Rise

Damn the kaptai¹, draw its blood, and,
the Chakma shall rise.

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[1] ‘kaptai’ refers to Kaptai Lake. According to Banglapedia, the Kaptai Lake is the largest man-made freshwater body in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, created by the Kaptai Dam as part of the Karnaphuli Hydro-electric project. The dam, built in the early 1960s, resulted in the submergence of 54,000 acres of land and displaced around 100,000 people, primarily indigenous Chakmas. To many, the Kaptai Lake is a popular tourist destination, but to the indigenous peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, it is the site of ‘Bor Porong’, or “the great exodus”.

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Feelings within cracks and crevices

mathematics is honest, reliable like an old adage, and
the glowing embrace of my father’s shade.
I could’ve left it at that but
there’s more to life than numbers, chemically balanced equations
and hormones –
love, where truths often neither here nor there clear, obscure and scare
for ease of expression where
Mishu seeks nuance or I say
bhasan char¹ isn’t heaven or hell, it’s just tucked away
between Pasternak’s funeral and Stalin in the mind of an octogenarian
on Victory Day
or when a lover feels like a sibling and a parent
all at once.

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[1] Bhasan Char, a 13,000-acre island in the Bay of Bengal and currently home to around 19,000 Rohingya refugees, is located 13 and 28 nautical miles away from Hatiya and Chittagong respectively in mainland Bangladesh. While the housing facilities on Bhasan Char are much better than refugee camps on the mainland, the limited right to movement given to its Rohingya residents has triggered some to desperately attempt to escape from the island.

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History

The fragrance of jhol¹
on dried fingers, overhear
the middle-aged and old caged in boro der kotha².
While the young – contemplative vessels of trauma,
feign comprehension in chuckled silence.

Smudged maps of lips and fingers
idly hang from cha³ cups
waiting to be read against amber flames,
if ever,
the future beholds.

The voices of the written form are history, as are
the dinner table musings of time-travelling mudlarks.
But no one writes
to the silence of inaction or the stillness of inertia,
slighting that they are history too

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[1] In Bengal, jhol refers to the spicy and stewy consistency of a fish, chicken or beef curry. The closest English equivalent to jhol is gravy.
[2] boro der kotha is a Bangla phrase that refers to conversations between elderly people, where children are not allowed to partake.
[3] In Bangla, cha refers to milk-tea, also called ‘dudh er cha’.

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