Dhaka: City of utmost unhappiness

In the corner of the room, lie the tent unopened. Beneath it the sleeping mat. On another side, the backpack, not a single item taken out. All ready to go, and yet everything frozen in a suspended animation.

The bottle-green army flask lay on the shelf. Water still inside and not a sip taken.

All the excitement of preparing for a camping trip, all the packing and unpacking, forgetting and remembering the small things essential for outdoors, are looking empty from the paraphernalia.

The running shoes have not been worn for weeks. Dhaka's inescapable fine dust has settled on the acrylic top.  

It resembles the room of somebody who had suddenly passed away. The family has not yet come over the loss and settled down to clean up the room and cast around for whatever is hidden in the recesses of the four corners.

It seems like I am looking at the room from a third eye, floating close to the ceiling.

And it is depressing.

More so because I am struck down during this strange time. We never had imagined something of this proportion happening to us in our lifetime. We always thought these are the things we read in the inside pages of the newspapers. They happen to some faraway countries, but never become real in our life. Something that remains on distant shores and never comes to ours.

But not this time.

It must be a unique experience to go through this time. Each page of the book is written with something new. You can peel it page by page and be amused by the twists and turns, desperation and disgusts, glimmers of hope and heartbreaks. Every day can be recorded into a unique history of mankind.

And it is depressing.

That evening I ventured out, bored of my immobile existence. Somebody who is into active life, nothing could be more painful than staying put.

So I went out against all advice as the dusk fell and walked for an hour.  And this Dhaka I have never seen before. It is not the emptiness of the streets – this we have seen plenty of during the non-stop Ershad era curfews. It is not the occasional ambulance wailing down the streets.  It is neither the police nor army patrols.

It is the eerie feeling of the whole city hunkering down, waiting for some bad event to take place. It is all ears for the scream, screech, blood spilling onto the street. You can just hear the silent heaving of the lungs.

And then the lone rickshaw puller, an old man with a tuft of scraggly beard, paddled by me and unashamedly asked for a handout.  He had no passengers, no relief, no nothing but all the hungry mouths at his slum home.

And it is depressing.

On Road 27 , just where the Sampan restaurant is, a banyan tree somehow exists. Under it I saw this obese woman sitting with a girl hardly nine-years-old. There was a man in a lungi and a dark brown shirt standing in front of them.

"Ja na (Why don't you go)," the woman in a white sari was shoving the small girl repeatedly. In the eerie silence of the city, I could hear her from a distance.

The little girl in a yellow kameez refused. "Na," she said loudly, twice.

Then the woman nudged her hard. "Ja bolchhi!(Go, I say!)."

The man took the hand of the girl. She just stood up like a zombie. Together they disappeared into the darkness of an alley at the end of the restaurant.

And it is depressing. 

Yesterday, one of my colleagues made a sad posting. He said he was feeling depressed and did not know where he or for that matter everything was going.

I tried to talk to him, myself depressed from my itchy feet, to cheer him up and said it was a unique time for a journalist to live through and cover, bit by bit, page by page, day by day. It was an exciting time. Enjoy it.

It was not me talking.

And it is depressing.

For the last few years, I visited her every morning, invariably. Hold her hand. Just feel her feeble heart still beating. And hear her stories from 90 years ago.

I knew time was running out and so every second I spent with her was precious.

I have not seen my 95-year-old mother for the last one month. And I am losing those precious seconds, minutes and hours.

And it is depressing.

Dhaka is now a frame-by-frame litany of depression.

You turn a corner and it hits you on the face. You turn your face the other way, you get slapped on the other cheek.

And that is how we live today, day by day.