YD6-69(TRT) Aetheria’s Swirl Beneath the Khulna Sky, Tyres Burn, Repatriation Breathes the Gulf War
BOOK SYNOPSIS: Step into this journey of becoming, where the cosmos whispers its secrets, and identity blooms like dawn. This story is an unfolding suite of chapters clarifying my book: The Code: Horizon of Infinity—a philosophical memoir exploring: How The universe Sculpted Our Minds. Through Aetheria, the lens of consciousness, aware of her need for a body to reveal herself and exercise her wishes, the narrative leads to her birth and the name she will claim: Sunshine.
Chapter synopsis: Step into a fractured topographic dream—where ferry decks blur with curfews, survey lines trace fading empires, and every telegram becomes an omen. In Gulf’s Shadow, political unrest and spectral landscapes converge, as the narrator races through collapsing timelines, haunted by exile, a looming war, and the quiet pull of Aetheria.
YD6-69(TRT) Aetheria’s Swirl Beneath the Khulna Sky, Tires Burn, Repatriation Breathes the Gulf War
I glance at my wristwatch. ‘Two o’clock.’ From the stuffy room, I spare a questioning glance outside the French door-window, where sunlight sits bright. I flip back the covers, fold into the bare spine of the bed. My feet find the floor--I dart for the bathroom, shacking Michel, my mentor until now.
Creeping under the shower--recollecting our course into unmapped bandwidths. Obelisks trellising into a gauze of Nyx, threading latent microwave veins through relay antennas--signals ghosting across the delta open to surveying.
Pulling up outside the Royal Hotel, cradled in the Y-crotch of the split street--the brick memory of empire. A layered pancake, a rotunda dwarf besides a fenestrated tower, keyed to a golden efflorescence--Aetheria awakening in Helios’ charm, even as I'm wiped by the night’s lack of sleep.
When we walked through the fourfold glass-and-wood-framed doors, I’m struck by a system shock. The Royal Carpet, bearing the landmarks, lay coffee stained--since colonizers’ departure. The crescent front desk, intact. Kashem approaches the dark wood--elaborate and solemn--blind to my hesitant pace. He led to the attendant: upright, elegant in his dark unisex tunic, proud yet friendly. We checked in, exchanging smiles beneath yellowed, unhealthy fluorescent tubes--lights smoked into the walls.
Now, under a steaming shower. I step out, dressing before the mirror--unsteamed. Toothbrush. Then the Philishave’s whirr--dry heads following my guide of my fingertips, until the stubbles surrender to smoothness.
I pass the foot of the bed, cross the king-size room. French doors--held a breath--welcome back the day, after a whole night on the road. I step onto the balcony. Khulna’s suburbs unfold--our point of entry--cutting a path branching to my feet at the edge of the seventh-floor deck.
I turn away. Cross the room, step into the desolate corridor. My index finger presses the call button--the elevator stirs, mechanisms sighing through the shaft. The doors part to the deserted cabin. I step in. Stand. Walk out into the squarish lobby. Veering into the ecliptic rotunda--ghostly Royal Hotel’s faded elegance. A shiny khaki uniform lingers in ricochet beside Kashem, whose eyes droop, sleep stolen in snippets. The seated officer lifts his gaze, as if asking himself, ‘Is that who I'm waiting for?’
‘What in hell? . .’ The thought flushes through me. ‘The bandits are already a memory. No fingerprints. No forensic?’
Both men rise--Kashem and the police officer leave behind a massive period couch, circling the coffee table to approach. The police officer tilts his head, speaks sideways. Kashem, a pace behind, translates. “In the report, there’s a discrepancy. You saw two bandits. The driver saw, five.”
The police officer demands that I unknit the driver’s pitch-black window from my memory, from the rear seat—faces eclipsed, emerged behind a flashlight sweeping off flares. “I saw two men,” I reply, correcting the discrepancy, “… at a time.”
After questing the team, a glance at my wristwatch, ‘five--what a wasted day!’ The officer shakes my hands, offers a smile. “You’re always smiling. Other Europeans aren’t like you.”
I wasn't teasing robotic creatures from under my skin--nothing feels cozy with these uniforms masking authority. Sunset creeps through a gray haze, and then the night pigeonholes me with my NEC clamshell laptop. Always a story to write about.
In the morning, beyond the four-paneled glass, our two-tone red and gray Nissan SR5 Patrol waits. I exit the Royal Hotel and embark with the team, heading toward a map-marked site--a mosque, a topographic departure from sea level.
After calibrating a pair of altimeters--I’m struck by a memory--Michel, tracking index contours leapfrog the altimeters, lingered and faded, to an idea. We pull up in the Nissan, idling in the hush. A cycling figure to a rickshaw squeezes past, trailing the tricycle one wheel off-road, leaning, garlanded in mirror-thread and rust, down the dirt driveway. An acquaintance of the team descends from a weatherworn apartment--a ghost of its concrete skeletal block. Above, children peer from balconies stretching across two floors, where cracked plaster clutches at laundry in brittle fray.
We follow his off-white checkered Panjabi--light and breathable--sandals silent, stairs. Behind a door, I pose one of the altimeters for safeguard in his apartment, on the windowsill. I nod a thanks. Walk away with the team. A premonition--a creepy feeling--breaches, raising a haunting doubt about adopting the technique, ruminating in mind: ‘Will terrain recording fold into the atmospheric pressure over the distances, to receive the latent relay? Antenna to pylons. Height to signal.’
The jockey driver follows the road while I record the mileage on the map--until our topographic Nissan SUV gives its last breath. Village men seem eager to lend a hand, pushing the Nissan--misled by a tag brimming with assurance: “Powered by Mercedes-Benz.” I leave with the team, onto a rickshaw--its skeleton figure pedaling us into sunset, into the night--until we’re dropped at the entrance to the Royal Hotel.
When in the morning, I catch a glimpse through the four-fold glass--my team in the Royal Hotel’s driveway behind a blue Toyota minivan. Kashem must have caught my surprised expression. “A replacement crankshaft has been found,” he offers, reading my questioning mind--then adds, “Now we need time to effect the repairs.”
‘That’s absurd!’ My head computes otherwise: ‘Open-heart surgery… A backyard mechanic is going to change a crankshaft?’ ‘That’s clinical, factory work. That engine will never be roadworthy again--certainly not for expeditions to the last village before the seas.’ The through flushes through me as Kashem pivots, saying, “That minibus is on loan from the Royal Hotel.”
‘OK. It looks alright. Newish.’ I thought, as Ibrahim loads the last survey case. I climb on board with the team, taking my seat next to the jockey driver. He tweaks the ignition. I press the reset on the trip counter. We idle out from the hotel portico, gliding through asphalt arteries--on a leisure ride through Khulna’s dense belt of population, until the road ends at the Rapsa river, also facing the opposite wharf. We descend, overseeing where silty rivers converge, downstream.
Given a stupendous open-air theater of our whereabouts--the tide-washed, dark clayish banks of the Rupsa, smothered in slick sediment, no eddies of the braided upstream branches besides us. A colossus hovers, absurd--an ocean liner, rust-streaked and still, far too grand for even the mother branch. A wounded titan--hull as a forgotten shield. A cargo dream beyond imagining, men offloading or uploading by the brow and shoulder. Then, from the blind side--a whine, resonating across the waters. Until revealed: a toy motorboat. A skipper, pupped at the aft-throttle, one arm outstretched, conjuring--steering from the wings of a stage play. Gulliver among Lilliputians.
Ahead, our way across the waterway, where the suburb herds to the waterfront. From amidst rooftops, an obelisk trellis rises--high-voltage limbs stretching skyward, relay antennas bloom in petal-white dishes. At eight o’clock, a trawler shoulders into a floating dock. Kashem approaches, leans elbows on the driver’s open window, as I jot down the mileage. He nods toward the mooring. “That’s our boat.”
I step down from the Toyota microbus, circling to the rear. From the tailgate, I retrieve the camera from the survey equipment case. We cross by ferry. I frame the full height of the pylon--shoot. As the shore draws near and the ferry docks, we step aground. I lift the clinometer--monocle to eye--tilt the dial to the pylon’s crown, watching the angle roll in degrees along the wheel’s edge. Survey marked: Kashem grips the casing of the surveyor’s measuring tape and sets off, while Ibrahim holds the hook. Ahead, Kashem stops and marks the ground. He winds the tape as Ibrahim catches up. I count the one hundred meters, moving with the mark, and again down the deserted street, around the block. Reaching the base of the pillar’s cable tray, we retrieve--an aerial anchored line stretches across town, a map in the making for engineers and technicians to follow in our wake. Back across the river, we board the Toyota--the jokey driver tweaking the engine to a purr.
My seventh-floor room transforms into an office--maps of the south-western region of Bangladesh spread across the bed, their edges scotched down. Kashem and Ibrahim bent over them in silence. I straighten from their midst. “I’ve rented an air-conditioned room…” But no breeze comes to extend my concentration or steady my resolve. ‘I will not let a promise evaporate.’
When they’re gone, I lift the clamshell of my NEC UltraLite. The liquid crystal display--ideal in the shade of evening light--flickers to life with Lotus Software 1-2-3. I'm inputting the day’s topographic data into spreadsheet cells. In my electronic diary, after recording the team’s starting point, the completion of our topographic survey, the glitch of loaning the Royal Hotel’s Toyota, and the mission carried through to the end of the day. Feeling accomplished--yet. I pull down the screen. 'Details always win an argument.’ My motto, anticipating the quiet, will one day return with questions of trust.
A day goes by--settling into leading my team by a compass, south into the delta, downstream, toward the sea. We gather in a new daylight into the Royal Hotel lobby--where, as the only guest, I lodge like an echo of the structural ribs. My team raised their concern. “You don’t eat--three days?” Kashem’s words echo in my head. ‘Why aren’t I hungry?’ a question that will filter, like nutrients, through the mineral-rich soil of food my body has already ingested.
A while later, we enter the flurry--a village’s males, drawn by the passing minivan. We disembark the Toyota. With the team, I walk across the flimsy planks spanning the frail bridge. Reaching the opposite bank, we turn--watching as the Toyota’s wheels edge onto a few butted stretches of planks, the wheel’s running tracks across a deck of cross planks beneath.
But I'm teased--by the princess. A young woman extricates herself from a flurry of young males, a bafflement trailing in the wake of the minivan from which I stepped. Through the thatched grass eaves grown too close across the roadway, Aetheria’s breath was drawn out behind them--a sillage of light and hush in the wake of the minivan.
The young woman paces gracefully upfront in slip-slops, a few strides ahead of the flat Toyota muzzle squeezed by the guardrails. The highlight of a rustic village--her rust-orange salwar flickering against raw, whittled wood. A white scarf, butterfly winged over her shoulders, woven from cloudlight, defiance--yet not. About to cross, a boy clutches a half-world of hunger. The blue Toyota coasts behind, its jockey driver shadowed behind the windshield--fearful, bracing for a flex beneath the weight.
Along the buckling railing, the young woman, in her own world--presses on without a flinch or glance, until the minivan shields my mind and blurs my memory. I’m bound to follow the team, climbing on board, drawn from an artery in dissonance. ‘Don’t even think--I don't want to be born into this world.’ The princess vanishes from the village gateway as we're driving--following our course, plotting the next pylon.
We boarded the Toyota, pulling out after a topographic survey--an enclosed site boasting a latent obelisk trellis--dusk’s self-painting, fenced silhouettes. From behind an iron picketed palisade, the street beyond wavered in a copper-tinted haze. Shadows broken--fenestrated facades and rooftops. One tucked into the other--margin a distancing street. A rickshaw drifts through mist. A boy stands still beside his bicycle, stealing a stare at our departure. In the depths, the sun, half-draped in smoke and palm fronds--paused without urgency. Birds, mid-flight, come to rest among others perched along aerial cables, we leave behind.
The countryside reaches out. My imagination runs wild--ghosts of hunkered men laying bricks draw me toward a hypnotic haze along a single-lane. “Can you drive faster?” I repeat, tighter, as the road stretches and my nerves fray. He responds with side-glancing thoughts: ‘You can't even drive?’ I read it, too, from the rear--minds blooming cotton bushes, their thoughts ripe for my mind to pirate, each questioning my skills.
Although TRT-Philips had prohibited, me, as a foreigner, from driving locally--warned about the judiciary entanglements--I ask the jockey driver to pull over. I step around the flat front of the Toyota and slip behind the steering wheel. Press the throttle. The team stirs in surprise. ‘We’re moving?’ Hushed eyes settle on me as the rough roadway catches me off guard. We surge into the air, bounce back--my passengers wide-eyed in disbelief. ‘He can also drive?’
But I soon realized--I’m no longer that 13-year-old driving the farm’s Volkswagen panel van over a washed-away overnight dirt roads with my brother Igor, flooring the throttle. I underestimated the undulated road’s rhythmic waves--they airlift the dark through and bounce from our seats with a pneumatic thud. The headlights skip like a stone over water--crest to crest, never landing. Even easing off the throttle doesn’t suffice. We’re thrown up and slammed back down. It dawn on me--It dawns on me--I’ve misread the hand-paved surface and the traffic’s creative speed bumps--harmless stunts, but not during a race deep into the night when all we long for is sleep.
I’m washed out. At the junction, I relent--set my ego aside and returning the control to our jockey driver. ‘These roads. . . They’re not for me?’ I reflect. We cross the village gateway, backtracking across the wooden bridge, headlight brushing the asphalt--until with a sweep of the entrance, we halt before the Royal Hotel, stepping out.
I cross the ecliptic hallway, and just before veering to the elevator lobby, Kashem catches up with me. He hands a telegram. As I stand inside the cabin, one glance. “TRT Philips. . .” And a thought rushes through me. ‘Head office wants to know if I’m still on the job.’
A day--to Friday evening--I enter my room, welcomed by a waft of fresh air. I lift the NEC clamshell laptop, the gray screen, upload Lotus 123--the spreadsheet for the day’s data input. Somehow feel they had the right not to switch on a dozen floor tower’s plant for a single lodger. The thought lingers, nurturing in the back of my mind--I had doubted the hotel would honor their advertised air-conditioned rooms. Then I’m distracted--by a hum in the street.
I step out of my pigeonhole onto the balcony, following the thread of a beam of eyesight--trawling a few floors above. With a poised look of advance knowledge, I catch the character of a journalist--observing from his balcony. Sentient. Almost writing a story in his mind for diffusion--morphing into a photographer, his long lens of sight already telling: ‘Something is going on here?’
I gaze after the reporter’s pointed regard--to where the city suburbs blur into palm forest--from where the plowing boulevard slips beneath the hotel’s blind corner. Just short of it, a clot of figures congeals: boys, men, swelling slowly. Shadows stretch long. The asphalt fragments to ash as black puffs of smoke coils in the air. Figures, in their elongations, move in a cluster, crossing the curb-median. Peering over shoulders, among loose hands over tunic--bystanders. No slogans, no shouting. Just the thrum of a few restless, stoking figures.
The margins hold still--a mixt crook of storefront retailers, apartment blocks--quiet, peeled, listening, and facing a shack leaning into its shadow, a corrugated roof rusted at the entrance to a park. Children linger near the trenches dark mouth--half-watching, half-unmoved. A signal post. A yellow sign, absurd. Absurd, blind to instruction. I turn away from the sun’s stays—hard, declarative—glinting off tin, off eyes.
Night falls. I steal another glance over the balcony--storefronts and streetlights united in their glow. As the street blocks itself with stoked tires and wood, bonfires blossom--multiply--turns inward. Awe-inspiring freedom fighters, men breathing “Koyra.”
Saturday morning. The shower streams--I become steam--my skin dissolves, my body softens, vanishes--a spirit’s breath caught cleansing to the bones. I step out, towel dry, wrapping my skin-suit. I dress--shirt, pants, socks, step into shoes, sweeping off, ‘what’s the day bringing?’ I step out to grip the handrailing--the suburbs recede like an old dream. The boulevard creeps forward, a trio of jingle trucks moving along the median. Cargo bed open, soldiers armed--some spilled, boots jogging alongside in broken formation.
But then, I hover--over a single civilian, a tuft of hair, weeping over the cabin roof of his truck. Around him, a truck bed filled like a livestock pen: military hard helmets, khaki shoulders, a few rifles cocked, barrels resting across the roof, aimed inside a tightening noose on last night’s debris, in the face of the Royal Hotel.
From the far rear--a jumble of retailer fronts, the interstice of apartment blocks--the police chased men forward. Young men scatter across the median like leaves caught in an autumn wind. While batons rain like monsoon thunder, driving them past the opposing street vendor shack. Mere shadows--chased into the enclave park, vaulting backyard walls, slipping through the cracks between houses. A few are caught--limbs twisting in resistance--hauled back toward one of the trio trucks. Stragglers vanish, but Khaki figures haunt them down, searching house to house, deep into the night.
By Sunday morning, a group of five officers lingers below my balcony--across the street, against the whitewashed brick wall of a warehouse. A few idling on a wooden bench, the others stand--lackadaisical--rifle slack in hand. Then behind me, Kashem enters my room. “A curfew has been imposed!” urgency held taut behind a crisp expression. ‘What are we going to do?’ He waits for my answer. By evening, the police vanish from the street.
Before the roosters cry in the distance. The team had responded to my call. Outside the glass of the four-fold pane of wooden doors, a Volkswagen microbus waits--child of my father’s expeditions. On school breaks, we left the nascent town of Goma. Dirt streets, to cross the molten lava river--driving towards the horizon as the earth raised a shadowing wall--to ride the cliffhanger road up the escarpment. Atop, veering into the rain forest. Meandering roads through the wilderness of wild banana plants, we left behind a trail of bogged-down traffic ravin-striken vehicles. De-P’p--father’s pride voice still echoes. “Volkswagen passes everywhere,” he says. “They don’t break down.”
At 4 a.m., we gather--eyes clear--spreading by the flank doors, climbing onto the benches inside. The jockey driver, by the contour, steps in behind the steering wheel. He tweaks the ignition. A metallic whine rises from the rear compartment--a childhood’s air-cooled music. We slip from the Royal Hotel, gliding through silent, far-scattered dim glow of street lanterns. Like ghosts escaping the city, we head for Khulna’s checkpoint to reach before six.
A day, growing concerned about the team keeping pace--marveling as Helios unfurls gold across our route, while Nyx, without remorse, tightens the sky’s breath and winks over the horizon. Leaving us, worming into a wall of darkness. Until we cross the river gate, glide through the sleeping city, and pull before the Royal Hotel. Stepping out the minibus, pressing my way through the door, I pass by the crescent desk, footsteps unbothered. When a flimsy envelope is pressed into my palm. After the first telegram, to no surprise, a reminder, on sight. “Philips TRT, Paris. . .” to feel chased by their ghost.
A nag I can’t quite wrap my head around. With foresight on an arc of daylight at loss, if I’m to chase a post office swallowed by the city--without a thought spared for the curfew trap. The last telegram is still dangling in memory--unanswered. Swinging like a loose rung in a fractured chain. To reply would only deepen the entanglement. My mind freezes in my dilemma--sentient of their minds. Men in air-conditioned Parisian offices, their gaze defaming from afar.
Bugged by my thoughts, I step into the elevator, emerge into the corridor--behind me, the door closes, and I fall into bed. Only to find my bio-clock, before Aetheria’s hour, Nyx’s still breathing the night--with foresight of our passage under the radar of the curfew. I glance at my wristwatch--outside, the stars begin to loosen their grip on the darkness. I slip out of bed, stepping on the floor. Dress. Stand inside the elevator cabin, an echoing whine shifting through the shaft, in the midst of the sleepy concrete skeleton. I walk out through the ground-floor lobby, veering for the oval reception--team up. We embark the Volkswagen minibus. The jockey driver tweaks the engine whimper--headlights feeble sweep the shadows out of hiding as we ghost through the deserted streets--reaching the ferry.
We drift, leaving behind Khulna’s political turmoils in our wake. Extending before our silent eyes, the bright beam burrows a silent language—a ghost flare approaches—a lone light—stretching space until its elasticity snaps into two converging headlights. The road thickens with dribbling rickshaws, a tailback gathering before folding into the bend. In the glow, shadow figures drift at the edge—stray vendors buttling in the margins. Under Nyx's gaze, the night animates dismay. Beyond—the road yields to hawkers burning paraffin lamps, ghosts at the roadside.
Out of the shadows: accidented stalls, shanty frames leaning wounded against the ink spill of the broad river. Rising ahead—behind a wall of rickshaws, in half-sight—an iron silhouette: the ferry, fading into the swallowing darkness, having dropped the tangle of traffic we passed earlier.
We pull up beside drab canvas stalls. The hush of minds. Thoughtful aura—smoking signals—silent messages exhaled. Silhouettes stir. Doors click. Figures rise from the interior, four doors loosed into the chaos swelling around the Volkswagen minibus.
I step away, eyesight circling beneath torn tarpaulin awnings, leaning against the faithful Nissan SR5 Patrol, tagged: “Powered by Mercedes-Benz.” At a side stall, a man with a shawl knotted around his head edges back, finishing his meal, fingers brushing away threads of saliva. He grabs the loose end of his shoulder-draped shawl and rises, wiping his mouth. Passing a rag nailed to the wall, he pulls its frayed edge toward him—wiping again. I watch in disgust as ghosting folks before and after repeat the same quiet ritual.
The man who cleared space near a pot of steaming broth leaves me watching a young boy behind a table. The boy glances up and addresses me with a hand wipe across an enameled plate—‘I’ll fill it up for you.’ I shake my head—no—but he persists, insistent in a language that slips past me. My refusal is dismissed. He ignores it—sees through it. Their food churns my guts.
With a tone of calm inevitability, Kashem relays, “Delayed… Five more hours to the destination. The ferry is late.”
Out of the dark, a steel dragon lifts its head—the floating structure moors. We roll onto the deck, crawling from the harbor into a void of pitch. Shadows flicker; feeble light anchors the ferry. We walk off the ramp, climb into the Volkswagen minibus, and drive off in a reverse semblance—dropping off margins: shaky stalls, peddlers, luminescent rickshaw figures treadling through their shadows. Trucks, buses—men clinging the roofs—the swarm fray down, thinning the medley, until the beam slips along the deserted asphalt, darting us into the void.
When the asphalt highway forks into a brick-paved path, I fall dumb and mute--surrounded by males in their tunics, while Kashem, in European clothes, stands fluidly talking among them. We leave the jockey driver behind. I duck after Ibrahim into the snout-to-rear calash of a Vespa, Kashem folding in besides the rickshaw driver--hip to hip.
The puttering ride stretches inland until we approach a swell of the road’s shoulder--rickshaws lined up, on both sides of a culvert’s concrete parapets. A pressure-cooker atmosphere at the squeeze--too tight for any vehicle to pass. We enter into the midst: bike pushers and Vespa drivers blaring loose bursts of conflict, their voices carrying--a myriad of trembling words. Kashem, at ease among his less-fortunate brothers, catches the lined-up discourse in a breath and translates: “The union is blocking the passage from crossing!”
Across the ditch--streaming a no men land--another row of Vespa snouts, lines the far shoulder, facing us, commanded by a leader. A bouncer’s figure swells behind the Vespa windshield, poised at the pathway’s edge--sinew and stillness, ready to crush the fear from any daredevil bold enough to trespass. Behind him, a burly giant, messy and rough, plonks into place--angled and immovable. But even his mass seems to shrink beneath the other’s gaze. A rank of rickshaws shoulders the pathway behind them. Their slight figures are patient, waiting.
On our side of the parapets, nervous drivers and pushers among rickshaws--none eager to let their lucrative customers walk off. But Kashem crosses the narrow bridge. His slight figure weaves the gaze of burlesque men framed in a gapping Vespa--eyes sharp, unmoving, guarding their territory. He returns--unscathed. We step down. We cross through the parapets--a silent threshold across the stream--and board another Vespa rickshaw, puttering into a slow U-turn.
The driver behind the handlebars, hands poised. At the rhythm of - ‘prr… prr… prr’ - we proceed along the pathway deeper inland. He throws glances around his elbow--eyes slewing, unable to flee the fire of a dragon unfolding from the trailing brick paving. For long stretches, he keeps ahead--until a freewheel rolls past, overtaking us like a farewell sign, loosing momentum, to wobble.
To the driver, the coils in a serpent’s track--the wheel lying out of breath in the sun--bear no surprise. With him, Kashem steps down, before me and Ibrahim. Stuck in the middle of bushland, no rescue in sight--only the dare of a mechanic’s gaze on the naked axle point, encircled by the drum brakes, a shoe resting on the chevron-pattern brick paving.
Kashem scratches his head, turns away, and gazes down the road. A ghosting tunic approaches--the spell cast over the Vespa. Kashem waves down the pedaling figure. We duck aboard. The skeleton rider pedals with superhuman tirelessness. After a jolting stretch, the wayside foliage morphs--We enter a market street. Villagers bloom in a flurry along sidewalk storefronts in midday sunlight.
On the peaceful sidewalk, the sun strikes the colonial post office--brick and ashlars effloresce--I'm blind to Aetheria’s aura, urging me to reflect--over the telegram unanswered. Topography the pylon, trailing Kashem by sight, in the grasp of a telecommunication engineer, emerging from the crows across the street. In diagonal approaching, leads the team away from the recorded transmission tower. Kashem inquires about the site electrification. Upon entering, a blatant cubic structure, home to a manual vintage switchboard desk. A zoophilist purrs below the dormant telephone party lines. The engine contented to gleam in the dusty corner--a red starter pull-cord capping a white gasoline tank--reminiscent of my testing day back in Kelvin. The value output of a portable Honda for our little family only survived a few globs in the event of a blackout.
In the telephone exchange room, the generator hums its phase--a cord trailing up the wall, feeding a single overhead bulb that glimmers over the exchange operator. We turn away--the site measured, recorded. Step back outdoors. Across the street, a Vespa rickshaw--no driver. Kashem walks across, searching through the bustle of retail strips. Midway, changes course, reaches toward a snail’s-pace Vespa. Waving the ride up, he negotiates briefly. Then waves us on board. We duck into the calash, puttering up the street--backtracking a ride emerging from cream-painted houses--before the day pauses. The fenestrated facades efflorescence a golden aura--as if to watch us go.
A day--the sunset drapes in a hush, rhyming with the song: ‘Sunrise, sunset. . . swiftly flow the days -- Sunrise, sunset -- One day following another. . . Laden with happiness and disappointment. . .’ Ahead, the sky blushes with a quiet it cannot keep--still, as we shift down south, beyond Khulna’s curfew and the jaded teeth of unrest,
When we pull in by the sentinel to a guardhouse, flanked by a peripheral wall, stopping in the background an invasive forest of palms. Through the black-plated swing-off gates--the enclave appears--planted by a blatantly engineered skeleton, concrete-plastered and efflorescent white, without illusion of architecture. The apartment block unfolds in repetition: fenestrated guest rooms lined in the shades of open, superimposed corridors. I'm touched by a young woman in a sari folded over her head, contouring the rough backyard piles of coarse sand, water buckets, and the scattered rigmarole of building material and equipment. Laboring in indigo, she carries a single ash-block on her hip, tucked under her arm--at a guess, toward a mason. She contours two men heaving burlap sacks shake their loads into a gear-clenched drum--mixing concrete, hushed by distance.
The driver steers away, pulling up before the entrance. Ahead, Kashem ascends to the upper floor. In a proud stride leading to my room. He declares, “These are a minister’s retreat.”
‘Am I supposed to be thankful to lodge here?’
From a changed base, by day--my dreams fade faster. Each day wakes the golden beam over these riverborn seas--but won’t save what slips away. Still, Helios engages the horizon, soft and soundless--silhouette the hull of a derelict against men in a pirogue, a barge moored ghostly, waiting to liven and set with the tide.
By the fishers' village. Ashore, birds don’t sing--my dream thins. The river mirrors the last, peaceful wake: the silhouette of a man--gripping a pole, his leg wrapped--an oar wound in linen. Walking the riverbed, still and yet propelling. A crutch incarnate, he hauls his cargo of driftwood. The dead and swollen were salvaged for the worth that remains. I break away from the image--a workhorse walking the gunwale, tilted, and a slipper above the silty waters.
Kashem paces in his shadow, restless along the waterfront. He returns, shaking his head. “The skipper is an hour late.” The delay entwines us tracing the pylon, threading the relay antenna’s voice of tomorrow. “It’s better than a pirogue…” I say sarcastic to Kashem. Stealing into sunrise, he barters for a powerboat. I don’t see beyond my next step. After the team boards the skeletal barge, we’re like children in mud, playing with what floats.
At the helm, the old sailor, A father-son constellation--the boy leans in—cranks the mechanical beast from the cold, coaxing it to cough black puffs to life. I read history here: My brother, Igor, and I--we who wrestled a stubborn single-piston diesel engine before school, taking turns with the crank, each kickback jarring the shoulder, as the fowls on Kyalami’s poultry farm waited for drinking water.
Precious, consuming into the start of the day, the old man turns his head, squinting commands through coils of black smoke. It dawns on me--he’s questioning the boy at the aft, the teenager hunched low in secrecy on deck, legs draped over the engine well, trapped, wrenching the throttle, ridding the piston’s ragged revs.
Weird, against the rate of my compass glimpses, tracking a river whose banks have meandered since mapped in 1928. Before the trailing vortex of black smoke, until the engine whispers a last breath. Beneath the anxious gaze of his old man, the boy yanks the lever--again, again, again--the piston choking at every turn. Coughing black smoke, failing a heartbeat. The humbled barge surrenders, shoreward--where we disembark—at the doorstep to the village.
A day in destiny’s reach--a path reveals itself in haphazard fragments--as Kashem turns again, before the braid waterfront, negotiating with skippers, as sunrise eclipsed behind anchored bleach men--rat-like they crawl the anchor’s rope. The cargo ship cast a shadow--a chunk torn from the river. From the gunwale, looming with grandeur, an unimaginable tonnage--memories of a bricklayer stir. I rose from the ranks of an apprentice teenager to comprehend. Men emerge from the shadows, an ant’s trail unspooling across the gangway. Six-pound bricks, twelve times loaded, stack to their heads, towering to the tips of fingers that shift the last two bricks’ reach, mythic carriers. Wobbling beneath bare feet, balanced across leaf-sprung paired planks. A spectacle behind Kashem, before his return, resolved.
‘Let's go?’ blurt in mind. “We’re going with the speedboat,” I say. The river opens to a clearing, silt circling at the prow. We slide ashore between two pirogues grinding moored at the lip of a riverbank. Where a fired clay riprap embankment rises--behind a village’s boy balancing on an ill-brick—a question too many eyes ask. Young men, shirts wilting from their shoulders, tucked into lungis drawn tight at the waist, in slip slops. While two bicycles wheel aboard a narrow hull, others shaded by the stilted huts. Thatch roofs offset by a warehouse whitewashed facade, roofed by rusted pitched corrugated iron sheets. The skeletal sentinels studying our approach—clutching equipment cases like foreign relics.
Kashem signals ahead and exchanges a gesture with the helmsman. I disembark last, stepping onto the raw cobble rise. The village males follow us--emerging from a hedgerow of trees. I pause, lift the camera. Frame. Shoot. The antennas atop the obelisk trellis--engineers to reinforce—are too feeble to carry the thread of signal farther toward the sea. Survey complete. We retreat toward base.
A day--en route to a remote village near the edge of the Bay of Bengal--we board with our bags onto the silhouette of a ghost trawler. A room with louvered windows breathes behind a middle-aged man in the wheelhouse, steering us downstream.
Kashem and Ibrahim in our field office--planks swollen, the gunwale blackened with use. They lean over; Ibrahim steadies the paper with one hand while Kashem inches the red planimeter along the map, tracing the topography in slow arcs. Beside them, the makeshift desk exhales--clutches of tools, loops of worn tape, the scholar’s handbag half-open, spilling pencils and pens. While nearby, with a cutter, I shave the eraser and jam the rubber into my ears. Tethered to the river. Catching the compass needle’s drift through the current’s middle--south. Mark the river that refused to stay still.
Until the engine fails--and the pace returns strange. Kashem and Ibrahim's voices carry across the water. From the dark riverbanks, clay figures rise, responding. I ask, “What are they saying?”
Patience thins. Squabbles ripple between us and men onshore. The Kashem turns to me. “They say they have no seaworthy boat.” We drift in. Disembark into a loose pool of waiting men besides cargo rickshaws--their gaze fixed on the next body, the next box to arrive.
With Ibrahim, I hop onto the cargo flatbed--Kashem leading ahead. Spoked wheels spider-crawl. We patter the narrow brick-paved path, threading through a trickle of rickshaw traffic. Behind us, a skeletal dwarf pusher, feet treading on booster blocks--an odd distraction--as wooden planks abrade flesh to pelvic bone. The ride stretches on. I don’t know how long I’ll endure--shifting hips, folding forward, thighs absorbing the pulses. We prolong the dark-clayish estuary embankment, sentient of an upcoming whirlpool--where rivers might forget which way to flow beneath the ocean’s tide.
At the crossroads of the deserted outskirts, I alight, relearning my legs. With Kashem and Ibrahim, we walk the brick-paved path into the village. From every crevice--thatch-shadowed doorways, cracks of homes--young males gather in our wake. They follow in silence. Bare feet. The weight of their gazes hovers my shoulders. In silent orbit, a darkness thickens--suffocating, enclosing us in an arc of masculinity.
I pause before a designated implant of a pylon, lift the camera. The creeping swell: young boys, middle-aged men, elderly drawn in, skirting into a swarm of flickering eyes. They frame the lens, obliterating open space. I need not think--only adjust the focus, set the light, then turn my back on the black crowd of faces, a full 180. They follow, drawn like flies, to the edge of their straw-roof village. When the swarm had shifted before me, my body uncoil. In the light of the lens, I whisk a frame across the bare plot of land--and leave it. Let the construction team come in the aftermath to raise the transmitter tower, foreseen to rise in due course.
Michel’s lifestyle surges ahead--a rhythm I couldn’t perceive beyond the four months I’d granted myself. Aetheria’s aura in a sliver of cloud, unwilling to participate. Her divine hush pressed against the scenes--watching, never yielding. My spirit captures flower girls fleeing my lens, scattering, whisking their beauty behind walls--in fear I might steal their soul.
We leave--village males straddling before a distant palm grove. Their naked footsteps fall off the paved street like husks, slipping into cracks as we pass scattered huts. Kashem and Ibrahim guide us back to a thatched hut--old, frayed--crutch against a hand-smoothed earth wall, juxtaposed with the hollow of a storefront at the crossroads to an aural labyrinth. A still breath in the whirlwind of our arrival. Kashem steps across and down the riverbank, haggling our fate with a boatman.
As Kashem waves us on board, the diesel roars. I leave, wrapped in a sari of warm vermilion, ochre, and quiet earth--folded over her head with grace. In a glimpse, the young woman grips me with her half-smile--neither shy nor performative. A little girl, sleeveless red top, skirt fluttering, barefoot in her mother’s long shadow, wide eyes--the aura of Aetheria’s reminder: 'I exist.' Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a traveler's leather satchel slung beside an elder man--white topi and beard, red kurta, and white scarf--quiet, exalting dignity. Paired with a cloth bag in the mother’s hand: the boat’s drop. . . in their homecoming?
As we drift upstream, retrieving ourselves into the silty swell of the flood tide, a naked riverbank trades for the opposite bank, disappearing beneath a claiming green tight-knit, flocculent, rich hedgerow sanctuary. I feel privileged as Kashem’s voice rises: “The Bengali tiger.” I search for cracks--but find none--for the creature who has earned a zodiacal domain: clumsy hunter, playful prowler, to revere. In the hush beyond the diesel’s roar, Aetheria brushes destiny into the air--skies mirror a Michelangelo, clouds animated by Helios shaping beasts in a zodiac forest.
Finding the Volkswagen minibus, our jockey driver returns us to the ministry’s apartment complex--and a day, in the late afternoon, crossing by ferry the river, oblivious to the fallen curfew, arrives at the Royal Hotel. We step out of the minibus. The first telegram had hovered a shadow over me--layered with quiet reminders. Kashem hands me the next one, which reads: “Due to the Golf War. Immediate repatriation.” No breath to gather my thoughts, no time to wrap up my accomplishment or review the data collected--left in limbo. I head off to the elevator; behind the door to the room, I fall to sleep.
Dressed, I stand on the balcony--sunrise over Khulna--the city speaking to me from the past few weeks. A stillness dawns on me. I respond: Khulna. . . Khulna. . . I learned to hate you and love your girls in the suns’ auras. It's finished. With uncertainty, I turn my back. My mission hovers out there--a spider network yet to realize. I walk out with the weight of my suitcase. From an all-nightclub daze, half-drunk, not finding my step. Outside--the waiting Volkswagen minibus. With the team, I climb on board. The jockey driver set course on Dhaka. We travel besides Helios waving his arc across the sky--unconsciously, I carry a memorandum home.
In closing loop, dropped off at the Sonargaon hotel, I anticipate the obvious: ‘What have you been doing all this time?’ Inside my room, I lift the clamshell of my NEC UltraLite. The liquid crystal display flickers, pages shifting late into the night--until I fall into the arms of Morpheus. In the morning, I walk from the hotel around the block, along the bustling thoroughfare. Besides the splashed wall of the ANZ Grindlays Bank, I step into the lobby, bearing no heed to the joiner’s makeshift workshop planning doors.
The elevator splits its doors, and I take a stance. I step through to the fifth-floor landing--an invitation onward by the paired doors, clearing TRT-Philips’ hum, unfiltered by diplomacy. No greeting. Each man for himself, in a dense, heavy atmosphere--figures mere scattering shadows of the past. Michel, even with his assured footing in geotech, doesn’t escape the mood. His freedom trails loose braids--a lifestyle of prostitutes—and behind his lost regard, churns Anita, his local girlfriend. His repatriation--a conflict with a wife in Paris.
I only fear becoming that character--further estranged from acquaintances and friends, like distancing mountains--their echoes changing as the shades of green fade into deeper grays and blurs. Even family feel lost in one’s reach.
The mistrust looms--an inherent weight from Paris. Amidst zombies walking about my existence, I save my diary file to a floppy diskette and slide it into the IBM-compatible tower at my disposal. Lotus 1-2-3 flickers on. I set the pages and mark the data range. One breadth--click. Holding my breath, I press “F7” for print. My heart throbs in my chest as the adjacent dot matrix printer zips lines across the paper, rippling down in spools. I tear the sheet off, feed it into the facsimile machine--wait until the receipt is sliced clean. Exhausted. Like running a marathon through the wires, reaching Paris. Destiny, eager, let me slip away. For once, it didn’t set a trap. Kind to me--without a glitch--the rarest harmony between competing electronic ghosts. Aetheria wants me home.
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