I swear by my dark-skinned mother’s milk that Dhaka has three-thousand-and-three-hundred mysterious names, and that everyone from Ginsberg to Günter Grass has misspelled Dhaka at least once.
I swear by my black father’s blood that everyone—from the Sena Kings of Vikrampur and the rulers of Sonargaon, to the Turks and the Pathans, to the Mughals and the British and the Pakistani—sweated the dark details of your three-thousand-and-three-hundred contours and curves, never figuring out who the hell you were, Dhaka, although many of them sized you up, and even measured your black chest, waist, hips, and height.
I swear by the black village of my birth that, digressed by the smell of London, Paris, and New York, your urban poets misread your motives and distort your profile, losing sight of at least eighty-five thousand villages that keep sticking out like night-black veins and arteries all over your body, your snazzy suit and pointed shoes and silk socks notwithstanding.
I swear by my black grandfather’s prayer-mat that parables and paradoxes make up your anatomy and your allegory alike. You run run run on your three-thousand-and-three-hundred legs and leap faster than those horses galloping away in action movies or fairy tales. Yet you often run out of steam, your eyes glaze over with boredom, and you keep limping like Kallyanpur’s Kanu Fakir beat under the burden of a begging day.
I swear by my black uncle’s black beads of sweat that your black slums and your white skyscrapers together keep writing your favorite epigram: “progress is history’s dirty joke.”
I swear by my black teacher’s black umbrella that a bearded man obsessed with unmasking capitalism—Karl Marx or plain Charlie, as some call him—wrote a missive on your tragic “muslin” to make the point that London is fat and overweight because you are skinny and underweight. And words burst into black flames as Charlie rubbed his conceptual blocs.
I swear in the name of black land and black labor, in the name of your fifty-two bazaars and fifty-three lanes multiplying for twelve-hundred years since your Kamrup days, in the name of Raja Ballal Sen’s Dhakesshwari temple, in the name of Islam Khan’s Jahangirnagar, in the name of 1952 and 1971, in the name of those dead metaphors only the dull prose of daily living can resurrect, in the name of those stories my grandmother told me, and in the name of my ancestral blood soaking the kernels of your paddy, that your admirers and detractors alike take advantage of your monuments and massacres, your moods and mythologies, your processions and posters, and your three-thousand-and-three-hundred wounds—whether you conceal them or reveal them.
And I swear in the name of your wounds that they keep bleeding and catching the color of black fire from Lakshmi Bazaar to Tanti Bazaar, from Gulshan to Gulistan, from Mirpur to Mohammadpur.
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