Part of you is always alone, you can’t help it. A good part of you is you, yourself. But again, there are people. You have to make a compromise between that aloneness and this crowd.—Naushaba Khatoon (my grandmother), December 2010
In Dhaka, Bangladesh, one is never alone. An operatic melody exists in the unremitting voices heard from sun up until late night throughout the city. Long vowels joined by soft consonants—hawking, greeting, gossiping. The recorded political tirades looped over loudspeakers and played from scooters buzzing around the city drone in angry, repetitive bass tones. There is percussion: the pounding hammers of construction, the punctuation of car horns; the sharp trill of rickshaw bells: two bursts in quick succession. Five times throughout the day, rounds of azan, the call to prayer, are sung from more than a thousand weather and pollution beaten domed minarets around the city. The words are identical, but each starts at a slightly different moment. The sounds of the azan are unlike the city’s other voices—harsh Arabic consonants, an affected nasality—a Middle Eastern chorus to the city’s distinctly Bangla song.
My grandparents’ apartment in Dhaka is just as it always was: plastic tablecloths, wicker bookshelves packed with dusty Bangla and English books. The living room still adheres to a black and white color scheme and my grandparents’ bedroom is strictly shades of blue. The walls are laden with photographs and paintings of two men: my grandfather, round-faced, smooth shaven, balding, bespectacled and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore: long-faced with sunken eyes and a pointed beard.
My grandparents are careful, speck-less. They wear starched white and gray clothing; no hair stands out of place. Even beset with dementia, my grandfather’s face is carefully shaved by his nurse at the breakfast table each morning, the shaving cream applied with a broad brown-handled brush. My grandmother large bifocal glasses stay on her face from morning until night, magnifying her large eyes and the upraised moles around them. She keeps a heavy bunch of keys in the waistband of her sari, then the pocket of her nightgown. At night she sleeps with the keys under her pillow.
My grandfather hums to himself and asks the same questions again and again. He points to a large portrait of himself and says, That is my father. He was a great man, a General.
My grandfather’s father was, according to my grandmother, a ne’er do well. A member of a prominent religious family in his village, he traded amulets and prayer beads for free meals and cash. My grandfather, an atheist, never thought much of him (or Generals) before. Though his dementia has been steadily invading for five years now, there is a part of me that doesn’t believe it. There is a flash in his eye, a curve of his lip that makes me feel like perhaps he is faking it.
My grandmother assures me he isn’t. It is so lonely, she says. There he is, there sits my friend. But where is the conversation? It is just me, alone. And he, a body.
