Right now, Dhaka is probably the most polluted city in the world! Wait, google says its at sixth currently! Oh well, Still close enough! With an AQI of over 300, mustard gas may well be as life-threatening! And here I am, a chain smoker, with severe asthma conditions, traveling through the city's busiest vein in a public bus! I had thought covid might have done the trick! Overcrowding in buses might have stopped, which was at its severest form right before it had hit us! And then as the news had stated, the public transformation might be having a reformative effect because of the pandemic, the thought alone made my heart a bit warm. As an ex daily commuter, I could have asked for nothing more! Up to that point where it might have somehow become one of my deepest desires! And yet nothing has changed much in the last year!
Exactly one year ago today, I was having the time of my life drowning in leisurely comforts of the only coral island in my country! Yet the experience wasn't as comforting as I wanted it to be! The pollution and loitering had reached that far end too! I realized it half when I stepped in the island for the first time in my life, and the other half of it, when I saw a diaper floating away like a white paper canoe right beside my face while I was half-submerged in the sea!
What I had learned from this was that as a population of over 200 million crowded in a space equivalent to the state of New York, we may never be able to change soon! Still, my affection towards this country is that of a boyfriend towards an abusive girlfriend! No matter how much hardship I have had to endure throughout my life as a bangal, I still love it with every inch of my heart! A cowards way to show his patriotism, but patriotic none the less!
There is this neighbor ours, a bit of cracked in the head, who takes everything very seriously! His tall monstrosity of a house is right beside ours, shadowing and towering far above our roof! On the other side of his house, there is this narrow street with a dead-end, mainly used for peeing! People pee in there when they come to that building, people pee in there even when they leave the building! This is such an absurd, yet typical human behavior that we have already learned and adapted to the art of living with the smell of rotten sulfur! Makes me imagine this is how an Irish bar might smell like!
A few weeks ago, my mum notified me that our neighborhood's security patrolling had caught two thieves from that street the previous night! Another everyday incident! Nothing much to be amazed about! But, later on, that day, I got to learn that, they were no ordinary thieves! They were snake whisperers! To deter people from peeing on his walls, our neighbor had hanged a poster with snake warnings saying there was a cobra sighting! So these two geniuses had actually come there to poach those imaginary snakes! The irony! Lack of public toilets to snakes! If people someday start mining for uranium there, I wouldn't be much phased! And now while I'm trying my best to write this on my phone, the air is filled with the aroma of sour and savory sweat! If I keep on writing, some of you might even get to smell it through my words!