Haroonuzzaman

By the year 2035, Dhaka forgets the scent of the Gulshan-Banani lake.

The automated blinds of the penthouse in Gulshan, an upscale area, rise with a soft hum, revealing a picture-perfect Dhaka morning.

Mira presses her thumb on the cracked power button of her phone.

At a gathering in the unfinished community hall, Saleha raises a question: "They gave us walls. But what do we want to grow inside them?"

When Ullash decided to choose the cat for one of his experiments, our borobhabi, Ullash's mother, didn't raise a single objection

Now, an automated metro-rail glides silently through the city. Conversations have become clipped, calculated. Efficiency replaces spontaneity. They call it peace. Rahim calls it absence.

Mohsin would burst into laughter, saying, "Justice for rape? Is that even a crime worthy of justice?" Rabeya, laughing alongside him, would add, "People expect justice for rape these days? I'm speechless at their naïveté!" 

Baul songs, stuffed with enigmas and codes, sum up the existential philosophy of deha tatta (Truth in the Body), probably the central theme of Baulism, outlining the aphoristic concept according to which 'whatever is in the universe is in the receptacle (the body).'