Revenge Read Online Free

refuses to calm down . . . The message was so obvious, I couldn’t help teasing him.
    “What has affected your heart all of a sudden?” I asked, and Haroon sighed deeply.
    “My grief that you are so cruel that you will never understand me.” He laughed. “Can’t you see that a storm is gathering!” he exclaimed, and asked me to sing, “On such a stormy night, you’ll come to me.” I stopped after a couple of lines.
    “Do you take me for a courtesan? I must sing to please you?”
    Now it was Haroon’s turn to sing. He wasn’t good at it, but he tried, only to get me to sing again, staying on the phone for hours as I sang and sang, then noisily applauding before he exclaimed, sighing, “There’s such magic in your voice.”
    The first three months of our acquaintance took place on the telephone. Our intimacy seemed to soothe both of us. I began to wonder if I was imagining it all, this attraction that seemed so sudden and unexplained. And then one day when we were on the phone, Haroon’s tone of voice abruptly changed.
    “I don’t feel happy going on like this.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I want to be closer to you . . . ”
    “Whatever for?”
    “For nothing else but to get my heart’s fill of you.”
    “Do you mean you are not happy with only talk and singing?”

    “It’s not the same as sitting face-to-face.”
    So we met on the university grounds, and he took me to his office. I was most happy to find a vase of fresh flowers on the table. He spread the flowers on my lap, pinned some in my hair, and cried, “My darling, these roses are meant only for you!” I sat silent, watching Haroon fuss with snacks. “Will you have tea?” “7UP?” “A chicken bun?” I was gazing at his beautiful eyes, at the smile that lit up the corners of his mouth.
    Now, of course, we no longer sing, and Haroon looks at me sharply if I begin even to hum a tune, and there is never time for roses. But in those days, he had no compunction about missing work and coming to meet me after my physics class in Curzon Hall. Time and again, I’d come out of class to find a good-looking man with a beautiful smile waiting for me, dark glasses keeping his dancing eyes from my gaze. I wanted everyone to celebrate my good fortune. I was not only a brilliant student and an effective leader in student politics, but I excelled in love as well! And Haroon couldn’t have been more solicitous of my achievements and obligations, standing by as I posted slogans and gossiped with friends over tea at the canteen. Afterward, he’d sit me next to him in his car and drive me around the campus, a cigarette dangling elegantly from his lips.
    Every so often that spring we drove a great distance, over the bridge of Buriganga, and settled ourselves on the banks of the Dhaleshwari River. Like me, Haroon loved seclusion, and those days alone were our great pleasures—hours of contentment I grew to rely on. One day, as usual, we drove to the river, and after we’d settled at our customary place,
Haroon looked at me with an expression I didn’t recognize. I waited as he overcame what seemed like dismay and began to speak. I was not, he told me, the first woman to whom he had given his love. Anguish, like a thin string, tightened around my heart.
    And so he’d sat beside the same river in quiet intimacy with another girl, had gazed into the eyes of another and declared his love! Of course I believed I was the first woman who had captured his heart, and, pouting to keep from weeping, I declared, as if it could change what he had just told me, that he was indeed my first and only love.
    “Did you come here with her?” My eyes were tearing, but I fixed them on the passing boats to keep my composure.
    “Many times.”
    “Was she beautiful?”
    “She was . . . ”
    I fell silent, and then managed another question. “Did you love her very much?”
    “Ah, yes!”
    “More than you love me?”
    Haroon took my hands and gave them a warm squeeze.