A Fictive Portrait

  High-pitched squealing from the hallway tunes out the voice melting through the scratch of the radio. I sit cross-legged by the scorching stove, intently watching the potatoes fry on the skillet. Amma kneads a piece of dough beside me, her hands starting to synchronize at some point, tender touches left untainted within every crevice. Sweat beads at her receding hairline even in the crisp weather. Tagore’s lyrics punctuate a tinge of the old Bengali remnants of our house, and the squealing turn to an eldritch screeching, all of which she has, quite literally and figuratively, turned a deaf ear to. I splay an open palm towards her, and she silently hands me a tiny bit of the dough she had been molding. I leave the kitchen and hop around on the brick pavement lining the open staircase in the front yard with the dough in my palm, imitating some older kids playing hopscotch at the end of the street. Fiery shimul are spread out like cherry blossoms all over the yard, and in stark contrast to the viridescent of my frock, they remind me of the splash of scarlet and green fanned out in every corner of the country at this very moment. Something along the edges of ‘freedom’ and ‘victory’ and ‘independence’. While the words are foreign to me at eight years old, the effect it has on the people around me sends my mind huddling with ecstasy.

**

The streets are a sight to behold. Kicking off from Ramna Park, the vibrant procession upholding paper-mache and fiber masks etched with tinctures of the tiger, the owl and other critters native to the country are well into crossing our street now. We don’t join, but our eyes don’t lose the spark of unalloyed amazement either. The flamboyant display of animal-shaped carnival floats, replicas of birds, butterflies, and traditional dolls draw our gazes like moths to a flame. The outer wall of the Faculty of Fine Art wears a new look every year. This year, it’s animated with palanquins, nakshikanthas, and rural motifs in dabs of red, white, yellow, and green. I feel hands in my hair and turn around to see Amma’s reflection on the cheval mirror in the golden hues of dawn, gleaming with the pair of bright amber Radhachuras clutched in her hands. I hurry down the stairs while the folds of my crimson saree crease up at the bottom.

We take a rickshaw from Ramna Park because the pleats of our sarees are on their way to a monumental collapse. The street lights flicker in a hazy halo, the town illuminated in spirit instead, by the presence of hundreds of people in white and red, indulging in the countless delicacies of a torrid April 14. A single tiny store selling bakorkhanis is the busiest here, people from all over the city coming in to get a taste of the infamous thick, spiced flat bread. Children stare longingly at the figures and toys splayed out on the ground, and my mind wanders to the terracotta doll and a set of brass pot and pan in a bag on my lap. There’s the unmistakable stench of mashed potatoes, tamarind syrup, and chili powder-filled fuchkas that make my stomach growl, a silhouette of a wooden, four-seater Ferris wheel, faces blurred with pink and white cotton candies while juice stalls serve as a small grace in the stifling twilight. The scene is imbued in my mind like the taste of sugary, creamy-white crispy batasha, a customary titbit of the Bengali New Year. It’s here too, cut into a small crook and nestled deep behind the bones of my flimsy ribcage. I feel the corners of my visage curl up in unequivocal blithe.

**

The voice of the Imam calling for the morning prayer resounds through the house. I hear Amma’s crooning make a beeline to the entrance, possibly seeing Baba and my brothers out. I head towards the small basin on the second-floor balcony, and absent-mindedly run a trail with my fingers over the blue grills tarnished with eons of fingerprints, ones that death filtered out everything but the memories.

The 9360 square feet house brimmed with people on Eid days. A Flame Tree of splendid crimson at the front, coconut trees lining the sides of the patio, and a gigantic mango tree beside the boundary wall providing an idyllic shade on muted summer days showcased a dazzling array of foliage in our yard. Amma serves a platter of dishes I’m unable to count the names of in two hands, Baba greets guests every passing second, neighboring kids play tag with bits of biscuit and pudding etched in the corner of their mouths while the older kids play cricket with a tennis ball and plastic stumps outside. I stare down at the scene from the balcony, still holding onto the tarnished grills, and wonder how long will it take death to filter this out too.

**

I step out of the building I entered fourteen hours ago. It’s past nine now, and I yield at my chances of hailing an auto-rickshaw. Silently striding through the desolated strip in front of the TSC Auditorium, I remain tethered to an idealized version of the place I grew up in, ignoring the dark present steeping into every nook of the town and my mind. I neglect the digits I typed in today, the total death count, pivoting instead to the pretty colors twirling and staining the clear blue backdrop during wintertide. Not a single rooftop was bereft of a child flying a kite, nor a single backyard of the whirring sound of badminton. Little is left of the past now, but my perception of Old Dhaka as utopia neglected the forlorn scenarios. I turn a corner to Shahid Minar Road quickly and hear quiet murmurs resounding through masks. They’re ex-colleagues and classmates, jobless after the pandemic. Journalism turned into a precarious sport, and there is only so much I can do to keep the career I worked so hard for. Two days ago, four journalists from the PC perished in their beds in the DMC, and today another colleague fell gravely ill. It’s only a matter of time now before I’m whisked away like countless others, but there is a job that has to be done. A job that has no surrogates. A job that, in the wake of devastating pandemics, is one of the few ingresses to a sanguine future. A knell of death rings in my mind unbidden, the pictures flashing behind my eyes with every step I take. Photographs of mass graves dug by shapes in thick white, and the constant trepidation of being six feet under the ground myself at any moment has night terrors plaguing me at broad daylight.

I take a turn at Bakshi Bazar Road and think of why I still haven’t surrendered. The answer lies here, in this microcosm of the world, a gilded patchwork of myriad cultures and people, each colony upholding its own identity. A vision for the current generation, living tragic questions about one’s sense of individuality and place in the world. I envision this part of the capital, born before the nation itself, as a blueprint of the fictive portrait I’ve always dreamt of living. Though it has strayed far from that now, my perception has excluded the iniquitousness of many and moved toward a buoyant future. I continue walking down Chowk Bazar to Ramna Park to New Market to Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. I’ve visited every single one of these places, ate, sat, and played with the rich and poor, black and white, young and old, and everyone in between, picking up on accents and habits I’ve yet to unhand. There’s the old rundown arcade, the small chess shop I used to play at every weekend, the carrom shop from where we had made the family’s first and only mahogany carrom board that’s still tucked away somewhere behind the foldable bed on the second-floor bedroom. There’s the Central Veterinary Hospital in shackles of grey patchworks, the abandoned chemical storage corner, narrow lanes, uncovered drainage, and countless sweetshops at every turn. There is the ghost of street cobblers and hairdressers on every slab of pavement, the prosaic hush in the afternoon stretching well past into the exuberant evenings. And there is the neglected front yard, the radhachuras, shimul, krishnachuras withering away without Amma’s delicate care. And through these places and the memories caged in them, I’ve learned my place in the world and the responsibility I owe them. I’ve learned that I belong somewhere where I am not above anyone, and nor is anyone inherently above me. And although nothing will ever be the same now, I have hope that we can make it through, I fueled with my memories and the rest of the world with theirs.

  It gets easier to breathe through my mask. And before I realize it,

I am home.