s.story 6: Elsewhere

Part I
Miran stood quietly on the edge of his seventh-floor terrace, fingers brushing the rusted railing where the paint had faded to memory. Below him, Dhaka stretched out in the heavy stillness of late afternoon—its breath a jumbled symphony of traffic hum, rickshaw bells, and the thin, aching call of a muezzin drifting through the smog. The city never really stopped. It pulsed—too full of life to slow down, too weary to keep going.

Behind him, behind the glass that dulled the sound of the world, his apartment remained still. The space was curated with obsessive calm—mid-century teak, monochrome canvases, and linen drapes that caught the light just so. Nothing was accidental. Even the imperfections had intention.

He sipped from a double-walled glass of black coffee—room temperature now—and stared at the last reel he’d posted. Him in a linen kurta, arms folded against a minimalist backdrop, jaw set like he’d just heard something quietly devastating. The numbers looked good: a slope of likes, a modest flurry of comments. He’d posted it Thursday evening, when the algorithm was hungriest. It was all part of the dance.

Then came the first buzz.
Saira: hey. free tonight? thought of you when i passed by that kebab place you liked.

He read it, twice. Nothing in it startled. Saira’s messages never did. She had a way of phrasing affection without pressure. She made space. And he liked that—at least, in theory. She was intelligent without being intimidating, sweet without being saccharine. The kind of woman who asked questions in the middle of movies but never talked during the ending.

But lately her words sat differently. Not like a welcome invitation, but like a window cracked open before a storm.

He didn’t reply.

A second buzz, seconds later. A name that brought something else entirely.
Rayhan: new rooftop opened in Gulshan 2. feels like Berlin. 9?

He didn’t hesitate: 9 works.

The city dimmed as the sun began to slide behind the distant construction cranes. Miran watched a street vendor set up his stools beside a flickering grill, the smoke rising like a flag in reverse. People began to gather—drawn not by novelty, but by routine. Something about that comfort stung.

Rayhan was already at the bar. He wore a black shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled just enough to show the curve of his forearms. He didn’t look up as Miran approached.
“You’re late.”
“You always say that.”
“Because you always are.”
No hug. No clasp of hands. Just proximity. An exchange of glances that contained years of shared language.

Rayhan handed him a drink. Smoky. Slightly medicinal. No garnish. No explanation.

They stood at the railing, facing the soft violence of the city’s skyline—unfinished towers, satellite dishes clinging to rooftops like desperate insects, the shimmer of movement in windows never fully closed.

“She messaged me again,” Miran said.
Rayhan’s brow lifted, barely. “Kebab girl?”
Saira.”
“Right.”

The DJ’s set pulsed faintly—no build-up, no drop, just background. Music that refused to commit.
“She’s kind,” Miran added, like someone citing a weather report.

Rayhan nodded once, then gestured toward a blinking billboard across the street. The ad had glitched—half a model’s smile hanging, eyes caught in digital stutter.
“That’s been like that for weeks,” Rayhan said. “No one notices anymore.”
Miran followed his gaze, then chuckled, quiet. “Like us.”
Rayhan didn’t smile. He just said, “Smiling too long.”

A silence followed. Not awkward. But not empty, either.

Later, back in his apartment, the silence lingered between them—not tense, but elastic, familiar. Rayhan had come back with him, neither of them saying much on the way. The air was heavy with the scent of dust and something faintly citrus from the drink still on Miran’s tongue.

They didn’t discuss where Rayhan would sleep. He simply followed Miran into the bedroom, peeled off his shirt, and lay down on the far side of the bed. The sheet was thin and the fan above them ticked rhythmically, air conditioned air joined cutting the heat into uneven bands of breeze.

They didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. At first, they simply lay there, backs turned, the silence between them steady and unforced. But as the night thickened and the city hushed into a rhythm only rooftops and faraway horns could hear, Miran shifted.

Without ceremony, he reached across the space and rested an arm around Rayhan’s waist. Rayhan didn’t move, but he didn’t pull away either. His breathing remained slow, even. Miran’s forehead touched the curve between Rayhan’s shoulder blades, and in that closeness—skin warm through cotton, breath shared in quiet sync—something unnamed softened inside him.

He fell asleep like that, holding Rayhan from behind, the world outside dissolving into a haze of passing headlights and distant engines.

By the time he stirred again—light barely pressing at the edges of the curtains, a bird offering its first uncertain call—Rayhan was gone. No note. No sound. Just the faint depression on the other side of the bed, and the soft trace of his cologne still hanging in the air like a whisper left behind.

He had left the way he often did—early, before anyone else began to move, before the city remembered to wake.

Miran stood by the terrace door again. The room was dark except for the glow of the city and the dull light of his screen. He hovered over Saira’s message, thumb twitching. Then opened Instagram instead.

The feed greeted him like an old friend pretending not to recognize him. Notifications blinked—style goals, teach us pls, collab someday? He scrolled past them like someone avoiding eye contact at a reunion.

He stared at his last post. There he was—angular, poised, distant. Light hitting his cheekbone like it had signed a non-disclosure agreement.

He archived the post. Not deleted. Just hidden. Like so much else he’d grown used to hiding.

He didn’t feel dramatic. Only vaguely embarrassed. As if he’d worn cologne to bed with no one to impress but his own reflection.

He glanced toward the terrace. The air outside pulsed with the faint throb of generators and conversations too far to decipher. Somewhere a cat wailed. A baby cried. Two things that wanted something simple—food, comfort. Maybe that was what he wanted, too.
Not applause.
Not admiration.
Just ease.

He closed the app. Set the phone down.

He met Rayhan three years ago at a gallery opening. It was something neither of them admitted to often. Rayhan had been pacing, impatient with the crowd, the art, maybe the hors d’oeuvres. Miran had found himself watching Rayhan watching the people.

They talked about everything except themselves. Miran had admired that restraint. It felt rare, even noble.
They never said anything. Never needed to. Their friendship operated like a painting—open to interpretation. A kind of intimacy that didn’t require ownership.

But lately, Rayhan had started to linger. Staying longer after drinks. Asking questions that felt like fishing lines tossed into deeper waters.

Miran let him. That was the unspoken agreement—they could toe the line, but never name it.
It was easier that way.
Especially with Saira.
Especially in Dhaka.

He often wondered what his life might have looked like in another city. Lisbon, maybe. Or Montreal. Cities where love was public, even if it wasn’t perfect. Where people didn’t measure affection by how well it fit inside a family photograph.

But this was Dhaka.
Here, silence was safer than freedom.

He thought about texting Rayhan again. Not with anything urgent. Just a breadcrumb.
That drink you made—what was in it?
Then deleted it. Wrote instead:
That billboard’s still broken.

Rayhan responded a moment later:
So are most things. Doesn’t stop us looking.

That made him smile. But not in the way that warranted a selfie.
It was enough.
For now.

Part II

Miran woke to the sound of crows tapping on the balcony rail, their claws scratching faint rhythms against the metal. Dhaka had not cooled overnight; the morning air was thick, veined with humidity. He lay there longer than usual, his phone still untouched on the bedside table.

No photos. No mug raised against sunlight. Just tea—brewed slowly, deliberately—in a clay cup he had picked up from a roadside vendor months ago and never posted about. He lingered by the window, tea in hand, as his gaze followed a boy in a crumpled school uniform darting after a scuffed plastic football down the vacant street. Morning had barely begun, and the heat was already pressing in, thick and unforgiving. But the boy ran anyway, barefoot and unbothered, as if neither time nor weather had any claim on him.

The buzz of his phone broke the moment. A message.

Saira: no worries if not, just wanted to check in.

He stared at the screen, thumb hovering. His reply came slowly, as if typed underwater.

you free later?

It felt unguarded. Almost primitive in its honesty. The dots appeared, then paused. Then came her response.

Saira: there’s a little book café behind Banani 11. quiet. low seats. let’s try that?

He agreed.

The café wasn’t new, just unseen. Tucked between a defunct gym and a boutique that seemed to survive on nostalgia alone, its entrance was marked by a wooden sign with chipped white paint. Inside, the scent of cardamom and imported books met him. The lighting was dim in a way that seemed intentional rather than insufficient.

Saira sat in the corner, hair tied back, her thumb circling the rim of a ceramic cup. She didn’t look up immediately. He took a moment to watch her—not out of desire, exactly, but recognition. She belonged to a different rhythm. She knew how to wait.

“You look tired,” she said, once he sat across from her.

“I feel tired.”

A silence. Not the charged kind that asked for attention. The kind that allowed room.

He told her about the reel. The rooftop. About the archive folder he hadn’t dared to delete. He didn’t use words like burnout or identity. He just said, “I feel like a reflection lately. Something bounced back at me, but hollow.”

She didn’t interrupt. Only listened, her hands still.

“I don’t need you to be curated,” she said. “Just real.”

He wanted to believe that would be enough. But part of him knew that even honesty, once spoken, became its own performance. Still, he reached for it.

“Rayhan thinks I’m smiling too long.”

She smiled softly. “Maybe he’s right.”

He looked down. “Do you ever wonder if what people see in you is just… a version of what they want?”

“All the time,” she said. “But sometimes I try to believe it’s also a version of what I am.”

They left together. The sunlight had thinned, the air pressed flat against the road. On the walk back to the main street, she didn’t reach for his hand. He felt grateful for that.

Later that evening, as Dhaka exhaled into its dusk haze, Rayhan messaged: you okay?

Miran read the message twice. Then typed: i don’t know. i think i’m tired of pretending.

Rayhan’s response was immediate.

that’s a start.

They didn’t meet that night. Miran didn’t ask, and Rayhan didn’t offer. But there was something in the gap between messages that felt like presence—an invisible thread, uncut.

The next day, Miran visited his parents in Mohammadpur. The building was unchanged—faded yellow walls, elevator still wheezing like an old smoker. His mother greeted him in her kitchen sari, hands dusted with flour.

“Baba, you look thinner,” she said. Not as a compliment.

His father didn’t look up from the newspaper. “Instagram doesn’t feed you, does it?”

There was love in the jab, familiar in its deflection. They sat at the table—his cousin Nilofer was visiting from Chittagong, and Mishal, his younger brother, had just returned from a training stint in Singapore.

“So many followers,” Nilofer said, wide-eyed. “Do you feel famous?”

Miran shook his head. “No. Just… visible.”

“Isn’t that the same?”

“No. One is admiration. The other is exposure.”

Mishal didn’t laugh. He just looked at Miran for a long moment, then said nothing. Later, on the narrow balcony, Mishal lit a cigarette and offered one to him. Miran declined.

“You okay, bhai?” Mishal asked.

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Well,” Mishal said, exhaling slowly, “let me know when you are.”

Back in his apartment that night, Miran didn’t turn on the lights. He let the city bleed in—headlights from a passing car slicing briefly across the wall, then vanishing.

He stood before the mirror, the fabric of his white t-shirt damp and clinging to his back from the heat. His pajama pants hung loose around his hips, worn soft from too many washings, sitting low in the easy, careless way of late summer evenings. No rings, no watch. No angles.

He opened Instagram again.

This time, he didn’t just archive. He deleted three posts. The most recent, the most adored, and the most performative. A small act, but deliberate.

He stared at the blank grid. It felt less like absence and more like space.

Then, quietly, he opened his laptop. The screen lit his face in pale blue. He hadn’t written in months. Not beyond captions, or clever remarks that fit a brand voice. But the blinking cursor waited, patient.

He typed a paragraph. A memory: riding on the back of his father’s motorbike at age ten, the wind pushing against his teeth, his hands clutched tightly to a man who never said “I love you” but always slowed down at bumps so he wouldn’t fall.

He reread it. Then closed the laptop.

It was enough—for now.

Part III

Two days passed before Miran texted Rayhan again. Not out of need, but as a kind of quiet reach—an invisible thread tossed across the stillness.

Miran: you around?

Rayhan’s reply came quickly, characteristically unpunctuated, as if the invitation had always been there:
Rayhan: always. come by.

This time, it wasn’t curated. No rooftop bar with mood lighting or vintage furniture arranged for Instagram. It was Rayhan’s apartment—Cantonment, third floor, a building weathered with time. The kind of place where rust lived freely, where stair railings had dents from decades of palms, and where the doorbell had long since given up.

Miran climbed slowly. His shoes echoed against the tiled stairwell. He paused once, hand on the chipped banister, a small tremor of anticipation in his chest—not anxiety exactly, but something adjacent. He was no longer sure what waited behind familiar doors.

Rayhan answered in a soft rustle of bare feet. He wore a loose cotton kurta the color of dust before rain. His fingers were sticky from a half-eaten mango.

“Caught me mid-tropical introspection,” he said, stepping back to let Miran in.

The apartment was small and unpretentious—a lived-in space with a bedroom, a modest living area, a narrow kitchen, and a balcony where the light lingered longer in the afternoons. No framed art, no curated decor. But everywhere, in glass jars and mismatched pots, money plants climbed and curled—on windowsills, tabletops, even the ledge above the sink—thriving without design, only care. The fan above creaked with every rotation, slicing the humidity into ribbons of warm air. Books leaned in casual towers against the walls, their spines worn soft by touch. In one corner stood a bare easel, a single pencil line on the canvas like the beginning of a question no one had finished asking. Nothing was fancy, but everything was clean—enough to feel held, not staged.

The scent inside was indistinct but comforting—incense, old wood, something herbal simmering faintly from the kitchen.

They sat on the jute mat. No table between them, only a chipped ceramic mug passed from one hand to the other.

Miran took a sip. Bitter. No sugar.

“You never had the influencer bug,” he said.

Rayhan smirked without looking up. “I prefer being a suggestion.”

Miran glanced around. “You live like someone who figured it out.”

“No,” Rayhan replied, gently. “I live like someone who stopped pretending he ever would.”

The ceiling fan groaned again. The rain began, quiet at first, then heavier, tapping rhythmically against the window grilles. Neither of them reached for their phones. Time passed without urgency.

Miran’s back rested against the wall, bare feet stretched across the mat. “I think I used to know who I was,” he said. “Before I needed to be seen all the time.”

Rayhan didn’t respond right away. He reached for the mango again, peeled another sliver from the skin, the juice threading down his wrist.

“Maybe you’re not lost,” he said finally. “Maybe you’re just remembering.”

The words lingered. Not as a solution. More like a tune hummed in another room—something you recognize before you realize it’s familiar.

They sat like that for a long time.

Not talking was not silence. It was presence.

Later, Miran rose to leave. At the doorway, he turned—hesitated just long enough—and stepped forward to pull Rayhan into a slow, wordless hug. Rayhan held him back, gently but without hesitation, their bodies pressed together for a moment that said more than either was willing to voice. Then Miran let go. Rayhan didn’t follow him to the door. He only said, “Come back sometime. Or don’t. Either way, I’ll be here.”

That evening, the sky darkened slowly, bleeding into the kind of dusk that made everything feel closer than it was.  Miran sat cross-legged on the cool floor, alone but not entirely untouched by the quiet life around him—the faint, steady hum of the fridge, a pigeon murmuring from the ledge, the creak of aging wood settling into the walls like an exhale.

He opened Instagram. His thumb hovered.

One by one, he deleted three posts.

Not archived—erased.

The most recent, the most adored, and the one where his expression had been rehearsed a dozen times. They disappeared without drama, without confirmation. And in the sudden blankness of his feed, he felt something unexpected.

Space.

Not emptiness.

A kind of unclenching.

He stared at the screen, then closed it.

No dopamine, no backlash. Just absence. And a silence that felt like his own.

He turned to the old desk he rarely used for more than sorting bills. A thin layer of dust had settled across its surface like a soft rebuke. He wiped it with his sleeve, opened the laptop. The login sound felt too cheerful.

The cursor blinked.

He began to type.

A memory: he and his brother Mishal on their father’s motorbike. Age ten. Rain beginning to fall. Clutching tightly to his father’s back, the air soaked with exhaust and the sharp scent of wet dust. He remembered the way their father slowed at every bump—not out of obligation, but care.

He wrote until the memory ran out.

Then closed the laptop.

He didn’t feel productive.

He felt real.

Three days passed before he messaged Saira.

Miran: if you’re free, come over for tea. no filters. just me.

The reply came before he could overthink it.

Saira: on my way.

He didn’t tidy. Didn’t arrange the cushions or dim the lights. He lit a single sandalwood candle, not for ambiance, but for grounding. A scent he associated with childhood afternoons during loadshedding, when the house went quiet and you were forced to sit with yourself.

When she arrived, he opened the door without a word. She stepped inside as though she’d always known she would.

They sat on the terrace. No photos. No stories. Just two cups of tea releasing steam into the soft breath of a post-rain Dhaka evening.

She asked nothing.

He told her anyway.

About the posts.

About the mango.

About the ache of always having to seem like more than he felt.

She listened. Not with the intention to fix, but to understand. Her silence was not passive. It was deliberate, generous.

“Saira, I don’t know what I want yet,” he said, his voice thin, a little above a whisper.

“That’s okay,” she replied softly, like she meant it.. “Just don’t disappear from yourself.”

It was not a declaration. Not a promise. But it landed softly between them like something almost sacred.

They didn’t kiss. They didn’t need to. What settled between them wasn’t romance, perhaps. But care.

Later, after she left, Miran stood once more on the terrace. The city wasn’t quieter, only more familiar. Cars passed. A generator stuttered back to life. Somewhere, a child cried for a toy they’d already broken.

He didn’t reach for his phone.

He stood still. With the noise. With the weight of all he had pretended to be. And with something else—an emerging truth not yet solid, but present.

He wasn’t above the world. Not removed from it.

Just finally inside it.

And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough.

~ May 2025