I am here at Burger Heaven watching a desi man and his two children from the other end of the patio.  The boy hops around the patio, looking this way and that.  A frenetic sparrow-bird.  He is eating with his mouth open, he is running around, he is chattering and gesticulating at things.  He goes crashing into the nearby water fountain, his entire body tilting over the edge like a seesaw.  He coughs loudly, melodramatically, and spits up a tiny piece of chewed up burger into the fountain.  He stares at it, engrossed for a moment, then rushes back to his father and sister and announces that he has spat his burger into the fountain.

The girl quietly observes everything.  She is younger than her brother by several years, precocious, sedate.  She has slipped off her white sandals and sits cross-legged in her chair, moving and saying very little.  When her brother thrusts some plant leaves into her face, she daintily sniffs them and nods gravely in assent, a child-queen passing judgment from her plastic throne. 

The father ignores them both.  He has broad, heavy shoulders and big arms that must once have been muscular.  He runs a hand over his thinning slicked-back hair.  He cups his hands over his mouth and stares bleakly down the long bridge of his nose.  He looks like a man in a trap, a man who thought life would be something other than what it has turned out to be.  

Dhaka

In the winter the city is beset by a corrosive dust. It hangs in the air, an oily smudge, a faint screen of grey, a smokey chemical smell. It stings your eyeballs when you walk outside. It settles on the leaves of trees. It infiltrates apartments.  There it eats at the finish on the wooden dining table. It devours the grout between the tiles on the bathroom floor. It gets into our lungs and slowly scrapes away. Like the subtle cockroach attacking a toe that has strayed too far from the mattress, patiently nibbling off gobs of flesh, unnoticed, nothing more than a twitch in the night.