Blast Jane's Addiction over muddy cobblestones
and look up into the darkening
sky slashed by electric lines
You'll find it there. Very nearly perfect.

This isn't the summer of my childhood. Muri isn't my constant companion. I can't skip all the afternoon teas and dinner parties and shopping trips to play outside or swim in the pond. My grandfather doesn't come back from his morning walk with hot and spicy daal puris for breakfast. He is not walking with me through the garden, tearing off banana leaves and folding them intricately, precisely into "watches" with bands and everything, his bent curly head mirroring my own. Nana has been dead for seven years, but it is only now that I feel it, now that I'm here in his house again, walking through the wild garden, crooked banana leaf watch on my wrist. My only context for him is fading from my already faded memory.

But Nanu is here, and she has always been the centre of my Bangladesh experience. Her shuffling walk, her wrinkled hands, the way she croons, Nanu, Nanu as she hugs me, harder, longer than I expect. My tiny grandmother is a force, a woman of reckoning. One of the first Bangladeshi women to graduate from college and go on to get a masters degree, she has spent her life in pursuit of miracles, not the least of which includes the education of village girls. Nanu travels from village to village, walks through the grey concrete classrooms with their empty windows and brackish chairs and desks, talks to headmasters, teachers, and parents to finds the girls who have escaped infanticide and child-bride-hood. She has spent decades fighting to keep our dark-chocolate-cream-skinned, bony, lithe, huge-eyed daughters in school.

This place, it is your home, my father told me before I left, in our only exchange of substance since our last fight. I hear his voice as I watch wordlessly through the rickshaw curtains at this fiercely alive and pungent city, breathing its last, its first with every gasping breath. Past the water stained buildings, the broken down roads, the paradises of green fields. You have roots here, his voice echoes. The rickshawallah's stringy calves pump and pulse under his skin, his eyes bright in his tired face, old enough to be my grandfather.

What my father didn't tell me was that the years away would leave me stifled by silence, a stranger in my own country. My words halt and stutter, my childhood vocabulary unfit for newly adult questions. Not that I know what to ask. What I really want to know is why I'm so lonely and why the children whisper as I pass. Dhaka at dusk is a mystery, a graveyard, a newborn baby. My grandparents' pond settles into a still mask, and underneath the lily pads I imagine a tumult similar to what's happening inside me, my skin camouflaging livid veins, moulting heart.

They found the boy today
arranged with the water lilies
in the still deep pond
he has empty eyes
all his soft parts eaten
by the tilapia and the eels
I don't know what's betraying me. I am wearing their clothes (my clothes), I'm speaking their language (my language), but somehow, they know I'm not from here. Can they smell it perhaps? The sweat that issues too easily into the little hand towel clutched damply in my fingers. Or maybe they see it in some unlikely angle, some betraying hunch or arch in my body.

Of course, there are times when I feel at home. Wearing the light blue shalwar kameez that has slowly become my favourite because of its easy folds, its washed-through thinness. Sitting under the fan whirling at just the right speed to juxtapose the unbearable weight of the heat and the snap of cooling wind, teetering between the two like the satisfaction of tears. And playing Speed Trump in my father's village home with my cousins, the card game we are obsessed with, driven by language barriers and a need to relate. We call our bets, throw down our trumps, nod knowingly, and in the midst of that, I feel comfort that is only more real because of its fleetingness. It disappears with the last slap of the cards when we all awkwardly disperse to get ready for dinner.

through water logged streets
rubber sandals sucking, flapping
the corner store is smoky sharp
lit by swinging kerosene lamps

powdered milk, oil, pickled mangoes
sugar, cigarettes, light bulbs, biscuits
back to the house by the pond

rubber sandals sticking, slapping
It's hard to imagine that my father grew up in this village, nothing but emerald rice paddies and fruit trees for miles and miles. I watch the half clothed little boys play soccer in the water-logged fields with an old acquaintance of my father's.

"We used to play here when we were children," he says smiling. His remaining few teeth are stained red with paan, the national tobacco and betel leaf addiction. "Not your father though. We asked him, but he was always studying. He said he was going to America. We didn't believe him. We didn't even believe in America."

I can see why. I can hardly believe in America either from where I'm standing. Even though I know my father's relentless iron determination firsthand, it's still difficult to see how he left this place.

Most of the time, I am suffocated by the silence. My mother and I have never known how to talk to each other. For all the conflict between my father and me, we at least can present our cases, however polar, shout out our logic, no matter how dichotomous, and reach our own separate and tragic conclusions. We've communicated, to some degree, even if there's no trace of nuance, complexity, or emotion. It's all black and white and right and wrong. Feeling, my mother's greatest gift, has always been the first casualty.

My mother has had allergies all my life. Here in Bangladesh, she seems to be better, the heat blooming in her cheeks, her motions easy and practised. I used to think that her bloodshot eyes were a sign of weakness. Perhaps that's why she asks her questions so plaintively, because she can sense my disregard.

Listen. I want to tell you something important, and I want you to listen carefully, ok?

It's as if she doesn't realise that I always listen, that I always have, and I remember every last thing she's ever said. She's so careful and yet so careless with her words, and of course, I can't see that it's all consistently about feeling. Instead I focus on her watery eyes, her thin eyelids, and it reminds me of every goddamn time I've loved her, so many times I could die from the counting.

Listen carefully, ok? Her voice upturned, but still dignified, Something important.

And sometimes I want to burst out and say the only important thing is that we're alive (immigrants being prone to rhetoric or silence and I'm no different from my mother in this respect), but I can't remind her of that, not now, with the red bloodshotness and the almost tears, I always imagine something else just underneath, instead of only the dust.

dusk drapes over the city
grey ragged children scream
hair matted like dry leaves
ghosts darting after each other
a little girl with a palm frond
follows them, her voice fading
grey ragged children melt
into the cooling darkness

Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi who recently won the Tanenbaum Award for nonfiction in the USA.