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.