Falling Somewhere You Will Never Know
I turn the cold metal dial until the water is exactly right. The water rushes over my head, my shoulders, down my back. I let my shoulders drop, and the steam envelops me.
For five days, I had boiled water in an aluminium pot, poured it into a bucket, and used a jug to wash myself. I would wet my entire body with just one jug of water, then soap and lather, and then rinse it all off with the second jug. Two jugs were enough.
Now I stand under the showerhead, hot water arriving without effort, and let it fall until I have my fill.
Every shower still feels like the first.
Eight Years
The shift began at the gate. Faces clustered together, Bangladeshis, dozens of us, waiting to go home. I stood among them and felt something I don’t feel often. All these faces that looked like mine.
When I stepped off the plane, winter made the air easier than I expected. Usually, a gush of humid air greets you, and it takes only a few seconds to feel the beads of sweat roll down your back. The smog hung like fog, but without its gentleness. The city looked rinsed of colour, buildings, sky, faces, everything under a grey veil.
Our family’s driver was waiting outside the terminal. He took my bags, nodded to my father, and ushered us toward the car. I sat in the backseat behind my mother, my father in front, my cousin on my left. We pulled into traffic, and Dhaka swallowed us.
Traffic
Cars drifted left and right, rickshaws weaving between them. A man pedalled a manual rickshaw with three passengers, legs stringy and thin, pushing. Traffic slowed to a crawl, then stopped.
When you stop at the traffic lights in Dhaka, they come. Old women with outstretched hands. Children weaving between cars. Mothers holding babies to their chests, tapping on windows with tired eyes. Young men and women holding up small toys to the glass.
A man approached our car, maybe forty-five, with a white beard and a limp, and I did what I always do. I looked down at my phone. Then I heard a tap on my window, but the sound was wrong. Too soft. Too dull. Not the sharp rap of knuckles I had heard a hundred times before. I turned my head. He had no hands. Not even forearms. Both arms ended below the elbows, the skin rounded over where the bone stopped. A crease ran where the skin met bone, sewn shut and left to heal.
He pressed the end of his arm against my window. He lifted both stumps toward me and shrugged, the way you might turn out your pockets to show they are empty.
I looked at the others to see if they saw what I saw, but I don’t remember their faces now, only his. The light changed, and we moved on, and no one spoke until we arrived.
My phone was still in my hand.
The Green Gate
Both my paternal grandparents have passed. My Dadi, my father’s mother, passed in June, and my Dada several years ago. I would visit them every year as a child, and the building where we stayed was where my father grew up, where all my cousins, aunts, and uncles used to gather. They’ll tear it down soon and rebuild from the ground up.
When I returned after eight years, they were cutting the roads and pouring new concrete. Broken ground everywhere, dust rising, slabs of fresh concrete laid around the manholes. Seeing those manholes took me back.
When I was young, maybe eight or nine, I was walking with my cousin and my aunt to drop him off at his after-school classes. I wasn’t paying attention to where I stepped. I walked over a manhole, and it gave way. My right leg fell knee-deep into human waste. Half my body dropped inside. I was wearing slippers, and I remember trying to grip the slipper with my toes as I pulled myself out, not wanting to lose it. I couldn’t hold on. I let it slip away and pulled myself free.
It happened right outside my cousin’s teacher’s house, so I could spray my leg with water and scrub it with Dettol, that sharp antibacterial soap that stings. My aunt was panicking. “Your mum is going to kill me.” In the end, we all laughed. Concrete covers that manhole now. My cousin is in Denmark or Norway. I can never remember which.
As I walked down the alley, I noticed the familiar green gate with a white painted diamond pattern at the end of a road that narrows so much that a car can’t fit. The pink building rose behind it, six storeys, dusty and showing its age, the kind of paint that leaves white powder on your fingertips when you touch it.
I walked through the rooms. The TV used to play Bangla shows, cartoons, and always something. Maids running through, my Dada yelling at someone, my Dadi calling from her room, the rattle of pots and pans. We had no glass in the windows. I could hear street vendors outside announcing what they sold, construction noise, hammering, and strangers shouting to each other across the alley. Now there was nothing. The TV was off. The fan wasn’t running, and I couldn’t hear the vendors outside.
I stopped in my grandparents’ empty room and sat on the bed. I stayed there for a while. I listened to the Adhan echoing through the alleys, the same sound from years ago, the distant crackle of the mosque’s microphone, a little run-down, like an old radio playing from far away. I would notice it most at Fajr, sleeping next to the window, when it would come through first thing in the morning. As a child, whenever we heard the call to prayer, we would turn off the TV and sit quietly.
Kites
On the roof, we flew kites in the afternoons. My older cousin taught me. He showed me how to dip the string in crushed glass to sharpen it. We ground down brown glass from medicine bottles because it cut best, coating the line until it could slice through anything. Sometimes we cut our own fingers.
When you fight another kite, you move yours left and right, let it dip, reel it in hard to pull it down, then release so it spins. You pull again to slide your string against theirs, and they do the same. When the line finally cuts, it goes slack in your hands, and you watch the other kite drift away, falling somewhere you will never know.
I could see children on rooftops blocks away. Younger than me, mostly. Thin bodies, dark skin with sweat showing through worn undershirts. I cut their kites; they tried to cut mine, too. Sometimes I lost, sometimes I hadn’t even tied the kite correctly, and it slipped away before any fight began.
In the evenings, when it was cool enough to be outside, everyone came up to the roofs. The sun hung low and orange, and hundreds of kites rose against the blue. Bright paper scattered across the sky. Tugging the string sharply, letting go slightly, tugging again, until the kite is far enough and high enough to hold itself in the air. The strings always went slack eventually.
Nanu
Nanu, my mother’s mother, is the last grandparent I have left. Around eighty-five years old, I don’t know if I will see her again. When I arrived, she was sitting by the door waiting to greet me. Her sister was there too. They had been expecting me. She got up, and I could see the strain in it, the slowness, the shake as she rose.
Her apartment was small. A thin, hard mattress on the bed, a mosquito net hanging above it, translucent green. A wooden cabinet, a metal dresser, a mirror. Bright fluorescent light and no windows. She was wearing a light pink orna.
Her eyes are sunken from age, but there is a sparkle in them. Her body has grown thin. Her hands shake with small tremors, the skin stretches delicately, almost translucent, as if time is slowly letting go.
I hold her hands gently, afraid any pressure might hurt her. They are cold and soft, the bones and tendons showing beneath her skin. She grips back lightly and lets me hold them as long as I want. I listen to her speak, noticing how much effort it takes now.
I ask her about her husband, and when she speaks about him, something changes in her face. The tiredness lifts. A light comes back into her eyes. He died when she was still young. They had been married for maybe fourteen or fifteen years. She was fourteen when they wed, had my uncle at eighteen, and she never married again.
She tells me he looked like a film star, Kishore Kumar from old Bollywood. He grew his hair like him, styled himself like him, and wanted to meet him. She would tie his tie every morning before he went out. She laughs a little when she says this, a slight chuckle, weak and warm. She teases him even now, his belly when he was wealthy and could eat well, the stress during the war with Pakistan, and how she overdressed my uncle when he was a boy.
She tells me that he was a very successful doctor. Their house was one of the first to have a colour television. He took her travelling to Singapore and Malaysia, and they had real adventures together. When she talks about those days, she sounds like a young bride remembering the love of her life, her voice lifting, her eyes brightening, as if those years were only yesterday.
The night before I flew out, I sat on her bed while she rested. My mother and uncle were nearby, all of us together. I had found an old photograph of them together, taken after their wedding. Black and white, dust thick on the frame. He had long hair like Kishore Kumar’s, clean-shaven, with glasses and a tie. She wore a traditional saree, her head covered. I added colour, then animated it. I showed her, expecting something, tears maybe, or stories I hadn’t heard before.
She smiled softly and said, “Yes, that looks like him.” She watched it loop a few times, then looked away.
I wanted it to move her. But she knew it was not real, and I was glad. It was a party trick. She has been holding him in her memory for sixty years. What I made in minutes could not touch that.
The morning I leave, I wake before dawn, anxious about the flight. I sit reading a book. At 6:55 a.m., the doorbell rings; the maid arrives. I go to open it, and Nanu comes out of her room too, already moving toward the door. They both go to work right away, into the kitchen where she stands over the stove and fries puri herself, the bread puffing up golden in the oil. Potato stew and beef, a last meal before I fly.
She brings out cookies from a stash she had kept. I usually say no to be polite, but she offers me hers, and I take them and eat with her. When someone offers you something, it is better to take it. Not for you. For them.
At the elevator, I kiss her forehead and hold her hands gently. “Be good,” she says.
The doors begin to close. She stands in the doorway, slightly hunched, waving. I look at her until the doors close.
Then I go down.
When I got home, I stood in the shower and let the water fall.
It hit my shoulders, my back, the top of my head, all at once. I closed my eyes. I didn’t move. The steam rose, and the mirror fogged, and the water pooled at my feet and drained away.
I stayed until my fingertips wrinkled. Then I stayed a little longer.
Two jugs were enough.
Alhamdulillah.