I’ve been reporting on Bangladesh since I was sixteen and a half. By the time I turned eighteen, I came to find that my life would be in threat if I didn’t self-censor. At the age of eighteen, fuelled by the student movements in my country in 2018 and the injustices committed against children my age and younger by a 70-year-old head of state, I learned that the only work that gives my life meaning could – suddenly and very abruptly – take it away from me. My parents, who are generally supportive of everything I do, were suddenly overly cautious, monitoring everything I say online for words that seemed vaguely critical of the government, taking every opportunity to sound alarm bells.
And so, I began to overthink and measure my every word. I never stopped writing, but gradually slowed down. Most of the time, I lived in my thoughts, within my books, and sought comfort in the Arundhati Roy quote, “Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.”
When I left my country at nineteen for university, I had the damning realisation that I took my fears with me – wrapped them in a dusty journal, packed up in a suitcase, and dragged all the way across the Indian Ocean. Can you tell, from this letter, how my expressions continue to be half-spoken? This is how the trauma of an egomaniac and ruthless dictator manifested in me.
15 years of a brutal administration. Nobody is well.
Years passed, and the stories of new critics imprisoned, killed or forcibly disappeared emerged. I could participate in campaigns for them, report the impunity with which their personal freedoms were tortured, but never enough. Never truly within my mind’s cage. Kalpana Chakma, Mushtaq Ahmed, Ahmed Kabir Kishore, Shahidul Alam, Shafiqul Islam Kajol, and countless others. The disappearance of Kajol was particularly maiming. I do not think it’s fair to him and his family for me to recount this in detail, but when news broke about him being found fifty-three days later, I’m certain nobody felt any sense of relief. He was imprisoned right after. Sheikh Hasina’s regime fed off of the livelihoods and dignity of the Bangladeshi people.
For years, my sleepless nights were spent listening to Aseer Arman’s song “Eka Beche Thakte Shekho Priyo” (in English: learn how to live alone, my dear), and I imagined the night sky from a prison window – the moon shimmering on the other side of torturous iron rails, the scent of white lilies lingering against the rotting musty air inside, and a bus stop somewhere far in the horizon.
My dear friend, architect Sofia Karim, as part of her work on the architecture of disappearance designed a hypothetical Lita’s house, with sketches of rustled pillows, cranes, and pears against pitch-black and dark-blue night skies. This is where she homes countless prisoners of conscience from across South Asia. Her and I, we’ve had several conversations about this house. I could never fully articulate what Lita’s House means for me, or what I understand of her sketches (I never quite studied architecture or learnt to read blueprints), but it is where I resided in my mind’s eye. I wonder if she knows.
15 years of a brutal administration. Nobody is well.
Sheikh Hasina has now fled the country, leaving behind mountains of bloodied bodies of children. I keep asking myself, “Do you feel joy?” I don’t. What is gone can never return.
“But love never left,” something whispers.
