It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mom in Dhaka must be in want of a balcony-garden
My love affair with spectacles has long been regarded by my mother as nothing but a symptom of my dramatic nature.
Back in 2006 at the age of 11, I was introduced to faith, in the most domestic way possible.
When I was born, my skin was dark, like my grandfather’s, in whose arms I discovered my first home. Relatives old and new, whose disappointment was being nursed by my parents’ fair complexions, looked from afar as my rotund cheeks melted into the sleeves of my dada’s discolored half-sleeve shirt.
My mother’s house is beside a lake that separates the rich and mighty of the city from a little isle of people who work for them.
Love is the enormous mango tree growing directly from an ancient grave, so old that no headstone remains at all.
My father’s ancestors were Ayurvedic medicine men from a remote corner of the North Bengal. A few generations ago, one of them had cured a long-lasting ailment of the Raja of Taherpur and had received, as a reward, a large chunk of agricultural land or “joat” next to the mighty Joshoi Beel.
In exchange for the presidential suites at the Ritz and so on, the men holding our city keys have already opened our skies to all that may come.
The only thing I like about this city is the thought of leaving it. And I was leaving it finally, after one and a half months, my longest stretch of stay in the last three years. Juggling my luggage with one hand and my phone with the other to get Google Maps directions while I balance myself on the rickshaw racing through bumpy Dhaka roads–it is a metaphor that sums up my life in this city.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mom in Dhaka must be in want of a balcony-garden
My love affair with spectacles has long been regarded by my mother as nothing but a symptom of my dramatic nature.
Back in 2006 at the age of 11, I was introduced to faith, in the most domestic way possible.
When I was born, my skin was dark, like my grandfather’s, in whose arms I discovered my first home. Relatives old and new, whose disappointment was being nursed by my parents’ fair complexions, looked from afar as my rotund cheeks melted into the sleeves of my dada’s discolored half-sleeve shirt.
My mother’s house is beside a lake that separates the rich and mighty of the city from a little isle of people who work for them.
Love is the enormous mango tree growing directly from an ancient grave, so old that no headstone remains at all.
My father’s ancestors were Ayurvedic medicine men from a remote corner of the North Bengal. A few generations ago, one of them had cured a long-lasting ailment of the Raja of Taherpur and had received, as a reward, a large chunk of agricultural land or “joat” next to the mighty Joshoi Beel.
In exchange for the presidential suites at the Ritz and so on, the men holding our city keys have already opened our skies to all that may come.
The only thing I like about this city is the thought of leaving it. And I was leaving it finally, after one and a half months, my longest stretch of stay in the last three years. Juggling my luggage with one hand and my phone with the other to get Google Maps directions while I balance myself on the rickshaw racing through bumpy Dhaka roads–it is a metaphor that sums up my life in this city.
Are ghosts real? This was the question Mollie, a little 8-year-old girl who lives at the end of our street asked me in a–real–letter she wrote me recently. I had apparently included a book of ghost stories in a bag of books I had given her.