munaiza

Dear Dhaka, 

You were my first love and my biggest loss. I have a bad habit of only writing to you when I feel the grief. It hasn’t been as sharp recently. The knife that pierced my lungs and sat at the bottom of my ribs has become dull. Its blade has been corroded by the acid of the comfort I took in the change. 

They say grief doesn’t grow smaller. That it is you who grows larger around it. 

I think aloud and wonder if I, too, have grown. Unspoken remains in my heart the worst of my fears. Have I grown out of you? It cannot be, can it? 

The carbon monoxide that spews in big, black fumes out of the trucks on your roads has settled into my bronchi in a permanent layer of grime. I cough up the acerbic taste of love and it’s acid on my tongue. 

I dye my hair purple and then green to feel something because the only thing I feel is not enough. I miss you and I don’t. I anticipate the grief of losing you miles away from the boarding time. The sleep I lose comes back in the irregularity of my heartbeat as it sputters out your city line. 

My tongue lolls and my drool spills onto my pillow and in the feverish haze of half-sleep it looks like the Padma. My nose burns because the air is too clean and too pure. I get a whiff of cow dung when I walk past the run-down house out in the back of the city and my lungs sink into my chest. It’s familiar and beautiful and putrid and acrid and I can’t imagine anything better. 

I decide that it smells too little like piss and bird shit in this town. That it smells too much like mountains and emptiness. It’s artificial, everything here. The food feels like floral foam in my mouth and doesn’t smell much better. And when I go to sleep I sink and sink into the mattress until I reach the core of the earth. I thought it would burn more. 

If I tunnel straight through the dusty carpet to the other end of the world, will I reach you? Will you recognise me with my skin melted into my bones? I would recognise you. 

Love, grief, everything in between and beyond, 

I think of you as if you’re a forgotten religion. But it’s made you more sacred in my eyes. I revere your piss-stained, graffitied walls. I worship the writhing masses of thick black wires that hang from electricity poles in every one of your street. I pray to the roaring hymns of buses and lorries that spew acrid black smoke. 

Dilijan smokes like you do. Sometimes, when I’m out, treading loose gravel, I close my eyes and breathe in deeply. It smells like you. Like blackened lungs and grey ash spraying in the wind. I pretend that in front of my closed eyes are people with skin the colour of rich earth. I pretend for a moment, that if I opened them, right here, right now, I’d see you in all your triumphant glory. 

I’m not used to the cold. I’m used to your heat beating upon my back. I’m used to sweat dripping down the nape of my neck and down my spine. I don’t think I like this. I don’t like the way the cold air stabs through my throat like a sharp knife. Fog comes out of my mouth in puffs when I talk at night, when it’s cold. I remember cursing your name when that didn’t happen during the winters I spent with you. I remember praying for snow like I pray for your warmth now. The rain doesn’t smell right either. It doesn’t smell like earth. It doesn’t sound like a thousand trees heaving a relieved sigh. It’s wrong. It’s not home. It’s not you.

Stay well, my love. Don’t ever quieten. Don’t ever become pretty. Wait for me to come back to you. 

Until I can taste the rancid garbage in your air again,

I often hear people complain about how we don’t have Starbucks here. What they don’t see is the small shop with Candy Floss written above the door, highlighting hotdogs and burgers in harsh fluorescent lighting that serves the best cold coffee in the world. What they don’t see is the warm, comforting smell of coffee beans that hits you in the face so hard that you almost get whiplash every time you enter a North End. Does Starbucks smell like coffee? Yes, it does. But North End is at home, and no smell of coffee on this earth will smell better than the one at home. People who come to visit you from abroad become slack jawed because we don’t have McDonalds. But we have the familiar yellow of American Burger and BFC that we couldn’t find our home in at McDonalds’ even if we turned the world upside down. 

Your roads will smell of rotting garbage and anger and frustration and will almost always be brimming with traffic. People will stare and say bad things. Commuting will be horrible and slow and inefficient. There will be load shedding. But you’re our home. And dare I say, that even if I will not miss these things, the thought of leaving makes my heart pang with a weird pain. 

I’ve been dreaming of leaving for a long time now. To be on my own and get away from all that overwhelms and frustrates and saddens me here. But you will forevermore be a part of me. You will be where I first met my soulmates. You will be where I made memories, and became a person. You will be the place where I’ve loved and lost and rejoiced and mourned. And for that, my dearest city, I will always love and cherish you. 

     Love,