The commotion outside our apartment highlighted the quiet within. Unspoken words poked at the cracks in our marriage, picking them apart, unravelling their edges. They were becoming harder to ignore.
I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh for the summer, spending time with my husband and our fourteen-year-old daughter. He was Bangladeshi American and working on a project here. For the past couple of years, he’d travelled back and forth from our home in New Jersey to Dhaka. At first, spending a week away, then a month. Lately though, the spells at home were short, the time away stretching longer, like taffy on the Jersey Shore Boardwalk. He’d spoken of his birthplace, Dhaka, with reverence during our twenty-year relationship. This was my second time here and I was eager to connect with him by embracing his hometown.
Outside the apartment, the din of the street below seeped in, crescendoing like a chorus. Baritones of trucks, rumbling on potholes; hollow, rhythmic buzzes from police cars; tinkling bells of rickshaws; alto and soprano car horns sang a cacophony. People drove with their horns here. Construction pounded from the building next door, providing a percussive framework. This symphony sounded nothing like my rural New Jersey home with its cicadas, swallows, frogs and wrens.
Overruling the myriad sounds, the Islamic call to prayer could be heard. Grandly broadcast far and wide, it floated ethereally above the fray. Melodic prayer in song. I couldn’t understand the words they were singing, but it was a holy sound. Rising. Falling. Street dogs barked. Perhaps they were praying, too. I prayed for a summer of reunion.
*****
Summer was an uncomfortable season to visit this city of 20 million people, the seventh largest in the world. The heat was oppressive and monsoon rains stirred garbage and other detritus, concocting a stew that lined the gutters of Old Dhaka. Still, I loved this city. It was infused with humanity—the colours more saturated, the sounds more lyrical, the smells more pungent than those at home. For me, it was also infused with the heady scent of him.
My husband hired a guide to show me the city while he was at work. I spent several days with a brilliant young photographer, Kaushik, who took me to places that pulsed with Dhaka’s heartbeat. Kaushik’s hobby was collecting stories in words and photos and, through him, I was able to speak to people without understanding their language. I was studying Bengali but it was going slowly and I relied on Kaushik’s translations. I’m learning about my husband’s birthplace through strangers, translated by a surrogate.
Kaushik and I visited a ship graveyard beside the Buriganga River. Men worked high in the air, on wooden platforms suspended by rope. Their platforms swayed like swings on a playground while the men used blow torches and mallets to break the metal apart. There were no goggles, harnesses or helmets, as the sparks flew around them. I looked away, cringing as I recognised that things were different, here—the safety protocols were gone. Perhaps they were gone in my marriage, too.
“Would you like to have tea with us?” Kaushik asked a wizened old man whose sinewy arms hung worn, blue floral hotel sheets before the brown backdrop of the river. The man shook his head with a kind smile, responding in Bengali.
“He can’t stop,” Kaushik explained. “He earns two dollars a day and hasn’t worked for the past few days because of the rains. He gets paid by how many sheets he hangs, so he must keep going.”
He slung the sheets on the line because he was hungry and hoping to make enough money to buy dinner. This story felt familiar. I’d heard it from a wood-panelled TV set in my childhood.
In 1971, The Beatles’ George Harrison and Ravi Shankar staged a concert for Bangladesh. Together, they gathered decorated musicians including Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, to raise awareness and money to feed the burgeoning new country. It had just separated from Pakistan
and was swept by famine. Though time had passed and conditions, for some, had improved, food insecurity was still very real.
Kaushik and I visited a railway village, behind the green market at Kawran Bazar. Families built transient huts from scraps of metal, cardboard and tarps. Men walked the tracks holding upside-down bouquets of live chickens by their feet. A train came by, slowing only slightly as it passed. We pressed our bodies against a plywood dwelling, arms splayed, to avoid being hit. I am out of my body, in this place. Out of my world.
Kaushik ducked his head into the window of a hut, greeting a young woman shelling beans inside. She had no legs. They chatted animatedly in Bengali and she swung her body closer to us by rocking her torso from side to side. She wasn’t alone—an older couple bustled about the hut, pouring water into teacups. They worked companionably, at ease with one another.
“The train took her legs,” Kaushik explained. This was not uncommon, living beside the tracks. We’d seen other amputees. “She’s transgender and was tossed out by her family, so she’s grateful to live here with people who accept her. She’s found a community”
I’d never faced a struggle like the hardship this young woman had lived. And yet she spoke not of her pain, but of appreciation. I was humbled by the resilience I saw on these streets. By the strength of strangers living under impossibly difficult conditions. By the warmth I’d received from people I would never see again.
One day, we crossed a bridge on the grounds of the National Parliament Building. As we watched teenage boys jump gleefully from the top of the bridge into the river below, a beautiful young woman ran up and embraced me, pressing her lips to my cheek. Her black hair, a stark contrast to my blonde, was pulled back in a plastic anime barrette and a rare breeze fluttered her red and teal shalwar kameez. The selfie we took together hangs on my wall in New Jersey now, a reminder of the affection I was handed by the Dhakaiyas, who expected nothing in return.
*****
At the end of the summer, just before returning to New Jersey, our family spent a Saturday in Manikganj, a town on the outskirts of Dhaka. We went to feed the villagers in honour of my father-in-law’s death anniversary. Men cooked outdoors all morning, creating vats of goat biryani in hammered silver pots, over an open flame. In red and yellow lungi and blue panjabi, they stirred with long-handled wooden ladles. The humidity did not seem to wilt them as it did me, heat waves radiating through the air, distorting the leaves on the jackfruit trees. It smelled delicious and my belly rumbled, though I couldn’t stomach the meat.
My vegetarian tendencies had grown as I confronted the stark reality of our food sources. In the comfort of a New Jersey supermarket, I bought my meat in shiny cellophane packages. It was different here, where butchers displayed all the parts of the animal, including the bits that Westerners don’t eat. I checked my privilege and ate my dal, delicious spiced lentils.
Our guests arrived at the celebration, bringing an air of solemnity to the sultry afternoon. They filled the yard at the side of the bright green pond, adorning the space with their colourful costumes, punctuated by the white tupis upon their heads.
“We are grateful for your father,” a neighbour said to my husband. “He gave us our home and saved our lives.” She put her hands on his cheeks and looked deeply into his eyes as they filled with tears. I was moved by his show of emotion toward her. His emotion toward me had faded.
Heads bowed, prayers were sent to the soul of the departed. My father-in-law was loved by the villagers. After prayers, they feasted on goat biryani, sweet rice and dough balls. This was tradition. The family of the deceased would honour his memory and philanthropy by feeding the village.
Exhausted by the heat and the emotion of the day, we rode the 52 kilometres back to Dhaka in Kamrul’s trusted care. He was a precise driver, hired by my husband’s employer. He knew how to wind through roadways filled with cartoon-painted trucks and rickshaws, decrepit buses belching exhaust, rickety bicycles that looked like they’d sparred with those buses, and cows.
Always cows. Once, to avoid what he warned would be an hours-long traffic jam, Kamrul jumped the island and drove against traffic, successfully weaving in and out of oncoming vehicles. It was a high-stakes video game, and he won. He had become a part of our family. We brought prenatal vitamins from the United States, for his pregnant wife. When his shoes wore out, we replaced them.
Back in our apartment in Dhaka, with our daughter ensconced in her bed, I collapsed on the sofa, grateful for a quiet evening in the air conditioning. A worry gnawed persistently at the edge of thought. We’re not connecting—something is off. He was terse, preferring to text me from the other room rather than engage directly. The point of this trip was to spend the summer together but we’d spent it apart.
My brooding was disrupted by what sounded like the bleating of a goat. “Maaaaaaaa,” it floated through the air. “Maaaaaa.” Looking up from my phone, I sent my husband a questioning look. He sat on a white sofa, across the same room for once but lost in his phone, as I was in mine.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It sounds like a goat,” he replied matter-of-factly, cocking his head. He stood, stubbing out his cigar.
Our Westernized apartment was located on the ninth floor of a high-rise in Gulshan, a tony area popular with expats. Hardly a place where I’d expect to hear a goat, even in a city as foreign as this, as there are no farms or paddocks nearby. And yet, there it was again. The unmistakable call of a panicked-sounding goat. “Maaaaaa.” “MAAAAAAAA.”
We opened the door to the shared hallway, expecting that the bleating would sound further away. Instead, the marble floor heightened the reverberation. The animal was inside the building. Poking my head into the stairwell, the acoustics amplified the sound, inviting us upstairs to investigate.
Two floors up, there was a small, black goat tethered to the railing by a fraying rope. Secured below, just within its reach, was a bunch of fresh green leaves. The goat, standing on the top stair, looked as surprised to see us as we were to see him, and brayed even louder, begging for help. I reached out and touched his soft ears, scratching the white patch between them. His horns were just emerging. He was a baby. My touch calmed him as his eyes pleaded with me, brown and puddle deep. My stomach lurched, remembering the goat biryani back in Manikganj.
Looking up and down the hall, all of the doors were closed. No one seemed concerned that there was a goat tied to the railing, crying his little heart out. My husband shook his head, exhaling impatience as he began rapping on doors. It was a holiday weekend—Eid—and no one responded to his increasingly frustrated bangs. Finally, a teenage boy opened one of the doors.
“Hey.” My husband said, in English. “Is this your goat?”
“Yes,” replied the boy with a nonchalance that implied there was nothing unusual about the situation.
“This is an apartment building, not a goat hotel.” My husband said.
The boy eyed me and switched to Bengali. They shared a brief exchange before the boy shut his door, leaving the bawling goat tied to the railing. My husband explained that the family purchased the goat for the Eid sacrifice, Qurbani. They would kill it later today. Until then, it would remain tied to the staircase, as it was considered unclean and couldn’t come inside.
Each year during Eid, Muslims sacrifice an animal—usually a goat, sheep or cow. This ritual killing remembers the Prophet Ibrahim’s resolve to kill his son for God’s favour. They split the harvest. At least one-third of the meat must go to the poor, in charity. The other two-thirds would be eaten by the family and shared with friends or neighbours. Islam asks that those who are fortunate share with those who aren’t. Charity cleanses sins and ensures a desirable spot in the afterlife. I was heartbroken for the goat but here to learn about a different culture, one very different from my own.
Ravaged by sadness, I gave the goat one last stroke. He was plushy and sweet, like the baby goats I took my daughter to pet at our local farm in New Jersey when she was little. The physical contact comforted me. I hadn’t realized I was longing for it. The goat and I shared a snuggle, as he breathed his leafy breath on me and nibbled my sleeve. I used the same sleeve to wipe my eyes. My husband and I went back downstairs to the silence of our apartment.
Eventually, the bleating stopped.
*****
My daughter and I returned to the United States, to a world where goats frolic on farms and meat comes from the supermarket. My husband stayed in Dhaka. I reflected on our summer and the words we didn’t say. In the loud muddle of Dhaka’s splendour, in days spent touring with a man who wasn’t my husband, he and I were silent. It was the sound of a marriage collapsing.
He came home after Christmas, blaming his busy schedule for the time away. The air between us was tense—viscous with unsaid words, huddled inside our own impenetrable hearts. We spent New Year’s Eve in front of separate screens and took our daughter back to boarding school after her holiday break. Then, on a cold, January night, we sat down for dinner after a quotidian day of running errands together.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, attempting to bridge the crevasse between us. He paused, put down his fork and looked intently into my eyes.
“My soul is deeply unhappy.” He said in a flat voice devoid of emotion. “I want a divorce.”
At that moment, our twenty-year relationship ended. There was no attempt at mending it, no couples counselling. He wanted a fast divorce. By year’s end, it was final.
Our marriage was gone long before that January night. On some level, I knew it was over during our summer in Dhaka. In all the external clamour of that place, the deepest dissonance was inside. I experienced a human connection there, but not with him. I found it in the man with the towels, the amputee beside the railway tracks, the touch of the woman on the bridge. They extended their hearts with generosity while the only heart that mattered, his, was absent.
In our divorce, he got Dhaka. It was his all along, on loan to me for only a summer. I doubt I will ever return—I don’t know how to untangle the city from my memories of him. But its people carved their initials in my heart and I miss them.
I miss Kamrul and his baby, whom I didn’t have the opportunity to meet. I miss the men carrying chickens and ducks along the road and the railway tracks. I miss the tea estates outside the city, where on a misty morning, my husband and I watched beamish tea pickers working in the fields. I miss the resplendence of the rickshaw art. I miss the women in Manikganj, who welcomed me into their huts while they squatted on the floor to peel vegetables. I miss the goat in the stairwell. I hope that, even briefly, I gave him the comfort he provided me.
