the word ‘love’. However, love didn’t shield us from reality. There was one particular day I still carry like a fragile memory. We had just left a seminar, quietly chatting about nothing important, when a group of seniors passed us. One of them stopped and made a snide remark about Bangladeshis living at the expense of Indian government and how they were taking away their seats. Hearing this, somehow made him, a fierce, confident guy spiral into his own thoughts as if those words hit a weak point, brought his past wounds.
But I couldn’t let them walk over him and defended him fiercely. Later, by the lake near my home, he opened up. He then revealed something really personal and sensitive about his family and his past. I still remember his words. “My parents are not rich. My dad’s is a school teacher back in Rajshahi. My mom used to stitch clothes, run a small tailoring shop at home. They don’t even own the house they rent a tiny two bedroom space.” He paused, took a deep breath. “I was just 6, when my parents decided to send me to India.
They said it will be safer in India and I would make a good future. My mother sold her wedding jewelry and my father took loans, just to afford the hostel, the books, the uniform in India. I’ve been staying in hostels in India since I was in first standard. Different cities. Different dorms. No home cooked food. Just report cards and long distance phone calls. I only get to be home for a few weeks and then I have to come back. I do love India. It’s safer, beautiful and I can dream here.
But there are nights when I feel like giving up every opportunity just to eat my mother’s rice and fish curry and sleep with my head in her lap. Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.” One line that stuck with me was when he said “I feel like a guest in both countries. Too Indian for Bangladesh, too Bangladeshi for India.” He continued his rant and I listened, “My relatives think I’m privileged for studying here. They say I don’t understand struggle. They think I am lucky and yes it’s true, but it’s not as easy as they say.
No one saw how I have celebrated every birthday with only my friends and not my parents. People think it’s easy coming from across the border and studying here. They say we’re privileged. They don’t see what we leave behind.” “I don’t tell people this. Not even my roommates. I don’t like to sound weak.”, he said. My heart clenched at this revelation and I told him, “If you ever miss home too much, you can share your thoughts with me”, to which he said, “You are my home, away from my home.” And I just melted…
It was in moments like these where we expressed our feelings, without using word like ‘relationship’, ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, ‘dating’. These terms felt way too shallow for what we had. He was my soulmate. We talked in forever’s. “In future we will…” “You’ll still be coding when we’re sixty.” But forever is a strange thing. One afternoon, just a week before mid semester break in our final year, he told me, “I have to go home early. Something urgent. It wasn’t unusual.
He’d gone on vacations before. But this time, something felt… wrong. He looked tired. Like he was trying to carry something without dropping it. That evening, I lied at home about going to meet my bestie and went to see him off at the bus stop. As he was about to leave, I hugged him very tightly. It was the first time I had ever hugged him and said the 3 words “I love you”. He smiled but was not surprised. He said that he knew it and fell for me from the start. He was just waiting for me to realize and believe in it.
His last call came from the airport, where we made several promises about marrying no matter how much we had to convince our parents. And then, silence. One day. Two days. A week. Like a mad possessed woman, I kept calling and messaging but they never went through. Unanswered, tensed, anxious. When I asked his friends they revealed that they also hadn’t been able to talk to him Soon, his friends and I reached out to his cousin. And finally, we got the news and it’s still a blur in my memory. A fire. An electrical short. His entire family gone.
I didn’t scream. Or cry. I just sat still. For hours. My world didn’t fall apart. It disappeared. Weeks passed. Exams arrived. The world moved on. I’d walk past the club room and still expect to see his bag kept lazily on the desk. I’d stare at the last unread message: “Tell me if the new cafeteria samosas finally improve.” They never did. I would replay the voice notes he sent me. Just to hear his voice. Just to fill the quiet. He was always talking. Eventually I survived through the race of life.
I graduated, got placed, wore bright beautiful clothes again and laughed at memes. But something within me the softest part of me never came back. Lately, my family started talking about my marriage. Being ‘liberal’, they said that they will let me marry a boy of my choice if he was a Muslim. When I said that didn’t have any, they started looking for Rishta’s. One night, I told my mother about him and showed our pics to her, with happiness and content expression on my face.
She was silent. Then angry. “A Hindu boy? From Bangladesh? Are you mad?”, she said, “Don’t you know what your father will react to this? He will kill him and stop your career. I’m disappointed in you. And why a Bangladeshi guy. That country is so poor and miserable. How can you do this??” I looked at her, and said simply, “He died.” She didn’t say anything, and told her everything about us. That night, I saw her kneel and whisper a dua for the boy I loved. She hugged me the next morning, knowing how much I had suffered alone and comforted me.
I told her I would never marry. She didn’t object. Just held me as I cried for the first time in years. I’m still an atheist and I still think religion divides more than it unites, and I still believe that religion makes people intolerant and illogical, full of hatred for others. But I do believe in some good hearted religious people. But I believe in people like my mother, who prayed for a Hindu boy. Like his mother, who made sweets for Eid. And him, who loved a girl of a different culture and nationality so dearly.
He didn’t get to say “I love you,” to me, but showed it every day in a saved snack, a glance across the library, a joke during a fight. I don’t believe in happily ever after’s. But I believe in love that’s quiet and unbreakable. The kind that doesn’t end when a body does. No, he’s no longer with me. But he is in every quiet moment. In every cup of tea I sip alone. In every sunset I wish I could show him. He’s in the way I sit by the window, exactly like we dreamed. In the notebooks where I still write his initials.
In the silence that follows every happy moment the silence that says, I wish you were here. He lives in my heart. And he always will.
Question: Does religion and nationality matter in love?
Option 1: Yes
Option 2: No