The loss of essentiality
Be a tree
THE OTHER WAY ROUND
My scarlet incarnation
Jojo-Buri
the moon watches over you, when whales beach themselves, the tides wash them back home; the moon looks down
Homeward
When I was born, my skin was dark, like my grandfather’s, in whose arms I discovered my first home. Relatives old and new, whose disappointment was being nursed by my parents’ fair complexions, looked from afar as my rotund cheeks melted into the sleeves of my dada’s discolored half-sleeve shirt.
The sound of Dhaka city
Once on a particularly smothering hot day, on a CNG ride to work, I was stuck in the most heinous traffic for over two hours. Over the yelling drivers, honking cars, and incessant cursing over why the CNGs were trying to overtake the expensive cars, I was listening to my usual cycle of songs. As coincidence would have it, David Gilmour in his seraphic voice posed the question: “So, so you think you can tell/ Heaven from hell?”
Of love, longing, and music that make us
My mother’s house is beside a lake that separates the rich and mighty of the city from a little isle of people who work for them.
If I Speak
Tell me what to say when I need to speak, If I have to say something, So what can I say: look at that
Not talking in a city of loudspeakers
The door didn’t fully click shut. That was an ordinary affair in the house because the door locked to prevent escape. But, by chance or sheer good luck, it didn’t fully lock this time. The click was off. Someone hadn’t done their job correctly. Bloody hell, no one does their jobs correctly in this godforsaken country.
T.S. Eliot and on living in unreal cities
I once again find myself drawn to "The Waste Land"—though this isn’t about just the one poem, not really—where so much of the old world exists in motifs in a tattered landscape.