There are moments—often in the late afternoons and early evenings in Dhaka, when the light turns the dust gold and the air begins to slow, thick with the weight of the day—when a thought stirs and tries to speak. It arrives uninvited: the memory of a voice, a scent drifting from some kitchens in my apartment building, the sudden ache of something unfinished. And then, as quickly, it slips away, lost in the rattle of a passing rickshaw, in the chorus of distant horns that never seem to rest.

I try to hold these thoughts, to trap them before they disappear into the dense heat and noise—or into the quiet corners of my apartment. I imagine writing them down—turning feeling into language, giving shape to the fleeting. But when I do, the words feel heavier than they should, as if the thought, in becoming visible, also becomes less true. Like monsoon clouds that promise everything and give only a hush.

Still, I write. Not perfectly. Not always clearly. But with a quiet kind of devotion. There is a ritual in the act—the slow gathering of words, the soft tapping of keys in a room filled with the whir of ceiling fans and the distant, half-hearted buzz of my mobile phone. It is not clarity I seek, but the gesture of trying. The careful, ongoing tending to something unspoken.

The city, in all its beautiful disorder, mirrors this process. Dhaka is not a place that reveals itself easily. It startles and soothes in equal measure. One moment, it’s the scent of wet earth rising from an old road after rain. The next, it’s a power cut mid-sentence, leaving you blinking in darkness, wondering what you meant to say.

And yet, I stay with it—the thought, the silence, the imperfect words. Perhaps the truest writing is not about mastery but memory. Not the capturing of something whole, but the reaching for what flickers.

In this city, in this life, I’ve learned: some truths don’t settle into sentences. They linger in the air like humidity, like longing, like the light on a late afternoon that never quite decides whether to stay or leave.