Some of my writings....

2026-07-27T07:27:47.248-07:00

Your Home in the Sky and the House in Disarray

It is long past due for Biman to start fulfilling its potential and becoming a cornerstone of the Bangladesh development story

M.K.Aaref

Sep 3, 2025 - 07:01

Sep 4, 2025 - 06:27

TORONTO — Biman, our national airlines, finally made history by announcing that it had made a record unaudited profit of Tk 937 crore, roughly USD 78 million, and this euphoric news was followed by the disclosure that it owed Padma Oil around 2,000 crore in unpaid fuel bills.

My personal experience with Biman began in 1972, flying between Dhaka and Chittagong in their 40-seater F-27 aircrafts, and later moving on to Boeings, DC-10s, and Dash 8 aircrafts.

On a summer evening in July 2023, the arrivals hall at Toronto Pearson International Airport buzzed with an electric anticipation rarely seen amid the usual throngs of weary travelers. As Biman Bangladesh Airlines Flight BG305 touched down from Dhaka, via a stop in Istanbul, cheers erupted from a crowd of hundreds waving Bangladeshi flags and holding handmade signs. Families embraced, tears flowing freely, as expatriates welcomed loved ones on the airline's inaugural direct service to Canada. For the large Bangladeshi diaspora in the Greater Toronto Area -- estimated at over 100,000 strong -- this was more than a new flight route. It was a bridge to home, a symbol of connection and progress.

"This flight means everything to us," said Rahim Khan, a Toronto-based software engineer who had driven from Mississauga to greet his parents. "No more layovers in the Middle East or Europe. It's direct, it's ours."

Social media lit up with posts from the community, celebrating the convenience and affordability of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner service. Reddit threads noted the airline's popularity among Bangladeshis in nearby US cities like Detroit, with users sharing photos of the sleek aircraft parked at Pearson.

Even casual observers remarked on the novelty: "Never heard of Biman airlines," one Redditor posted, capturing the curiosity sparked by the green-and-red livery emblematic of Bangladesh's national colors. Facebook was awash with Toronto residents following the path of the inaugural flight in FlightRader and photos of the 787 landing at the airport captured by enthusiastic plane-spotters.

The euphoria was palpable, reflecting a deeper yearning. For many in the diaspora, Biman's arrival signaled Bangladesh's growing global footprint, a nation of 170 million people asserting itself on the international stage.

Yet, beneath the celebrations lay a poignant irony: Biman, Bangladesh's flag carrier, has long been a story of unfulfilled potential, hampered by decades of corruption, mismanagement and political meddling. In an era where national airlines can transform a country's image, attract tourists and spur investments, Biman's trajectory offers a cautionary tale of lost opportunities.

Biman once promised the world “Your Home in the Sky,” but over the decades that home morphed into a crumbling, overcrowded house-- where nepotism picked the furniture, corruption ate the pantry bare, and mismanagement forgot to pay the maintenance bills, leaving passengers wondering if the roof might cave in mid-flight.

National flag carriers have historically served as more than mere transporters of people and cargo; they are ambassadors in the sky, shaping perceptions of their home countries. A well-run airline can project stability, innovation and hospitality, drawing visitors and investors alike.

In an interconnected world, where aviation contributes trillions to global GDP, these carriers enhance connectivity, boost tourism revenues and facilitate trade. They embody national pride, their liveries becoming visual icons that blend cultural storytelling with modern aspiration. For emerging economies, a strong airline can counter negative stereotypes, turning challenges into narratives of resilience.

Few examples illustrate this better than Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier and a beacon of success amid adversity. Founded in 1945 under Emperor Haile Selassie, with American assistance, the airline has weathered civil wars, poverty, famines, and political upheavals that continue to plague Ethiopia for decades.

Despite all this, Ethiopian has built a global network spanning over 130 destinations, including major hubs in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Its fleet of more than 140 modern aircraft, including state-of- the-art Boeing 787s and Airbus A350s, has made Addis Ababa a pivotal gateway for African travel.

The airline's achievements are remarkable. In 2025, Ethiopian was named the Best Airline in Africa for the eighth consecutive year, praised for its service, innovation, and reliability. It has turned challenges into strengths: leveraging Ethiopia's central location to create efficient routes, investing in training academies that produce world-class pilots and engineers, and partnering with other African nations to manage their carriers. This has not only generated profits -- reporting $7 billion in revenue in 2024 -- but also elevated Ethiopia's image. Tourists flock to sites like Lalibela's rock-hewn churches and the Simien Mountains, aided by seamless connections.

Investments follow, with the airline facilitating cargo for Ethiopia's booming flower exports and manufacturing sectors. As one analyst noted, Ethiopian operates "like a private company," free from excessive government interference, allowing it to outpace rivals like Kenya Airways.

Ethiopian's model has inspired similar successes elsewhere. Consider Turkish Airlines, which has risen phoenix-like from Turkey's economic and political turbulence. Founded in 1933, the carrier faced coups, inflation, and regional conflicts, yet under strategic leadership, it expanded aggressively in the 2000s.

Today, it flies to more countries than any other airline --130 nations -- turning Istanbul into a mega-hub rivaling Dubai. This growth has spotlighted Turkey's rich history, from Byzantine ruins to Mediterranean beaches, drawing 50 million tourists annually and bolstering investments in infrastructure and energy. Despite domestic challenges, including earthquakes and political polarization, Turkish Airlines projects an image of dynamism and connectivity, with its "Widen Your World" slogan resonating globally.

Further afield, Vietnam Airlines offers another compelling case. Emerging from the ashes of war and isolation, the carrier was restructured in the 1990s as Vietnam embraced doi moi economic reforms. Today, it operates a fleet of over 100 aircraft, connecting Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to 50 international destinations.

The airline has been instrumental in Vietnam's tourism boom, promoting UNESCO sites like Ha Long Bay and the Mekong Delta to millions of visitors. Foreign direct investment has surged, with aviation links enabling tech hubs in Da Nang and manufacturing in Bac Ninh. Vietnam Airlines' success underscores how a national carrier can symbolize post-conflict renewal, fostering national unity while attracting global capital.

Even in more stable contexts, flag carriers like Emirates and Singapore Airlines demonstrate the transformative power of aviation.

Emirates, launched in 1985 with just two aircraft, has helped catapult the United Arab Emirates from oil dependency to a tourism and logistics powerhouse. Dubai's skyline, malls and beaches are now synonymous with luxury, thanks in part to the airline's sponsorships of events like the FIFA World Cup and its fleet of Airbus A380s.

Similarly, Singapore Airlines has positioned the city-state as a premium gateway to Asia, its impeccable service enhancing Singapore's reputation for efficiency and innovation. These carriers invest in branding, from in-flight cuisine reflecting national flavors to partnerships with cultural institutions, proving that airlines can be potent tools for soft power.

In contrast, the Biman Bangladesh Airlines story is one of squandered promise, a mirror to what Bangladesh might have achieved.

Born in the euphoria of independence, Biman was established on January 4, 1972, mere weeks after Bangladesh's liberation from Pakistan. Founded under a presidential ordinance, it began with a modest fleet inherited from pre-independence operations: a Douglas DC-3, a DC-6 and a Fokker F-27. The name "Biman," meaning "airplane" in Bengali, evoked aspirations of sovereignty and connectivity for a war-torn country rebuilding from devastation.

In its early years, Biman embodied hope. By the 1980s, it had expanded to international routes, including London, New York, and Tokyo, serving as a lifeline for Bangladeshi migrants and exporters of ready-made garments, the backbone of the economy. The airline's growth mirrored Bangladesh's own: from a least-developed nation to a lower-middle-income economy, with GDP per capita rising from $135 in 1971 to over $2,500 today.

Biman could have been the catalyst, promoting Bangladesh's natural wonders -- the world's longest beach at Cox's Bazar, the Sundarbans lush green mangrove forests teeming with wildlife, and ancient Buddhist ruins in Paharpur -- to global tourists. It might have attracted investors to the country's burgeoning tech scene in Dhaka or shipbuilding in Chittagong, much like Ethiopian has done for Addis Ababa.

Instead, Biman became synonymous with dysfunction. By the 1990s, whispers of corruption grew into scandals. Political interference was rampant: appointments to top posts were often based on loyalty rather than expertise, leading to inefficiency Aircraft leasing deals turned sour; in one infamous case, Biman leased two Boeing 777s from EgyptAir in 2014, only to face mechanical issues and losses exceeding 5 crore taka ($600,000) monthly due to poor maintenance.

Mismanagement compounded the woes. A Transparency International Bangladesh study highlighted chronic problems: fake ticket confirmations, overpriced spare parts, and a lack of aviation experts. By 2022, marking its 50th anniversary, Biman was labeled a "hot mess," with accumulated losses in the billions of taka and a fleet plagued by delays.

Recent probes have uncovered more: a 2022 pilot recruitment scandal involving forged documents and a 2024 ticket embezzlement scheme implicating a former civil aviation minister and travel agencies, siphoning millions. The Anti- Corruption Commission filed cases against 22 officials over dubious Boeing 777 leases, while leadership turmoil persisted, with allegations of irregularities in hiring.

These issues have exacted a heavy toll. Biman's poor reputation for punctuality and service has deterred tourists; Bangladesh welcomed just 1.2 million visitors in 2023, far below neighbors like India (10 million) or Thailand (28 million).

Investments suffer too: while the country attracts FDI in textiles, aviation bottlenecks hinder diversification into tourism and logistics. Experts argue that a robust Biman could have emulated Ethiopian's role in cargo, supporting Bangladesh's $50 billion garment exports, or Turkish Airlines in connectivity, linking the diaspora -- remitting $22 billion annually -- more effectively.

The lost opportunity is stark. Bangladesh, with its vibrant culture, resilient people and strategic Bay of Bengal location, has immense potential. Yet, Biman's "frustrating legacy of misadventures" -- as one newspaper editorial has aptly put it put it -- has damaged national credibility. Calls for privatization or restructuring grow, with some suggesting breaking it into subsidiaries to curb inefficiencies.

Recent bright spots, like the Toronto route expansion to three weekly flights by 2025 and plans for New York service, offer glimmers of hope. But without rooting out corruption and depoliticizing management, these may prove fleeting.

As the crowd dispersed from Pearson that July evening, the euphoria lingered, a reminder of what could be. For Bangladesh, reclaiming Biman's wings means confronting its grounded realities -- turning a symbol of stagnation into one of soaring ambition.

2026-07-27T07:26:18.901-07:00

The Weaponization of History

What happens when history is turned into an instrument not of understanding, but of coercion, sanctification, and political legitimacy? Across continents and ideologies, regimes and ruling parties have wielded history not just to remember, but to silence, not to teach, but to control.

M.K.Aaref

Jun 1, 2025 - 12:10

Jun 2, 2025 - 07:10

Across the world, history is increasingly being mobilized not as a means of understanding the past, but as a tool to shape the present and control the future. Collective memory, often rooted in real trauma and national struggle, is selectively invoked to stifle dissent, elevate certain narratives to unquestionable truths, and reinforce the legitimacy of those in power.

This trend raises difficult questions about how societies remember, who gets to decide which histories are told, and what is lost when remembrance becomes a means of political control rather than collective reckoning

History, at its best, is a collective reckoning with the past. At its worst, it becomes a liturgical performance, recited to affirm a state’s narrative, denounce dissenters, and stifle alternative versions of truth. When the past becomes a bludgeon instead of a mirror, the politics of memory slides into authoritarianism cloaked in reverence.

This is not new. From the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) to Stalin’s purging of photographs, history has always been vulnerable to revision. What is more contemporary, however, is the bureaucratization and internationalization of historical weaponization, the use of trauma to define national identity, to demand perpetual moral high ground, and to delegitimize critics.

Few historical tragedies carry the moral weight of the Holocaust. Six million Jews murdered in an industrialized genocide, this is not simply a chapter in Jewish history, but in human history. Yet the state of Israel, particularly under successive right-wing governments, has often deployed the Holocaust not just as a site of memory but as an unquestionable foundation for political immunity and the justification of their actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

To critique this weaponization is not to deny the Holocaust, but quite the contrary. It is to insist that historical memory should serve ethical vigilance, not political impunity. The Israeli state has used the Holocaust to sanctify its founding, justify security measures, and frame criticism of its actions as antisemitic or as moral betrayal.

The late Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned of this decades ago. He criticized what he saw as the “Holocaust cult,” not remembrance per se, but the transformation of Holocaust memory into a tool of nationalistic self-righteousness. The suffering of European Jewry became, in some narratives, a blank cheque for the state’s military actions in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.

Consider the way critics, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are sometimes treated. The late British MP Gerald Kaufman, himself a Jewish son of Holocaust survivors, called Israeli policy in Gaza "brutal" and was immediately denounced. Organizations like B’Tselem, or Breaking the Silence, both Israeli and both critical of Israeli policy, are often accused of betraying the Jewish people. Dissent is not argued with, but instead it is excommunicated. To weaponize the Holocaust is to drain it of its ethical power. It becomes not a warning to humanity but a fortress of moral exclusivity.

In South Asia, the past is not just remembered, It is recruited into the service of political legitimacy, moral certainty, and ideological entrenchment.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Bangladesh, where the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s founding leader, had been elevated to a sacred national trauma. Under the Awami League, this event became more than a site of remembrance; it functioned as a litmus test of patriotism.

Dissenting interpretations of the Liberation War or Sheikh Mujib’s legacy had been treated not as contributions to historical discourse but as acts of betrayal. Laws like the Digital Security Act further codified this control over narrative, criminalizing deviations from the state-sanctioned version of history.

Even when the Awami League was not in power, the controversy of who declared the independence of Bangladesh regularly became an issue, and even the images of our currency were changed. The sensitization of our independence history is so acute that no one or no university in Bangladesh till date has produced or promoted a Ph.D program specializing in our own history. It is a narrative that has been completely hijacked by politicized discourse, and not by historians.

This strategy is not unique to Bangladesh. In India, the ruling BJP has reshaped public memory through a Hindutva lens, by recasting historical figures, selectively erasing or vilifying Muslim rulers, and appropriating the memory of Hindu kings and sages as symbols of national pride. School textbooks have been revised, monuments and cities renamed, and historical wrongs selectively highlighted to consolidate a majoritarian identity. The Mughal era, once studied as a significant part of Indian syncretic heritage, is increasingly portrayed as a dark age of foreign occupation.

In Pakistan, the state has long used the memory of Partition and the Two-Nation Theory to justify a religious-nationalist identity, suppressing alternative visions of pluralism and the secular dreams of figures like Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The memory of East Pakistan and the 1971 war is largely censored or reinterpreted in ways that absolve the military and political elite of responsibility. More recently, the narrative of martyrdom around military operations and religious conflicts has been weaponized to silence criticism of the army or calls for civilian supremacy.

In Sri Lanka, the state’s post civil-war narrative has glorified the military victory over the Tamil Tigers while marginalizing Tamil suffering and demands for justice. Commemoration of Tamil civilian deaths is prohibited or heavily monitored, and efforts to establish independent historical truth through international inquiries are routinely resisted as attacks on national sovereignty.

In Bhutan, often viewed through the lens of Gross National Happiness and peaceful diplomacy, the state’s promotion of a singular national identity led to the marginalization and mass expulsion of the Lhotshampa, an ethnic Nepali minority in the late 20th century, which has been called ethnic cleansing by many. The official historical narrative frames this as a move to preserve cultural unity, effectively silencing the experiences of over 100,000 displaced people. This selective memory serves to legitimize past policies while erasing inconvenient truths, illustrating how even omission can function as a form of historical weaponization.

Across South Asia, the state’s hold over historical narrative reveals a deeper anxiety, i.e. the fear that open reckoning with the past might weaken present authority. Instead of a contested, evolving memory, history becomes a fixed script, one that rewards obedience and punishes deviation. In this script, reverence replaces inquiry, and remembrance is tightly managed not to heal, but to harness.

In Russia, the memory of the Second World War, known there as the Great Patriotic War, has become the cornerstone of Vladimir Putin’s nationalism. The Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazism is indisputable. But under Putin, that victory has become a holy myth, divorced from nuance or critique.

Victory Day, celebrated on May 9, is less a remembrance of suffering than a celebration of imperial pride. The estimated 27 million Soviet dead are invoked not to promote peace, but to justify aggression.

In the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin framed the move as a denazification campaign, invoking the ghost of Hitler to rationalize the incursion. To criticize the Soviet past, e.g. its pacts with Hitler, its repression of Eastern Europe, etc is to be labeled a traitor or Western puppet. Russian civil society has suffered as a result: organizations like Memorial, which documented Soviet-era abuses, have been shut down. History, again, becomes not a mirror but a muzzle.

In China, the Communist Party does not weaponize history by remembering, it does so by forgetting. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 is almost entirely erased from public consciousness. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are downplayed or sanitized. Only those chapters of history that glorify the Party are permitted.

This selective memory is not passive, instead it is enforced. Censorship, surveillance, and ideological education combine to ensure that only one version of the past is available. The Party does not just own the present, it owns the past and, therefore, the future. Here, the weaponization of history operates not through sacralization but through erasure. What cannot be instrumentalized is deleted.

In the United States, historical weaponization takes a more decentralized form but is no less fierce. The legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and systemic racism is at the heart of a cultural and political struggle. Debates over school curricula and Confederate monuments reflect an ongoing battle for control over historical memory.

The political right accuses critics of "rewriting" history to shame the country, while the left argues that the sanitized narrative of American exceptionalism is itself a revisionist lie. Both sides recognize that whoever controls the past shapes the moral boundaries of the present.

The backlash against critical race theory, largely misrepresented, is a clear example. By framing honest historical reckoning as indoctrination, opponents sought to prevent students from engaging with the complexity of the American past. Here, the fight is not just over history, instead it is over the national imagination.

Living in Canada, I often reflect on the stark contrast between the country’s squeaky-clean image abroad and the uncomfortable truths buried beneath it. While Canada is widely seen as a global symbol of tolerance and human rights, its own history tells a different story, particularly in relation to Indigenous peoples.

For generations, the brutal legacy of residential schools was downplayed or ignored, framed as well-meaning policy rather than cultural genocide. Today, land acknowledgements and reconciliation efforts are part of public life, but I sometimes wonder whether these acts, while necessary, risk becoming performative gestures that smooth over rather than confront the deeper injustices.

Canada’s example shows that even nations admired for their moral standing are not immune to the selective use of history to protect their national myths. In fact, it underscores a global pattern, i.e. that the past, far from being a settled record, is often curated to serve the present and to shield the powerful from deeper accountability.

What, then, is to be done?

We must separate memory from manipulation. Honouring the past does not require policing the present. Reverence must not mean repression. When history becomes scripture, it stops being scholarship. Societies must cultivate a pluralism of memory.

Every national narrative has fissures, contradictions, and competing voices. A mature historical culture does not eliminate these but embraces them. We must defend the autonomy of historians, educators, and journalists.

History should not be dictated by parliaments or politburos. It must be the domain of those willing to ask uncomfortable questions. Finally, we must remember that to weaponize history is to betray it. The past is not a tool, it is a teacher. And its greatest lesson is that it should be left alone.

In Bangladesh, the Liberation War, the assassinations of Presidents Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman, and the traumas of military rule are not merely remembered, they are deployed to their fullest extent.

However, the past should not be an arsenal. Instead, it must be a space for reckoning, not rigidity. To truly honour Bangladesh’s complex history is to embrace its contradictions, the triumph of independence alongside the failures of governance, the heroism of its leaders alongside their very human flaws.

Remembering well in Bangladesh means resisting the urge to canonize or criminalize memory. It means protecting the right to ask uncomfortable questions, even about the nation’s founding myths.

The weaponization of history here is not just a political tactic, it is a moral danger. For when history is wielded as a weapon, truth becomes a casualty, and the future, especially for new generations of Bangladeshis are held hostage to a singular, unquestionable narrative.

2026-07-27T07:24:40.204-07:00

Whose History Gets to Stay on the Wall?

Historians genuinely disagree about how much of the Bengal famine's death toll is attributable to policy versus war-driven scarcity that no government could have fully solved, just as historians and communities genuinely disagree about how the Nakba should be contextualized alongside the displacement of Jews from Arab lands.

M.K.Aaref

Jul 12, 2026 - 15:56

Jul 12, 2026 - 16:43

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

In the space of a single month this summer, two museums on two continents found themselves at the centre of the same argument, dressed in different clothes.

In Winnipeg, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights opened “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present,” a modest 11-metre display on the 1948 displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians.

In London, the National Portrait Gallery quietly let a Turner Prize-winning artist's video installation be withdrawn after 50 peers, led by Winston Churchill's own grandson, denounced it as a "barefaced lie."

Both exhibits dealt with mass suffering tied to the machinery of empire and war. Only one survived contact with power.

That contrast is the real subject of this piece -- not because the two histories are identical (they are not), but because the “institutional reflexes” they triggered are so recognizably different, and so revealing of whose discomfort a Western public institution is built to absorb, and whose it isn't.

The Nakba exhibit had been four years in development before it opened on June 27. It told a specific, bounded story: the displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 war, illustrated through personal artifacts -- replica property deeds, a set of house keys a Winnipeg family carried out of what is now Israel, embroidery, testimony.

The museum was explicit that it was telling one community's experience, not attempting a comprehensive history of the conflict.

That did not stop it from becoming, in the words of one arts publication covering it, an exhibit "born in controversy" before a single visitor had walked through the door. An Israeli advocacy group threatened legal action pre-opening.

A museum trustee resigned, calling the exhibit "intellectually dishonest" for not giving equal space to the roughly 850,000 Jews displaced from Arab countries after 1948.

Canada's heritage minister toured the exhibit and publicly said parts of it "should be rectified" -- despite his own office insisting, in the same breath, that the government has no business dictating museum curation.

Competing petitions for and against the exhibit each drew over 11,000 signatures. The museum held its ground. The exhibit stayed up, unaltered, running through November 2028.

What is notable is not that the exhibit drew criticism -- serious historical arguments were made on both sides about context, omission, and the museum's consultation process, and those arguments deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved away.

What is notable is that despite ministerial pressure, a board resignation, legal threats, and a genuinely fierce public fight, the institution did not fold. The story stayed on the wall.

Contrast that with “Persistence,” Helen Cammock's 40-minute film, which had been running at the National Portrait Gallery since September 2025 as part of a contemporary portraiture program.

In it, Cammock described "the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill" during the 1943 Bengal famine, which killed an estimated three million people, and drew a parallel to Oliver Cromwell's campaigns in Ireland.

The film had been on public display for ten months without incident. Then Lord Roberts of Belgravia -- a Churchill biographer -- organized an open letter, joined by more than fifty peers including Churchill's grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames.

The letter called the film's claim "foul and vile" and "historically ludicrous," arguing that Churchill had in fact ordered shipping diverted, even at cost to the war effort, to relieve the famine. Within weeks, Cammock "voluntarily" withdrew the piece.

The gallery insisted it had not pressured her out; Cammock's own statement -- "I do not accept this pressure. To question, challenge and explore ideas and histories is vital to a healthy society" -- suggests otherwise.

To be fair to Lord Roberts and Soames: they were not denying that three million people starved. Their argument was narrower and more defensible on its face -- that intent matters, that "wilful starvation" implies a deliberate policy of murder rather than wartime negligence and imperial callousness, and that Churchill's own directives show he did not want Bengalis to starve.

But that argument does not survive close contact with the historical record, and it's worth being precise about why. Leo Amery, Churchill's own Secretary of State for India, recorded in his diaries that Churchill blamed the famine on Indians "breeding like rabbits" and reportedly asked why Gandhi hadn't died yet if the famine was so bad.

Historian Madhusree Mukerjee's “Churchill's Secret War” documents that Britain continued exporting grain out of India during the famine, that offers of food aid from Canada and Australia were turned down or delayed, and that shipping capacity was repeatedly prioritized for the Mediterranean and stockpiling in Europe over relief for Bengal.

Amartya Sen's Nobel-winning work on famine established that the 1943 famine was not primarily a food-availability crisis at all -- there was enough grain in India that year -- but a failure of distribution and entitlement, worsened by wartime price controls and the denial of relief that Whitehall had the power to authorize and chose, for long stretches, not to.

None of this requires believing Churchill drew up a starvation plan on a napkin. It only requires acknowledging that a man who could organize the evacuation of Dunkirk and the D-Day landings had the administrative capacity to move grain, and for the better part of a year, largely didn't.

So the peers were technically right that no memo exists ordering genocide -- and substantively wrong that the famine was simply bad weather Churchill tried his best to fix. Cammock's phrasing was blunt, but the underlying historical case for serious British culpability is not fringe; it is mainstream, well-sourced scholarship.

And yet it was that account -- not a legally aggressive threat, not a resignation, not a cabinet minister's public rebuke -- that proved fatal to the exhibit. A polite letter from fifty peers was enough.

It also matters who was doing the pressuring, and from where. In Winnipeg, the museum faced a sitting cabinet minister, a resigning trustee, and an advocacy group threatening litigation -- the full weight of formal political and legal power -- and treated all of it as commentary to be noted, not instruction to be obeyed.

In London, the pressure came from outside government entirely: A backbench-adjacent group of peers and a family member, with no legal authority over the gallery whatsoever. On paper, the National Portrait Gallery had every institutional justification to hold firm that the Winnipeg museum did not. It simply chose not to use it.

I did not come to this comparison as an outside observer. My mother's family was uprooted from their home during Partition, one of the largest forced displacements in modern history, and both of my parents witnessed the famine's aftermath firsthand -- the starvation, and people dying in the streets of Kolkata, close enough to touch.

That is not an abstraction I found in an archive. It is the house my family no longer lived in, and the bodies my parents stepped around.

The artist Zainul Abedin, who sketched Bengal's famine victims in charcoal and ink as they were dying in 1943, left behind some of the most unflinching visual testimony of that year -- gaunt bodies, children reduced to bone, the quiet obscenity of a famine unfolding in a British-administered province that was, by the government's own wartime logistics, still ‘exporting’ rice.

Those sketches sit in the same moral category as the keys and property deeds in the Winnipeg exhibit: Personal, physical evidence that a catastrophe happened to real people, not a contested abstraction to be argued into non-existence.

It is also worth being precise about why the grain didn't move, because the "it was just a typhoon" defence collapses under the same logistics that supposedly justified the shortage.

Wartime priorities did draw shipping away from Bengal -- grain and vessels were being diverted to feed Greek civilians and soldiers after Italy's occupation, and denial policies aimed at slowing a possible Japanese advance through Burma saw boats and rice stocks in coastal Bengal deliberately destroyed or requisitioned, on the theory that they might otherwise fall into Japanese hands.

Both were real wartime considerations. Neither required three million Bengalis to starve to death to be honoured; they required a colonial administration to weigh Bengali lives against other priorities, and to keep weighing them that way for the better part of a year while people died in the streets of the city my parents called home.

The Nakba, likewise, was not a natural disaster. It happened within the specific administrative and legal architecture of the British Mandate for Palestine -- a mandate Britain had accepted from the League of Nations, administered for three decades, and then exited in 1948 having produced, through its own policies of land allocation, immigration control, and eventual military withdrawal, exactly the conditions under which the war and mass displacement that followed became possible.

Both catastrophes, in other words, trace back to the same imperial habit: London (and its colonial administrations) treating the lives and land of subject peoples as a variable to be balanced against London's own strategic and military priorities, war after war, decade after decade.

Here is the uncomfortable symmetry. In Winnipeg, an institution absorbed sustained, high-level political pressure -- including from a sitting federal minister -- to alter an exhibit about a foreign, ongoing conflict, and it declined. In London, an institution absorbed a single open letter about its own country's imperial past, and the piece was gone within weeks, dressed up as the artist's free choice.

It's not that Western institutions are incapable of holding difficult exhibits under pressure -- Winnipeg proves they can. It's that the pressure lands differently depending on whose history is being disturbed.

A story about a conflict thousands of miles away, involving other people's ancestors, can survive ministerial disapproval and legal threats because the discomfort it produces is, for the institution, largely external.

A story that names the institution's own national mythology -- Churchill as the indispensable saviour of civilization, not also the administrator of a colonial famine -- turns out to be far more fragile, because the discomfort is internal, and internal discomfort has more people with the standing and the social capital to make a phone call.

This is worth resisting the temptation to overstate. The two exhibits are not equivalent in scale, evidentiary contestation, or political stakes, and treating every uncomfortable colonial fact as settled beyond argument is its own kind of dishonesty.

Historians genuinely disagree about how much of the Bengal famine's death toll is attributable to policy versus war-driven scarcity that no government could have fully solved, just as historians and communities genuinely disagree about how the Nakba should be contextualized alongside the displacement of Jews from Arab lands.

A good-faith argument about context and proportion is not hypocrisy; it's how institutions are supposed to work.

What crosses into hypocrisy is the asymmetry in which arguments get to "end" the conversation. In Winnipeg, "this exhibit lacks context" produced four years of consultation, a public fight, and a decision to keep going.

In London, "this claim is foul and vile" produced silence and a quiet withdrawal within weeks, over a history most serious economic historians treat as substantially, if not entirely, the product of British policy choices.

A society that can hold open a fresh, contested, foreign wound for two and a half years, but cannot hold open an 80-year-old domestic one for 18 months, has told you something true about itself -- not about which history is more painful, but about which pain it has practised looking away from the longest.

MK Aaref writes on culture, history, identity, and geopolitics from a South Asian and diasporic perspective.

The Case for Selling the Family Silver

Bangladesh does not need a government that owns everything. It needs a government that has the political will to solve issues from the perspective of its citizens and not of the ruling class.

M.K.Aaref

Jun 15, 2026 - 14:02

Jun 21, 2026 - 15:24

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

This year’s national budget arrives with the language of relief. For ordinary citizens, it offers a slightly wider income tax cushion, some tax relief on essential commodities, concessions for farmers, cheaper mobile access, healthcare related relief, and encouragement for freelancers, startups and the digital economy.

These are not insignificant gestures. In a country where food prices, medical costs and uncertainty around employment shape household anxiety, even modest relief matters.

But the larger question remains unavoidable. Can a government that is short of cash, struggling to raise revenue, borrowing heavily, and trying to rescue a distressed banking system still justify owning and operating a sprawling empire of banks, mills, hotels, industrial units, transport entities and loss-making commercial enterprises?

The FY 2026/27 budget is large in ambition and fragile in arithmetic. Total expenditure has been placed at Tk 9.38 lakh crore, revenue is projected at Tk 6.95 lakh crore, and the deficit stands at Tk 2.43 lakh crore.

This means the government must borrow heavily while also trying to reassure citizens, creditors, depositors and international lenders that it has a credible path to stability.

For the ordinary citizen, the budget must therefore be judged not merely by what it promises, but by whether those promises can be financed without creating a bigger crisis later.

From a household perspective, several measures are welcome. Raising the tax-free income threshold gives some relief to salaried people. Reducing withholding tax on essential commodities such as rice, wheat, potatoes, fish, onions, garlic, salt, sugar and edible oil may ease pressure if the benefits are passed on to consumers.

Relief on agricultural inputs could help farmers, and VAT concessions on items such as cardiac stents, intraocular lenses and dialysis inputs are important in a country where medical bills can destroy family finances overnight.

The withdrawal of the Tk 300 SIM card tax and support for freelancers and startups also recognise the importance of digital access and youth income.

Yet the citizen should ask a simple bazaar question: will prices actually fall? Bangladesh has too often mistaken tax concessions for consumer relief. A tax may be reduced at import or wholesale level, but unless markets are competitive and supply chains are properly monitored, traders may simply keep the margin.

The state loses revenue, the middleman gains, and the consumer receives a press release instead of cheaper food. The social safety net allocation is also welcome, particularly the proposed Family Card program for women-headed households. But social protection must be clean, targeted and auditable. If it is captured by local patronage, it becomes politics wearing the clothes of compassion.

The real shadow over the budget, however, is the banking system.

Bangladesh is not facing a simple liquidity problem. A liquidity problem means a bank has decent assets but not enough immediate cash.

Bangladesh is not facing a simple solvency problem. A solvency problem means the assets themselves are impaired.

Bangladesh has both. In some banks, the liquidity crisis is only the visible fever. The deeper disease is bad lending, political capture, and the erosion of capital.

The budget speech itself acknowledges the severity of the problem. Non-performing loans have risen sharply. Several banks face acute liquidity pressure. Depositor confidence has been damaged.

Capital adequacy has weakened to alarming levels. The government has spoken of recapitalization, risk-based supervision, management reform, stronger central bank authority, reduction of political interference, and restrictions on family control of banks.

These are necessary steps, but they will not be enough if rescue money merely refills institutions that have already been looted or mismanaged.

The state must protect small depositors first. Ordinary savers should not pay the price for regulatory failure and politically connected lending. But protecting depositors is not the same as protecting owners. If a bank has been hollowed out by connected borrowers, weak directors or shadow owners, public money must not be used to restore the same people to control.

The S. Alam episode has made this lesson brutally clear. Whether the final numbers are settled through investigation, litigation, or asset recovery, the broad pattern is already familiar: concentrated ownership, related party lending, weak supervision, regulatory capture, and capital flight.

It is the oldest banking scandal in the world with a Bangladeshi accent. Weak regulation plus powerful borrowers equal national plunder.

Any banking rescue must therefore follow a hard sequence. First, conduct independent asset quality reviews. Second, identify the true capital hole. Third, remove unfit owners, directors, and senior managers. Fourth, pursue asset recovery inside and outside Bangladesh.

Fifth, recapitalize only after governance has changed. Sixth, where possible, sell rehabilitated banks to qualified investors through transparent public processes. To return sick banks to the same families or groups that helped make them sick would be less reform than theatre, and very expensive theatre at that.

This brings us to the broader question of nationalized assets. Why does the government still own so many commercial entities?

Some public ownership makes sense. Sonali Bank, for example, can remain as a core public banking institution because it performs treasury, pension, social transfer and rural banking functions that the state may reasonably want to retain.

Strategic infrastructure, ports, parts of energy security and certain development finance functions may also justify state control.

But why must the government own multiple weak commercial banks? Why must it remain in ordinary manufacturing, hospitality, airline operations, sugar, jute and industrial units that do not perform essential sovereign functions?

Why should public capital remain trapped in assets that private operators can run better, while hospitals, schools, urban transport, climate adaptation and bank restructuring need money?

The old argument that the state must own such assets for national dignity belongs to a post-colonial moment that has passed. A flag carrier is not a substitute for a functioning aviation policy. A state hotel is not tourism development. A loss-making mill is not heritage. A politically directed bank is not financial inclusion. It is a leaking bucket, and the taxpayer is repeatedly asked to refill it.

This does not mean everything should be sold blindly. Privatization without regulation can turn public inefficiency into private predation. Bangladesh knows this danger very well. The country does not need another round of assets quietly transferred to politically blessed buyers. It needs a disciplined national asset strategy.

The starting point should be a public national asset register. Every state-owned bank, company, hotel, industrial unit, land parcel, subsidiary, debt and contingent liability should be listed. The government should then classify assets into four groups: strategic assets to retain, public service assets to reform, commercial assets to sell, and dead assets to liquidate.

The second step is valuation. No asset should be sold without independent valuation, audited accounts and clear disclosure of liabilities. This is particularly important because profitable assets command better sale prices. If a hotel, bank or industrial unit can be made cleaner, more transparent and more profitable before sale, the taxpayer receives a higher price.

The purpose is not a distressed fire sale. The purpose is to convert poorly governed or non-strategic public assets into productive national capital.

The third step is buyer scrutiny. Every buyer must pass source of funds verification, tax clearance, anti-money laundering checks, loan default checks, politically exposed person screening and beneficial ownership disclosure. The public must know who is buying public property.

No industrial conglomerate should be allowed to control a bank if it is also a major borrower. Related party lending must be tightly capped and disclosed. Bank directors and controlling shareholders should face personal liability for fraudulent approvals and concealed ownership.

Hotels and airlines are useful examples, but they should not distract from the larger argument. The issue is not whether one particular hotel has charm or whether a national airline has emotional value.

The issue is whether the state should tie up public capital in commercial businesses while asking citizens to absorb austerity, banks to absorb rescues, and lenders to provide breathing room. If a unit is profitable, transparent and commercially attractive, that is precisely why it may fetch a stronger price.

If it is loss making, the state must decide whether reform can raise its value before sale or whether continued ownership only deepens the hole.

Proceeds from asset sales should not disappear into routine government spending. There should be a National Asset Recovery and Restructuring Fund, with proceeds ring fenced for bank restructuring after governance reform, reduction of expensive public debt, and targeted investment in health, education and social protection.

Selling assets to pay salaries would be fiscal vandalism. Selling assets to repair the financial system and reduce liabilities would be reform.

Can the sale of nationalized assets solve the government’s cash crunch? Not by itself. One-time proceeds cannot fix a recurring revenue problem. Bangladesh still needs a broader tax base, better compliance, less leakage, and more disciplined spending.

Asset sales can provide breathing room. They can reduce pressure on bank borrowing, improve fiscal credibility, attract foreign investment and help fund bank recapitalisation without simply printing money or piling more debt onto future taxpayers.

The budget gives citizens some relief, but relief without reform is aspirin. The banking sector needs surgery. The state-owned enterprise sector needs triage. The government must stop confusing ownership with sovereignty.

A modern state proves its strength not by running hotels, airlines and weak banks, but by regulating markets, protecting depositors, prosecuting plunder, and spending public money where only the state can act.

Bangladesh does not need a government that owns everything. It needs a government that has the political will to solve issues from the perspective of its citizens and not of the ruling class.

MK Aaref writes on culture, history, identity, and geopolitics from a South Asian and diasporic perspective.

2026-07-27T07:22:59.969-07:00

The Myth of Arab Unity

The Arab world is connected, but it is not unified. Its leaders may meet under chandeliers, embrace for cameras, and issue communiqués about common destiny in a common language. But beneath that ceremonial language lie rival economies, competing ports, divergent security partnerships, dynastic anxieties, and national projects.

M.K.Aaref

May 4, 2026 - 11:46

May 4, 2026 - 15:07

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

In Bangladesh, the word Arab does not usually begin as a political category. It begins as reverence, aspiration, labour, and distance.

For many Bengali Muslims, the Arab world first enters the imagination through Islam: The language of the Qur’an, the direction of prayer, the sacred geography of Mecca and Medina, and the moral authority attached to the land where Islam was born.

Arabic words enter Bengali Muslim life through our names, greetings, sermons, prayers, funerary rituals, and religious instruction. Even when Arabic is not understood as a spoken language, it carries symbolic authority. It is not merely foreign. It is sacred.

But there is another Arab world in the Bangladeshi imagination: The Gulf as workplace. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman are not simply dots on a geo-political map. They are destinations of departure. They are the places where fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, cousins, neighbours, construction workers, cleaners, drivers, domestic workers, technicians, and small contractors go to earn a living.

For Bangladesh’s labour market, the Arab world is not a civilizational reference point, it is a remittance corridor, a recruitment network, a family survival strategy, and sometimes a theatre of exploitation.

This economic relationship is not incidental. In 2025, approximately 81% of Bangladeshi overseas workers were employed in the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and Gulf employment generated 46% of Bangladesh’s remittances, according to figures cited from Bangladesh Bank and the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training.

For Bangladesh, therefore, the Arab world is not an abstraction. It is built into the village house, the urban apartment, the wedding budget, the school fee, the medical bill, and the monthly cash flow.

This dual image matters. From Bangladesh, the Arab world often appears unified because it is filtered through religion and migration. The distinction between Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Kuwaiti, Omani, or Bahraini may be clear on passports, contracts, and immigration forms, but in popular imagination they often collapse into one broad idea: Arab.

The region is seen as wealthy, Muslim, oil rich, conservative, powerful, and culturally and morally authoritative. It is where Islam came from and where money now comes from. In ordinary conversation, that can be enough to create an illusion of coherence.

Yet the word Arab itself is far more complex than this perception allows. Arab identity is rooted above all in the Arabic language, but it is not a single race, tribe, state, or physical type. It describes a vast cultural and linguistic world stretching across the Middle East and North Africa, uniting people of varying ancestry and local customs through broad cultural similarities and a common language.

This geographical breadth is essential to understanding both the power and fragility of Arabism.

Arabism began in the Arabian Peninsula, long before the modern Saudi state existed, but it did not remain there. Through the early Islamic conquests, the spread of Arabic as a language of scripture, administration, trade, scholarship, and law, and through centuries of migration and cultural absorption, Arab identity expanded across an enormous landscape. It moved into older civilizations and did not simply erase them.

Egypt did not stop being Egyptian. Morocco did not stop being Amazigh, African, Mediterranean, and Andalusian in memory. Sudan did not stop being Nubian, African, and Islamic. Iraq did not stop being Mesopotamian. But each was drawn, in different ways and to different degrees, into the Arabic linguistic and cultural orbit.

For Bangladeshis, this distinction is often obscured by the twin filters of faith and migration. The Arab world is seldom understood through the long and uneven history of Arabization, or through the different ways in which Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Iraq, and the Gulf became part of the Arabic cultural sphere.

Instead, it is often imagined as a single civilizational field: Sacred because of Islam, wealthy because of oil, and familiar because of labour migration.

From Dhaka, Sylhet, Chittagong, Noakhali, or a village in Comilla, Arabia can appear unified, Muslim, powerful, and coherent. Seen closely, however, that unity breaks apart into monarchies and republics, tribes and sects, ports and armies, ruling families and migrant labour systems, sovereign wealth funds and oil ministries, each driven by its own national priorities.

Arab unity, therefore, survives most convincingly as culture, sentiment, and rhetoric. It does not reliably survive as state behaviour.

The United Arab Emirates’ announcement that it would leave OPEC and OPEC+, effective May 1, is therefore more than an oil story. The UAE framed the decision as part of its long-term strategic and economic vision, including its evolving energy profile and investment in domestic energy production. That explanation is important. It is also revealing. The UAE is saying, politely but unmistakably, that national interest now outweighs collective discipline.

Why would one wealthy Gulf Arab state break from a collective oil structure long associated with Arab and Muslim power? But the surprise comes from the illusion. The UAE is not acting as a member of a sentimental Arab family. It is acting as a sovereign state with its own production targets, investors, customers, global ambitions, and strategic anxieties.

Reuters reported that the UAE’s decision exposed deepening tensions with Saudi Arabia, including disagreements over energy policy, Yemen, Sudan, regional leadership, and different visions for the Gulf’s future. This is precisely where the language of Arab brotherhood meets the arithmetic of power. Brotherhood may be invoked at summits. Quotas, ports, military alliances, investment flows, and sovereign strategies are negotiated elsewhere, usually with a lot less poetry.

The modern idea of Arab unity has always carried romance. It imagines a people divided by colonial borders, restored to dignity through collective action. In the 20th century, this dream found its most charismatic expression in Pan Arabism, especially under Gamal Abdel Nasser.

It promised liberation from Western domination, resistance to Israel, social justice, and the revival of Arab self-confidence. But its institutional record was far less impressive than its emotional force.

The Arab League could coordinate language but rarely commanded action.

The United Arab Republic, formed by Egypt and Syria in 1958, collapsed in 1961.

The dream could fill public squares. It could not easily survive ministries, armies, egos, and bureaucracies. That failure was not accidental. Arab leaders often needed the language of unity to legitimize themselves, but they feared the reality of unity because it threatened sovereignty, dynasty, military authority, and regime survival.

A truly integrated Arab order would have required rulers to surrender power to a collective structure. Few were willing to do that. Unity was useful as theatre. It was as dangerous as architecture.

Older loyalties also never disappeared. In much of the region, political identity has long been shaped by family, clan, tribe, sect, city, region, dynasty, and ruler. Modern statehood did not erase these attachments. It often absorbed and repackaged them.

In the Gulf, the state is not simply a bureaucracy with a flag. It is a ruling family, a welfare bargain, a security apparatus, a tribal memory, an oil economy, and increasingly a global investment platform. The skyscraper and the majlis are not opposites. They are parts of the same political landscape.

This does not mean Gulf societies are trapped in the past. That would be a lazy and condescending reading. The Gulf states are among the most aggressively modernizing political economies in the world. They build airports, museums, ports, artificial intelligence campuses, financial districts, research hubs, airlines, entertainment zones, and entire new urban futures. But their modernity has not dissolved older structures of authority. It has made them more sophisticated.

The Gulf Cooperation Council illustrates the point. It brought together six neighbouring monarchies with shared security concerns, hydrocarbon wealth, and broadly similar ruling systems. If Arab unity could work anywhere, it should have worked there. Yet even the GCC has been marked by competition and fracture.

The Qatar blockade demonstrated that shared Gulf identity could not prevent hostility. Differences over Iran, political Islam, Yemen, media influence, Turkey, Israel, and regional leadership repeatedly pulled member states in different directions. Oman has often maintained its own diplomatic posture. Qatar turned isolation into resilience. The UAE developed an agile model of ports, logistics, capital, and security partnerships. Saudi Arabia, because of its size, religious centrality, and oil weight, continued to see itself as the natural centre of Gulf power.

That assumption is now being challenged. The UAE’s departure from OPEC is one sign of a broader shift in Gulf politics. Abu Dhabi is no longer content to be treated as a disciplined junior partner in a Saudi-led order.

Reuters has noted that the UAE increasingly saw OPEC as a constraint on its ambitions, especially as it sought greater freedom over oil production and pursued a diversified economy built around trade, finance, tourism, technology, and logistics. This is not merely an energy adjustment. It is a statement of strategic personality.

Qatar’s earlier withdrawal from OPEC was a warning sign. In 2018, Qatar announced that it would leave OPEC from January 2019 after reviewing ways to enhance its international role and long-term strategy. At the time, it could be treated as a special case because Qatar was focused on gas and politically isolated by its neighbours.

But the UAE’s exit suggests a wider pattern. Smaller but wealthy Gulf states increasingly prefer flexibility over collective discipline when the two come into conflict.

Trade is perhaps the most powerful solvent of Arab unity. The UAE has built its modern identity around movement: Goods, aircraft, tourists, capital, data, talent, oil, finance, real estate, and global brands. Dubai and Abu Dhabi face the Arab world, but they also face India, China, Africa, Europe, North America, and the global market.

Their airports and ports are not nationalist monuments. They are machines for circulation. Their logic is less Pan Arab than planetary.

This marks a profound transformation. The older Arab nationalist imagination was ideological and territorial. It spoke of liberation, dignity, sovereignty, unity, and shared destiny. The new Gulf imagination is infrastructural and transactional. It speaks of connectivity, diversification, market access, logistics, artificial intelligence, sovereign wealth, security partnerships, and global positioning.

The hero of the older imagination was the leader at the podium. The hero of the newer imagination is the airport, the port, the investment fund, the free zone, the data centre, and the carefully branded city.

For the outer non-Arab world, especially for non-Arab Muslims in countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey, the Palestine and Israel question was long assumed to be the issue where Arab unity would finally reveal itself. If Arab states shared language, history, religion, geography, and memory, then surely Palestine would be the cause around which they would act as one.

From outside the region, Palestine appeared to be not merely a national liberation struggle, but the moral test of Arab solidarity.

Yet Palestine became one of the clearest demonstrations of Arab disunity. Arab states did not approach Israel through a single strategy. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, after the Camp David Accords created the framework for the agreement. Jordan signed its own peace treaty with Israel in 1994, establishing peace between the two states.

In 2002, the Arab Peace Initiative offered collective Arab normalization with Israel in exchange for an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In 2020, the Abraham Accords opened yet another path, normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab or Muslim majority states, including the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco.

The reasons are not difficult to understand, though they are morally uncomfortable. Egypt’s peace with Israel was tied to recovering Sinai, securing American support, and stabilizing the Egyptian state. Jordan’s peace was shaped by geography, demography, security, and the kingdom’s delicate relationship with its Palestinian population.

For Gulf states, Israel increasingly became less a purely ideological adversary and more a potential partner in technology, intelligence, trade, defence, and access to Washington. For Saudi Arabia, Palestine remained central to its symbolic leadership of the Muslim world, but even Riyadh has had to weigh that symbolism against Iran, American security guarantees, investment strategy, and regional influence.

This is a hard lesson. Palestine unified the Arab populace far more than it unified Arab states. In the streets, mosques, campuses, and cultural imagination of the Arab world, Palestine remained a shared wound. But inside palaces, military headquarters, foreign ministries, and intelligence agencies, it became one file among many: Security, regime survival, Iran, America, trade, Islamism, border control, domestic unrest, and economic modernization. The Arab public could afford moral clarity, whereas Arab governments practiced strategic calculation.

For Bangladeshis, this contradiction is especially striking. Palestine occupies a powerful place in the Bengali Muslim imagination, often understood through the language of injustice, occupation, religious solidarity, and anti-colonial memory.

Many Bangladeshis assume that Arab states, being geographically and culturally closer, would naturally act together in defence of Palestine. But proximity has not produced unity. In fact, proximity has often produced caution, rivalry, and compromise. Those closest to the conflict have also been those most exposed to its costs.

The Palestine and Israel equation therefore strengthens the central argument. Arab unity survives powerfully as emotion, rhetoric, and symbolic identification. But when translated into policy, it fragments. Some Arab states fight, some negotiate, some normalize, some mediate, some fund, some condemn, and some hedge. Palestine remains the emotional centre of Arab solidarity, but it has never been sufficient to create a unified Arab political order.

For Bangladesh, this distinction is especially important. The Bangladeshi relationship with the Arab world is layered with faith, dependence, admiration, frustration, and vulnerability. The Gulf provides employment to millions and remittances to families across the country.

But the migrant worker often experiences the Arab world not as a unified Muslim brotherhood, but as a hierarchy of citizenship, sponsorship, class, nationality, wage, and labour rights. The sacred geography of Islam and the lived geography of migrant labour do not always match. One belongs to devotion.

The other belongs to contract, bureaucracy, and power. That tension should make Bangladeshi observers especially alert to the myth of Arab unity. The region that appears from afar as one Arab and Muslim space is in reality, a series of competing states with different ambitions. The Bangladeshi worker who passes through Riyadh, Dubai, Doha, Muscat, or Kuwait City quickly enters a world of difference: Different laws, employers, bureaucracies, dialects, wages, social codes, and national priorities. “Arab” becomes less a single identity than a sequence of encounters with unequal power.

The UAE’s OPEC exit simply says the quiet part aloud. The Arab world is connected, but it is not unified. Its leaders may meet under chandeliers, embrace for cameras, and issue communiqués about common destiny in a common language.

But beneath that ceremonial language lie rival economies, competing ports, divergent security partnerships, dynastic anxieties, and national projects. The façade is impressive. The load bearing walls are elsewhere.

Arab unity, then, is not entirely false. It is real as memory, culture, language, music, literature, religion, and emotional resonance. It is real when a poem travels from Cairo to Casablanca, when a sermon is understood across borders, when a Palestinian tragedy produces grief from Rabat to Dhaka, when an Arabic phrase enters Bengali prayer, when millions face Mecca in shared devotion. But as a system of political action, Arab unity has always been weaker than its slogans.

Perhaps the myth survives because it is useful. For Arab rulers, it provides grandeur without surrendering sovereignty. For Arabs, it offers dignity beyond failed states and disappointed revolutions. For non-Arab Muslims, including many Bangladeshis, it offers a sacred geography and a civilizational centre. For migrant sending countries, it offers the image of a wealthy labour market that can absorb economic pressure at home. Everyone needs Arabia to mean something larger than itself.

But the 21st century is stripping away the romance. Gulf states are no longer merely oil monarchies wrapped in Arab solidarity. They are sovereign brands, logistics hubs, security clients, investment powers, tourism platforms, and strategic actors. They may speak the language of Arab brotherhood, but they bargain as competitors.

The myth of Arab unity endures because it contains both truth and illusion. The truth is cultural kinship. The illusion is political coherence. The Arab world is not one caravan moving across the desert beneath a single banner. It is a crowded landscape of states, dynasties, tribes, ports, armies, investors, clerics, workers, exiles, artists, citizens, and migrants, all negotiating their place in a hard regional order.

The UAE’s departure from OPEC did not create that reality. It merely illuminated it. Arabism conquered distance through language, religion, and culture. Arab unity has never fully conquered politics.

MK Aaref writes on culture, history, identity, and geopolitics from a South Asian and diasporic perspective.

2026-07-27T07:21:59.165-07:00

Why Did Urban Planning in Dhaka Fail So Miserably?

Disorder in Dhaka is not always accidental. It is often profitable.

M.K.Aaref

Apr 23, 2026 - 15:56

Apr 23, 2026 - 14:51

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Dhaka’s urban misery is often explained as though it were destiny. The city is too crowded, too poor, too burdened by migration, too vulnerable to monsoon rains. There is truth in all of this, but not enough truth. Cities do not become unlivable merely because they are dense, poor, or flood prone. Many cities across Asia and Latin America have faced similar pressures and still managed, with varying success, to build more coherent systems of movement, housing, drainage, and public space.

Dhaka’s failure was not inevitable. It was produced.

The city did not collapse under the weight of growth alone. It was undone by a deeper failure of governance. Dhaka expanded without a coherent metropolitan logic linking land use, transport, drainage, housing, ecology, and enforcement.

The problem was not simply that the city grew too quickly. It was that the institutions meant to guide that growth were fragmented, weakly coordinated, and too often unwilling to impose discipline on land and infrastructure. Dhaka urbanized faster than the state could regulate it, and in some respects faster than the state ever seriously intended to.

At the center of this failure lies RAJUK, the Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha, the capital development authority formally responsible for planning and development control. On paper, that should have created metropolitan order. In practice, Dhaka has long been shaped by a tangle of ministries, utilities, city corporations, transport bodies, and politically connected interests whose powers overlap without converging.

Roads are widened without resolving drainage. Buildings are approved without regard for transport capacity. Water bodies are encroached upon while flood management is discussed somewhere else. Public space is treated as leftover land. The city is administered in fragments, but never governed as a whole.

Nothing reveals this more starkly than Dhaka’s relationship with water. This is a deltaic city. Its canals, wetlands, ponds, floodplains, and lowlands are not decorative extras waiting for proper development. They are part of the city’s survival infrastructure. Yet for decades these spaces were treated as vacant land banks.

Wetlands were filled, canals were narrowed or blocked, and retention areas were surrendered to speculation. A city that should have learned to live intelligently with water instead behaved as though water were an inconvenience to be erased.

The result appears every rainy season. Streets flood after moderate rainfall. Water lingers because natural drainage routes have been severed or clogged. Neighborhoods cycle through inconvenience, contamination, and economic loss. The poorest residents bear the brunt because they are more likely to live in vulnerable areas with weaker infrastructure.

What is often described as natural hazard is, in large part, man made vulnerability. Dhaka’s waterlogging is not merely a monsoon problem. It is a planning problem.

Climate change now makes this failure more dangerous. Bangladesh is one of the world’s most climate exposed countries, and Dhaka is already both a refuge and a pressure valve for people displaced by environmental stress elsewhere. More intense rainfall, greater flood volatility, rising heat, and migration pressure will all deepen the city’s weaknesses.

In that context, every lost canal and every filled retention basin becomes more than a local planning error. It becomes a failure of climate adaptation. Dhaka has been dismantling the very ecological systems that should have formed the basis of its resilience.

Transport tells a similar story of delay and fragmentation. Dhaka allowed dense growth to accumulate before building a serious public transport backbone. For years, the response to congestion leaned on roads, flyovers, intersections, and traffic management, as though moving private vehicles more cleverly could solve a city whose underlying structure was already broken. But transport is not only about roads. It is about where people live, where they work, what they can afford, and how mobility is organized across the metropolitan area.

Dhaka reversed the correct sequence. Growth came first. Structure came later, if at all. Neighborhoods densified without reliable feeder systems. Bus services remained fragmented and poorly regulated. Commercial intensity grew without coherent transit planning. Roads were then asked to rescue a city whose land use decisions had already made road dependence inevitable.

To expect traffic engineering alone to fix this is rather like applying cologne to a collapsing building. It may improve the atmosphere for a moment, but the structure is still failing.

The popularity of the metro is important precisely because it reveals how much demand for dignified public transport always existed. Dhaka’s residents did not need to be persuaded to use mass transit. They had been waiting for it for decades. The metro’s success should be read not only as a transport achievement, but also as an indictment of how long the city waited to build what was so obviously necessary. The demand was there. The governance was not.

Housing deepens the crisis further. Dhaka’s housing problem is not simply a shortage of units. It is a crisis of affordability, location, and exclusion. Well located housing near jobs is beyond the reach of many lower and lower middle income households, while land values and regulations work against inclusive development in central and better connected areas.

The poor are pushed outward or into informal settlements, often on environmentally risky land. Housing and transport then become one combined punishment. Those who keep the city running are forced to spend more time, more money, and more physical effort reaching the places where their labor is needed.

This is not simply inefficient. It is unjust. Informal settlements are often treated as symptoms of disorder, but many are the result of a formal city that excludes the very people who sustain it. When decent, affordable, and reasonably located housing is unavailable, informality becomes not an exception but an inevitability. Dhaka’s planning failure is therefore also a failure of social inclusion.

That exclusion is also gendered. Women experience the city’s failures through unsafe footpaths, poor lighting, hostile public transport environments, and the absence of dignified public space. Elderly residents, children, caregivers, and people with disabilities face their own daily negotiations with a city that seems designed to punish ordinary movement.

A broken pavement is an irritation for one person and a barrier for another. A badly lit bus stop is a nuisance for some and a source of fear for others. A city that neglects walkability and safety is not merely badly planned. It is socially indifferent.

Why, then, has reform been so weak? Because disorder in Dhaka is not always accidental. It is often profitable. Weak enforcement, discretionary approvals, politically connected land conversion, speculative development, and fragmented transport interests all create incentives to resist a more rational urban order.

Protecting wetlands restricts lucrative real estate expansion. Rationalizing bus routes threatens entrenched operators. Stronger development control reduces the value of political access. Affordable housing in better located areas challenges exclusionary land economics. Structural reform does not merely require technical competence. It threatens rents.

This becomes clearer when Dhaka is compared with cities that handled similar pressures more intelligently.

Singapore is not Dhaka, and no serious person should pretend otherwise. But it shows what institutional continuity looks like when long term vision is tied to enforceable planning rules. Seoul recognized that more roads were not enough and reorganized transit as an integrated public system. Curitiba aligned transport and land use instead of letting one chase the other. Medellín treated infrastructure as a tool of inclusion, not just circulation. Colombo, perhaps the most regionally relevant comparison, treated wetlands as flood infrastructure rather than as useless land awaiting profitable conversion.

These cities differ in wealth, politics, and scale, but they share one habit Dhaka has lacked. They protected strategic urban assets before they were fully consumed, and they gave planning enough authority to shape growth rather than merely lament it.

Dhaka is not entirely without hope. The metro is a clear success. Hatirjheel, despite its limitations, showed that water management, connectivity, and public space can be addressed together. Canal restoration efforts and the Blue Network idea begin from the correct premise that waterways are systems, not residual spaces.

Neighborhood level initiatives such as Shahjahanpur Jheel suggest that a more humane urbanism is possible, one that takes public space, greenery, walkability, maintenance, and everyday dignity more seriously. But these remain exceptions rather than doctrine.

What Dhaka now needs is not another handsome plan for shelves and seminars. It needs enforceable metropolitan coordination across land use, transport, drainage, housing, and ecology. It needs to treat wetlands and canals as protected infrastructure. It needs transport to shape growth rather than chase it. It needs housing policy that no longer pushes essential workers into fragile margins. And it needs to treat walkability, safety, and public space as fundamentals rather than ornament.

Dhaka failed not because it lacked intelligence, energy, or ambition. It failed because fragmented institutions, speculative land politics, transport delay, ecological disregard, and social exclusion were allowed to harden into a governing system. Yet the city is not beyond repair. Its future depends on whether its better instincts can be scaled into metropolitan discipline strong enough to outlast speculation, bureaucratic rivalry, and political impatience.

Dhaka has spent too long reacting to damage after it occurs. Its recovery will begin only when planning once again acquires the authority to prevent damage before it becomes destiny.

MK Aref is the co-founder of AniMedCare.

2026-07-27T07:21:06.696-07:00

The Election Bangladesh Needs but Isn’t Having

The timing could not be more appropriate. With election dates announced, the country has slipped into a familiar trance. What is striking is not what is being said, but what is being omitted. There is almost no sustained conversation about how Bangladesh will pay its bills, grow its industries, or persuade its own citizens to invest in their own country again.

M.K.Aaref

Dec 21, 2025 - 11:15

Dec 21, 2025 - 12:15

Photo Credit: Envato

What Bangladesh needs now is a slogan less lyrical than sovereignty and less combustible than conspiracy. Something closer to Clinton’s blunt instrument from the 1990s from his first presidential campaign. In our context it might read, with deliberate inelegance: “It’s the economy, shadhinota rhetoric notwithstanding.”

Or, to keep it shorter and sharper: “It’s the economy, full stop.”

The timing could not be more appropriate. With election dates announced, the country has slipped into a familiar trance. 1947 is summoned like an ancestral ghost, 1971 invoked as moral capital, and 2024 framed as an existential reckoning.

Every rally is thick with the language of betrayal, conspiracies, and guardianship, of enemies within and hands without. What is striking is not what is being said, but what is being omitted. There is almost no sustained conversation about how Bangladesh will pay its bills, grow its industries, or persuade its own citizens to invest in their own country again.

Bangladesh today is not poor in symbolism. It is poor in foreign direct investment, short on confidence, and overexposed to debt service. The taka has been steadily losing value, not because of a single villain but because of a structural imbalance between ambition and capacity.

Megaprojects rise on the skyline like declarations of intent, yet the interest payments alone, roughly seven billion dollars plus annually, now sit on the national balance sheet like a silent austerity program. This is not an ideological problem. It is an arithmetic one.

The political class, however, prefers history to spreadsheets. History is elastic. It can be stretched, weaponized, romanticized. Economics is less forgiving.

A depreciating currency does not care who marched in 1971. Capital flight is unmoved by patriotic slogans. Investors, local and foreign, are not asking whether Bangladesh is sovereign. They are asking whether rules apply equally, whether contracts will be guaranteed and honoured, whether policy will change with every change of wind or minister, living them in a limbo.

In the journalistic tradition of puncturing grand narratives with inconvenient facts, one might note that Bangladesh’s most urgent sovereignty question today is not territorial or ideological. It is fiscal.

A country that cannot broaden its tax base, diversify its exports, or discipline its public enterprises gradually surrenders its autonomy to creditors, to commodity cycles, and to emergency negotiations conducted behind closed doors. Sovereignty erodes quietly, through balance of payments crises rather than border skirmishes.

Consider foreign direct investment. Bangladesh’s FDI inflows remain modest compared to peers who began the race at roughly the same starting line.

Vietnam, often cited admiringly but rarely studied seriously, did not achieve its gains through rhetorical unity. It did so by creating predictable industrial policy, decentralizing growth beyond its capital, and making peace with private capital rather than treating it as a necessary evil. Bangladesh, by contrast, continues to signal ambivalence.

Investors are welcomed in speeches and thwarted in practice, lost in regulatory thickets, traffic jams, and discretionary decision-making that rewards proximity over productivity, and as a result, FDI never crossed the USD 2 billion mark.

Then there is the concentration of wealth. Dhaka expands while districts hollow out. Real estate appreciates while manufacturing struggles to climb the value chain. A narrow elite accumulates assets, often sheltered from competition, while the informal economy absorbs millions with little protection and less mobility.

This is not merely unjust. It is economically inefficient. A level playing field is not a moral luxury. It is a growth strategy.

State-owned enterprises present another unexamined contradiction. Many of them are white elephants in the classical sense. They are expensive to maintain, politically sensitive to reform, and functionally detached from their original purpose. Privatization, the word itself, triggers ideological allergies across the spectrum.

Yet around the world, from Eastern Europe to parts of East Asia, the lesson has been less about selling assets cheaply and more about governance. Independent boards, professional management, partial listings, and transparent performance benchmarks have often delivered better outcomes than either total state control or reckless sell offs.

Bangladesh could study these models. It mostly chooses not to.

Development outside Dhaka remains a campaign slogan rather than a policy architecture. Infrastructure alone does not decentralize growth. Universities, healthcare, logistics, and decision-making authority do. Without them, expressways merely funnel people and capital back to the capital. The result is a metropolis that groans under its own weight and a hinterland that votes but does not prosper.

What is missing from the current campaign season is not passion. It is seriousness. There are no competing macroeconomic frameworks on offer.

MK Aref is the co-founder of AniMedCare.

What Can We Learn From Vietnam?

Keeping India and Pakistan as the main mirrors will always make Bangladesh look respectable. but adding Vietnam to the frame as a benchmark is more meaningful.

M.K.Aaref

Dec 7, 2025 - 12:47

Dec 10, 2025 - 14:47

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

When nations sit down to judge their own progress, the choice of mirror matters profoundly. For half a century Bangladesh has held up the familiar reflections of South Asia -- India, Pakistan, sometimes Sri Lanka -- and asked: how do we measure up?

The exercise is natural, comforting, and, increasingly, misleading. Size distorts everything. India’s trillion-dollar digital economy and nuclear submarines sit alongside pockets of poverty far deeper than Bangladesh’s worst districts.

Pakistan’s chronic instability makes Dhaka look like a model of governance. Sri Lanka’s recent collapse flatters everyone else in the neighbourhood. These are not useless comparisons, but they are limited ones -- comparisons of circumstance more than of choice.

There is another country, far beyond the Bay of Bengal, that started from the same scorched earth in the mid-1970s, faced the same inheritance of war, famine and isolation, and yet, by deliberate policy design, pulled decisively ahead.

That country is Vietnam.

My interest in that country is not new. My closest friend in college in the mid-1980s was Vietnamese. Part of the educated upper middle class, his family was forced to vacate from South Vietnam in rickety boats, eventually settling in the US. There was no love lost between him and the Communist regime that finally united the two halves.

I accompanied him to various student rallies denouncing communism and the regime there. However, to my utter amusement and shock, I found out that he is a regular visitor to Vietnam, albeit attracted by the bon homme between the two former enemies and the ease and comfort the country provides for tourism and for doing business.

Over the past three decades its per-capita income has grown from roughly the same starting line to almost double of Bangladesh’s today. Its factories now assemble Samsung smartphones and Intel chips alongside garments. Its poverty rate has fallen below 4% while Bangladesh’s, after years of heroic decline, has begun to rise again.

Vietnam is not a perfect twin -- its politics are authoritarian, its land less flood-prone, its population smaller -- but it is the closest thing to a controlled experiment in what happens when a war-ravaged agrarian society chooses a different sequence of reforms.

The blunt numbers tell the story first.

Indicator (2025 estimates)	Bangladesh	Vietnam	Notes
GDP per capita (nominal USD)	$2,850	$4,850	Vietnam now ~70% higher
Average real GDP growth 2010–2025	5.9%	6.8%	Vietnam never dipped below 5% even during Covid
Exports as % of GDP	15%	85%	Vietnam is one of the most trade-open economies on Earth
FDI inflows (annual average 2020–25)	$1.3bn	$19.5bn	15 times more capital chasing
Poverty headcount ($2.15/day)	27.9%	3.6%	Bangladesh’s rate spiked after 2022
Adult literacy rate	78%	96%	Gap explains much of the productivity difference
Logistics Performance Index (1–5)	2.9	3.3	Ports, power and roads decide where the next factory goes
Share of manufacturing in GDP	21%	25% (and rising)	Bangladesh’s figure has barely moved in a decade

These are not marginal differences; they are the compound interest of three decades of divergent policy choices.

Two nations, two wars, two recoveries

The parallels at the starting gate are uncanny. Bangladesh was born in the blood and fire of 1971: countless dead, infrastructure obliterated, GDP per capita $130, more than 80% of the population in absolute poverty. Vietnam limped out of its own thirty-year war in 1975 with dioxin-scarred soil, a shattered south, and an economy cut off from the West by American sanctions. By the early 1980s both were basket cases dependent on food aid, both overwhelmingly rural, both saddled with illiteracy rates above 70 per cent.

Yet within a decade their paths began to fork -- not because of geography or natural resources (neither country has much oil or minerals), but because of the timing, sequencing, and ruthlessness with which they dismantled the failed economic models they had inherited.

Đổi Mới in detail: the reform package that changed everything

Vietnam’s transformation begins with a single Vietnamese phrase: Đổi Mới -- Renovation. Announced at the Communist Party’s Sixth Congress in December 1986 and deepened through a cascade of laws and resolutions over the next 15 years, it remains one of the most successful examples of state-orchestrated market transition in history.

Đổi Mới in eight key moves (summarized)

• Agricultural decollectivization (1988-1993): Resolution 10 and the 1993 Land Law gave households long-term, transferable land-use rights and freedom to sell surplus. Rice output tripled in five years; Vietnam flipped from importing 2 million tons of rice to the world’s second-largest exporter by 1997.

• Price liberalization & macro stabilization (1986-1991): Scrapped price controls, unified exchange rates, slashed subsidies. Hyperinflation (700%+ in 1986) fell below 20% by 1992, restoring market signals.

• Opening to foreign capital (1987 onwards): Landmark 1987 Foreign Investment Law allowed 100% foreign ownership, no nationalisation, long tax holidays. Industrial zones offered plug-and-play factories with reliable power and one-stop administration; attracted Samsung, Intel, LG and thousands more.

• Trade integration: Joined ASEAN (1995), US bilateral deal (2000), WTO (2007), then CPTPP, EVFTA, RCEP and others. By 2025 Vietnam has more FTA's than any other developing nation; tariffs collapsed, export procedures fully digitised.

• Building local supplier ecosystems: Used local-content rules, cheap loans and technology-transfer requirements to force foreign firms to source locally. Result: thousands of Vietnamese SMEs now supply Samsung and Apple directly.

• Human capital as industrial policy: Massive investment in free universal primary/lower secondary schooling, industry-linked vocational colleges and overseas engineering scholarships. By the early 2000's Vietnam produced more engineers per capita than India.

• Infrastructure ahead of demand: Power plants, deep-water ports (Cái Lái, Cái Mép - Thị Vải) and expressways built years in advance, often with Japanese/Korean ODA. Reliable 24/7 electricity repeatedly cited as the top reason firms chose Vietnam over Bangladesh.

• Political continuity as competitive advantage: One-party system delivered decades-long policy predictability; investors could plan 20 - 30 year horizons without fear of sudden reversals or nationalisation.

By 2025 Vietnam is in the middle of what officials now call “Đổi Mới 2.0” -- an ambitious upgrade that includes merging provinces from 63 to 34, slashing the number of ministries, declaring the private sector the “most important driving force” of the economy, and aiming for a 50 per cent digital economy by 2045. The original Đổi Mới is not a historical footnote; it is a living, evolving framework.

Our garment miracle and its limits

No one should belittle what Bangladesh has achieved. The ready-made garment (RMG) sector, born almost by accident in the late 1970s when Daewoo of Korea set up a joint venture under the Multi-Fibre Arrangement quotas, is one of the greatest poverty-reduction machines in history. It employs four million people -- 80 per cent of them women -- and turned Bangladesh into the world’s second-largest apparel exporter after China. Female labour-force participation leapt from under 10 per cent in the 1980s to 36 per cent today. Primary school enrolment is near universal, child mortality has plummeted, and a dense network of NGOs and microfinance institutions has delivered services where the state could not.

Yet the very success of garments has become a trap. Eighty-two per cent of export earnings still come from apparel and related textiles. When global buyers look for the next product -- smartphones, automotive parts, medical devices -- they fly over Dhaka and land in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.

Attempts to diversify have repeatedly foundered on five recurring obstacles:

• Incentives without infrastructure: Bangladesh has announced multiple special economic zones; most remain patches of empty land without reliable power or road access.

• Energy shortages: Factories routinely run diesel generators at a cost of 18-22 US cents per kWh -- double Vietnam’s industrial tariff.

• Shallow supplier bases: A foreign electronics firm arriving in Bangladesh must import almost every screw and capacitor. In Vietnam it can source 60-70 per cent locally within a year.

• Skills bottlenecks: Bangladesh produces plenty of garment workers but far too few technicians, quality-control supervisors or industrial engineers.

• Policy volatility: Changes of government, bureaucratic turf wars, and frequent reversals of tax incentives have made long-term investors wary.

The result is stark. In 2024-25 Vietnam attracted roughly $20 billion in FDI; Bangladesh managed barely $1.2 billion.

Lessons from the neighbourhood

South Asia offers its own cautionary tales. India grew fast but created too few manufacturing jobs. Pakistan never achieved macro stability. Sri Lanka diversified into tourism and light industry yet, collapsed under debt and mismanagement. None of these neighbours offers the clean, replicable sequence that Vietnam does.

A roadmap in five moves

None of this is to suggest that Bangladesh must copy Vietnam’s political system -- only its method. Five concrete, sequenced steps would dramatically narrow the gap:

1. Build three or four world-class industrial corridors (Matlab-Meghna, Mongla-Khulna, and an extension of the Dhaka-Chittagong axis) with guaranteed 24/7 power, deep-water access, and genuine one-stop shops run by independent authorities shielded from routine political interference.

2. Replace blanket tax holidays with performance-based incentives tied to local value addition, skills training, and R&D spending -- the Vietnamese model.

3. Launch a national supplier-development programme with subsidized credit and technical assistance to turn thousands of small firms into Tier-2 and Tier-3 suppliers for global giants.

4. Triple the budget for technical and vocational education, making industry co-design and co-funding mandatory, and tie SEZ incentives to apprenticeship quotas.

5. Depoliticize infrastructure planning: give a strengthened Planning Commission or a new National Infrastructure Authority a 15-20 year mandate protected by cross-party agreement.

And Finally ...

Bangladesh has every right to remain proud of its South Asian journey -- few countries have lifted so many people out of poverty so quickly. But pride must not blind it to possibility. Vietnam is not a richer cousin next door; it is a country that stood in the same ruins fifty years ago and chose a different ladder out.

Keeping India and Pakistan as the main mirrors will always make Bangladesh look respectable. Adding Vietnam to the frame will make it look restless -- and that is exactly the sentiment a country still young needs if it is ever to reach the factory floor of the twenty-first century.

MK Aref is the co-founder of AniMedCare.

2026-07-27T07:19:22.551-07:00

When Bangladesh’s Demographic Dividend Turns Into a Curse

The demographic dividend is not destiny -- it’s a choice. Bangladesh has 15 years to act, but the window shrinks daily. Without a bold vision, this youth bulge could ignite unrest rather than prosperity, echoing the Arab Spring’s unfulfilled promise.

M.K.Aaref

Oct 9, 2025 - 11:32

Oct 9, 2025 - 15:50

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

On a humid morning in Dhaka, as the sun rises over the sprawling megacity of 22 million, the streets hum with the energy of a young nation. Bangladesh, with its 170 million people, boasts a demographic dividend -- a rare window where a bulging working-age population (ages 15-64) outpaces dependents, promising economic growth if harnessed wisely.

This dividend, a legacy of declining fertility and mortality rates since the 1980s, has fueled the country’s rise from one of the world’s poorest to a lower-middle-income economy, with GDP growth averaging 6-7% annually through the early 2020s.

Yet, as I watch from afar, the promise feels increasingly hollow. The clock is ticking on this opportunity, and without urgent action, this dividend risks morphing into a demographic curse -- a burden of unemployment, inequality, and social unrest that could define Bangladesh’s future. It has been a year since the Gen Z revolution, and the stakes have never been higher.

The concept of a demographic dividend is deceptively simple. When a country’s dependency ratio -- the proportion of children and elderly relative to the working-age population -- drops, more hands are available to produce, innovate, and invest. Bangladesh hit this sweet spot around 2007, with the ratio falling from 90 in the 1980s to about 53 today, according to World Bank data. Economists estimate this could add 1-2% to annual GDP growth, a boost that has underpinned the garment industry’s boom and rural microfinance successes. However, this window, projected to last until 2040, is narrowing. By 2029, Bangladesh will become an aging society, with the elderly share climbing to 10% and reaching 20% by 2050. The question is not whether the dividend exists -- it does -- but whether Bangladesh can capitalize on it before time runs out.

The signs of trouble are already visible. Unemployment among youth (ages 15-24) hovers at 12-15%, triple the national rate of 3.35%, despite a workforce that should be its greatest asset. Each year, 2 million young people enter the labor market, but the economy generates only 5-6 million jobs -- far short of the 10-12 million needed to absorb this growth, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. The garment sector, which employs 4 million, mostly women, remains the backbone, but it’s a precarious one. Low-skill, low-wage jobs dominate, offering little upward mobility. Rural areas fare worse, with agriculture absorbing surplus labor at subsistence levels, while urban centers like Dhaka swell with underemployed migrants. This mismatch isn’t just an economic failure; it’s a social time bomb. Disillusioned youth, unable to find purpose, fuel protests -- like the July 2024 uprising that toppled the government in 2024 -- or seek risky and expensive migration routes to the Middle East, where exploitation awaits.

Education, the cornerstone of any demographic dividend, reveals another fault line. With a literacy rate of 78%, Bangladesh has made strides, but quality lags. The World Bank estimates that only 46% of children reach their full productivity potential due to inadequate schooling and skills training. STEM enrollment is low, and vocational programs struggle to keep pace with demands for AI, tech, and green industries -- sectors critical for a modern economy. The July Revolution, driven by students demanding fair job quotas, exposed this gap: a generation educated enough to protest but not equipped to thrive. Without investment in higher education and retraining, millions risk becoming unemployable as automation reshapes global markets. The interim government has pledged education reform, but with economic growth dipping to 3.3% in fiscal 2025 amid inflation above 10%, funds are scarce.

Health is another Achilles’ heel. Rising non-communicable diseases -- diabetes, hypertension, and mental health issues -- stem from urban sedentarism and poor nutrition, sapping workforce vitality. Bangladesh has just 0.7 physicians per 1,000 people, well below the World Health Organization’s recommended 1.0, straining an already overburdened system. Undernutrition persists in rural areas, with 30% of children stunted, per UNICEF, undermining early cognitive development. A healthy workforce is the engine of a dividend, but without preventive care and mental health support -- especially after the trauma of 1,400 deaths in the 2024 protests -- this engine sputters. The government’s focus on stabilizing banks looted by allies of the previous government diverts resources from these human capital needs.

Gender inequality further dims the dividend’s glow. Women’s labor force participation stands at 36%, half the male rate, constrained by cultural norms, childcare burdens, and limited access to skills training. The garment industry, while a lifeline, often traps women in exploitative conditions, with reports of wage theft and unsafe workplaces persisting post-Rana Plaza. Empowering women could double the dividend’s impact, yet progress stalls. The interim government’s July Declaration nods to gender equity, but without concrete policies -- subsidized childcare, legal protections -- words ring hollow. This exclusion not only wastes talent but deepens poverty cycles, a self-inflicted wound on an economy teetering on the edge.

The aging transition looms as the ultimate deadline. By 2040, the elderly will demand pensions and healthcare, shifting the dependency burden back onto a shrinking workforce. Bangladesh lacks a robust social safety net, with only 15% of the elderly covered by informal support, per a 2023 Asian Development Bank report. If the current youth aren’t upskilled now, the next generation will inherit a fiscal crisis, paying for an aging population with stagnant wages. The World Bank warns that South Asia, including Bangladesh, risks “squandering” its demographic window without creating 20 million jobs annually region-wide -- a target that feels distant as investment dries up amid political instability.

The July 2024 uprising, a clarion call from Generation Z, offered a chance to reset this trajectory. Students, led by figures like Nahid Islam, toppled a well entrenched autocracy. The interim government dissolved parliament, banned the Awami League pending trials, and launched reform commissions. On the uprising’s anniversary, it issued the July Declaration, committing to electoral and judicial overhauls, with polls set for February 2026. Yet, progress falters.

The National Consensus Commission struggles to unify the youth-led National Citizen Party (NCP), which demands justice and a new constitution, with the BNP’s push for earlier elections. Military chief General Waker-uz-Zaman, overseeing deployed forces amid a police strike, resists prolonged interim rule, complicating reforms. Recent Dhaka clashes on September 10 injured dozens, while minority attacks -- mostly since August 2024 erode social trust.

Economic headwinds amplify the risk. Growth at 3.3% in fiscal 2025, down from 6.5% in 2023, reflects floods in Sylhet, a 30% investment drop, and looming US tariffs on garments. Inflation exceeds 10%, hitting the poor hardest, while graduation from least-developed status in 2026 threatens export incentives. Diplomatically, Dr. Yunus’s demand for Hasina’s extradition strains ties with India, while warming relations with Pakistan via trade pacts on August 25, 2025, signal a pivot -- but offer no quick economic fix. The Cyber Security Act, with 15 cases filed this month against critics, revives repressive habits, stifling the free thought needed for innovation.

This demographic dividend, then, becomes a curse when policy fails to match demography. The interim government’s focus on political stabilization overshadows economic planning, leaving youth unemployed and restless. Polarization between the NCP’s reform-first stance and the BNP’s electoral haste, compounded by military caution, stalls bold action. Economic stagnation diverts attention from education and health, while minority violence -- often unchecked amid police shortages -- undermines cohesion. Diplomatic isolation limits foreign aid, and the judiciary, steeped in old loyalties, resists overhaul. Corruption, exponentially grown since 1971’s modest relief fund thefts to today’s multi-billion-dollar heists, entrenches a kleptocratic inertia that siphons resources from human capital.

Yet, hope persists. The youth’s defiance, economic resilience in cooperatives, and global scrutiny post-uprising offer a path forward. A “second dividend” is possible through sustained investment: vocational training to boost STEM skills, NCD prevention to enhance health, and gender equity to unlock women’s potential. The government could partner with NGOs and international bodies like the ILO to create jobs, leveraging Bangladesh’s digital growth—IT exports hit $1.5 billion in 2024. Tax incentives for green industries and rural broadband could spur innovation, while a universal healthcare pilot in Dhaka could test scalable solutions.

Watching from Toronto, I see a nation at a crossroads. The demographic dividend is not destiny -- it’s a choice. Bangladesh has 15 years to act, but the window shrinks daily. Without a bold vision, this youth bulge could ignite unrest rather than prosperity, echoing the Arab Spring’s unfulfilled promise.

The July Revolution’s spirit demands more than protests; it requires a commitment to education, health, and inclusion. On this October morning, the future hangs in the balance -- will Bangladesh seize its dividend or succumb to its curse?

As per Alexander Pope:

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never is, but always to be blest.”

Tags:

Demographic dividend

2024-09-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Awakening of Layla

The dreams are repetitious. She is a teen in Erbil, holding hands with other girls, laughing, and running toward the Kirkuk Citadel. Giggling and gossiping about the boys who hang out by their school, they are closely watched by their parents sitting on mats, drinking tea, and snacking on lokum and watermelon. Right next to them is the Prophet Daniel Mosque, surrounded by a patch of green grass. The park is nothing like those lush, green, blooming pieces of heaven that are dotted all over Toronto, but it was “home,” that arid piece of barren land that passed off as a park in a part of the world where the future is always uncertain and the past is compromised. They used to run around the park, chasing each other, nibbling on their koftas and khubz, while the men stood in corners, chain-smokers to the core, puffing away and arguing about politics and heated discussions about Kurdish nationalism. It was not exactly a cosmopolitan city like her new home, but you would occasionally hear a cacophony of Turkish and Arabic, along with Kurdish, of course.

In the heart of Scarborough, Toronto, amidst the cacophony of diverse cultures and bustling streets, Layla found herself at a crossroads. Her journey from Erbil to the promising shores of Canada had been a tumultuous one, filled with hardships, resilience, and sheer willpower. That morning, as the sun rose over the horizon, Layla stood by the window of her modest apartment, gazing out at the vibrant neighbourhood below. It had been six years since she had arrived in this new land, seeking a future that was not exactly planned. With a degree in English literature and a heart full of dreams, she embarked on a journey to carve out a new life for herself. She studied hard, encouraged by a father who believed in her future and became an English teacher. Every day she utters a shukr that she is able to become one. Her degree made the transition to cross the Atlantic and start a life from scratch much easier.

After the toppling of Saddam, there was euphoria. Their homeland, the Iraqi portion of Kurdistan, would become autonomous with the help of the Americans. Then there was the disastrous referendum and all of that disappeared. The Iraqis established their authority once more, and like in Mosul, the Arabization process started. Tired after generations of betrayals by others, it was none other than her father who cajoled her to take admission for yet another teacher's training course in Canada, and here she was.

She graduated with flying colors, but no one seemed interested in hiring her. Money was always tight, and she had to think on her feet. Her first job was at a fast-food restaurant, flipping burgers and serving fries to indifferent customers. It was a far cry from the career in teaching and writing that she had envisioned for herself. But Layla refused to be disheartened. With unwavering determination, she worked long hours and saved every penny, inching closer to her goals with each passing day. It paid off. Finally, she landed a teaching job in a center that catered to newcomers and found this place she could afford not far from Victoria Park. It was tiny, a bit too quiet, but it was a place of her own.

Despite the obstacles she faced, Layla found solace in the small joys of everyday life. She immersed herself in the vibrant culture of Scarborough, befriending neighbors from all corners of the globe and soaking in the rich tapestry of languages and traditions. People around her spoke Somali, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Ukrainian, Tamil, Pashto, Dari, and myriads of other languages. In their stories, she found echoes of her own struggles and triumphs, forging bonds that transcended borders and boundaries.

But amidst the hustle and bustle of her new life, Layla found herself grappling with unexpected emotions. A widowed Palestinian man named Ahmed had caught her eye, his gentle demeanor and kind heart stirring feelings she had long buried beneath the weight of her past. Yet, she hesitated to open her heart to love, uncertain of the future. Ahmed had escorted a couple from Jordan to her center, helping them to enroll in her class, and they had wanted to talk to the teacher. The fact that Layla also spoke Arabic turned the encounter into a cordial one. Ahmed had brought his 6-year-old son Ali, who stared at Layla and kept smiling. Afterward, when they were leaving, Ahmed turned back and sheepishly asked Layla out for a meal.

As Layla wrestled with her inner turmoil, Ahmed continued to court her with quiet persistence, showering her with acts of kindness and affection. Ali became a constant presence in her life, his laughter filling her days with warmth and joy. And though she tried to resist, Layla found herself drawn to the warmth of their embrace, longing for a future she had never dared to dream of.

Ahmed also had enough of his past life. Growing up in the shadows of the Israeli-Palestinian turmoil, Shuqba was a sleepy little hamlet south of Jerusalem. His father had owned olive groves, harvested honey, and grown oranges in a small plot next to the groves. Despite the turmoil, life went on. Then one day, a bunch of people showed up from across the border with guns, and claiming divine rights to the land, forced them out at gunpoint and turned them into refugees overnight. He was studying at Al Najah University at the time, and all of a sudden, he did not have a home to go back to. Somehow, through the kindness of his extended family, he managed to graduate and cross the border into Jordan to look for work. Jordan itself was teeming with refugees to the point where more than 80 percent of the population were Palestinians. They were wary of his presence. Finally, he managed to land a residency at the local hospital in a small town. By that time, his siblings were already dispersed in various places, namely Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. One of his brothers, Sulaiman, managed to get himself to Cyprus and was repatriated to Canada as a refugee.

Meanwhile, Ahmed fell in love with a nurse at his hospital. Her name was Nadia, and in spite of considerable objections from her family, they married. Two years later, Ali came into their lives but at a heavy toll. Nadia died from excessive bleeding and did not get to see her new son. Her parents accused him of negligence and wanted to take Ali away. He refused. Somehow he managed a wet nurse and decided to pursue the life of a single father, a rather unusual choice in the Middle East. Eventually, he applied for residency in Canada and here he was, also struggling to land on his feet. When he saw Layla, something stirred. He could see in her eyes a longing for peace, stability, and happiness.

But amidst the joys of her newfound success, Layla could not shake the lingering doubts that plagued her mind. Her dreams made her doubt, casting a shadow over her blossoming romance with Ahmed. And as he pressed her for a commitment, she found herself torn between the promise of a future together and her dreams of being a self-reliant, independent woman who stood her ground. She did not want to be confined within the Eastern definitions of a traditional housewife bound to a household.

In the end, it was Ali who showed her the way forward. With his dogged pursuance and the wisdom of age, he reminded her that love was worth fighting for, even in the face of uncertainty and doubt. As Layla looked into his bright eyes, she saw a reflection of her own hopes and dreams, shining bright against the backdrop of a world filled with possibility. In Ali, she found the stirrings of motherhood that she had suppressed forever. Lacking a mother figure, Ali had adopted Layla instantly since they had initially met at her college.

Then one day, Ahmed asked Layla to come with them on a picnic. She made those lamb and herb rolls called sfiha and filled a large flask with orange blossom and honey tea. She knew that those rolls were Ali's favorites. On that pleasant Saturday morning, they came to pick her up. She noticed that he had a bag full of containers, which she knew was meant for a mezza platter. There was also a box of knafeh from her favorite Arabian bakery. Ali had a little bow tie on, with eyes sparkling and beaming ear to ear. They also had a large bag that had sheets and other paraphernalia for a picnic.

Layla was somewhat amused that Ahmed had called an Uber. They usually limited themselves to wherever the routes of the TTC took them. The car took them to Guild Park, full of discarded neo-Greco-Roman relics from demolished buildings, with breathtaking views of the lake. After a wonderful picnic that was full of laughter, they went for a walk. At one point, Ahmed took Layla’s left hand and brought out a tiny box. She looked at Ali and saw him with a very eager, longing face, hands clasped together as if pleading. She looked at his eyes and said “yes,” and before Ahmed could react, it was Ali who lunged at her, bawling. As they stood beneath the canopy of trees with the light beaming through, Layla knew that she had finally found her place in the world.

With newfound courage, Layla took Ahmed's hand and embarked on a journey of love and self-discovery. Together, they would navigate the challenges of blending their families and forging a future built on trust and mutual respect. In this newfound journey of love and self-discovery, Layla embraced the promise of a brighter tomorrow, knowing that with Ahmed and Ali by her side, anything was possible. Their love story was just beginning.

2018-09-07T01:13:00.002-07:00

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Bangla is our hard-earned brand

M K Aaref

· Published at 07:00 pm July 31st, 2018

What’s in a name? BIGSTOCK

The renaming of West Bengal to Bangla will unleash a world of confusion

Ever since Yugoslavia broke up into fragments back in 1991, the area, already notorious for giving the world the word “Balkanization,” lived up to its name and erupted into fragmented wars based on ethno-religious lines.

Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia hogged the world’s headlines for some time, before settling into the peaceful co-existence of today.

One region which did not suffer the consequences of war, but went through a severe identity crisis, was the newly minted Republic of Macedonia.

Their very legal existence was vetoed for the past two decades within NATO and the European Union by their southern neighbour, Greece, who also happens to have a province named Macedonia just south of the new Macedonian republic.

The latter ended up using abbreviations like FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). Only very recently has the conflict with Greece been solved, when they renamed the country Republic of North Macedonia. A cultural and political compromise has been finally reached. By the way, there is also small province called Brittany, south of Great Britain, that is undisputedly French, in spite of its history.

Now, our neighbouring Indian state of West Bengal/Poschim Bongo is opting for being named “Bangla.” So we have Bangla and Bangladesh as two geo-political entities now. While populations of both places have the rights over Bangla culture, language, and heritage, I personally believe that a distinction is necessary.

Given the additional historical weight we have on our side for the sake of Bangla, not just as our language, but also as an indistinguishable part of our national identity, this rings too many bells of nomenclature appropriation.

During the second partition of Bengal, we on the eastern side, colloquially known as Purbo Banga, became East Pakistan and the attempt to replace Bangla was instigated from the earliest days of Pakistan.

Then of course, the language movement culminated with the martyrdom of our students, and the establishment of February 21 as “Bhasha dibosh.” Language Day, and also adopted by UNESCO with the same motif.

Since that day, our nationalism was piqued, we never looked back, and established Bangladesh in 1971, through a lot of sacrifices, as the home of the Bangla nation. Simply put, we earned the right to be the Bangla Nation, Bangla Desh more than anyone else.

However, our cultural umbilical cord does encompass our brethren across the border. Tagore was born there, and the epicentre of Bengali Renaissance was more based there than here.

I get it. They are of the Bangla culture too. However, this recent attempt to rename the state to Bangla -- initially from West Bengal, to “Poschim Bongo,” now to the simplified Bangla -- creates an identity confusion.

Apparently, when the chief ministers of the Indian states are summoned to Delhi for presentations, they are called alphabetically using the western letters. Therefore, the CMs of Andhra and Bihar get all the attention, whereas the attention span goes out the window when the last state of West Bengal is called.

New names and states in India are not new. There have been new states created from larger states such as Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana recently. However, this is the first attempt to rename an existing state entirely.

There could have been other options too. They could have renamed as “Banga,” or “Banga-Rajya,” and still be ahead of Bihar. It could also have been the simplified “Bong,” from which the word Bangla was later derived.

I do recall the novel Bong Thekey Bangla by Rizia Rahman from decades ago, where she chronicled the evolution of this region from the ancient Gangaridai to present day Bangladesh. Given the apparently intense pressure of Hindification over there, the attempt to re- impose a Bengali identity is very commendable, but not at the expanse of diluting our Bangladeshi identity of this side.

The state of Western Bengal is undisputedly a part of a much greater Indian territory and its economic future is also undisputedly tied to the west than to the east. Therefore, this reassertion of the name “Bangla,” as if Bangladesh is behind you and out of one’s sight, is sad. Having said all this, I am also saddened by the non-response of our own civil society and cultural icons who have not taken a stand about this renaming issue.

Our national anthem is “Amar Shonar Bangla” and not “Amar Shonar Bangladesh.” All Bengalis used to call Bengal Bangladesh once, but now it is our hard-earned brand.

However, Bangla, as a language, as a culture, as an ethnic identity, and a name cannot be specifically appropriated. Some diplomatic efforts are also necessary to avoid this confusion about to be unleashed geographically, of having a Bangla and a Bangladesh right next to each other.

MK Aaref is a freelance contributor.

The Falling Chronicles

2013-02-17T00:32:00.003-08:00

I find my bed precariously balanced at the edge of the roof of a skyscraper. I am still lying down, but as I look down on my side, I see a modern day canyon of high rises. The bed, a four poster one that once belonged to my grandparents and on which my father was once born, is enclosed on three other sides with walls that have crept up to the bed itself. I try to peek out, and see walls running around the corner, so I cannot put my foot across the wall and creep up on the adjoining roof, because there is none. The only way out of my bed is down, almost 40 or 50 stories down

I panic at my own entrapment at such lofty heights.

Momentarily I am engrossed by the streaks of lights way below caused by the headlights of cars, like a long-exposed photograph. Everything is in slow motion, like the page of a surreal calendar on cityscapes. I eventually resign to the inevitability of the situation, move towards to the center of the bed so I won’t accidentally roll over and decide to get some sleep. Instead, in one of those James Steward moments from the “The Rear Window’, I turn around and decide to check out the windows of the high rise across the canyon. Now I am empowered with super vision, able to peek and peer without a telescope.

I see a couple dressed in black and with flashlights breaking into a safe…

I see someone engaged in an intimate embrace on top of a desk, passionate and kinky…..

A child, a boy at that, holds a Barbie by it’s hair and threatens to drop it on the street below, while another girl, presumably the sister screams her head off behind him…..

A couple is sitting on a tattered sofa watching a rerun of Casablanca on TV….

My eyelids get heavy, I pull the duvet over and succumb to my sleep.

I wake up, momentarily gripped by panic as I begin the process of putting my feet down on the floor. Instantly I am assured by terra firma below me and I go through the recollection process of the dream on the roof top. I usually cannot remember the sequences later in the day. This, however, is not the first time I have found myself confined in my dreams. This time, I have decided to go back to sleep, but usually I wake up, covered in beads of sweat, momentarily paralyzed, with my heart racing so fast, I would be afraid that it might stop.

The shrink makes me lie down on that uncomfortable divan of his and makes me go back and recount the dreams, most of which are sketchy. Many of these consist of going back to places where I was relatively happy, but surprisingly devoid of any populations……stark, surreal landscapes full of classical and modernist landscapes, almost like an actual version of DeCirrico landscape. He is concerned that I am increasingly hiding into the fantasies of my head. I tell him that I don’t mind. They are much better than falling off tall buildings from my bed.

He thinks I am an escapist.

I concur. Yes I am.

Reality is stressful, full of coincidental situations, and uninteresting. I jokingly tell him to hypnotize me so that I can go back to those surreal worlds and explore more. I am a trained urban planner with no scope here, I tell him. Let me go back to the perfectly built city of mine, so what it has no people? They would have trashed it up, covered it with fumes, and the wear everything down. The places I visit have perfect one point perspectives in every direction. It has buildings with beautiful sand-stoned facades and hotel complexes that cover the entire length and breadth of the slope of a hill…the whole promenade is full of steps and escalators, boutiques and restaurants, and surprisingly, museums.

This very morning, I tell him, I had gone back to the city of my graduate school. I left the campus holding the hands of this Greek girl who I was very close to and walk off to the city center. Instead of the chaos, we are greeted by a sunset that is stuck on the horizon, the city center has become a series of hillocks, each perched with a classical Palladian mansion, all surrounded by a park. The two of us go up and discover a tree house that is connected with a walkway to the next hill. My friend smiles and disappears somewhere, whereas I undertake the journey. She turns out to be waiting to be next hill already and decides to go for some adventurous shopping. We walk into a men’s boutique, and I ask this cocky girl with a long pony tail on top of his head to show me something for ‘a collage kid like me’. She keeps chewing her gum, looks up and down. ‘You are surely not a college kid, but that is what you want to think of yourself, come this way’. I am surprised at how I can be deflated in my own dreams. What I remember next, I am on this huge patio surrounding on three sides by rolling plains, intersected by a highway. The hustle and bustle of a busy residential district is behind it. Somehow, I am singing the praises of this property to an ‘acquaintance’, a former friend, and now a recovering drug addict. I show him the façade on the patio, a French style, with tail turrets on two ends. Somehow I am still stuck in that permanent sunset and the lights coming out of the windows, the sheer curtains billowing on the breeze, with the dramatic sky of clouds illuminated in pinks and reds from the setting sun gives a enchanting outlook. The building is owned by a Bangladeshi, who has obviously made it big in the west and the friend is sarcastic in his opinions of him. Yet there I was, defending and praising this nouveau riche monstrosity.

The shrink is not impressed.

You are regressing, he insists. I have no problem with that, I counter. I have not shied away from the responsibilities of the daily world. But, he argues, the shocks of your business and family life has pushed you to the brink, like you on that edge of the bed, and one of these days, you will fall off. He makes it sound like he is putting a curse on me. I think you are supposed to listen, not pass judgments on my predicament.

The session ends . He keeps telling me to keep a dream journal. I am supposed to write down and note the vision of the night before they disappear in the course of the first few hours of the morning. The last thing I want to do is to scribble right after I wake up. I wake up at 5:00 am on the dot every day, yet don’t leave the bed till it is almost 7, forcing myself to go back to sleep so that I can re-enter the world in my head. And every day, that endeavour fails miserably, and I finally leave the bed more tired than the night before, with every edifice in my body crying out to be let go.

Then that day, it was the worst of days, my behind glued to various seats, benches, and stools of multitudes of government offices and companies waiting for various signatures to happen, and they don’t. The MD of this have been ‘on his way’ for more than two hours, but he never does. That lofty civil servant goes off to lunch at noon and does not get back till three, but conveniently gets a call from his minister in his chamber. The bank calls and lets me know that one of my client’s cheques have failed to clear and as a result, a whole series of cheques that I have written against it will now bounce too.

I need a drink, desperately.

The path to my nocturnal hours is also frought with land mines of the familial kind. An SMS arrives from the MidEast, where this rich uncle lives and have earned million apparently. He is asking for a loan to salvage his father’s estate. My grand-uncle, a property magnate in his days, have traces of grandeur and wealth all over the city to be squabbled over among his 8 siblings. No one has taken charge and the choicest pieces are up for auction thanks to the failure of paying taxes on time over the years. Why me? What happened to his swiss account? Another uncle arrives, bringing in news of the squabbles over properties of a demented uncle and his ex Slovanian wife. Mother dearest wants to go on a pilgrimage of family shrines and estates of distant satellites of the southern sea-boards, preferably the next day, which is not going to happen. I have three cards waiting. More wedding s of the mass feeding frenzy, I realize. I just have to make sure I am photographed by the society photographer-cum ex-banker-cum restaurateur to be published in Facebook to have my presence verified for eternity and move on to the next event, eventually to end up in my room, curled up with either a book or my IPad and pretend the world outside does not exist except through the screen of the pad. To make a perfect ending to my sarcastically perfect day, the cook burns the pot pies and still has the audacity to put them on the table calling them ‘Cajun Style’.

Cajun my foot, burnt is burnt. I opt for some home- made pasta instead.

This time, I am sitting on the perch of my bed, dangling my calloused feet on the edge of the canyon. The confined four-poster is no longer intimidating. I know I won’t end up as road kill down below, I will simply glide though. I am actually surprised at my own audacity of courage and the lack of fear. My phobia of heights is not prevalent whatsoever. I am looking at the crimson sky at the horizon, which gradually darkens to pitch black, but speckled with stardust and the iridescent green trails of jets crisscrossing the vastness of that blackness. I am whistling a tune, which to my own disgust, turns out to be Justine Beiber’s ‘Babe, babe..yeah’. I stop right away, embarrassed. Even in this surreal alternate reality, Justin Beiber is not supposed to be in my radar. Then of course I realize that my niece earlier was wearing a Beiber t-shirt and belting out in her whiney pre-teen voice till my mother had earlier told her literally to shut up. I try to focus on one of the windows and I am delighted to see that I have developed zoom vision, just like a digital camera more pronounced than before. I look into the window right across the canyon from my bed and zoom in.

I see a cadaver, grey in colour, wrinkled from old age and dehydration, with its stomach slit open and its entrails wrapped around the body whole, as if demarcated. The person overlooking the body is dressed in a black overcoat, with intoxicating kohl lined pitch black eyes, intense, passionate, oozing sexuality, fluorescent crimson lipstick covered lips, translucent skin, pale to the point where I can see the minute veins crisscrossing her cheeks, giving them the rosy colours of a distance. The head of the corpse turns towards her and says in an extremely husky and hoarse voice, ‘I am ready now.’ ‘Not yet’, the lady replies in a voice that gives away the fact that she is a woman in her prime. The heavy gold chain that cascades around her bosom slightly glints from the light of one the stars. She gently puts her right hand inside the cadaver and starts caressing the area where the heart is supposed to be. The cadaver lets out a subtle ‘aaaaahhh’.

I subconsciously clutch at my own chest and find a black thread dangling to the fabric of my t-shirt. I look up again and see that the rim of the fabric that woman has wrapped around her face, is frayed and that black thread on my chest is connected across that concrete canyon to her face.

My own heart skips a beat.

I close my eyes, squint really hard and open my eyes again. It works. Like a TV set, I have changed the scene of the window. I see my own father, lounging on an easy chair, a old hookah set next to it, dressed in linens like a prophet and yet clean shaven, making gurgling sounds as he puffs on the end of the tube. The tube itself has the texture and colour of a python. A bridge table with a set of cards is his scene, not this, I tell myself. Spying on my own father, I zoom in. I see a dark gypsy woman with wrinkled skin with a bandana and bright red skirt sitting on a chair next to him. She reminds of an aged Frida Kahlo. Next to her is a sprightly Rottweiler, young, full grown, vicious, with bared fangs and hazel eyes looking straight into me. The lady and my father give me a synchronized wink.

I am disgusted, appalled, and angry.

I squint again, and this time I see a grand cityscape unrolled before me. The skyline is interspersed with mountain peaks topped with pagodas and spires of splendid skyscrapers with croens like that of Chrysler and the Empire State. A full moon, very large and very close to earth it seems, washes the entire landscape with a golden hue. In a distant, there is the backdrop on an ocean, where mammoth waves are raging and the crests of which catch the moon rays and create a glittery effect. I am looking at the perfect city laid out in front of me, with bits and pieces of laughter, music, clinking of glasses, and Ella Fitzgerald wafting up the streets.

I feel ecstatic at the sight of this magnificent cityscape, a mixture of Hong Kong, San Francisco and New York put together in a grander scale. I start scratching and look at my right arm. It is flaking like a severe case of Psoriasis, but more intently. I realize I am disintegrating in the air in a thousand million specs of dust, as if I am being removed for interloping at this visual feast.

I squint again, but this time I keep my eyes shut for almost a minute to purge the previous moments of my own disintegration.
It works. The black skies speckled with stardust areback. However all the windows are dark. Zooming in, they all reveal empty rooms. Eventually I am bored at the lack of any activities or any sign of life. I also realize that the crimson sky is slowly surrendering to the blackness. Restless, I decide to explore the canyon and push myself from the perch of my bed into the void ahead.

To my horror, instead of that dreamy ability to glide through and be a voyeur, I am plunging downwards, till my hands make contact with water and my entire body feels compressed with the weight of a thousand gravities. I think I am on the threshold of crossing some kind of a physical reality, with every part of my body screaming to explode into a thousand million atoms.

I have finally landed on the street below.

That building across looks awfully familiar, like the door of that old almirah in my room.

I see the water on my hand turn yellow, then orange, then blood red.

I realize I a m actually bleeding profusely through my nose and my body is an absurd angle on the floor.

I have broken free from the confines of the four-poster, drenched in my own sweat and blood……

I have woken up.

DID YOU HEAR THE MAYNA BIRD SING?

2013-02-17T00:28:00.002-08:00

‘What is with your face this morning? Didn’t you sleep?’

Mayna smiles at her neighbor from the next shack. She had in fact slept very soundly indeed. She had put her head on her husband chest and listened to the rhythmic beat of his heart all night. She felt secure and comforted like a baby.

Yes, it was an unusually calm, peaceful night indeed.

Most nights are different. Her husband Hassan comes every night somewhat intoxicated, with only a few takas in hand and demands food. She has also come back after working on the road side construction jobs, toiling under the hot sun, underpaid, underfed. Eventually and inevitably the discussions will turn towards food or rather the lack of it. On most evenings, she would also be ridiculed and put down for being barren and childless. Both know that the lack of a child is an economic blessing and yet both feel less of a human because of that. Hassan feels that his manhood is ridiculed and Mayna feels that the right to motherhood is being denied to her.

Yes, she slept. She came out of her shack right by Gulshan lake and take in the view. Surrounded by immense wealth, fashionable morning-walkers , and foreign joggers, she makes her way to the sacred bush at the end of the lake, demarcated for women. Usually most women have finished their bodily chores, but she was late this morning. She wanted to crawl right back to her shack and lie down on the floor, put her head on his chest ,take deep breaths, and take the day off. However reality beckons. If she is not on the construction site for her brick chipping job on time, some other lady, any lady, even her neighbor will take her job for the day. That means she has to starve tomorrow. She takes a deep breath. In spite of two incomes within their meager household, meals are rare, spartan and day to day.

They have been married only 11 months. She used to live in the shanty town of Agargaon behind the huge edifices of government buildings there. Hassan used to ply the Mirpur Shymoli by-roads for his fares and used to end up in front of the tea stalls located by the shanty. Her uncle owned one of those stalls and she used to come by there occasionally, in the hope that he would give her a free biscuit every now and then, which he did. In those days, she also has started earning, as a ‘Chuta Bua’ in one of those flats in Shaymoli, wiping floors, washing clothes, and helping the mistress of the house in the kitchen. Unlike the stories she used to hear from other girls, of mistreatments, scolding and beatings, and even sexual harassments, her mistress was a kind one, occasionally giving her old clothes and cosmetics and always some tidbits to take home. She had come from work and was hanging out by the stall and her Uncle blurted out, ‘By the way Mayna, will you not get married?’ . If the truth be told, she did not think about it seriously. She wanted to become a ‘garment girl’ in one of those factories in Mirpur with a steady income, movies once a month and dress up with her coworkers on holidays and hang out.

She had given her Uncle a blank look, at which he exploded, ‘Dhangor Maiya ek-khan’. Embarrassed by the public ridicule, she meanders through the maze of her slum and enters her shack, shared by her mother and a younger brother. Mother gives her a stale chapatti with sugar on top and asks her coyly’

“Did your Mama say something to you?’

‘He scolded, why are you smirking Amma ?’.

‘Shona, a proposal has arrived via your uncle’.

Hassan has noticed her a couple of times at her uncle’s teas stall and had breached the subject with him.

There was none of the romance or courtship dancing in the rain in a wet sari like Sakib and Sabnoor in one those movies. It was just a somber affair of a red sari with gaudy gold trimmings, a thin gold chain, 1,500 taka cash, and distribution of sweets to the neighbors. The local Imam was given 20 takas to officiate and that was it. She was put up in a rickshaw while her mother and brother bawled, Hassan wearing his starched pagri, and they were brought to the lakeside of Banani , overlooking Gulshan.

Mayna loved her new surroundings right away. The slum was cleared by the police only weeks ago and was slowly creeping back. It was sparse, empty, almost luxurious after the crowded mini-city of squalor of Agargaon. Hassan’s distant relative of sorts from the same village has helped him put up a few discarded corrugated sheets and covered it up with plastic. True it was cramped inside, there was no way of standing up straight inside the shack, unlike her old quarters, which were more like corrugated huts. She has her own man now and her own room to share him with. That was enough.

After a week or two, it was casually suggested that she should look for work. Among all the rich households, and with her domestic background, finding work should not be a problem. However, it turned out, Gulshan and Banani was not Mirpur and Shyamoli. Getting to the front door was not a possibility. It was all through referrals. Garo girls dominated the scene. Those who were hired, were hired from other households, an incestuous cycle of referrals.

The honeymoon ended violently.

Hassan came home one day and demanded a bowl of rice. She herself had starved all day and there was none. She was eagerly awaiting his return with some money. She would rush over to the Banani Bazaar, get some rice, lentils and spinach, and cook up a meal. The hearth was all ready with firewood, and the few utensils were scrubbed and cleaned. She smiled and put her hand forward.

‘Give me a few takas’.

Hassan simply lost it that day.

‘ I toil the streets all day, sweating from hand to foot. Cant even expect a bowl of rice to quieten the growl in my stomach.’

Shocked, Mayna slowly retrieves here hand.

‘So what can I do? These rich people won’t even let me get through the front gate’.

Instead of a sympathetic ear, what she got a loud slap on her left cheek. Then Hassan took hold of a tuft of her hair and started shaking her violently.

‘One Beyadop magi you are, You surely know how to eat though.’

The ordeal of that day ended because of the Hassan’s cousin from two shacks down came over.

‘You brought her not only four weeks ago, and already beating the crap out of her? Let me tell you, this one will leave too.’

This one? There were others? Mayna, swallowed her shock and finally took a 20 taka note from her husband, knowing very well what meager provisions she could be purchased with that amount. She assumed that there would be more beatings and she assumed right.

Yes there was another wife, two in fact, the cousin next door filled in the next day. The first household was established in the guard room of a house in Kalachandpur. The landlord evicted them due to their constant fights and beatings and the pair went their separate ways. The second one was a cook in one of those ferangi households. For Hassan, it was the perfect marriage. He got to sleep in a proper quarter, they both earned aplenty she as a cook, he as a gardener, and the shahibs would send down tasteless but fulfilling dishes every now and then, which her wife would turn into spicy casseroles. However, he was literally caught red handed by the shahib with his hands in the liquor cabinet. Given the choice of eviction or keeping the job, the second wife promptly and wisely evicted her husband with a verbal divorce and kept her job.

After wandering listless for a few weeks, he finally managed to hire a rickshaw on a daily basis. It would take months of hard labour and near starvation to accumulate enough to be able to pay his mahajon on time daily. Nowadays, when he shows up in the warehouse, no questions are asked and a richshaw his allotted to him for the day right away. He missed the company of woman. The floating girls of the streets took care of his lust and occasionally his wages , but he longed for permanence, household, and his own family.

When he spotted her at the tea shop, she was wearing a plain salwar kameez and had kohl in her eyes. She wasn’t skinny like the rest either, rather curvy, and luscious, and perfect for plucking. Tea and biscuits became a regular habit at the end of the day. On rainy days when passengers were few and far, he would even skip the afternoon meal and spend the savings in the tea store. Most days he was not disappointed. Her mistress of the household would let her go right before the Maghreb azan and she would stop at her uncles’s shop to say hello, pick up a thing and two and disappear inside the maze of huts.

One day he mustered enough courage and asked the shopkeeper.

“Know that girl?’

‘Which one?’

‘The one who just left.’

‘Why? ‘ The Uncle was all alert and suspicious.

‘What is your intention?’

‘No no, no bad intentions at all. As I was saying…..Uncle, you know that I am a rickshaw puller. I am tired of living by myself. You know what I mean……’

The shop keeper smiles finally, “That’s my niece, very very nice girl indeed. A real Lokkhi….Whats your story? No other wives?’

Taken aback with the directness of the question, there is a small moment of silence.

’ What are you saying? No no, never married. Just saved enough now…’

There are further questions about kins, home districts, relatives close by, …..all kinds of questions. Mynah’s family, also eager to pass off an eligible girl and a liability did not dig further.

Once the first barrier of hitting her has been crossed, it became a regular affair. Too little rice, too much salt, not enough gravy, the water glass half empty….one trivial issue after another. The beatings stopped when she found the job of braking bricks but eventually it crept back. He would even take her daily wages away. She countered that by spending her money in the bazaars first. Slowly but surely, the tables turned. The husband became her kept. He no longer contributed to anything. Yet the beatings did not stop. He picked up or rather resumed his habit of taking all kinds of intoxicating spices and condiments.

That night he came quite late, high on bhang and low on patience.

‘What are you looking at, you barren whore?’

Maynah, numbed over the months by his constant verbal and physical abuse could not care less.

Incensed by the indifference, he screamed,

‘Gone deaf I see, lay out the food.’

It was past twilight, with light of the houses shimmering on the waters. She actually loved this play of light and shades after the first moments of sunset. She had also forgotten the oil for the lamp. It was not a priority for her, or most of the neighbors on the row for that matter. In spite of the fact that they lived right in the middle of a teeming metropolis, their cycles of lives were still very much dictated by sunrises and sunsets, just like their parents back in the village.

Hassan was in cloud nine that night. The shimmering lights of the lake, fueled by the narcotics in his blood, turned him amorous. He started caressing her in the hut, but at some point the foreplay turned violent. She felt being bitten with such harshness that she wanted to scream but he had covered her face with one of his hands. Finally at one point she grabs one of the small botis neatly stacked on the side of their tiny linear hut and hits him on his back.

It works. The sharp pangs of pain stops. He slowly relaxes and slumps on top of her. She feels her husband relax totally on top of her, taking deep breadths. She also relaxes. It is one of those moments of marital bliss that may not come back. She also passes out in a deep slumber, her momentary passage of contentment.

When she wakes up, it is dark. Even the lights of the living and bedrooms of the households behind her has been turned off. This is a good time to take care of the bodily function by the bushes. Her husband is still on top of her, but Hassan feels a lot heavier. Cajoling him gently does not work. He does not respond to her verbal request to get off her. She finally manages to push him off, fiddles through the utensils and finds a stump of a candle and manages to light it. The view splayed in front of her in that tight confined space does not frazzle her one whole bit. Hassan’s shirt is blood stained at the back, he seems to be breathing and putting her head on his chest, there is also a heartbeat it seems. She doesn’t care. She feels no compunction to call someone and ask for help. The thoughts of law enforcements does not cross her mind even though she can see the police stand at the end of the line of shacks.

She just sits there, staring at the semi cloudy sky.

She calls him, “Hassan, are you awake?’. She calls him by his name only when she thinks he is asleep.

No answer.

She feels this calm like never before. Taking a deep breadth, she pushes him more to the side, pulls out a bronze ladle, one of her very few prized possessions and starts digging.

The distant sound of the Azan for Fajr prayers wakes her up. She had layed her down on the mound of dry clay that her Hassan is covered in now. After the ordeal was over, exhausted she had lied down and she was soothed by the constant beat of the heart. It reminded her of falling asleep on the chest of his long dead father. It was the safest place to be on the face of this harsh cruel world.

‘What is with your face this morning? Didn’t you sleep?’

‘Hoi, I did. After a long time’

She had her gold necklace in her hand, the one given during the wedding which Hassan had forgotten about.

Time to find a new place of work and a new address….

She starts following the path by the lake, covered in beautiful greenery, shimmering green water on one side, and rows of buildings on the other.

She wonders if she will miss this neighborhood.

By The River....

2010-02-14T23:45:00.000-08:00

‘Was that a bad dream?’ Khaled was stooping down on hers and was caressing her hair. She had woken up, with beaded perspiration covering her forehead, in spite of the four bladed fan going swish swish over their bed.

She just sighed, ‘I am fine, go back to sleep.’

Khaled turned around and slowly drifted back to his deep slumber but Arifa just could not.

Every now and then, she would reconstruct that fateful day back in Calcutta, when she saw a new dimension to the human psyche as the facades of her some of dear ones were stripped to its naked ugliness.

There had been a buzz in the air for days. There were talks of dividing the country into two, ‘partition’ they kept calling it. Stoked by both sides of the debate, things were literally heating up to enforce their respective agendas.

Arifa was oblivious to all that. There had been occasional discussions at the dinner table about moving to Pakistan to the east, possibly to Dhaka or to Chittagong, where they still owned property and where the family had originated from six generations back. To her, those places were beyond her grasp of imagination. Murshidabad, the seat of the Nawabs of Bengal and the place of her birth, and Calcutta, where she has blossomed through her schooling and it’s cosmopolitan trappings, was her world, her realm of existence, and hopefully her future. Her father had passed away twelve years back when she was only six, and her mother four years later, but her three brothers never let her or her two sisters feel their void. Within the realm of a liberal, educated, upper-middles class Muslim household, she had her freedom of friends, going to the cinemas and plays, going for drives with her bhabis around Chowrongee and the Gorer Math, and even the occasional renting of a small barge with all her nephews and nieces, her brothers and their wives, and sail down on the Hoogly and literally gawk at the monstrous Howrah Bridge from below.

Murshidabad was somewhat more conservative. The biggest event was the Nawab’s fete, Held on December 9th every year, her birthday, on the grounds of the Hazar Duari Palace. There the invites were treated to savories and chicken pieces coated in almonds, served in petit little forks. The rest of the year was spend within the confines of the Mussalman Para, a big chunk of which was owned by her Nana and majority of the occupants were tenants, called ‘Projas’. Between the idyllic settings of the palace grounds, her childhood home, the sandy shores of the Ganga, and her schooling in Calcutta, she had a perfect life. As soon as the schools and colleges would close, her family would board the train from Howrah and descended on Murshidabad till it was time to return. It was a time to reconnect with the extended chain of uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, near and distant cousins, childhood friends, and the best part was, there was a always a wedding to attend within these broods.

Now she was in Chandpur, a sleepy little town on the shores of the mighty Meghna, where the other side of the bank was visually non-existent. Consisting of a large number of bungalow type house with corrugated roofs, there were only a handful of pucca houses, one of which they now occupied. The branch of the newly established National Bank of Pakistan was located downstairs, while they occupied the two bedroom flat upstairs. It was what they called a ‘junction’ town, so access to Dhaka and Chittagong was not problematic, but she felt at piece there. Khaled was literally feted as a celebrity here, the handsome debonair banker who had been given the responsibility of opening a branch of one of the biggest banks of the country. As his wife, she was the centre of the social scene, albeit a very small one, that included the wives of two other bankers, the tax collector, and superintendent of the police. As per Dhaka, it was depressing in its totally provincial pettiness of scaled down amenities, Chittagong was pretty but it was nice to be out of the grasp of her Uncle-in-law Shahed Chacha, whose grounds her husband literally worshipped, Murshidabad had become a place across the border, and Calcutta, oh well, it had become a city of betrayal, a place turned out to be a another façade of sorts, hiding the ugliest of human emotions and prejudices behind the facades of its architectural grandness and intellectual hot air.

Elora was a dear, dear friend of hers, both in their first year at Lady Brabourne College. Seated on the bench coincidentally on the very fist day of classes, these two initially shy girls immediately took to each other. When it was ‘discovered’ that her mother was also originally from Murshidabad as well, the friendship was firmly cemented, to the point, her bhabis, specially the Calcutta born older one accompanied her to their places every now and then and the friendship had spilled over to familial terms. Elora had an older sister called Ajanta, already married, but since the husband was in ‘Beelaat’ to become a Barrister, she was back in her parents’ household for the time being. Kabita was the little darling who was only in class four but wise beyond her ages, and spoilt rotten by the two elder sisters, since there were none others, especially boys in the form of brothers to lavish their attention upon. Their house on the vicinity of Hazra Street was a semi-palatial one, which obviously had seen better days, now partitioned into three of their families, but none-the-less grand, with its marbled floors, Greco-roman columns and a vast inner courtyard that was used for everything from drying pulse seeds and rice, to airing the laundry to family get-togethers.

Elora had invited her over the next day to come spend the day with her. It was the 15th of August, Arifa remembered very clearly. The two spent hours on the college grounds chatting, and planning, and then someone had burst the bubble.

‘Baba is not sending me to college tomorrow. Something called the Direct Action Day and hartal. Baba said it may get out of hand.’ Upoma’s father worked in the Calcutta police department, therefore the source was reliable.

‘What then?’ Elora had grumbled. All her plans, including coaxing her father to take all the girls to the cinema was crumbling. She had her mind set on watching Subah Shayam and fantasize about her P.C. Barua.

‘Nothing to do then. Just have to do it another day’, the ever practical Arifa had responded,.

“Nah, you come this evening. Stay overnight.’

Staying overnight anywhere was not well looked upon under any circumstances. One advantage with this household was that, other than Elora’s father, there were no other male members in the household, which her Bhabi knew very well. Since she would be staying with them, convincing her to agree to the overnight soiree should not be a problem.

Boro Bhabi, as expected, agreed, but Boro Bhai did not. However, in all matters of the household, Bhabi had the upper hand, reinforced by her snapping remarks and her cascading voice that was tantamount to a shrill when she was contradicted.

‘Oh leave it.’ She had snapped over his ‘concerns’. “I know them, remember? Besides, it will be good for her to spend some time with those girls during the hartal instead of being cooped up right here all day. Elora is exactly her age and her mother is from Dokkhin Para for Murshidabad, your home….Didn’t I mention that before?’

Her Bahbi’s occasional outbursts would leave Arifa somewhat perturbed in favor of her brother, but this time it was to her advantage. She managed to suppress her smile which wanted to erupt from ear to ear.

So, after having tea with biscuits, a tomtom was duly summoned, and her Boro Bhai and Bhabi, their two children, and Arifa, with a small cloth bag, and her clandestine copy of ‘Chokher Bali’ wrapped inside her clothes, got on the car.

‘It is wise not to go to the cinema tonight.’ Elora’s father had opined, and therefore that was that.

The earlier part of the evening was spent gossiping about their class-mates, the upcoming marriages of some of them and their grooms, and of-course their matinee idols. Elora’s knowledge of the Calcutta drama scene was vast, and could recount in vivid details each and every scene, along with the features of the actor. The latest play to be witnessed by the family was Bijan Bhattacharya's 'Nabanna', and obviously it had left a mark on her psyche. When Arifa asked about it, Elora got all animated and explained how realistic the production was, away from all the over-dramatization that was synonymous with Bengali films and dramas.

‘Dhoor, I did not like it at all’, Kabita finally managed to pipe in within the exuberant description of the play.

After a lull of a second, Elora exploded. ‘See Arifa? This is why little babies like her should not be allowed to see these plays. A waste of a seat, that’s what it is, when more deserving people cannot even find tickets.’

Kabita’s eyes welled up, which irritated Elora even more. “Ouf, I cannot even say anything without the Ganga flooding everything. Just watch Arifa, she will start bawling and go to Maa, and Baba will descend upon me to save his precious youngest daughter.’

As predicted, Kabita started the motion of getting off the bed and dash towards the room down the hall where their parents were.

‘See, I told you.’ screamed Elora.

Arifa, seeing the situation getting out of hand, grabbed Kabita’s hand before she could slip away and held her back in a tight embrace. ‘Ahare, why do you say such things?’ She asked Elora.

Elora just winced, arched her eyebrows, and trying her best to sound as cold as possible asked, ‘So, do you want to hear about the rest of the play or not?’.

Arifa wiped away little Kabita’s tears and cheerfully said ‘Keep going.’

Eventually dinner was served in the room downstairs next to the kitchen and they were summoned. Professing modernity, the whole family dined every night on the huge marble top dining table with solid brass plates and glasses. About to enter the room, she noticed that one porcelain plate and a glass were being hurriedly replaced with the similar brass utensils. Mashi Ma was telling this elderly man, must have been be the Thakur, ‘Haven’t I told you a number of times that these things are not to happen in my household’? She had walked in just at that importune moment and she was somewhat embarrassed. ‘Come in Maa, just sit anywhere you like, except that one’, pointing at the head table. ‘Ajanta’s Baba will sit there’.

Arifa smiled. She knew exactly what had taken place prior to her entry in the dining room. The Thakur, the cook of the household must have been from the old school. Not willing to pollute the utensils with the touch of non-Hindu, he lad laid out a separate set of plate and glass just for her, which, she was sure, was kept in a separate cupboard all together. Her own Murshidabad household was no different. Her father also kept a set of plates for his pundit friends. Narayan Babu was a dear friend of her father’s, albeit from the old school, who, other than well versed in Sanskrit, had rudimentary knowledge of Farsi, in which her father excelled, and they would talk for hours. In fact, she as a child had to sit cross legged at his feet in their huge verandah downstairs along with her older siblings and learn the tenants of Sanskrit grammar from him. Every time he visited, her mother would ‘borrow’ the Brahmin maid from the household next door and food was served through her.

Mashi Ma was famous for her spicy fish cooked on open fire wrapped in banana leaves. In Arifa’s honour, the fete was repeated, which delighted all the women in the family.

Arifa for a few seconds contemplated whether to put the anchol of her sari over her head as a sign of respect for her elders as practiced at home. Usually whenever any older relatives visited, whether male or female, it was customary to do so. However, a quick glance around the table told her it was not necessary.

‘So Arifa, what has your family decided? This side or that side? ‘

‘Jee?’ She had put the first morsel of rice and fish in her mouth, which had exploded into a spicy explosion of taste and aroma and she savoring the whole essence of it.

‘I am just asking, if this Pakistan happens, your family will go in which direction? After all, what I know you come from an educated Muslim family. Both your brother and brother in law are Shibpur graduates; in my opinion this Pakistan thing is not for people like you. It is for those illiterates in East Bengal.. Let them have their Pakistan, and in five years they will want to come back into the fold.’

Arifa didn’t have an answer. Ajanta was busy helping her mom passing the vegetable dish, and Kabita was relishing her food. Elora looked absolutely uncomfortable, and after a quick glance at Arifa, tried to make eye contact with her mom to restrain her father.

“Aare, leave it. No partition fartition talk on this table. Don’t ruin my efforts with the fish by talking of all this rubbish. It happened in 1905 and see what happened? Just eat, will you??’

Relieved from being removed from the spot-light she complemented her on the fish. Eventually the talks moved back to the movies. Jathamoshai had gone nostalgic and was talking about the first film the family watched together. he ever saw, some film called ‘Niyoti’ back in 1939.

Mashi Ma started giggling. ‘He was more interested in Kamala Devi and Hena Devi. He even bought me a sari that was just like the movie…..’. Catching a glimpse of her husband, she stopped, aware that she had said a bit too much already.

Rest of the meal went smoothly, basically limited to conversations about the latest songs, followed by rosgoolas. ‘Not as good as Nabin Babu’s but not bad either……’ Opined Jathamoshai.

Ajanta, being married, had been assigned a bedroom of her own even though her husband was abroad. What was now Elora’s room was still shared by Kabita and tonight it would also be Arifa’s. There was only one toilet in the upper floor, and therefore there was a queue for toiletries. Arifa being the guest, she went last and came back dressed in a cotton sari with a simple golden zari edge.

Elora took a look and retorted ‘Bapre, you are becoming a Bairagee or what?’

Kabita was cajoled into falling asleep and eventually the copy of ‘Choker Bali’ came out. Both Arifa and Elora had both read the book at least a few times, but since they were both ‘forbidden’ to read the book, it had a cult status between them and her friends. To make matters juicier, Arifa had found this copy among her mother’s belongings in a trunk after she had passed away years later, with a scribbling on the front from her father to her mother.

Both fell asleep after reading aloud from selected sections of the book.

Next morning, they were woken up by Ajanta who brought in two cups of sweet tea and a plate full of hot steaming luchis into the room. Since Fazlul Haq had already declared the day to be a holiday ahead of the hartal, a leisurely pace seemed to have resumed. Arifa came out of the room into the balcony facing the inner courtyard and saw Mashi Ma sipping tea on an easy chair. She smiled and gestured Arifa to come forward. Very gently she took hold of her hand and asked ‘Did you sleep well, Maa?’

Arifa swallowed hard and nodded. She was at a loss of words. Her mother used to occasionally use exactly the same words.

The rest of the day was a mild cacophony of sounds. Songs blaring on the All India Radio somewhere, vendors screaming their wares of vegetables, one or two singing beggars, the occasional horn and the ringing of the tom-tom bells, with the girls splayed out on the beds with various books and magazines, but after lunch there seemed to be an eerie silence. Ajanta worked on her cross-stitch, Mashi Ma busied herself in the kitchen to see what was in the works for supper, and Kabita, after busying herself with hopscotch with her cousins in the next wing, came back and fell asleep on the bed.

What transfixed the household was a faint ‘Naraye Takbir’, followed by ‘Allahu Akbar’, followed by screaming at a distant, eventually dieing out. Jathamoshai came out of somewhere and announced, ‘No need to go out today. The whole city has been engulfed in a danga.’ Now Arifa was worried. Her Boro Bhai and Bhabi were supposed to pick her late in the afternoon.

By the time night descended, in spite of the relative silence of Hazra Street, all kinds of rumors were coming in. Stories of outright butchery, of throats being slit, of people burnt alive or cruelly beaten to death, of Hindus torching shops in Muslim neighborhoods and vice versa…..Arifa and the girls were forbidden to go outdoors and even to downstairs. They were also told to stay away from windows lest they were ‘observed’ by someone.

Compared to the relative joviality of last night’s dinner, this night’s was a dark somber affair. Thanks to the black out, a kerosene lamp was put at the centre of the table on top of old tin of English biscuits so that the whole table could be illuminated. The ghostly shadows it cast on the faces was even more eerie. The meal was finished without a word exchanged. Because of the stifling heat, eventually the household help was instructed to lay out the charpoys on the roof. That turned out to be another depressing experience altogether. There were ambers glowing in a distance in every direction, fires and remnants of fire were evident all around.

The next morning, Jathamoshai was devouring the paper over the cup of tea and biscuits. The headlines said it all. The photographs printed showed bodies lying on the streets. There were also reports of police inaction and a picture of Suhrawardy talking to reporters. It was obvious that the reports were going to fuel more agitation and retaliatory actions between the two communities now.

Arifa desperately wanted to be home. There was no sign of her Boro Bhai since yesterday. He had not been able to come and pick her up for obvious reasons but she also could not but help being accusatory towards him.

The tension in the household was visible. No one was talking much except for Kabita, who, initially ecstatic about not having to go to school, but by noon was bored to smithereens and wanted to go. Ajanta was busy with her mom in the kitchen while the two of them was idling away on the verandah as usual with fans in hand and sipping tea.

Their uncle from the next wing paid a visit.

‘Dada’, he came straight out to Jathamoshai. ‘Just heard that you have been a keeping a Musaalman girl in the household. Is it true?’ The conversation taking place downstairs was very audible in the verandah upstairs.

“Yes, Elora’s friend from college is here. They are very close. You have seen her before……”

‘SO IT IS TRUE’. He bellowed. He did not let him finish the sentence. “Has your head gone totally malfunctional? I see that you are reading the paper. What is going on, have you no clue? If some of the people in the Para find out that there is Musallman girl in the house at a time like this, do you know what kind of danger our household will fall into?’

Elora grasped Arifa’s hand and pulled. “Arifa, come into the room.’ But she took her time to un-wrap her hand and go though the motion of putting her sandals on. She wanted to hear more.

‘Either someone will torch us for harboring her or some Musaalman gundas will do the same in the name of saving her. Dada, think. And send the girl home.’

‘How will she? The situation in the city……’

‘I don’t know and don’t want to know. Get rid of her somehow. Just remember, you have three young girls in your own home and you have other nephews and nieces in this house as well. Think of them, will you?’ And he was gone.

Arifa could feel her ears turning red with an acute burning sensation. At the end of the verandah she could see Mashi Ma biting into her anchol, and Ajanta with her hands on her mother’s shoulder. They took a quick glance towards her and quickly disappeared into the rooms.

Elora was pulling her again. ‘Come inside, will you?’

Arifa looked at her friend’s face, whose eyes were welling up with tears of embarrassment. Arifa tried her best to put on a brave face and tried to smile to reassure her friend.

‘Kobita, where are you? Can you ask your father to come upstairs?’ Mashi Ma was calling from that room.

Diligently Kabita reappeared from somewhere and bellowed out, ‘Agge Maa, going..’

Elora’s father duly appeared upstairs, clutching a corner of his dhoti in his hands.

‘Don’t take any of that to heart. My uncle is somewhat like that. Nothing will happen, just wait and see….” Elora was trying to reassure Arifa. But she didn’t have any idea how or what to respond to. She took one of the magazines lying in bed and started fidgeting with it.

Meanwhile the conversation two rooms down between Jatha Moshai and Mashi Ma was becoming audible due to the rising octaves.

‘What he said, was is true? There are three young girls, do you hear me, three….girls in this household. If anything happens to them, I will…..’ Mashi Ma was saying.

‘Maa, will you stop? They can hear you.’ It was Ajanta.

This time it was Arifa whose eyes were welling up.

A few seconds later Jatha was in the room and found his second daughter holding her friend in a tight embrace, with both girls sobbing.

“Maa, as I was saying,’ Jatha Moshai was obviously addressing Arifa. “Your brother was supposed to pick you up yesterday. Is there any way you can contact him to pick you up? As you can see, the situation in the city is quite dangerous. You should be home with your family’.

‘Baba, how do you think she will go? Her Dada obviously could not come yesterday. I am sure he will come once it is safe.’

‘Yes I know….’ he was avoiding all eye contact and was rubbing his head with hand. After a quick glance at the girls, he made his exit.

Mashi Ma was just outside the room. “What did she say?’

‘Aha…will you please be quiet?’ The girls could hear the pair of them going down the verandah.

A few seconds late Mashi Ma's voice was loud and clear. “Elora, come to this room, right now!’

Once Elora made it there, there was no holding back as far as voices were concerned.

‘Who told you to ask her to stay over? You and your ideas from college……Why did you dig a canal and bring that alligator right into our house?? Ajanta’s husband is in London and there are still the two of you to think off. No matter how, all of you make some arrangement to get her out of this house. Did any of you hear me?’

Meanwhile Arifa had come out of her room, holding on to Kabita’s hand and had proceeded to the door of the room. She just wanted to reassure her hosts that hopefully she will go as soon as her brother showed up, but she didn’t get a chance to say anything.

Mashi Ma took a look at the two of them and addressed her youngest. “What are you doing out there?’ She yanked little Kabita out of her hand and slammed the door shut.

‘Maa…..’ it was Elora inside the room, sounding totally grief-stricken and alarmed.

Arifa all of a sudden could not feel her legs. She wanted to run, just anywhere, but preferably just run down the stairs and out to the streets and run all the way home if she had to. But her legs were frozen. Her mind was going numb to.

She just stood there, for what seemed like forever.

Elora burst out of the room, and took hold of Arifa hand and ran towards their room. Arifa noticed that eyes had already puffed up, with copious amounts of tears flowing down.

But Arifa’s legs remained frozen. She could not respond to Elora’s gesture and fell face forward on the verandah. All she could see was a dizzying array of stars followed by a throbbing pain on her forehead.

Elora turned her around and screamed, ‘Maago... .’. Once Arifa’s eyes got back into focus, she could see the look of total anguish in her eyes. Arifa could also feel something warm flowing down on her from around her forehead towards her temple. Obviously she was bleeding.

“Didi, Maa, Baba, come here quickly’, Elora was literally shouting between her sobs.

First to come out instantly was Kabita, who saw Arifa’s bloodied face and started crying.

She was followed by Ajanta, her Didi, who immediately came to Arifa’s side.

Her parents came out of the room in unison and looked down on the lying Arifa a very short distance away.

Now Mashi Ma had started bawling. Then all of a sudden she raised her right hand and brought it down on her forehead in a loud thump. “He Ram….save me. When danger comes, it comes in droves’. Jatha Moshai by this time was obviously coming to his senses. “Will you leave your drama behind and see if she is hurt?’. However Mashi Ma’s crying was accompanied by heaving bosoms, and a distorted face. In that state, she slowly turned around and went back to her room, continuing to sob on the bed.

“Ajanta, go see you mother, Kabita, hold on to Arifa’s hand and pull slowly….Elora don’t let go…pick her up slowly and take her to your room…..’. He was hovering over them, not sure whether to actually make any physical contact with Arifa, but seeing Kabita’s ineptitude, he finally put his hand behind the fallen girl’s shoulder and gently pushed her up.

What followed was a frenzy. Lying down in bed, Arifa could smell and feel the boric powder diluted in water on her forehead. Kabita kept massaging her hand for no particular reason, her father was frantically pacing up and down the room, and Elora kept mumbling ‘Arifa….Arifa….’ There were two or three unknown female faces in the room staring down at her from the door frame. One was nudging the other,’ That is that Musallman girl…….’ “Elora, I am sending you some bandages to dress her. Have to stop her bleeding.’ Arifa figured out they must have been Elora’s aunts from the greater household. Her mother was nowhere to be seen.

The bandages arrived and Elora with the help of one of the aunts, put Arifa’ head in few loops of dressing with cotton inside. A bit later, the area of the cut was saturated with blood and tuned a garish red, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. She just leaned her head on the wall and sat up on the bed. She desperately wanted to be in her room in her own house right now, and to be cared for by her bhabis and not this lot, to whom she had become a tremendous liability since this morning. She missed the touch of her own mother’s caring hands.

She started sobbing uncontrollably.

The aunts, having done their duty and somewhat caught in an emotional situation, quickly made their exits, both wiping away tears. Jatha Moshai also made his exit. Ajanta was fanning Arifa furiously. All Elora could do at this point was put her head on Arifa’s head and sob with her friend.

Boro Bhai finally came around six in the afternoon that day. The usually meticulous man with pomaded hair and pressed shirt had looked totally disheveled. He was told to wait in the formal living room as Arifa was sent for. Ajanta and Elora flanked her on both sides and brought her to the room. Bhai literally jumped out of her chair and rushed towards her, almost knocking Ajanta of from her side. “What happened to you?’ and turned on Elora,”What happened to my little sister?’ Elora has tremendous respect for Arifa’s brother, who sometime had also dropped her home from college.

‘Yes, I mean….’ Elora started, but by that time her father also entered the room.

‘Nomoshkar, Boro Babu’, he greeted boro bhai, whose name he didn’t know except that he was the oldest brother of Arifa’s. “Yes, your sister tripped on the balcony upstairs. You know these restless girls…..We didn’t get a chance to take her to a doctor…you know the situation outside…none of us have dared to venture out on the streets today. If you can, take her to one, on the way to your home’. He had emphasized ‘your’ home…

‘Bhiaya, cholo’, Arifa finally said, breaking the awkward silence. ‘Didi, so I am leaving for today?’ she addressed Ajanta, who barely managed a smile and nodded. She just gently touched Kabita’s cheek who responded, “Arifa Di, when will you come again?’.

‘Yes, I will’, Arifa said, and faced Jatha Moshai. She wanted to lean down and touch his feet to show her respect but as she leaned forward, her head started throbbing and she pulled up. ‘No No, leave it, Maa, no reason for that in this situation’.

Elora did not need to be addressed. She just patted her hand.

‘Bhaiya, cholo’, she had said again, and proceeded towards the door. No tom-tom outside but a rickshaw with a scrawny looking coolie was waiting. As her brother was helping her on the rickshaw, a female voice, that of the Mashi Ma’s came out. ‘Arifa, you and your brother didn’t eat anything. Have a cup of tea at least’.

Arifa’s stomach was churning with hunger. She had refused to eat lunch under the grueling emotional circumstances of the day, nor had the family pressed her to eat anything against her wishes.

Now Mashi Ma was coming down the stairs towards the rickshaw and had raised her right hand as if to touch Arifa’s forehead. “Mashi Ma, another day……’ and turned her face forward. Almost in a commanding voice that startled her brother sitting next to her, she addressed the coolie, ‘Cholo’.

That event seemed like it was eons ago….

Khaled had gone off to his bank branch downstairs, and after going through a few pages of ‘Golpoguccho’, Arifa decided to go for a walk. She had not slept well and was felling somewhat restless. There were still remnants of the monsoon clouds in the sky and there was a nice breeze flowing. She summoned her maid Majeda and proceeded towards the riverbanks, a barely fifteen minutes walk. Once there, she felt at peace, the wide expanse of the Meghna being a visual treat, with the sounds of the waves gently crashing on the shore complimenting that scenario. So different from the rivers she was used to, she thought. A small strand of her hair flicked upon her face and she raised her hand to put that back in its place. As she did that, the tip of her fingers felt the small bump created after that fall on that verandah just a few years back. She always took care to hide that with a gently curved strand of her hair. This time for a few seconds, the fingers lingered on it, feeling the small anomaly on the skin that had become permanent. She looked around, at felt at peace as the wind hit her face once again. Yes, it was so different here……

UNDER THE TREE

2010-01-07T02:41:00.000-08:00

The following story got the first prize in the short story competition organized by Kalakahani of UK; the submitted stories had to be about the Asian diaspora based in East Africa......

Shefali wakes up in the sweltering heat and miss the refreshing chilled air that would have filled the verandah back there. Whenever she wakes up like this, she always seems to be filled with remorse, nostalgia…a kind of longing that is very discomforting. The girls, Maya and Nandita, have no interest in her previous life in the suburban hills of Kampala, the bungalow on the hill, from where you see the lake at a distance on a clear day……

‘It was cooler back there….’, she would say sometimes. Maya, the older one would scoff and retort…

‘Cooler?? Back there In Uganda?? It's Africa mom..!!!!!’

Anther sigh...these kids…why don’t ever Google Kampala and find out about it? Africa is a huge place. But they won’t…not a bit interested…

Her father was a very well known trader there, a 3rd generation at that, originally from Surat at the turn of the century. Life was so different then, wasn’t it? It was a lively, closely knit community; her mom a 3rd generation settler herself spoke fluent Gujrati and Ganda with a smattering of English. There was never any scope of getting lonely….life centered around countless teas, kachoris, cholafali, ‘englis’ sandwiches and dinners and heartfelt ‘kamche?’ throughout. The men separated themselves after a while and brought out their cheroots and whiskeys and the women would, at least some, bring out their ‘paans’, preciously preserved and sourced all the way from Mombassa where they were probably ferried in clandestinely on dhows all the way from India. Tinkling of glasses, a shimmering of saris, a cacophony of mixed Gujrati and Hindi dialects and even a few ‘local’ friends, ‘Emerald’ in particular, whose presence in the house was always discreetly frowned upon by his father.

But here….the kids….they go off to school and she starts her routine. Washing dishes, vacuuming, occasionally a quick trip to Safeway and then to the Indian grocers for the assortment of vegetables and spices, and at noon sharp, parks herself in front of the TV to watch ‘All My Children’ and end with ‘General Hospital’. These characters from the series will sometimes take over her psyche and it will bugg the hell out of her. Then she will force herself to make a few phone calls, play canasta with the neighbors once a week, and late in the afternoon the kids will descent, followed by Rahul, her husband, a few hours later, again preoccupying her with the usual domesticities.

She had been unnerved to the core last week when Maya had a few friends over. One of them, Roberta, is a feisty Tanzanian student, who is at her daughter’s school on an exchange program. Her father is English and mother is from Tanzania, so technically she isn’t a full Tanzanian per se, and even more so, she was born in Brighton. Both of her parents seem to be highly educated, and both works for the UNHCR. What got her attention was that they have recently been posted to Kampala. Roberta was gung-ho about going there in the summer for the first time. They have been allocated a bungalow on the northern suburbs that was once built and owned by ‘Indians’ on Edwards Street, renamed Onyango Boulevard, and has a huge columned verandah at the front from where one could gaze at the vast expanse of Lake Victoria at a distance. The road is still called by the same old name by some.

Some of her acquaintances had recently been ‘invited’ back to Uganda and the stories they have sent back were simply depressing. Businesses ruined and properties in such dilapidated conditions that it took days for them to recover from the shock. Since her father, the original owner of their businesses was long dead and cremated in the UK, there was no documentation whatsoever for them to go back and claim anything. Her brother, born in Liverpool, had made the trip last year and apparently the situation was bureaucratic, but ‘promising’.

‘Can you call Roberta over for dinner one day?’ she causally says to Maya.

‘Since when did you start getting interested in my friends, Mom? What’s the agenda, hmmm?’

Shefali doesn’t have an answer right away. She stares at Maya’s cherubic face, thinking of an answer, since there was an ‘agenda’.

‘Talk to me’. Maya sternly tells her, taking advantage of the few second delay before she could speak up.

‘I was just curious about their house’.

Maya’s face changed immediately from curiosity to disdain. Caught between South Asian, East African, and now the identity of the American South, her daughters obviously are most comfortable with the American upbringing. At the same time, looking at the mirror, there is no escape from their Indian identities, so they play themselves up as these exotic Indo-American chicks, deliberately dressing up in embroidered blouses and skirts and the occasional 'bindis', to school. To introduce yet another identity and an African one at that, especially when there are so many African American students, it is convenient to discard that part of the heritage. It took forever to explain that both of her parents were actually ‘African Indians’ who had never set foot on the Indian subcontinent in the past three generations and were ignonamously expelled by a despot called Idi Amin. She was born in Bristol in the UK, a year after Shafali and Rahul got married, and the family finally migrated with the help of an uncle with a number of businesses to the fertile and humid plains of central Alabama with a substantial black population, and that was that. The second generation Indian kids already taunt by calling her and her sister ‘ABCDs’, American Born Confused Desis that is…and the sad part is she does feel confused. She and Rahul, also of ‘expelled Indian stock’, consistently talks of Uganda as ‘back home’ and even a road trip to Orlando or New Orleans will naturally evoke long winded memories of trips to the resort town of Butiaba up north or to the exotic mix of Mombasa in Kenya. Their Gujrati network extended all the way to Durban and Cape Town covering the entire eastern African coast and there was no end to the choices of places they could go for trips. Even a trip to Niagara elicited an innocent remark, ‘Oh, Victoria Falls was so much bigger than this’. Maya, her elder daughter was having none of this….nostalgia, African nostalgia at that……of her parents.

As for Shefali, how could she explain to Maya that at the age of eight, Shefali’s family boarded a BOAC flight out of Entebbe one sunny day, with her mom crying her heart out, sister Padmini in tow, and twenty English pounds in the pocket and a small suitcase for all four of them? Her dad ceremoniously kneeled down right before climbing the gangway, put his right palm on the tarmac, and when prodded immediately by the tip of a gun of a security guard by raising his palm and gently caressing his head with it. Those tumultuous times, preceded by a life of luxurious bungalows and chauffer driven cars and then immediately followed by a ten by ten room for all four of them in an Asian enclave of Liverpool, how would Maya relate to them? Her father would die four years later, totally shattered, broken and apologetic for not being able to provide for them. She was hastily married off to Rahul, two years older than her, right after her ‘A’ levels, started a family, and eventually rerouted herself to the US while Padmini an their mom stayed back.

Shefali however did not deal too much in those transitive ‘in between’ years. She dwelt on being woken up by Charity, her adorable Ganda speaking Bantu Amah, centering her life around these two sisters ever since they were born, their miniature park with a slide, swing and a see-saw at the back of the house, which was the envy of the neighborhood, the huge Edwardian doll house that was in their verandah, stuffed with miniature English furniture, and moreover Laxmi, their cook, who refused to cook anything that had any vestige of African ingredients of recipes in it. The day Shefali was born, her father had planted an Alphonso mango tree next to the playground at the back, which bordered her mother’s expansive kitchen garden. Eight years later, the tree was almost two stories tall, bore fruit profusely and was the pride and joy of their household. The evening before their departure, she and her sister had dug a small hole close to the roots and deposited their most valuable worldly possessions in it. Padmini had put in a small porcelain faced doll with gold hair and she had put in a penny, yes, an English copper penny with the silhouette of King Edward the Seventh… the King Emperor, inside the hall. Apparently her grandmother had clutched it in her hands when they were shipped to the east African coast and a few years back had given it to her before passing away quietly in their back room.

Somehow her childhood memories are still centered on that penny.

She wants Roberta to ask her parents whether the house was once called ‘Surabai Villa’, named after her great-grandmother and if so, is there a huge mango tree at the back? She is not going to ask about those pink curtains in her room, nor those wooden filigreed partitions in the living room. Looted, damaged or destroyed, it will be utterly foolish to spring those questions to a teenager who had never been there. Just what are the odds of Roberta’s parents being allocated the same house? If her brother, born in the UK two years later after landing there, ever manages to get their properties back, this house should be on the top of the list.

She is very tempted to ask Roberta to dig a hole around that tree and if possible, dig up that penny…..

Of Crumpets and Earl Grey…..

2009-05-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

Ever since Michelle literally patted the Queen on her back, Sid, the Kolkata based anglophile royalist husband of my friend Gauri, has been having nightmares. In the last one, he tells me, Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth the Second, has been mounted upon by a huge black man, her butler, no less, and she was enjoying it thoroughly in her throes of passion. Initially who the hell was Michelle and why on earth was she patting that old grande-dame, I had no idea. But of-course, then there was the picture of Michelle Obama on CNN, wife of the most powerful man in the universe, patting the remnant of an old hag ruling over a tiny island with a huge past. Faux Pax Extraordinaire no doubt…..

The e-mail was vivid with details.

Geez. Get a life man…..

I keep telling him and that gorgeous wife of his that he desperately needs therapy. His obsession with the English royal family has reached sickening proportions; in my blunt, and lately totally subtle-less conjectures, I have rebuked him over this absurdity. His ongoing mental affair with the long dead Diana, which has also reached a climax by now I am sure, drove me up the wall on his last visit to Dhaka. I literally left him gaping on the dinner table at the Prego and stormed out after some expletives after hearing some anatomical details of the body of the princess while he was about to consummate….geez, sick sick sick….I had gotten down at the lobby, called Gauri, and gave her an earful. Thank God she and I we go way back when we were taking art history courses together back in the States decades ago. She just sighed, then chuckled, and said, ‘Hulo, why do you think I don’t accompany him to his trips anymore? He needs his bloody space and frankly at this point, so do I…. screw him, what are you up to?” The nerve …and she sensed it. ‘Guess what… I teasingly told him about my fantasy with Willy, Diana’s boy and he gave me a mouthful. It totally silly, isn’t it? “

Oh, you have joined the ball game, have you?

Gauri and I, whom she had nicknamed Hulo, like the Bengali stray cat for my wild ways, we are connected somewhat. Soul-mates? I don’t think so…but I felt totally at ease around her and vice versa, even now. To think that there was no sexual chemistry at all would be wrong though. We had our fling, had a huge fight, and then realized we were absolutely necessary in each other’s lives. We moved in. The Indian and Bangladeshi families knew we were ‘cousins’, the yanks didn’t give a damn, Steven and Juan, her true soul-mates and a bona-fide flag bearing gay couple suspected, eluded and hinted that I should join their ‘cause’ since ‘Gory’ was the perfect fag-hag; Alan, Rishi, Rithik, and Eddy, her ‘beaus’ in that order suspected me as her boy-friend on the side, and Teresa, Leslie, Laura, Maria, and Tanya suspected her to be the same while I supposedly double-crossed the lot. She initially tried to cater my cravings for the occasional home-cooked meal by serving blackened chicken and burnt fish and rice more like the ‘moorie’ but harder, and eventually I would look up the recipe books and cook up connotations that never seemed to last in the fridge. Between her coursework and readings, she would swoop down to the kitchen and devour everything in sight. In short, eventually, it was a perfect arrangement. She did the laundry, we cleaned, I cooked, we studied, partied, and got high together, picked up each other from our dates, conveniently disappeared from our flat when someone had to stay over or during the end of our living together, just gave up all pretences and the three of us, in whatever permutations combinations would end up would have breakfast together.

By the time Gauri reached Kolkata after her prolonged Bachelors and Masters, her marriage was already arranged. Dates were fixed, the trousseau was arranged without any fanfare from her side and I was shocked. This girl could don a skimpy mini-skirt, do a table dance on a C&W bar, and kick someone’s ass for being nasty with those crocodile leather boots and she had agreed to wed this character called Shuridoy, Sid for short, after a brief phone conversation between NY and Kolkata, and that was it. I kept asking, ‘Are you sure about this? You know what you are doing?’

Her great grandfather was the last of the hereditary Rai Bahadurs of this principality close to Beltala up north. While the previous generations were righteous with foresight, this particular gentleman was cut from a different fabric altogether. Multiple marriages, tons of children, both legitimate and illegitimate, and this one particular passion for gambling, which included stakes of lands as pawn all over the estate. By the time partition had happened, the estate looked more like a piece of rotten Swiss cheese, with pockets of ownerships distributed between the cash rich and the landed gentry, going all the way up to the royals of Bhawal, Rangpur, Cooch Bihar and far away Tripura. When the Cripps commission looked at the situation, instead of the Chit mahals created up north, they decided to do away with the arrangement all together. Thus came five generations of English ass-licking to an end. Her father, claimant to that illusive and non-existent title, had made it his mission to reverse the situation, at least reputation-wise. Gauri’s only brother was Oxford returned, doing very well, married the daughter of former titled scion of an estate, and now it was her turn to do the same. “Sid’ had been to Harvard and Don Bosco, his great grand-father was Cambridge educated, titled ‘Sir’ for his contribution to the Raj, and doing very well in business.

The marriage took place in November of ’93. She was gracious enough to push the marriage by a few weeks to make sure that I could also come, since I was also returning for good. The marriage was fantastic, colourful, full of pageantry and yet totally appalling. Sid came with his retinue riding this fantastic Arabian horse to the gates of the Grand Hotel. What dismounted from the horse was a creature from another planet. While Gauri did yoga, went to the gym, and maintained herself, this fellah was bald, short, pugnacious, and …and …I was totally lost for words. With two rosy cheeks that looked more like Baldrick after a shower, I was stunned, and for a few brief seconds was overcome with the idea of ‘rescuing’ her and run off to Dhaka.

After all the feasting and rituals, it was time for the portraits. Gauri kept insisting that I was in as many of them as possible, with her in-laws, cousins, but I kept avoiding looking at her. She knew what I was thinking and kept slowly patting my hand which she kept making me keep on her shoulder, not sure whether she was reassuring me or herself.

She had her fun and now ‘duty’ beckoned.

My wife Anjali has been more accepting of Gauri as my friend, specially after she met Sid on the very first trip. We had gone to Kolkata for a few days. The deal was we were to stay at the Tallygunj Golf Club for the first two days and then move to their house after their other guests were gone. It was obviously not Gauri who was in charge of the situation of the household. It was Sid. He ran the place like a five star hotel, immaculate, the guest room had three sets of towels, for each part of the day and were changed everyday. It was Eggs Benedict for breakfast, and porridge, followed by Earl Grey, which apparently also traveled with him , but not in tea bags, mind you, loose tea with a strainer. Gauri apparently had plenty of excuses to eat lunch outside, since the ‘smell’ of home cooking at the home kitchen made her husband very squeamish. Dinner was a western sanitized affair. In a sprawling household how the aroma of curry permeated to his royal olfactory was a total mystery to me. The first day Anjali was ‘why cant you be a little bit more like him? The house is immaculate.’ I just told her I just wasn’t ready for an upgrade and that was that, but by the second day, her sympathies were more with Gauri. She took her to her ‘den’ on the top floor on the roof with a beautifully laid out tropical garden. The room was more ‘Ikea’ than ‘Ethan Allen’, …the Gauri I knew. She had forbidden Sid from that room. There was a wall full of pictures attached with simple blue tack, but all composed and in straight lines. There was some of us, including one of me, kissing her on the forehead, and which also required some explanations later.

To come back to the Royal Obsession, there was a bust of Queen Victoria in his mahogany lined library, which was impressive no doubt, but it was the titles that intrigued me. Lives of the Mountbattens, Marlboroughs, Hastings, Curzons, Dalhousie, Earls, Dukes, Royalty of entire Europe, and hundreds of leather-bound copies of the lives and genealogies of the Indian Royals. There was a small framed picture of Lady Diana in that famous turtle neck of hers, and there was a oil portrait of Gayetri Devi, immaculate, beautiful, and regal. When asked about it, Gauri gave a mischievous smile and told me, ‘Why don’t you ask him about it? He would loooove to tell you all about it’.

That mixture of eagerness mixed with sarcasm put me off.

‘Why is that bloke looking down over our plates? ‘ I pointed at the bearded gentleman above the fake mantle piece of the chandeliered dining room.

‘That’, Sid boomed,’ Is Edward the VII th.’ .

‘I know’, I scowled back, trying at my utmost to sound and look as black as possible.

‘But why is he here?’

‘Because,’ he boomed, ‘it was during His Excellency’s tenure that my Great-Grandfather was ‘knighted’ for his contribution to the science of botany’.

I was about to say that King-Emperor did not give out titles those days like the Queen does these days, to the likes of Elton John, and Cliff Richard. There was a Viceroy for that, and if any titles were given, it probably was given thorough a ‘royal firman’, with contacts between the two races kept to a minimum., I knew my history somewhat, but in this case a little knowledge was a fatal thing and the glare Anjali gave me was enough to keep my trap shut. Gauri was having the time of her life, gleefully sipping her watery porridge with sets of utensils cascading out from each side of her bowl. Eerily it reminded me of one of those mornings almost two decades ago when we both had our significant others staying over for breakfast.

Gauri was wearing a simple diamond droplet, significant yet simple. It complimented her long slender neck beautifully. In fact Anjali had drawn my attention to it earlier.

‘That diamond droplet is really pretty…is it from here?’ I asked Gauri to divert the simmering ‘toofan’ based on the Royal of Royals.

‘Pardon?’, she said absently. Gauri’s mind was probably more mired in practical things, like how to manage the car to pick up Rono, their son, from school and squeeze in shopping with us at the same time.

‘Hulo, let ME tell you….’, Sid boomed again. That tiny façade of a body surely packed an irritating voice.

I glared back, literally. He doesn’t have the right to THAT name, and glared at Gauri. She, in turn, snapped into attention and gave a pacifying smile.

‘Zamir, as I was saying…,’ Sid has picked up exactly where he had left off. ‘I had it modeled after the droplet in the centre-piece of the famous Patiala necklace. Surely you must have heard of it. I did send you a message when it was featured in the Discovery chanel. You did catch the show I hope’.

Well I did, unfortunately. The necklace was one huge piece of layered jewelry worn by the ruler of Patiala for some occasion or rather, maybe the Durbar in Delhi. It was one of those obscene pieces of ornament, carted back from Paris that could have fed a million or two, for a week or two. The king also could have had Sid executed for even drawing parallels to the two pieces. It’s like comparing the Himalayas to the ‘tillas’ of Srimangol.

‘Nice’. I said. ‘Can we check out the boutiques after breakfast?’ I am beginning to feel like the nouveau riche interloper in the boudoir of the Prince Regent. But hey, why am I feeling like this for? What is he then? I buttered the muffin and directed my attention towards Gauri and an obscure Rubens that is apparently stored in the Marble Palace and was the subject of agonizing research years ago and from which I plagiarized for another class. I got an A and Gauri made a B+, and she never forgave or forgot. Now totally animated, she started talking about the rest of the collection there while the rest of us ate in silence. ….. Peace.

On the way back, we decided to stop for some ice cream in front of New Market. I pointed out the Grand to Anjli and Gauri and reminisced about the wedding. Since it was just beyond lunch time, the kid has been duly deposited with the nanny back home, and there was no apparent rush for anything. It was a beautiful December morning, sunny and cold, and we started walking towards Park Street. The street has books of all sizes and shapes and price ranges, stalked in the glittery Oxford to the footpaths on both sides. I initially proposed a quick lunch at Ban Thai inside the Grand, but since we were closer to the Park Hotel, the Atrium Café it was instead.

After lunch, the ladies decided to go window shopping. I looked at the Hobby Centre across the street, now a forlorn outlet, but in the early 80s, a real destination for us teen-agers coming from the backwaters of Dhaka. It stocked radio controlled airplanes and exotic accessories for aquariums in those days. I looked up at the edifice of the buildings all around. More than a hundred years old, still standing, stripped of its grandeur and glamour. In one instance, some kind of royal insignia over the main door was painted over with the garish red and gold while the rest of the building looked like it was ready to fall apart but couldn’t out of obligation to history. Having been in London for a few years, I could see the semblance. Looking up, ignoring the throngs of us Bangals below, and it was easy to be transported back to the skyline of London in its Imperial heyday.

‘What are you laughing at?’ Anjali and Gauri was back and my wife was giving me one of those amused looks.

It was then I realized that I had my hands in my pockets, with the jeans jacket on me, looking up to a building across the street and literally laughing away.

‘Nothing’, I said, trying to control myself.

“I know that smile, spill it.’ It was more of a rebuke from Gauri, who looked at Anjali and gave each other one of those all knowing condescending smiles. Those two have bonded, it seems.

‘Oh, nothing, lets go.’, I put myself between the two and put my hands on each of their shoulders.

Looking at that building and its pretentious insignia, I understood Sid.

Sid was that building personified.

The Hiatus from the Begum Wars

2009-02-02T20:32:00.000-08:00

Written in early 2007, right after the takeover of the care-taker government in Bangladesh, it was published in New Age, retitled "If Mary could marry Elizabeth'....

The Hiatus from the Begum Wars

"It doesn't do to get too starry-eyed about Elizabeth. She was only too obviously made of flesh and blood. She was vain, arrogant, spiteful, bloody-minded, frequently unjust and maddeningly indecisive. She was also brave, shockingly clever, an eyeful to look at and, on occasions, genuinely wise. In other words, she had all the qualities it took to make the political genius she undoubtedly was'. It's a direct quote from Professor Charles Schama's 'History of Britain'.

Given the time of Elizabeth I, she had ruled at a time when links between England and Bengal were bare minimal except for a few stray ships probably. However, on New Year's Day , 1600, she does grant the charter for a company called 'The East India Company', the repercussions of which were of such magnitude that as a Bangladeshi sitting in Dhaka, I find great comfort in writing this piece in English. Historical anomalies aside, if I asked someone which one of our past prime ministers did the above quote apply to, there would be definitely some stroking of chins and the number may or may not be divided between our two contemporary Begums, whose initial claims to fame were very 'Begum' like, i.e. one is the daughter of the martyred former President and Prime Minister and Father of the Nation', and the other is the widow of yet another martyred martial law administrator turned president. Talk of pedigrees, can't get any better than that in the modern era in this part of Bengal, devoid of the opulence and the 'khandaan' of the more royal parts of the South Asian continent. These self-styled princesses have been a thorn and a bane to each others' existence ever since the toppling of the previous wannabe royal called General Ershad, whose amorous attentions seemed to have bypassed these two.

Elizabeth the First also had to deal with another woman who was like a constant thorn to her side….her own cousin Mary, Queen of the Scots. Scotland being a different kingdom altogether during those times, it still had royal connections to the English and the French royal families. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry the Eighth, the first English monarch to be raised under the influence of the Renaissance. In fact, so enlightened and emboldened was he that, when the Pope denied him a divorce from his first Spanish wife to legitimize his hanky-panky for Ann Boelyn, he decided to become the head of the church himself, a self-proclaimed pope you might say, and decided to usurp Catholicism from Britannia. As with all matters of spiritual fate, this of-course opened up a schism within the society that would last another generation or two. Henry's daughter Mary, married to Phillip of Spain, and herself daughter of the Catholic first wife, was determined to reverse the 'reformation' launched by her father for the obvious reasons. Talk about hereditary politics. Given to her extreme persecution of non-Catholics, historians and bar-tenders alike remember her as 'Bloody Mary'. Mary's extreme unpopularity was divinely solved by her dieing without leaving a child. All other siblings being dead one way or another, our Lizzy the First was crowned the Queen. Her father's infatuation for her mother Ann Boelyn was reason for all this Catholic/Episcopal divide, so of-course she was a staunch anti-catholic. However, like fundamentalism today, there were pockets of Catholicism with patronage from very high places, like the Northern Earls, who wanted to ensure that Mary, (the Scottish cousin), sat on the throne and restored the faith. Mary's predicament must have been akin to the military general of Bangladesh in the 70s, constantly in motion due to some intrigue and conspiracies, to the point that she came running to her cousin Lizzy for help, who promptly puts hers in prison. Later on she would go one step further. Wily and full of guile that she was, she kind of cornered her in signing a letter that incriminated herself against her cousin the reigning Queen, , and poor poor Mary, …..off went her head.

In those days, kings and 'shenapatis' being the same, castles and cantonments were also the same, a muti-purpose luxury resort cum garrison cum prison, depending on who you were. Surrounded by the noblemen, yes-men, and ladies and gentlemen in waiting, the political secretaries of those days, the detachment from reality for these ladies were immense, then as now. The so called Marie Antoinette syndrome of substituting cake for bread continued in Bangladesh for an inordinate time. While the northern areas suffered from a famine like phenomenon called 'manga', georgettes and silks shimmered in the power houses. The rivalries surrounding the Lizzy and Mary camps ended up costing countless lives in the name of religion, a foreign invasion in the form of the Spanish Armada, and palace intrigues so much like the Hindi soaps that Lizzy the Survivor decided not to marry, at all. However, looking beyond the petty but bloody family history, Lizzy did have the foresight to declare James IV of Scotland, whose mother, Mary, Queen of Scotts, she imprisoned and eventually beheaded, as her heir apparent, renamed James I, and for the first time Scotland and England unified under the umbrella of the Tudor household. Upon her death and coronation of James the First, other than the few dour-faced Scotsmen cheering for England's opponents in rugby and soccer matches, that unity seem to have endured to this day.

We have a unity of different sorts here in Dhaka these days. However, unlike the unity of dynastical heirdoms (whew, that was just above the horizon, wasn't it??) we have one imposed by a number of 'bhodroloks', propped up by some with big guns. Surprisingly we don't mind. In fact, we are reveling in it. Our 'addas' always end up talking about cricket and politics, and the conclusion is the same, The Tigers are unpredictable, and we can wait for the elections just a tad more…… Again, some of us don't mind. Freed from the cacophony of 'begumspeak' from our tellies, the discussion has turned serious all of a sudden. No more talks of hair-sprays, Gucci glasses, matching Zari-paar saris, or the sheer rude bile that was inflected upon each other by the Begums. It was hard to imagine that both were where they were because of the men in their families, both were elected in a democratic process as the prime minister of a nation of 130 million, and both had more in common with each other as far as tragedies and their personal lives were concerned. In their invectives, the rest of us felt like the comical referee in one of those god-awful American wrestling shows gone bad. Wham-bam, blood pouring, but the glorious warriors are still howling & flying off the trapeze in their customized…er. .costumes, but the referee and his cohorts in their nylon trousers and their black & white shirts are positively shattered with more human concussions. Ours were more to our psyche than to our bodies. The rest of the world went ahead with 10%+ growth rates while we chugged along with 6 or 7. Neighbors are buying passenger aircrafts in triple digits while our aircrafts are closing down Dubai airport for hours. China was commissioning one power plant a week and we were commissioning a hundred power poles a week as well…..all dressed up, so to say, and no where to go…..

The mother of Sylvester Stallone, riding on the Rocky phenomenon of the 80s, instituted this show on TV called GLOW…(the Glorious Ladies of Wrestling). I swear. It didn't do well in the ratings, in spite of the scantily clad ladies smeared in mud, the American TV viewing public showed some taste at least. The matches in Dhaka are over and out for the time being, but we are rather anxious for the next round. The prospect of being in the spectator seat while mud and verbal bile is flying above, with the occasional splattering on the shirt have had its moments but it is getting old. Trying to send these two Begums in their gilded cages abroad seemed to have run of steam, so there will be mud flying over, around, and on us eventually.

There had been an old, wonderful joke, doing the rounds in the 1560s, that all their problems would be solved if only Mary and Elizabeth would marry each other. In one sense they had baby of sorts; once the blood-letting stopped, a stable prosperous Britain that would dominate trade and dominate northern Europe and eventually the globe. Pax Bangladesh? Oyeve….!!!!

Love, Divinity, and Fantasy...

2009-02-02T01:53:00.000-08:00

Is love so divine
With sweetness so sublime
That reality stops
And Fantasy begins?

Kiss

2009-02-02T01:52:00.001-08:00

That lightest of touches
That hint of moisture
That lightest allusion of desire
That closeness of spirits
That desire to Be…
And that faintest fragrance of life…
Is that the perfect kiss??

Happiness..

2009-02-02T01:51:00.001-08:00

This thing called Happiness
A fleeting thought perhaps…
A place between reality and illusion
Or the first smile of the first-born
Or like the sweetness of a loved one
Or even the touch of a lover..
Alas, ‘Happiness’, so easy to achieve
Yet.. far far away lies that touch of that loved one
Yes, an illusion then, perhaps..
This fleeting thought, this thing called…..
Happiness…

That Illusive Quest

2009-02-02T01:48:00.000-08:00

I am in the lookout for that perfect companion…..
The one who lives in the present and believes more in this life than in the so called hereafter…
The one who has passion, in whose presence I come alive
With whom conversations are never-ending as if they just started
The smell of whom arouses a thousand thoughts of desire
Whose light touch through my hair,
dissolves the weariness and frustrations of the entire day
Whose very smile makes it worth living
Whose voice has the melody of a spring shower and the light strings of a violin
The one who listens patiently
Or just by looking at my face …
Or just hearing my ‘hello’, understands my feelings right away.
The one who agues just as passionately about Plato and switches next minute,
cooing into my ears sweet little nothings…
In whose arms I collapse in sublime submission
And I am told ‘Where have you been all these years??’

Singapore Blues

2008-10-15T03:28:00.000-07:00

Bangladesh went through a transitional government phase, ruled by a military backed non-elected civilian government, one of whose mandates was to go after the political elite who were purportedly corrupt. That drive resulted in an outflow of politicians and businessmen to various destinations, Singapore being the most popular. The country switched to civilian government in December of 2008.

These shopping trips can be such a drag. After a month or two, they all look familiar. Done with the Abdullah street and its throng of exiles. I rather be seen somewhere else, or none at all. But they keep asking me the same questions, and all the bloody familiar faces, and then again the same topics...again, and again, and again…the ‘situation’ back home, the sheer stupidity of the caretakers and the army, and of-course the constant plotting of how to get back home…..and the brutal torture of their friends in jails of Bangladesh,

Today I just want to go to side street café and eat Singapore Noodles. Go easy on the shrimp, will ya? The doctor at Elizabeth has been specific. The doctor has seen so many Bangladeshis that he has greeted me with a heavily accented ‘kemon achen’? Went at the insistence of my hubby who wants to make sure I am ‘healthy’ all the time. Will be happy to get a car. It’s as if I love being confined to the 18th floor of this hotel all the time. Can we get a service apartment? The hubby is too status conscious for that. Half the time he is on the laptop managing his accounts and calling the banks and giving them codes and god knows what else. I wish he would talk to me sometimes, I mean talk talk, not just ask me for a glass of water or ask what I want from room service. Watch it girl, getting depressed is dangerous. But it has its occasional good parts too…..like the humongous ruby cabochon necklace he got me the other week. Not my style, but more like a show-off piece. Where did I wear it? Oh, at the restaurant below, at the gathering of other fellow exiles. You would think they would be morose or something, but hell no….wine flowed, so did caviar, which not too many appreciated, the ladies sparkled along with the jewels and the rediscovered passions for French see-through fabrics. Someone needs to tell Mrs. Reaz that her choice of fabrics with that figure of her’s borders of bearing the likeness of a tropical snowman……a bit too revealing isn’t it? Anyways, my ruby necklace will be a bigger hit when I to gets to wear it at my niece Nitu’s wedding coming up in a few months, if I make it to Dhaka by that time, that is.

The day has been spent with Mrs. Safayet at the Amrita Spa located at the Raffles. Tons of gooey mud, and scrubs, and pampering in the backdrop of piped music, the then, boredom, again. She is the only kindred soul it seems in the whole group. The rest, well, the equivalent of Bangladeshi trailer trash, simple women with humble backgrounds, suddenly ennobled with an infusion of undreamed amount of cash, transplanted from the ‘mufasshals’ straight to Gulshan and Baridhara via transit through Khilgaon and Lalbagh. Mrs. Karim is an exemption, but her nose is stuck up so high, it looks taller than the Empire State. Pedigreed with some minor sidelined Indian royal blood, she acts as if she is the reigning maharani of the exiles and yet her contempt and disdain for the rest doesn’t take long to spill out eventually. Their money helps, this combination of old and new money that is. They have bought to small estate on the northern shores from where you can literally see the lights of Johar bahru across the strait. Must give her credit for her impeccable taste though. Full of antiques, Chinese and Indian and western, and all in their perfect places. Her house has been , in Gulshan with two attached plots, the same. Had this been the US, both places would have adorned the pages of Architectural Digest by now. The sons and daughters and their spouses and their ever expanding broods of children, life a little factory of sorts, all centered in that estate, and there are already talks of buying off the adjoining estates on the left and right. I think negotiations have already started. With their wads of cash, it won’t be long before the deals go through. The locals (well they have been here for so long now, the Locals are just them Bangladeshis, and the Singaporeans are just plain ‘them’, an insider joke no doubt) are already calling the street KarimNagar. Oh well, I miss my mom, all left alone in Dhaka. I want her to move to the US with my brothers, but my ‘bhabis’ are a breed apart. Selfish, self-indulgent and totally spoilt, and did I mention their husbands, my brothers, all three of them wrapped around their petit manicured fingers like little chimps? My Boro Apa is the reigning matriarch of her huge extended family, and highly respected by the in-laws. Mom will not move there though, with these Bengali inhibitions of staying with the ‘jamai’. I call her as often as I can. Thank goodness, she has her school to take care off in Banani and that keeps her occupied. Initially she was adamant that she should quit the school and surrender the day-to-day operations to members of the trustee board. Now it seems like a blessing, with her in Singapore. And I miss my kids, immensely, achingly so. Shama has been duly deposited in a boarding school close to KL, and Shanu, my dear little Shanu, has been sent to a ‘public school’ in the UK, costing a fortune and more so, millions of miles away, in a totally different time zone, in a cold climate, where he dearly misses his mom, and hates the constant grey of its skies. Rabbi, my not so dear husband at the moment, has shipped them off so in whatever places that was available at such a short notice. I, and only I, take full credit for their good grades prior to their public schools. A strict regimen of rationed TV and play-stations, tons of reading, both out loud and in their own capacities, and all those math games, which tried my patience and my sanity sometimes, but I persevered, looking at their cherubic faces. I had to. Shanu, the finicky eater whose saving grace was either a mug of Holicks or sushi from Samdado, and Shama, they both avoid the subject of food when I call up UK or KL, and there is always this accusatory tone in their voices, that literally breaks my heart every time. Rabbi….whenever the kids gets emotional with him, duly passes the phone back to me. They need their Dad too, don’t they? In these moments, if the timing is not odd, I always call Mrs. Safayet, lately relegated to Seema Aunty. God knows why an Ivy League professor would get his head unscrewed and come home to enter politics. Uncle has been sued by Anti-corruption for putting his signature on some dubious deals and look at the mess they are in. At least they have US passports and soon will be on their way there to stay with their second son who lives in New York and some sort of a hoity-toity investment banker recruited straight out of Harvard business school. Once they are gone, I will miss Aunty a lot. She reminds me of so much of her own khala back in Dhaka. She is always affectionately calling me ‘Beta’, I just love that, and when she asks about my kids, sounds like she really means it. She had also deposited her brood in various private schools during her husband’s pre-tenure vagabond days as a professor. I hope Shanu and Shama, my sweet little darlings will turn out to be like her kids, successful, good looking, and ….well, willing to put up their parents in times like this.

I tell the taxi driver to head for the Clarke Quay. I am in the mood for hummus and the Marrakesh serves a decent plate along with their chicken cooked in fermented lime, topped with olives and dried apricots. It always cheers me up. After that? A bit of window shopping at the Hilton arcade, and maybe have tea there. Rabbi must have come back from hi morning swim, and probably will be downing more whiskey then he should have; then he has all these ‘meetings’, a combination of gossips, back-biting, strategizing their return, and more business plans. Lately there have been too many bottles of Johnny Walker lying about around the suite. Need to have a talk with him, a bit of moderation cant be that bad. He has already opened up two companies, not only to siphon the money into businesses, but also to get the resident visas that make their stay ‘official’ and long-term. Oh forgot, supposed to drop by at the real-estate agent’s office and look up some more properties. So far I have refused to make any choices, like admitting that our exiles are permanent. Rabbi is, thank god, totally happy with my delegated role as the house hunter, otherwise I would have been forced into the role of a housewife all over gain, catering to these hordes of bhabis in their diaphanous saris. Well, Mrs. Halim showed up in a skirt and a top the other day, but she looked more like her house-keeper at her hotel floor. And Halim Bhai with his loud Hawaiian shirts and dyed moustache, they make quite the pair. I like them though, with their off-the cuff remarks that border on political incorrectness and their constant for the perfect ‘Deshi taste’ (the taste of home) in all they eat. But, hey that’s another story. I wanted to take a few courses on nursing at the Yuba College, just for the heck of it, but hubby objected. Why should his wife ‘do’ nursing???? He suggested that I take some courses on finance, but what on earth for? He is there for THAT. Now he is suggesting a trip to Bali for the weekend, but I wanted to see the Angkor Wat. Ever since I took that art history course on Asian arts and architecture back in college, I have been enthralled by it. But no great hotels close by and therefore it was vetoed. I am craving for company, someone who notices my existence and talks about the world in general. Should I give Atef a call? I still have his pen in my purse…the very thought of it gives me the shivers.

Atef, oh Atef, he is some piece of work. Of mixed Indian and Middle Eastern descent, dark olive green eyes, light olive skin, lean and tall, with a head full of sexy long curls, with a body that is definitely toned for hours at a time at the gym. Both Atef and I were waiting at the VIP customers’s lounge at the Citibank while Rabbi was inside, with his ‘personal banker’. He wanted me to sign something and sent out this form, but I needed a pen, and out came a MontBlac out of Atef’s pockets.. Unlike Rabbi who treats the pen like a status symbol, always poised in his shirt pocket, he even carries a separate pen for his more mundane needs, Atef’s has seen some use, no doubt, full of scratches and even a bite mark. Goodness, a MontBlanc that gets chewed. He had flashed me a quick smile while he had forwarded the pen nonchalantly towards me. When the coffee service came, he jumped at it, asking whether I took cream and sugarand some small talk followed. He apparently represents his father’s business interests in Singapore. A bit later I was given his business card, and mechanically I gave mine, that stated my name, cell number and the name of the hotel. Initially he assumed that I worked there and asked my position. Visibly embarrassed and somewhat blushing, I just said that my husband and I ‘lived’ there. Flashing a quick smile, he looked towards where Rabbi was in and asked me what he did. I just tell him, ‘business, I suppose’…Thank god Rabbi just walks out at that very moment and I introduce him to Atef.

A few days later Atef calls and invites the pair of us for lunch. Rabbi naturally refuses and doesn’t even bother to ask what or where was the location. So, I show up myself, not without much morose that the spouse cannot join….Turns out the lunch is at Hua Ting at Orchard Road. The place is fabulous, the Cantonise cuisine is to die for, and the pleasant company, so divine…. Before I knew it, the ‘lunch’ has lasted three hours, have been informed in detail of each other’s family all over the globe, both of our mother’s penchant for ethnic looms, the love for live pop concerts. Rabbi and Atef shared the common passion for fast cars and Atef was particularly enthusiastic about the debut of the Grand Prix in Singapore in a few more months and apparently has already ‘bought’ a box. After dinner we strolled on the streets, looking at the various stores selling brands from the world over. It was tea time. Atef invites me to the Marina for tea…

It turns out Atef lives on a boat, a yatch to be exact, a smooth 80 feet schooner. I kind of guessed that he was well off, but this was totally unexpected. Initially wary of climbing onto it, I was somewhat reassured when a turbaned Sikh butler and a matronly Malay purser appeared on the deck to receive us. The purser Mrs. Abubaker, turns out to be his Amah from his early days and apparently have been looking after Atef since his early teens. She looks at me with very keen, not exactly disapproving, but curious eyes. Maybe there will me a passing remark about her to Atef’s mom later sometime. Earl Grey and buttered scones were followed by petit samosas and bite-sized pastries. The interior exuded charm and sophistication that she has only seen in movies and magazines. A bit later Atef offered his chaufer driven car to drop me off at her hotel. A total gentleman…damn.

That was two weeks ago. Since then there has been other invitations, all declined, but their phone conversations have definitely become longer, to the point we were teasing each other about their families, clothes, money, and even their looks, almost in a childish way. The Boloshoi Ballet was in town and he has tickets, but I decided not to. Why feed the rumour mill fodder with the whole town crawling with ‘us’. What I need to focus and get out my head was the brief brushing of his hand against mine in front of the chinese jade store while pointing at a piece. It had sent shivers down my spine but he was totally oblivious to this briefest of encounters. Anyway, better ask Rabbi about their dinner plans. He is ‘busy’. He is always busy lately, boozing, now he has taken up poker and has ‘discovered’ Scottish malts. He tells me to pick up some paracetamol from the corner store. How much cash do I have?

The pen is still there, with that bite mark staring at me…

My heart is beating really fast... I bring out the cell and call Atef…..

Priyotomeshu……

2008-10-13T02:31:00.001-07:00

It has to end…it just has to. After two years, I have absolutely nothing to show for it except for a lot of bitter emotional upheaveals and tons of agony.

It all started when Sachin offered to introduce me to you in Café Mango on the 12 th of August, 2005. Yes, I remember the day pretty darn well. You were supposed to meet at 7:30, for which I had to make some excuses for some meeting from his office and literally run over there. But you were one and half hours late, by which time Sachin was totally embarrassed, He was totally pissed, and you offered no apologies, absolutely none whatsoever. You, the doyen of the NGO crowd, with the possibility of beauty and grace showed up in a haggered t-shirt and baggy jeans, hair some-what ruffled, dark circles underneath the eyes, and a small purse held in your hands. You also refused to make any eye contact whatsoever and requested a cup of ginger tea and a fudge brownie with vanilla ice-cream on top. I made some polite conversations about work, got some matter-of-fact responses, which seemed forced, and decided to just shut-up. You didn't have a mobile phone with you and could not be reached or summoned as to why you were late, nor was any explanations offered. Fuming, when Sachin confronted you, you just mumbled. You were not the least bit curious about me.

Those eyes, those beguiling eyes of yours,….I still cannot get them out of my head. Those very dark eyes, framed on the top with those bushy, somehow not very feminine eye-brows seemed to speak volumes. It spoke of intellect, an erudite mind-set, and a psyche that I find intensely mesmerizing. I still cant fathom the irony of this attraction since, after leaving that day,I gave Sachin such a hard time for wasting his time with this creature from the abyss of rudeness such as you…..

Sachin came to Dhaka five years back as a senior merchandiser for one of the huge local conglomerates that made everything from under wears and denims, to funky shirts to uniforms. He had a grinding job with the strangest of hours that had to combine both the local time-zone and the west-european one. He constantly cribbed about it but the fact that he was being paid in cash in crisply US dollars and he endured, yes 'endured' with be just the right word for it. In spite of all this, he managed to have a small circle of friends consisting of expats, the NGO crowd, and the semi-intellectuals who dabbed in 'social development' I guess you fell into the latter. You were mentioned a couple of times as the 'girl you should meet', butyou never seemed to have the time. You were either traveling, or had conferences to attend and arrange, or was burning the mid-night oil in your office in Lalmatia.

Coincidentally Sachin kept calling wanting to find out whether either had called. He totally felt bad for the whole experience, specially after the months of hype, and wanted some positive outcome to come out of it. I finally said 'yes, I will eat my pride for you and give her a call…ok?', but I I didn't have your number. Sachin promptly sent the number over the SMS and called back.

"Call her now', he said. "I told her you are gonna call right now and she said it was OK'.

I ring her number which is a land-line with a PABX extension and you answer the phone yourself I guess there wouldn't be any receptionist there at 8 in the evening.

I introduce myself. There is a pause and she says in a matter of fact way, "Who? I can't recall…what is this all about".

Sachin would really look good in a coffin. I say, 'Café Mango, a few days ago? We met through Sachin?'. And as the ultimate ice-breaker I add 'You were awfully late, remember?'

The Ice-Queen thaws somewhat and responds warmly " Ahh, yes Hi Rubel. That was the worst possible day for me to do anything, specially meet new people. I had just got my transfer notice and was totally down 'bout it.'

'Where to?'

'Beijing, of all places. My NGO has been given this advisory consultancy for the ministry of social welfare there and I have been asked to go for two years. It was such a shock since I had no intention for moving abroad, but its such a career move, I was totally torn about it.'

One more nail just got hammered in Sachin's coffin. She is leaving…what a waste of time.

'Oh, that's good, I guess….when do you leave?'

Our first one-on-one conversation is about her leaving. I could the irrelevance of it all. I had maintained a long-distance relationship till a few months ago for over four years, and after the misery of such an ordeal, I am not even remotely getting associated with one in similar circumstances of the opposite sex.

"Hey Rube… (From Rubel to Rube…not bad), is it possible to meet up for coffee and talk? I have to get this report in by tonight and its already eight."

'Where at and when?'

'You suggest, my schedule is pretty much clear after day after tomorrow and I am quite flexible. ' (flexible, are you?)

'How about Santoor at Dhanmndi on Thursday evening, around 8 ?'

'That will be great. Yes, I can make it. Will see you then, okay? Bye."

Santoor was where the chemistry began. There was where I discovered that beyond that unkempt outdoors of yours, there is a soul uncannily complimentary to mine. We, you and I, we have read the same books, the same movies, more or less the same music and even coincidentally the same sarcasms. I have found my soul-mate. It was meant to be a short dinner, till the waiters started to turn the lights off and dropped enough hints that we needed to go. Your departure to Beijing was only three weeks away. On the way out, in the pretext of looking for your driver, you held on to my arms for a few seconds.
Then we were unstoppable.

It was Eid Day. You were flying out the next morning. A single guy showing up at your doorstep was a hint less than subtle, but I showed up anyway. Your mother was more than ecstatic to see me at your doorstep. She asked me a million prying questions before she bothered to inform you that I was downstairs. Later on you could not rebuke her enough in front of me. I stayed as late as possible that was within the civilized norm, cushioned by the fact that quite a number of our 'mutual' friends showed up. That was the day, with the harmonium and the tabla decorated on the living room floor did I realize that you are a classically trained vocalist, but you refused to perform that night, you just wouldn't. Your stubbornness permeates through more than sweat, doesn't it?

I called religiously every Saturday since that day. I couldn't sing the praises of Beijing enough and yet the first thing you write to me is 'Reached your dream city, quite a dreary place so far….." ….

I wanted to come a week before my b'day, which would have been your b'day. My idea was to celebrate it together, but you told me to postpone the trip. You were drowning among economists, protocols, and VIPs who wanted to 'do' Beijing. And showed up I did, went to the local version of the 7-11 and got ourselves two slices of lemon mernague cakes and celebrated our b'days together. I had to maintain the utmost of secrecies about this trip, remember? After all we are Bangladeshis and guys are not supposed to show up in a girl's apartment as a guest, are we? You did make me promise that you and I would be at our 'best' behavior.

Beijing was a total blur. Next day I proceeded to clean out your apartment, which was a pig-sty to be totally honest. It totally lacked a woman's touch it seemed. There were molded veggies in your fridge that were left behind by your mom a month back. You were totally unabashed when I told you that the penicillin farm was ready for harvesting. I hardly saw you till late at night, totally blurry and fatigued beyond belief day after day. I cooked and cleaned and played the role of a tourist with a vengeance, my frustrations at being able to even have a decent conversation taken out at the various unsuspecting souvenir sellers and sales clerks. Only on the 8th day, after I had postponed my departure twice and had totally given up on you did you finally come around. As usual you came in late and tired, walked into the kitchen, saw the food, lit two candles for the dining table and set the table. Then you did the most remarkable thing. You freshened up, came out and with your right hand took my left and guided me the table for dinner. The first thing you said was 'You can do much better than me, are you sure? ' It is as if I have already asked your hand for marriage. All I said was 'Yes, I am here, aren't I?'. It was the quietest most romantic dinner I ever had. I remember the glow of the candles on your face with a gentle shine on your hair cascading down your shoulders, and there was a sparkle in your eyes that was enchanting beyond belief. You produced a bottled of white wine afterwards which we finished till the late hours of the night, and when it was time for bed, you kissed me on the cheek, our first.

Next the day, we were finally a couple. Hand in hand, you took me to the flea market and the arts district in the converted warehouses. We had dinner in the phutongs in that quaint little avant-gard looking restaurant. Don't deny that you had a great time that day. I saw you in a totally different light that night. There was a side of you that was totally frivolous and free from all the chips on your shoulders that you seem to carry all the time.
There was a gait. That night, when I went to sleep, you came back, stood there by the door for what seemed like hours and you had a smile on your face. Yes, I was awake and could see your silhouette from the light of the hallway. If there is an enduring image of your that is totally transfixed in my mind, it will this one, you in your pajamas and a t-shirt, hair let down, looking at my face while I pretended to sleep….

That was a year ago.

Since then, the walls around you have started to be raised. I can feel that you are raising your defenses. But why? I have asked you to marry me and you haven't answered. I have asked for a definite answer to our at least being together have not received a definite answer. Can you say something, please? There are pressures in a long distance relationship to begin with, but you have made it harder by not sharing anything. We still talk on the phone for hours about everything….social issues, the latest drama in Dhaka and the latest social initiative in Beijing….but never 'us'. You avoid the subject like the plague. But if I don't call for a week or two, there will be desperate calls, messages, and e-mails asking about me.

Look, I have been a friend, but I have always wanted more and I have been straightforward about it. Please do me a favour, and I am sure after two years you can do this for me. Just give me an answer. We can both move forward. No formal 'Ogo Priyotomeshu….' letter is required. Are we a couple? Yes or No??

Fair and Lovely….

2008-10-13T01:47:00.000-07:00

It was almost love at first sight. Taufic had gone to the Lalmatia Aarong to pick up a few things and her cousin Laboni had wanted to come along. She called and said that some friends from college were joining her. It would be fun to hang out, she said. Afterwards, going to the lakeside on road 32 and having ‘‘fuchka’ was on the itenary. When Laboni and the gang walked in, all four of them together, Taufic was literally thunderstruck by one of the ‘friends’. She was a bit tall, very very fair, a long face, with hazel eyes, but a nose that was more Mediterranean than Bengali. The nose reminded her of Indira Gandhi, whose biography was being avidly consumed at home by his mom at the moment. Laboni must have noticed his face, because she said right away, ’Oh, this is Farzana by the way….and this is…’

All of a sudden Laboni had become Taufic favorite cousin. Laboni, astute and clever as ever, promised to introduce the two, provided he paid for this overpriced handbag she has seen at the One Stop Mall.

Santoor was not that packed. It was, after all a week-night and the dinner crowd was a bit sparse on these days. It was precisely for that reason Taufic had chosen that venue. It was public enough and at the same time nice, quite and classy to impress a damsel. He was actually out on a ‘date’. He had finished his MBA from IBA and was immediately gobbled up by a bank with a foreign pedigree. Since then, his family has been ‘visited’ by a large number of friends’ friends, obscure and not so obscure relatives, and even some women who are in similar positions. His parents lapped up all the attention they had been getting and at the same time goading him to make a choice, get married, and settle down. With his education over and the career more or less settled, Taufic tended to agree. Farzana seemed perfect. She seemed demure, polite, and subtle in her make-up, not that she needed much to begin with, finishing her Masters in English at Dhaka University, father was a banker just like him and mom also taught at a school. Like Taufic, there was just one other sibling.

The meeting was not what he had expected. None of the gushing of the harlequin romances, but more like the beginning of a negotiation. The numbers and statuses of immediate relatives, properties they own, future plans, whether both were ready to be married or not, and any skeletons in the closet in terms of past liaisons…. Taufic confessed there had been one, a turbulent passionate affair in his intermediate and undergrad days but it had fizzled and the girl was married with kids now, living the suburban life in Sydney. Farzana said that there had been none, there had been more than a few interests but their family being somewhat insular and conservative, she did not pursue anyone. She also said that her father was actually her step-father, her own father being out of the picture since her birth. She was born in 1971 and it has been assumed that he did not survive the turbulent times.

Laboni asked her mother, Taufic’s khala, to take the proposal to Farzana’a parents. They came over to Taufic’s, met the clan, dates were set, number of guests were negotiated and the marriage was solemnized. Laboni even got a genuine Benarasi Silk sari out of it.

Farzana’s younger sister Tarana was on the darker side, like his dad. Apparently she has had a complex about the whole thing, especially since she always got compared to her elder, fairer, therefore prettier sister. She described herself as wheatish brown and her bathroom cabinet was filled with all kinds of fairness products that were available. Somehow her complexion stubbornly refused to upgrade itself from wheatish brown to a lighter version of brown but she wouldn’t give up. Farzana’s admonitions about these products always came with a rebuttal, ‘look who is talking’. Tarana was the spoilt brat who had the run of the house, but Farzana was the over-protected one. Her mom was more open to Tarana and Farzana always perceived her mom as somewhat cold towards her. Not that there was any neglect or cruelty, but the bonds that are supposed to be there between a mother and her first born was somewhat lacking. Father was always kind, somewhat formal, and looked after everything Farzana ever needed. But she could feel that it required an effort, which he executed flawlessly, never letting her feel like a step-daughter. Ever aware of the attentions Farzana would get due her complexion and looks, they were always on the alert, gently guiding her to stay out of trouble. However, when Tarana and their dad interacted, sparks flew. All the coquettishness of a young girl came out of Tarana naturally and father indulged her daughter. Mother was always a bit distant, quiet, had a fixed smile on her face, always observing everyone, never interfering. It was an atmosphere Farzana wanted to escape. She wanted to be doted upon, the centre of someone’s entire existence. She hoped and prayed that Taufic would be her pillar and her prayers had come through.

Not only Taufic, but the entire clan doted on her. A fair skinned beauty, but also down to earth, she got along with everyone was an instant hit. They have become the golden couple, him with the flying career in finance and a trophy wife and she the doyen of every elderly female and an item of jealousy among his colleagues and their wives. She also became the benchmark of all future bridal acquisitions, fair, educated, spoke bangle and English with equally ease, a budding gourmet cook, looked after the in-laws like her own and quite the host, throwing small elegant dinners with menus coming out of the ever growing piles of cookbooks collected from New market and Nilkhet.

Two and half years have passed. Now there are perpetual hints about the ‘need’ to have a baby. Both of them were really in love, happy, and life trudged on; there wasn’t any compulsion for parenthood for either of them. But Taufic had been concerned lately. Farzana kept having this slight fever which after all kinds of antibiotics, refused to go away. Blood tests were suggesting some kind of infection but after going through several doctors, nothing could be pinpointed as a source. Other than the slight temperature and the occasional fatigue that accompanied, she seemed to be nonchalant about the whole thing and kept assuring her hubby to be patient. It would eventually go away.

Anyway, Taufic was about to be sent to Singapore by his bank for a training on financial derivatives and he applied for his holiday right after the training was over. He would take his wife and enjoy a kind of second honeymoon and at the same time get her wife checked out over there.

Farzana was ecstatic there. Singapore was like a dream, with walkable streets, window shopping, a variety of street foods and a gleaming cityscape. She would wander about during the day, check back in to the hotel room in the late afternoon and wait for Taufic to return from his training, get some rest and hit the town again. There was always some rendezvous with some colleagues and afterwards they would go for a walk by the waterfront. The doctor’s appointment was next Tuesday.

The doctor heard her history, frowned, and ordered a whole volley of tests that subjected her to giving out what seemed like vials of blood, peeing in a cup, and waiting for two long days. He immediately referred her to nephrologists who seemed to repeat the blood drawing all over again, and put her inside a giant scanner to look into a 3D image of her kidneys. There was no good news. The reason for her recurrent fever was that both of her kidneys were not functioning, polluting her blood with the impurities her kidney failed to flush out. She needed to be on dialysis. In the long run, she needed at least one new kidney.

The honeymoon was over. There was considerable crying and praying that accompanied their arrival. Dialysis meant in those days braving the corridors of either PG or Suhrawardi and enduring the stench such public hospitals offered. She didn’t have a choice and endured. Her fever abated. Her glow was back after each and every session, but pregnancy was out of the question. Her mother offered her kidney but the tissues didn’t match, and Tirana’s life was till ahead. Imagine her suitors finding out she had only one and had to watch her diet for the rest of her life. The local specialist finally said that Farzana’s biological father’s family could be traced. There just might be a poor relative of some kind who could come to an arrangement for a kidney…..

Taufic’s conversation with her parent’s on this regard didn’t go well, not well at all. Her father just looked at her mom and kept quiet initially, and her Mom’s face went totally blank and pale at the same time. Obviously fighting her tears, she solemnly announced, ‘baba, it is not possible’ and went off to her room. The generally congenial Taufic really lost it. After half a minute of numbness, he asked her dad ‘Why Not?’ Then thinking that this might be a sensitive issue for him, he solemnly got up, stormed out of the living room and went to their bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him. Amma was sitting on her chair in the corner of the room, obviously morose, shaking, and crying her heart out. Even during the wedding, she was somewhat stoic. Taufic had never seen her or even assumed her to be this vulnerable or even emotional. Taking a deep breadth, he started, ‘I know it’s hard, but she is your daughter and her life is at stake. She can’t be on dialysis forever. Can’t you help us? Her father must have some relatives somewhere. Look, you don’t have to do anything. Just give me a lead or two and I’ll do the rest. Think of Farzana. She is really suffering’.

Amma looked at his face, this time her body having in violent sobs and tears. She just said, “Baba, please forgive me, but that’s not possible’. This time Taufic also started crying. Farzana over the past two and a half years had given him so much peace of mind and a feeling of happiness, Taufic didn’t know such feelings existed. He was in love with her head over heals and the prospect of losing her in the long run was NOT an option. The same question came out, this time in very high decibels, ‘WHY NOT??? What can be more valuable than the life of your daughter???” There was a gentle tap on the door. ‘Open the door, its Baba’. Taufic, coming back to his senses and realizing the scene he just created, timidly opened the door and kept his head low. Baba gently took his hand and guided him towards the bed; they both sat down next to amma’s chair. Amma had started wiping her tears with the edge of her sari and was trying to compose herself. As gentle as ever, baba simply said, ‘Nilu, Taufic should now.’ The crying started all over again, and Taufic, bewildered kept looking from Baba to Maa and finally asked, ‘Know what? Please tell me.”

Both Baba and Maa were engaged to be married in February of ’71. But the war broke out and all the wedding plans were temporarily put on hold. They were both student of Rajshahi University, where they had met. She was from Kushtia and him from Jessore. After weeks of tearing at his conscience, he finally joined the Mukti Bahini and disappeared. There would be occasional messages of his activities and what he was doing. She was just happy that he was alive. In the meantime Kushtia was overrun by the Pakistani army. The army camp was just five minutes away and a sense of fear permeated the neighborhood. One Cornel Belayet was in charge, occasionally seen puttering about in town in an open jeep, mustached and sun glassed, the quintessential army officer in charge. Somehow she had caught his attention while she was hanging her clothes in the balcony to dry and he was passing by. He made an appearance in the household that same evening and made some polite enquiries about the family. He was pretty keen on Nilu, ‘Bohat accha larki hai apko’, he said to his dad. Sensing the direction the conversation was going, he informed the colonel that she was already engaged, in fact, the ‘aqd’ ceremony had already taken place and once things were back to normal, he would formally take her to Jessore. The ‘aqd’ was a total lie of course, but the Colonel was dejected no doubt. He literally turned red on the face, said a very formal ‘Khoda Haafez’ and left. He was back two weeks later. He had made some inquiries and found out that the fiancé was a Mukti Joddha. He had to pick her up for questioning about his whereabouts. There was hardly any questioning. Initially there was a lot of physical harassment, but when his coaxing was not getting him anywhere and he finally lost it. He kept slapping her and started tugging at her sari. She was returned two days later, broken in body and spirit, eyes sunken beyond recognition, and she refused to speak for days. Colonel Belayet was eventually taken to a POW camp in India and he was the father of Farzana.

Farzana had no clue about her parentage. They had uprooted themselves for her sake and started another life in Dhaka to protect her. Besides, which girl would have a normal life knowing of her violent conception?

The silence in the bedroom was eerie and deadly. Amma’s face had turned to stone, Abba had an arm on Taufic’s shoulder and his eyes were watery. Taufic had gone totally blank.

The story continued. Farzana was born premature in December, a miracle baby in certain ways since she was not expected to survive. Mom, now unofficially a ‘birongona’ had tried to kill herself or at various occasions tried to starve the baby to death. But Farzana’s nani persevered. When Baba came to see her on the 20th of December, he kind of knew already what had happened. The baby, tiny as ever, was being fed with a dropper by an ayah, Nilu in a post natal depression, totally refused to even touch the baby and had been in her own state of self-rejection. Abba, stayed on, a week later took Nilu as his wife and took the baby and went off to Jessore. They would move to Dhaka a year later. It was in fact Abba who took Farzana in the palms of his hands and placed it on Amma’s lap for the first time. Tarana was born five years later.

Taufic just came home and found Farzana resting on the bed. He just lied down next to her held on tightly and started crying.

There was a happy ending at the end. Tarana insisted that she donate one of hers and the tissues matched this time. The whole family went off to Singapore where the transplant was successfully completed. And Tarana was married off after all. Apparently Taufic’s colleague from work, Shabbir had met her during their wedding and while not exactly smitten, had been in touch ever since. He had been updated all along of the saga of Farzana and her health. In fact he thought she was a heroine of some sort for the sacrifice she was making for her step-sister. Only that she wasn’t as fair as Farzana……

Like all these little fish in the river……

2008-10-13T01:46:00.001-07:00

Hausa was really perturbed by the whole process. She has made Black Forest Pudding a million times in her life but today it is not looking or tasting the same. She has a reputation for the cake in her Zonta and Rotary Club circles. People ask for the recipes all the time and she always has been very generous with it. However, they all say that they never taste like hers. Well, today she is facing the same predicament. Not only that, today the pudding has been requested by her mother to entertain her friends and cousins, and therefore will be under heavy scrutiny of all the aunties and khalas. Well, the cherries were perfect, so were the brown sugar and the combination or plain and self-rising flour, exactly 200 grams of butter, no more no less, her private stash of dark chocolates and Kirsch whipped cream lovingly sourced by herself and occasionally by her husband form their numerous trips abroad….well something has gone terribly wrong. After the required hour and forty five minutes of baking, she had put the skewer in for tasting and it was bitter and overly sweet. Must be the chocolate and the sugar. Oh well, she has to instruct Ammi to serve with heavy doses of plain whipped cream to make it palatable, but went ahead with the garnishing of the pudding with shaved chocolate swirls and cherries with stems on the top so that it looked like a cute little volcano with the bright red lavas erupting from the top. Her son Andalib always gets a kick from the décor, before diving into the pudding.

Earlier in the morning, she had been to Agora for her shopping. Aisles after aisles of delectable, mostly imported that has the likes of her new avenues of cooking and tasitng adventures. She hated the fact these items were no longer the exclusive domains of women like here, well traveled, thoroughly westernized, and a palate that has been painstakingly acquired with dining in all the fancy restaurants of home and especially abroad. At the same time, there was a certain delight and pleasure to be able to find Danish whipped cream and Japanese Sago noodles under the same roof so close to home. She needed some brown sugar for the recipe for the pudding, along with chocolates and cereals for the kids, detergents and cleaning solvents for the house, and wanted to get a kilo of the Thai dragon-fruit that are seasonal and just arrived.

Hausa was in the aisle that stocked shampoos and beauty products and specially those Sri-Lankan herbal items. She was always looking at them but the packaging was always very boring and unattractive for her. They probably would look out of place among the bottles of Este-Lauder and Shishedos, but there was no harm in looking. There were two women next to her, hawking the space in front of the baby products but were having an animated conversation of some sort. Apparently one of them just returned from the southern areas, visiting her in-laws, where there had been a storm of biblical magnitude. Oh yes, thought Hausa, she had scoured her closet for all the old salwar kameezes and the cotton saris that she no longer wore and, along with a check for twenty five thousand takas, had dropped them off on behalf or Rotary and thus cleared her conscience. The imagery from the devastation moved her immensely and she and her friends quickly called each other, collected a truckload of clothes and money and got them dispersed as soon as possible. There was also the picture of her husband with the Chief Advisor giving a chunk of money to the relief fund. Then of course the wedding season and the season of wild Bengal winter began and her calendar was booked choc-a-block with fittings, tailors, parlors, jewelers and the countless weddings, walimas, and engagements parties which always seem to be held at Radisson, Westin, Spectra, or Shenakunjo. She dreaded going to the ones in Sheraton or Sonargaon, because by the time the traffic has been dealt with and festivities began, she felt hitting the shower and untangle the artwork of her favorite stylist….and she definitely dressed down for any events in the community centres… Anyways, this women, Shoma was the name she had gathered, was mentioning her distant phupu-sashuree in the village who had lost her son and her grand-daughter. Apparently when faced with devastation there, it was Shoma who had broken down. The phupu-shashuree, apparently after having shed her share of tears for weeks on end had merely patted Shoma's head and produced a cup of tea and a some 'mooree' for them. Her husband, who definitely had a close connection with the family during his childhood was lamenting the loss of his cousin, not seen in almost fifteen years was regaling the childhood memories of running through the fields, chasing the water buffaloes into the ponds and stealing the neighbors mangoes together. Apparently the women had kept her stoic composure and finally told the two, "Baba, I have no more tears to shed. After the storm, we all cried like all these little fish in the river. Allah has taken what He wanted back and now our lives are going on as you see it.' Transfixed, Hausa kept fiddling with the bottles of lotions and what not till Shoma and her friend moved on. These simple village people….crying like little fish in the river. Fish don't cry, big or small, do they? Anyway, she found the brown sugar in the next aisle that was required for the pudding and checked out…..

Zebun and Hausa have been friends since their school days. The friendship has endured over two decades in spite of the ups and downs that are part and parcel of any such long term alliances. Zebun's two sons, Shaehan and Shohan adore Hausa as if she is substitute mother of some sort. In fact her own son and daughter and those two act like siblings along with all the fights and affections and jealousies that come with it. Shaehan, the elder one, was asking for a particular brand of chocolate a week back and she had seen it at Agora and picked some up for him. He is also into fish. Their verandahs and spare rooms have aquariums that are teeming with fish of all shapes, sizes and colours. Hausa was somewhat fascinated by them but up to a moment. A few minutes of gazing and listening with rapt attention to Shaehan's latest statistics about new batch of eggs that had just hatched and then Zebun and her would catch up with the latest developments of their lives, shopping, acquisitions, and their respective husbands and children. This time, the weather being so pleasant, Zebun asked for tea in the upper floor balcony, which looked out to the garden below. Here was also a rather long fish tank with some small fish that were swimming in swarms. Something about it seemed to transfix her and she was staring at it for a few seconds when Zebun snapped at her, 'What happened to YOU all of a sudden, heh?'. Shaehan was crossing the verandah to go to the other side of the house where his mother has made them a game room stocked with the latest gizmo. She called him out, 'Shaehan, baba, don't remember seeing this tank before. What fish are those?'. Excited about her interest in the subject, his face lit up. "Oh auntie, this one has been here for ages. You just didn't notice. These are the local 'pootee'. In fact, auntie, the cook is always threatening to fish them out and serve it for lunch. Isn't it ridiculous?'. A quick smile and he was off.

Yes, the 'pootee' was very much part of the diet once. She never realized how pretty they were. A tiny body shimmering in silver, with small black dot close to the tail, just like those evil-eye spots on babies. They were swarms and swarms of them swimming back and forth in that huge tank. A bit of deflected light fell on the tank and it was like a shimmer and dazzle that was almost hypnotizing. The fish went back and forth over and over again and, in that hypnotic state of hers, they seemed like millions, multiplied into infinity. Just a fish tank and imagine this in the river……

She was holding the cup of Earl Grey in her right hand. But the hand started to shake and Zebun retorted right away, 'What the hell!!! You OK? What's bothering you??'. Hausa's eyes were swelling with tears and she could feel the uncountable emotions welling up inside. So….this is what the woman had meant. All those tears, Oh God.

Once home this unknown woman related to this also unknown Shoma had already began the process of permeating her mind, body and soul. How much tear do you need to shed before you dry up? Her mom called twice to remind her about the black forest pudding. Those imageries from TV began the process of haunting her. Even when she was pouring the brown sugar into the bowl, her mind became a jumble of images of those infinite sugar crystals and the millions of 'pootees' swarming in the water and the imagined face of that woman shedding copious amounts of tears all at once. A few of her own salty tears fell into the mixture as well. No wonder, she thought, the pudding didn't taste right. She wasn't paying attention and must have put too much of the brown sugar with chocolate. The pudding all of a sudden seemed totally un-important. She wanted to hold that woman tightly and cry with her. She wanted to find her right now, and all of a sudden she felt utterly and totally helpless. She sat down in the settee in her bedroom and started her version of shedding tears….. like all those little fish in the river……