A short story set in East London’s Bangladeshi Community
Written by Mujibur Rahman
Chapter 1 – The Last Night in Whitechapel
The machines are the only ones who care whether he lives or dies.
They blink and beep like small, impatient gods gathered at his bedside, counting what is left of his heartbeats.
Rahim lies still beneath the stiff white sheet of Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel. The ceiling above him is a blank page no one will ever write on. The bed rails are cold. The room smells of disinfectant and boiled vegetables and the faint, sour trace of other people’s fear.
The chair beside his bed is empty.
They have asked him, three times, if there is anyone they should call.
“Next of kin, Mr Rahim?”
He recited two numbers, his tongue heavy, his voice unsure. The nurse wrote them down on a clipboard, her face professional, kind but distant, like kindness on a contract.
No one came.
The nurse now is a different one. Blue uniform, tired eyes, hair tied back in a hurried knot. She checks the drip, presses his wrist with cold fingers, glances at the screen above his bed. Her name badge says “Amelia”. He reads it slowly, syllable by syllable. She smiles once when she catches his gaze, the sort of smile given to a stranger at a bus stop.
“How are we doing, Mr Rahim?” she asks softly.
He wants to say: I am dying of wealth and loneliness. I am drowning in money that lies in empty tills, in bank accounts without names attached, in restaurants where no one says my name with love.
Instead he says, “Okay,” because that is cheaper.
When she leaves, the silence expands, filling the corners of the room like a thick fog. Outside the window, London’s lights smear themselves across the glass like a million tired stars. Somewhere down there, his restaurants are closing for the night. Metal shutters are being pulled down. Staff are counting tills. The streets smell of rain and fried chicken and last trains.
No one knows that the man who owns four restaurants is lying here alone, his body failing him, his heart tired of dragging around his life like a sack of coins.
A dull pain moves through his chest like a slow, stubborn wave. It is not new. It is an old acquaintance, grown bolder.
His eyes close.
In the dark behind his eyelids, another night rises. Another bed. Another ceiling. Another version of him, sixteen years old and thin as a promise, lying on a mattress on the floor above a restaurant.
He sees the boy as if watching a film: clothes smelling of curry and smoke, hands raw from dishwater, fingers clumsy with exhaustion and hope.
Rahim’s breath stutters. The heart monitor hiccups.
He is slipping backwards, into the wet tunnel of memory, where time runs in two directions at once.
On the white hospital bed, an old man exhales.
In the small room above Brick Lane, a new boy arrives.
Chapter 2 – Sixteen and Hungry in London
The first thing London did was slap him with cold.
It was in the air, in the drizzle that sliced sideways, in the breath that hit the back of his throat when he stepped out of the airport for the first time. The sky hung low and grey, like it wanted to press his shoulders down.
He hugged his thin jacket around himself, clutching the small canvas bag that held his whole life. A shirt. A lungi. A photograph of his mother, the corners already curling. A folded note with an address written in someone else’s handwriting: a place in the East End, near Whitechapel. A restaurant.
He had grown up in a village where the sun never seemed to tire. Where rice fields stretched out like green prayer mats and the smell of wet earth after rain was sweetest of all. Poverty was a constant hum, but it was familiar. London was not.
On the bus into the city, he pressed his forehead against the cold glass and watched the streets change language: fields to estates, estates to terraced houses, terraced houses to towers and shops with words he could not read. Everything moved too fast. Cars. People. Clouds. His own heart.
At the address on the note, a narrow doorway opened into a bright-lit restaurant. A sign in the window claimed it was “Indian”. Inside, the men spoke Bangla, Sylheti, Urdu, English—words mixing and colliding in the steam floating above the tables.
“New boy,” someone said, pointing at him. “From desh?”
He nodded. His face burned with shy pride and shame.
They took him upstairs, up a steep wooden staircase that creaked under his weight as if shocked he was so light. The room above the restaurant was small and crowded—four mattresses on the floor, blankets rolled up like sleeping snakes, suitcases pushed into corners. The air smelled of sweat and cumin, damp socks and old dreams.
“This yours,” a man with a tired moustache said, pointing at the last empty mattress. “Sleep. Tomorrow you start.”
Tomorrow came fast and hard.
The kitchen downstairs was a furnace of noise and heat. Pots clanged, oil hissed and spat, waiters shouted orders over the sizzle. The Head Chef addressed him only as “Boy”. He learned the rhythm of the place through his skin: chopping onions until his eyes burned, washing dishes until his fingers wrinkled, running up and down the stairs until his knees buzzed.
Each hour he earned a tiny river of money. Each hour he sent most of that river back in his head to his parents, his brothers and sisters, their names like lit candles in the dark.
At the end of his first week, the owner called him into a cramped office. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling like an eye.
“Here,” the man said, counting notes into his palm. “That’s your wages. Don’t spend. Save. Or send home. Understand?”
Rahim nodded, the notes hot and crinkly in his hand. He had never held so much money before. It felt like holding fire.
That night, when the restaurant finally closed and the others snored around him in the upstairs room, he could not sleep. His body ached. His eyes were grainy. But his mind was a storm.
Quietly, he sat up. One by one, he took the notes from his pocket. He smoothed them on the thin mattress with reverent fingers. Then he slipped off onto the cold floor, arranging the crumpled notes in a small, careful circle.
In the centre of that circle, he placed his hands, palms down. His heart beat like a drum.
“Amar malik tumi,” he whispered to the notes. You are my master.
“Make me rich. Make me big. I will serve you.”
Below, in the kitchen, someone had forgotten to turn off a neon strip light. It hummed softly through the floorboards like a distant prayer.
In the village back home, his parents slept on woven mats, unaware that their son was slowly replacing his God.
In the hospital bed years later, Rahim’s old lips move with the echo of that first whispered vow. The machine above his head records the tremor in his chest, lines jumping on a dark screen, drawing out his regret in green.
Chapter 3 – Making Money His Master
Time in London did not walk; it ran.
The weeks in the restaurant poured into months, like oil from a bottle, thick and unstoppable. Winter slid into spring and then back into winter again. Rahim worked every day, his world reduced to two floors: the kitchen below, the crowded room above.
He learned the restaurant’s heartbeat. The clang of the tandoor door. The sing-song of waiters yelling, “Two chicken tikka! One lamb bhuna!” The sigh of the extractor fan drawing out the breath of the place. The muttered curses when someone dropped a plate. The owner’s laugh when he counted the till and found it full.
In the beginning, Rahim still timed his day by prayer. Fajr before dawn, when the streets outside were quiet and the city seemed to pause. Zuhr in the brief lull between the lunch and dinner rush. Asr squeezed into a corner of the storeroom, the smell of rice and spices wrapping itself around his whispered surahs.
But money has its own call to prayer.
It began quietly. An extra half hour helping to close, because the owner might notice, might raise his wages. A missed Asr because the sink was overflowing with plates and the chef was shouting. A delayed Isha because the last table lingered, laughing loudly, ordering one more naan, one more lassi, one more excuse to stay.
Then came the envelopes.
Every Friday, wages. And every Friday night, when the others collapsed onto mattresses, Rahim sat on the floor and built his circle again. More notes now. Fives and tens, sometimes even a twenty. The room was dim, only a strip of yellow from the hallway cutting across the floor. The notes looked like small, folded leaves fallen from a strange tree.
He arranged them carefully. Edge to edge. A perfect ring.
Inside that ring, he sat cross-legged, his hands resting on his knees. His eyes traced the inked numbers like they were verses. He spoke to the money in Bangla, in broken English, in the private language of longing.
“Stay with me,” he murmured. “Bring more of your brothers and sisters. I don’t want anything else. Just you. Always you.”
Outside, the mosque’s loudspeaker floated through the night, calling men to prayer. The sound slipped in through the window, gently, like an invitation.
He heard it. His fingers twitched.
Then he reached forward and touched the notes, one by one, as if to anchor himself to them instead.
On his rare day off, when others went to the park or to visit cousins in other parts of London, he took the Tube alone and walked past rich streets: shiny shops, men in suits, women with bags full of things that meant nothing but looked like everything. He watched them from the pavement, hands in his pockets, feeling hunger of a different kind.
He thought of his village, the cracked earth, the smell of dried fish, the chorus of frogs in the monsoon nights. He thought of his family, their faces lit with pride when he left, their expectations like a second skin on his body.
“I will come back rich,” he had promised. “I will build a house. I will never let you go hungry again.”
In the hospital, his old heart squeezes at the memory. The machine beside him tuts disapprovingly. He knows now that every promise he made to them was quietly redirected, siphoned away, into his devotion to something else.
He remembers the first prayer he skipped on purpose. Not from tiredness, not from forgetting, but from choosing.
The kitchen was chaos. A big booking, a birthday party, laughter bouncing off the walls. Rahim’s phone buzzed in his pocket—an alarm he had set for Maghrib. The adhan from the local mosque floated in from the street, riding the steam from the pots.
“Boy!” the chef shouted. “More plates! Faster!”
Rahim’s hand brushed the notes peeking from the owner’s apron pocket. That was all it took.
He silenced the alarm. He served the plates. He told himself he would pray later.
Later dissolved into never.
And in that small, unnoticed moment, something deep inside him shifted position—like a stone turning in a riverbed.
Chapter 4 – The First Restaurant
The day he signed the papers, Rahim felt like he had been handed a new name.
He wasn’t just “Boy” anymore. Not just the skinny kid from the village washing dishes upstairs. He was “Proprietor”, stamped in ink on official documents, his signature crawling across the page like a shy, uncertain insect.
The restaurant he bought was tired. Faded sign. Flickering lights. Tables that remembered better days. The previous owner wanted out. Rahim wanted in.
He had saved for years. Every circle of notes on the cold floor had been a rehearsal for this moment. Every skipped prayer, every overtime shift, every coin sent home with a little less love and a little more resentment.
“You sure?” the previous owner had asked, shuffling the paperwork. “Restaurant business is hard. Lots of stress.”
Rahim smiled. He had lived inside stress for years; it felt like home. “I am sure,” he said. “I will make it work.”
He moved into the small flat above the restaurant. One bed. One wardrobe. One window overlooking the busy street. When he opened the window the first night, the city poured in—sirens, laughter, arguments, the deep engine of London humming without rest.
Downstairs, the kitchen waited, empty and eager.
The first night of opening, a drizzle of customers came. A couple celebrating an anniversary. A group of friends on their way to a gig. A family with a tired baby. He greeted them with a stiffness that he mistook for professionalism. He watched them eat, their faces softening with pleasure at the food made by his own hands.
At closing time, when the last table left and the staff went home, he locked the front door himself. The metallic clank of the shutter coming down sounded like a curtain closing on one performance, readying for another.
He went to the till.
The drawer slid open with a hopeful ding. Notes, coins, card receipts. Not a fortune, but more than he had ever had in one place that was his.
He gathered the money, cradling it like something alive. His hands trembled.
Upstairs, in the flat, he cleared a space on the floor. The room was quiet except for the distant hum of the city. The bulb above his head buzzed faintly.
He laid out the notes, one by one, in a circle. He added the coins, their silver and copper glinting among the green and blue paper. The circle was imperfect at first. He adjusted it obsessively until it pleased his eye—until it pleased something deeper, darker.
Then he stepped inside it and sat down.
In the centre of his earnings, he felt safe, as if he had built himself a small fort from numbers and ink. The same boy who once prayed on a woven mat in a mud house was now kneeling on laminate flooring, head bowed to a god printed with the Queen’s face.
He stayed there for hours.
London thinned itself out around him. Traffic slowed. Pubs emptied. A fox screamed somewhere in an alley, its cry slicing the night. The glow from the streetlamps seeped through the curtains, turning the circle on the floor into a strange, glowing halo.
He whispered to the money, the words crawling out of his throat like confessions.
“I know you now. You are stronger than God. You give quickly, you take quickly. You reward those who bow without question. I am yours. I will not fail you. I will build you temples. I will make people serve you under me.”
The first light of dawn was creeping in when he finally stood up, knees stiff. The notes were scattered slightly from where his shifting body had moved them, as if they too had grown restless under the weight of his devotion.
He picked them up, smoothed them, placed them in a metal cash box. He closed it with a soft click that sounded, in the stillness, like the closing of a door behind him that would never open again.
In the hospital bed, he remembers that first circle as clearly as he remembers his first prayer as a child.
One a gateway.
One a goodbye.
His breath rattles. No one hears.
Chapter 5 – Four Restaurants and a Millionaire
Success did not arrive all at once. It came in small increments—like drops of oil falling into a pan, slowly filling it until it hissed and spat.
The first restaurant gained regulars. A banker who came every Tuesday for lamb madras. A nurse who ordered takeaway after late shifts. Families celebrating GCSE results, anniversaries, forgiveness.
Rahim watched the reservation book fill up. He watched the numbers in his bank account slowly fatten. He moved differently now—back a little straighter, voice a little harder. He had grown a thin layer of arrogance over his old insecurities, the way grease gathered on the kitchen tiles.
When the opportunity came to take over a second restaurant, he didn’t hesitate. The bank manager shook his hand. “You’re doing well,” he said. “Growing fast.”
Fast became faster.
Second restaurant. Then third. Then fourth. Each one another mouth to feed, another till to count, another set of staff to command. His life became a map of London postcodes and business rates and delivery schedules. He knew the opening hours of his kitchens better than he knew the opening hours of his own heart.
Somewhere in the middle of this expansion, he got married.
Her name was Shabana. She came from another Bangladeshi family in East London. Their marriage was half arrangement, half business deal, with a thin veil of romance stretched over it like plastic over leftovers. She saw stability in him. He saw continuity in her.
They had a small wedding. Gold bangles. Henna. The smell of biryani and rosewater. People smiled in all the photographs. For a moment, Rahim allowed himself to think: perhaps this, too, is wealth. A wife. A home. A hand to hold when the restaurant shutters came down.
Two children followed. A son first, then a daughter. Their names tasted sweet in his mouth the first time he said them aloud. He held them with a fear that surprised him. They were so small. So completely uninterested in money.
In the early days, he would come home, smell of the kitchen still clinging to his clothes, and find his son asleep on the sofa, toy cars scattered around him like fallen soldiers. His daughter would run to him on unsteady legs, pressing her face into his thigh, leaving small grease marks from her chocolate-covered hands.
But the restaurants were always calling.
There was always a leak somewhere, a staff issue, a supplier problem, a customer complaint, a new opportunity. His phone buzzed during school plays. He took calls in the middle of family dinners. He left before dawn, came back after midnight. Shabana’s eyes grew tired, the skin under them permanently shadowed, like someone had tried to erase her dreams with a smudged thumb.
“You never have time,” she said one night, standing in the kitchen of their flat, the children asleep in the next room. “You never sit with us. You don’t know what your son likes, what your daughter fears. You only know your tills.”
Rahim opened his wallet and threw a stack of notes onto the table like a magician slamming down his final card.
“Everything they have is because of this,” he said. “Because of me. You think love pays rent? Love buys school uniforms? Love pays for doctors?”
She looked at the notes on the table as though they were insects.
“Love makes people want to sit beside your hospital bed,” she said quietly. “Money doesn’t do that.”
He laughed then, brand new and brittle. “We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see what money can do.”
In the hospital, that laugh returns to him like a ghost. It echoes in his ears, thin and desperate.
His phone lies silent now in the bedside locker, screen dark. There are missed calls from restaurant managers, accountants, a solicitor. None from the people whose names once tasted sweet on his tongue.
His children have grown up somewhere beyond his reach. Somewhere beyond the reach of money.
Chapter 6 – Cracks in the Empire
Empires rarely collapse in one dramatic moment. They crack quietly, along lines that were always there.
In Rahim’s restaurants, the first cracks were in voices.
“Boss is too much, man,” a waiter whispered in the staff room, rolling his eyes. “Always shouting.”
“He counts every grain of rice,” the tandoor chef muttered, slamming the oven door. “Trusts no one. Thinks we are all thieves.”
He became known for his temper. For his suspicion. For the way he flung a plate across the kitchen because a naan was slightly burnt. For the way he docked wages if someone made a mistake. For the way he talked about money as if it were a fragile, sacred thing that only he understood.
Staff came and went. New faces appeared in staff photos, then disappeared into other jobs, other lives. The only constant was Rahim, prowling his own kingdom, eyes always on the tills.
At home, the cracks were deeper.
His son grew into a teenager with a storm behind his eyes. He stopped asking where Baba was. He stopped waiting up. He learned to expect absence.
His daughter, once glued to his leg, pulled away. She spent more time in her room, her laughter shared with friends through glowing screens instead of with her father across the dinner table.
One evening, Shabana stood by the living room window, looking at the city lights pricked across the night. Rahim sat on the sofa, shoes still on, counting the day’s takings from one of the restaurants, notes spread across the coffee table.
“I heard from your sister,” Shabana said.
Rahim didn’t look up. “Which one?”
“The one in the village,” she said. “Your mother’s not well. They say she’s weak. They need help with medicine.”
Rahim kept counting. “I send money every month,” he said. “He knows that.”
“They say you used to send more,” she replied quietly. “They say you don’t call. They ask why you have forgotten them.”
A flicker of discomfort nudged his chest. He swatted it away like a fly.
“They always want more,” he muttered. “No matter what I send, it’s not enough. They sit there and wait for my money. Let them work. Let them struggle a bit. I struggled.”
Shabana turned from the window. Her face had a tired dignity to it, like a statue worn by years of rain.
“You send less money home,” she said. “You send less time here. You are generous only with your anger.”
He slammed the metal cash box shut. The sound made her flinch.
“If you don’t like this life, go,” he said. “Take your clothes. The house is mine. The restaurants are mine. Everything here is mine.”
Her silence after that was not empty; it was full of slow decisions.
Months later, Rahim stood in a solicitor’s office, the air stale with the scent of old carpet and paper. Divorce papers sat on the table between them like a small, neat grave.
Shabana did not wear any jewellery. Her hands were bare.
“For the children, I want—” she began.
“You want money,” he cut in. “Always the money.”
“For the children, I want stability,” she corrected. “And I want them to grow up knowing that people matter more than notes in a box.”
He scoffed. Agreed to the settlement with bitter reluctance. Watched her leave with the children, their backs straight, their eyes not looking back.
The flat felt enormous and echoing after they were gone. He stayed a few nights. Then he moved permanently into the flat above one of his restaurants. The circle had closed itself again: work below, sleep above, nothing in between.
In the hospital, he realises that his empire had become a house built on coins stacked like bricks. No mortar. No love holding anything together.
It takes almost no pressure at all for coins to scatter.
Chapter 7 – Decline and Isolation
His body gave him warnings long before it gave way.
At first, it was just tiredness that didn’t lift. A heaviness in his limbs, like someone had hidden stones in his muscles. He woke up already exhausted, dreams full of numbers and tills and silent dining rooms.
Then came the chest pains. Small squeezes, then stronger. He would be in the middle of shouting at a waiter, and a fist would close around his heart, making his voice catch. He paused, hand to his chest, then forced the sentence out anyway.
“Don’t…you…ever…serve cold naan again.”
Doctors told him his blood pressure was high. They talked about cholesterol, about stress, about the importance of rest.
He nodded politely, then went back to his restaurants. Rest meant lost revenue. Lost revenue meant smaller circles on the floor.
The staff noticed.
“Boss doesn’t look well,” a young kitchen porter whispered one night, watching Rahim lean on the counter, his face pale, sweat beading his upper lip.
“He’ll outlive us all,” the chef replied, half bitter, half afraid. “He’ll haunt the tills.”
His children became distant voices on the phone. At first, they answered sporadically, short conversations punctuated by long silences.
“How are you, Baba?”
“Fine. Busy.”
“How is work?”
“Good. Business good. You need anything?”
They needed presence. He offered money instead.
Then even those calls became rare. His son stopped answering entirely. His daughter sent the occasional text, polite and thin, like a greeting card written by a stranger.
One rainy evening, alone in his flat, Rahim scrolled through his contacts. Names swam before his eyes: managers, suppliers, accountants. He found his daughter’s number and pressed call.
It rang. And rang. Then clicked to voicemail.
Her recorded voice, younger, brighter, spilled into his ear. “Hi, it’s me. Leave a message.”
He didn’t. He hung up, heart thudding in the quiet room.
The circle on the floor that night looked different. The notes were the same, but the space inside felt colder. He sat in the middle of them, knees pulled up slightly, like a child afraid of the dark.
“You’re still here,” he murmured to the money. “You didn’t leave.”
But even as he said it, the notes seemed flatter, less alive. They were just paper, stained by a lifetime of touching them more than faces.
Months later, the collapse came.
In the middle of a busy Saturday service, the restaurant buzzed with the usual chaos. Orders piled in. Plates clattered. Laughter rose from the dining area, a messy chorus.
Rahim was in his office, counting the afternoon takings, when a pain shot through his chest, fierce and sudden, like someone had stabbed him from the inside.
He gasped, fingers spasming. The notes slipped from his hands, fluttering to the floor like wounded birds.
He tried to stand and could not.
The door opened. One of the younger waiters froze, eyes wide.
“Boss?”
The room tilted, the fluorescent light above them elongating into a bright smear.
The last thing Rahim saw before everything went black was a five-pound note lying face down, half under the desk. It looked like it was trying to escape.
When he woke, it was to the antiseptic light of Royal London Hospital. Wires. Tubes. The beep of machines. A nurse saying his name with an accent that had never once wrapped itself around his story.
“Is there anyone you want us to call?” they asked.
He gave his children’s names. Their numbers.
“They’ve been informed,” the nurse said later. “They know you’re here.”
Days passed. No one came.
His restaurants continued to operate without him. Managers sent him updates. Profits were maintained. The world moved on.
Only he was stuck, pinned to the bed by gravity and regret.
Chapter 8 – The Servant and His God
Night in the hospital folds itself around him, layer by layer.
The corridor lights are dimmed. The sounds soften. The beeping becomes a metronome marking the slow retreat of his life.
Rahim stares at the ceiling. The white above him has become a screen; his mind projects scenes onto it, flickering, unfinished.
He sees his mother’s hands, rough and gentle, packing rice into his school tiffin in the village. He sees his father’s back bent over the fields. He sees the long, shimmering ribbon of the river in the heat.
He sees the first time he boarded the plane, how the world fell away beneath him. How his heart pounded with fear and promise.
He sees the restaurant above which he first slept, the mattresses lined up like boats on a dirty sea. He sees himself as a thin, wide-eyed boy, smoothing out his first wages, arranging them in that foolish, earnest circle on the floor.
He sees the circles growing larger. The flats getting bigger. The restaurants multiplying like mirrors reflecting each other, each one showing him the same hollow-eyed man counting notes late into the night.
Most of all, he sees faces. So many faces.
The young waiter he slapped once in front of customers for dropping a plate, the boy’s eyes bright with shame and something like hatred. The chef he underpaid for years because “he doesn’t know his rights”. The dishwasher whose back hurt so much he asked for a day off and was given a week off—with no pay and no job to come back to.
Shabana’s face, wet with tears she no longer bothered to hide. His son’s jaw clenched in adolescent anger. His daughter’s eyes refusing to meet his when she finally said, “I don’t want to talk to you if you keep shouting.”
He had built his life on other people’s bowed heads. On his own bent knees inside circles of paper.
The beeping speeds up a little. A nurse passes by, glances in, checks the monitor. He feels the weight of her gaze like a question he cannot answer.
He turns his head—slowly, it feels so heavy—to look at the empty chair beside his bed.
Once, he imagined his old age surrounded by grandchildren, by laughter, by the smell of home-cooked food and arguments over who gets the biggest piece of fish. He imagined telling stories of his struggles, his success. He imagined being admired.
Instead, the chair holds only the dent of air.
He thinks of God then—not the god he constructed out of numbers and ink, but the God he left behind on a village prayer mat.
It is strange, he realises, how quietly you can abandon something holy. No grand gesture. Just one missed prayer, then another, each absence small and ordinary until the silence between you and the Divine becomes a canyon.
He wonders if there is still a bridge somewhere.
His lips move. The words of an old surah stumble out, rusty and fractured. He is not sure if he remembers them correctly, but his tongue remembers the shapes. Tears leak from the corners of his eyes, hot enough to surprise him.
“I am sorry,” he whispers—to God, to his parents, to Shabana, to his children, to the boys who washed dishes for him, to himself. “I chose wrong. I chose badly. I worshipped paper.”
The machines keep beeping. They are unimpressed by apologies.
Somewhere deep in the building, a lift door opens with a soft chime. Footsteps echo. A trolley rattles. Life continues its indifferent choreography around him.
He thinks of his restaurants. Of their lit signs, their crowded tables, their fragrant kitchens. He imagines the tills opening and closing, notes being counted by hands that will never sit in a circle on the floor, because they have other gods, other fears.
For a moment, he wonders if anyone there thinks of him tonight. If a manager pauses while counting money and thinks, The old man made all this. Or if a waiter secretly hopes he never comes back.
In the small, exhausted heart beating in his chest, something unclenches.
The money, the restaurants, the properties, the accounts—none of it is here with him. There is no circle around his bed. No notes under his pillow. No coins on the floor. Just wires, white sheets, and the space where a hand to hold should be.
His breathing grows shallow, each inhalation a little smaller than the last.
The nurse, Amelia, comes in, looks at the monitor, then at his face. For the first time, she pulls the chair closer and sits down. She takes his hand in both of hers. Her palms are warm.
“You’re not alone,” she says softly, though perhaps she is saying it more for herself than for him.
He feels the pressure of her hand. For the first time in years, he is being held without any contract, without any exchange, without any calculation.
His eyes flutter. Through the blur, he sees the sixteen-year-old boy again, sitting on the floor of a cramped room above a restaurant, surrounded by his first week’s wages. The boy’s eyes glow with fierce devotion, with terror and hope, with the belief that money will save him where God could not.
Old Rahim wants to reach into that memory and take the boy’s face in his hands.
“Don’t kneel to it,” he wants to say. “Use it. Earn it. Share it. But don’t bow.”
He cannot. Memories are one-way mirrors.
In the hospital bed, his chest rises and falls, once, twice, then struggles.
The machine above him draws a final, straight line.
There is no sound of coins falling. No rustle of notes.
Just the quiet exhale of a man who spent a lifetime serving a god that never once turned around to serve him back.
Disclaimer
This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.
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