DNA
As I walked through this new city for the first time, something familiar constantly clicked in my mind, making me pause, every now and then. "I have definitely been here before," I mumbled to myself, skimming my hand over the rough plaster, proceeding forward with the nagging feeling of familiarity.
I was very excited, when at school Miss Corrine announced my DNA result, which indicated that my ancestral inheritance could be traced back to this particular region. Latitude 24° N, and longitude of 90°. Little did I know, when I packed my bags and travelled across the world to this small city, the 400 year old capital of Bangladesh, that my ancestors lived in a place so different from that of mine.
As I walked past building after building, hovering through the streets, I saw men sitting on verandas wearing khaki shorts with white t-shirts, a boy delivering milk to a smiling young girl in a red sari, the old grandfather yanking the little boy up on to the rickshaw. They were from different times and yet somehow my own.
Passing a mosque that stood blocking a footpath, I advanced into an apartment reeking of more than just rain and mud. Strangely, the warmth made me think back to last Christmas at my grandmother's, as I proceeded up the staircase, drawing nearer to the apartment above. "Home," my head whispered as I twisted the rusty knob, cracking the door open.
Last year when I visited Africa, for a study tour, I hadn't left out any undiscovered detail in my research on their heritage and culture and yet even though equipped with that knowledge and astounded by the alluring environment, I did not feel even a pinch of kinship with that place. Yet, here, now I cannot help but feel so connected with an unsound city, that nobody from the past fifty generations of my family has ever visited. The caging of the verandas with grills, the minimal expanse between buildings, electric posts that substituted trees and the narrow roads were as endearing as inconvenient. I could imagine living here, under the shiny hot sun and then the clouds and rain afterwards, enduring the sounds of the city, its people. I did not need any research to know this city, for the city was and forever will be in my heart, in me.
Mahmuda Binte Habib is a third year undergraduate student of architecture at North South University.
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