Contradictions

The following is a work of fiction

Tamim grew up in a home where nothing was simple, though everything appeared orderly.

Their apartment stood in a quiet, tree-lined neighbourhood of Dhaka. Inside, framed Arabic calligraphy hung beside abstract European prints. His mother recited verses in the morning and watched Western crime dramas at night. His father spoke gravely about moral decline but encouraged debate about global politics at dinner. The children attended an English-medium school where Valentine’s Day was celebrated discreetly and Shakespeare quoted more often than scripture.

At home, free mixing between unmarried men and women was described as dangerous. Outside, it was ordinary. No one named the tension. They lived within it.

Tamim learned early how to shift between worlds. At home he was dutiful, attentive, deferential. At school he was loose, ironic, restless. Among friends he laughed loudly and spoke casually about girls as though they were episodes in a series rather than people who lingered.

His older sister, Samira, moved through the same duality with quiet skill. She covered her hair loosely when visiting relatives and uncovered it the moment she reached the car. She attended study groups and also spent long evenings messaging friends whose names the family did not know.

Once, during a power outage, they sat together on the balcony, the city dim and humid below them.

“Do you ever feel,” Samira said, “that we’re always performing?”

“For whom?” Tamim asked.

“For everyone.”

He shrugged. “That’s just life.”

She smiled faintly. “Maybe.”

At school, his friends treated desire like sport.

One afternoon at a café, Karim leaned back in his chair and said, “You never stay long with anyone.”

Tamim stirred his coffee. “No need to complicate things.”

“You ever think,” Karim continued, “about what you’re doing?”

“They know what they’re doing too.”

Karim watched him. “And if someone treated your sister like that?”

Tamim felt irritation rise. “Don’t be dramatic. It’s not ownership. It’s choice.”

The word choice settled on the table between them, heavy and undefined.

The hotel corridors were anonymous places. Tamim liked that about them — the neutrality, the way doors closed on stories without names.

That evening he was half-listening to the girl beside him when he heard laughter outside. It traveled through the corridor with a brightness he knew too well.

He opened the door a fraction and looked through the peephole.

Samira.

Her hand looped through the arm of a man he had never seen. She looked relaxed, almost luminous in the dim light.

They entered the room next to his.

Tamim stood motionless.

The girl in his room said something he did not hear. Through the wall came indistinct sounds — movement, muffled laughter, a rhythm suggesting intimacy. His imagination constructed what his senses could not fully confirm.

He felt neither anger nor grief at first. Only a strange, spreading cold.

The symmetry Karim had suggested now stood before him, no longer hypothetical. The same logic he had applied elsewhere circled back, stripped of abstraction.

The girl beside him eventually left, confused by his silence.

Tamim lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. The paint had a hairline crack running across it. He followed it with his eyes until he slept.

After that night, conversations at home shifted, though no one named why.

At breakfast Samira passed him the salt without meeting his gaze. He noticed the tremor in her fingers.

A week later he asked, casually, “How’s your study group?”

She paused. “Fine.”

“What do you study?”

“Everything.”

Their mother intervened gently. “Why are you interrogating her?”

He looked at Samira, searching for something — confession, defiance, solidarity — he did not know which.

She lowered her eyes.

Silence became a presence in the house.

The city began appearing in headlines. Raids at dawn. Apartments stormed. Young men detained for plotting to purify society of corruption. The news anchors used words like cell, network, ideology.

Tamim watched without expression.

He had begun attending gatherings at a mosque near the university. The speakers there spoke of coherence in a fractured world. Of discipline in a culture of appetite. Of obedience as clarity.

He found in their language a structure that seemed to resolve contradiction.

When he stopped meeting his old friends, Karim confronted him.

“You’re disappearing.”

“I’m changing,” Tamim replied.

“Into what?”

“Into someone who doesn’t pretend anymore.”

Karim exhaled. “You think we’re pretending?”

“Aren’t we?”

Karim searched his face and found no trace of irony.

At dinner one evening, his father said carefully, “We’ve heard you’re spending time with certain groups.”

“Which groups?” Tamim asked.

“Groups that don’t end well.”

Tamim leaned back. “What is moderate Islam?” he asked suddenly.

His mother looked confused. “Why do you ask?”

“Define it.”

His father hesitated. “Balance. Mercy. Proportion.”

Tamim’s gaze moved to Samira. “Balance,” he repeated softly. “Proportion.”

She looked down.

“Do you want to know,” he continued, “what proportion looks like in practice?”

“Enough,” his mother said sharply.

The air thickened.

Samira spoke quietly. “You don’t know everything.”

The words lingered long after she left the table.

The police raids grew closer. One morning, two streets away, a building was surrounded before sunrise. Gunshots cracked through the dawn. Smoke rose briefly above the rooftops.

From the balcony, Tamim watched men being led away in handcuffs. Some were barely older than him.

He did not flinch.

Weeks later, his father found a bag hidden beneath Tamim’s bed. Inside were pamphlets, coded messages, and a firearm wrapped in cloth.

The confrontation was short.

“You will not bring this into our home,” his father said.

“It’s not about home,” Tamim replied.

“It is entirely about home,” his father answered.

His mother wept openly. “We sent you to good schools. We trusted you.”

Tamim felt an odd detachment, as though he were observing actors reciting familiar lines.

“You care about reputation,” he said. “I care about coherence.”

“Leave,” his father said finally. “If this is your coherence, take it elsewhere.”

Samira stood in the doorway. Their eyes met. In hers he saw something complicated — fear, perhaps guilt, perhaps recognition that neither of them had lived entirely within the rules they defended.

He left without another word.

Months passed without contact.

The final raid happened in an unfinished building on the edge of the city. Security forces surrounded it at night. By morning, the operation was over.

Tamim’s name appeared in a scrolling list on television.

At the apartment, no one spoke.

Claiming the body required paperwork, questions, public acknowledgment. The family remained still. Silence, once again, made the decision.

He was buried in a public graveyard on the outskirts of the city. The grave bore no name.

Years later, Samira sometimes walked past that cemetery on her way to visit a friend. She never entered, though she knew he lay somewhere within its rows.

At home, the calligraphy still hung beside the European prints. The television still played foreign dramas at night. The balcony still overlooked the restless city.

Nothing had resolved.

Tamim had sought purity in a world that offered mixture. Samira had sought freedom within boundaries she publicly affirmed. Their parents had wanted both modernity and preservation. They all had dreams of their own standing afar in a world that stood disconnected from the present. It was as if they were biding time in their present in hope of drifting to their dream world happiness through the powers of invisible hand…perhaps the divine hand.

Each had lived within contradictions they neither fully recognised...it was a world sewn as patched quilt.

In the end, the corridor between rooms — thin-walled, anonymous, echoing with muffled sounds — remained the truest image of their lives: separate spaces, close enough to hear one another, divided by something both fragile and impenetrable at once.

Dr Farooq Sheikh is an academic with an interest in a diversity of disciplines in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences and taught for three decades at US universities; he was a tenured faculty at SUNY Geneseo.