It feels odd to sit with nothing in hand. Behind the counter stands a lonely woman. I walk up to her and ask for a 'suitable purchase'. She tells me sales have not yet begun. She however grants me permission to sit quietly in solitude. Without any transaction, a 'comfortable agreement' is reached.
With the comfortable agreement on my side, I sink into an even more comfortable sofa.
A golden day is coming out behind clouds, I can see though the window. It perhaphs rained in the dawn. A pity that in this city, even heavy rain does not flood the streets. Children never make paper boats and set them afloat. I used to do that in Bangladesh when I was a child. I think to myself, this city could afford to be a little less tidy for a while. Then perhaps I could get to see paper boats now and then when it rains atleast.
With the illution of paper boats, I drift into the past. Just as a child’s soaked paper boat sinks into the water, I too sink into the past. Fast.
In some television drama of the '90s, I once saw a middle-aged Bangladeshi gentleman whose polythene bag tore, dropping fish into the water on the street. In the other hand, he held some 'wounded' vegitables. He wore a cotton shirt, his only cotton shirt. The camera zoomed in to reveal the face of a disappointed, middle-class, middle-aged man. Perhaps this was the only day in the week he could afford to buy fish for the family. The actor's desperation felt real. I remember clearly.
I test my muscle memory with a tissue-paper from the coffe table. In childhood, I could make a paper boat in one go. Now, with my fragile & faded memory, I manage to produce a fragile boat.
I had last seen such a fragile paper boat in 2004. I was working at BRAC and had gone on a field visit to Mymensingh. That year, there was heavy flooding though. Road connection between Dhaka and Mymensingh was cut off. I was stuck there for a few days. That’s when I met Jaman, a real life middle-class, middle-aged man who could afford fish for the family only once a week. He was only son after four sisters. His father had wanted an heir to carry the family name. That was why he HAD TO came into this world. The price of his coming however was paid with his mother’s life. During childbirth she died. That death, according to Jaman, was perhaps not so bad because had she not given birth to a son, there was a strong possibility she would have been divorced.
“I never really felt the lack of a mother,” Jaman told me. “My eldest sister and my grandmother took care of everything.” In his words, his father was a man of character as he never remarried.
I return to the present. For a short while though. All the buses in this city are red. They arrive silently and leave silently. I like the sight of red buses. Does red mean Manchester United? Or communism? Or the first sunrise I ever saw as a child? I do not know.
This morning, this coffee shop, these red buses, this rain has nothing to do with him, yet I think of a person back home. We don’t speak much since I left the country. Well, not that I used to call him often when I was there. A man living a life painted on his own canvas with touches of serenity, pride, doubt, and an ocean’s worth of unspoken hurt hidden under his smile. Only a grain of that hurt is visible to the world, I think.
Meanwhile, red buses arrive and depart. The rush to get to work from the passengers body language becomes visible. Among the passengers, I notice a kind of 'poetic discipline'. I like it. It seems everyone in this city is poetically disciplined.
The coffee shop is still quiet. Only a few people are here. Their existence, eyes, and attention are all inside their phones. Even though they are in the coffee shop, they are not in the coffee shop.
I see a worker coming and cleaning the windows of the coffee shop. He works with some care and dadication. He doesnot step inside. The woman from the counter appears for a moment and wave at him warmly. Between them is just the pane of thick glass and some unspoken words.
I think of that person back home, the one I shouldn’t be thinking of. He lives in a 110 year old house in the old part of Dhaka. Someone who does not seek wealth or property, who only seeks dignity and a life free from hassle. That doesn’t seem too much to ask yet how reluctant others are to give it to him. In the daily noise they have built over the years, he exists but he is not really there. Just like these people in the coffee shop — here, yet not here.
I see the woman behind the counter walking toward me with no cup of coffee in her hand but a warm smile on her face. I look out the window and see that the morning has grown stronger. I understand that the coffee shop’s long-standing stillness & calmness has almost reached an end. It is about to break. The golden day is about to start. --------- Luleå, August 2025
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