Kumejima station. Well past midnight. Cold, dreary, bright. Bright. Brighter than it ever needs to be.

It’s quiet. The kind of quiet you get when a behemoth structure designed for the rush and reverberations of a flood of hundreds of thousands of people echoes only with the hushed bustle of thousands of people. The kind of diluted quiet of a giant stadium that is not quite empty but acres away from its intended capacity. The kind of unexpected quiet when a quintessentially bursting city like Dhaka empties up around Eid and despite currently holding the appropriate amount of people in regards to its dimensions feels empty to the eyes accustomed to writhing crowds and dense processions, its bricks used to soaking up vibrations now absorbing way too much, its inhabitant’s ears trained to detect music in the omnipotent city static now blanching at the auditory void. The kind of quiet that makes you whisper in a raised voice, the kind that hints at privacy when none is present, the kind that lies of rest and serenity and completed journeys when the travelers are just as tired and fatigued and wayward as they were in the morning. The kind of quiet that gets to you unless you are a child, a naïve one, who still retains both the capacity to be enchanted at the experience and the right to be carried home should exhaustion outlaw walking. 

It was the kind of quiet you get when a train station that is normally full is mostly empty.