Existence seemed like a riddle, the ends of which were intertwined and lost. His heart was a blackboard on which there was an inscription, but the dust of time had made the text illegible. The more he thought about the text and tried to recollect it, the more it became obscure. It was this text which was the main cause of the melancholy of his soul. The dilemma of his soul shoved him rather into melancholy, but he was not able to understand his situation. The same thing happened to him that day.

Everyone had food at around 9 p.m.

Asrar told his relatives that some of his friends were waiting for him. He told his mother that in case it got very late, he would stay over at a friend’s place.

When he left his house, his heart was gloomy. His feet were proceeding towards Jamila Miss’s house.

His heart was asking him again and again, ‘Why is the heart so treacherous?’

This thought was fatal. It rose in his heart like a shark on the surface of the sea. He submerged under the weight of the question. His eyes lost the virtue of looking at the surroundings as they were. He saw himself diluting in the darkness spread by this question. He wasn’t an earthen lamp which the winds could silence, but he could feel the roaring sound of the growing storm around him in the darkness of the question. The question never lasted for more than three minutes but those three minutes had the gift of longevity. They drank on his thoughts and made him feel the agony. Every time he would tell himself that his heart was a blank slate on which unwanted sentences had been scribbled. He kept reading his past from the slate and realized that the heart had become a dormant desert entering which was next to impossible. No one in Mabadmorpho had ever thought about the heart turning into an impregnable jungle of weeds. His mind would revolve around this jungle and then a sentence would leave his mouth which would bring him back from the state of melancholy. Having reached the stairs of Jamila Miss’s house, he tried gathering control over his melancholy. ‘Jamila Miss is also cheating on her husband.’

He smiled at that thought. He stopped and turned. There was no one behind him. Not even his shadow. He thought, at times even the shadow leaves us. When the thoughts of his shadow engulfed him, god knows from where a frame of his new shadow took shape in his heart. He liked that shadow. He told his shadow that he was part of Jamila Miss’s treachery. This treachery was a vicious cycle.

By the time he reached Jamila Miss’s door, he concluded that treachery and cheating were human instincts. In fact, the most important aspect of the human instinct.