A son is studying eight hours away from his rural home in Bangladesh. He’s at university, building a name for himself, paving a path not trod by his forefathers. He meets peers who have known only cities. He hones his formal Bengali, shedding his informal dialect. In a nationwide civil service exam, he ranks in the top percentile and earns a coveted merit placement. He leaves behind the swampy farmlands of his youth to forge networks in the big city.
The nation is still rebuilding two decades after its Liberation War, infamously referred to as a bottomless basket case. One day, he receives a letter: his father is ill. He drops everything for the rocky seven-hour drive on unfinished roads and marshy soil back to his ancestral village.
He steps into a vacant home, then turns toward the courtyard and notices activity near the burial grounds. He hears the women’s weathered wails and past them—over a fence—he sees a group of familiar men wiping sweat from their foreheads, walking back to the house.
Thirty years later, he is established in the United States. He’s had to start over and has gradually made his way closer to his American dream. His mother and siblings remain in his native land, still in the same ancestral home.
He tries to bring his mother to the U.S. for better health care, but she is happier in Bangladesh. She experiences two years of seeming stability. But then she becomes bedridden and quiet; gangrene creeps up her toes, quickly encircling her calves and hips. Learning this too late from his siblings, he urges them to take her to a doctor and sends a remittance across the continents. They scramble, taking her two hours to a downtown hospital, where the doctor diagnoses a silent stroke, late-stage diabetes, and kidney failure. More could have been done if she’d been seen two months earlier, the doctor says, deeming her condition now terminal and sending her home.
Sensing an echo of the past, he drops everything and books a flight to Bangladesh. At a layover in Dubai, the dreaded call comes. From Dhaka, it will be another six hours north by road. So in Dubai, he calls on the connections he forged all those years ago. A flight to Sylhet is arranged. A car awaits him there. It’s a race against time.
This time, he reaches the burial ground just as the shrouded body is lowered into the grave. He steps forward and releases the last handful of soil.
From overheard phone calls and half-told stories, this is the narrative that I, the son’s daughter, have gathered.
Faiza Chowdhury
The Bronx, New York