Dhaka: The city we never want to return to, but always do

There's no love lost between me and the city I came from. 

A small town where the air is thick with gossip, politics, and dust. Everyone knows everyone, and no one ever forgets how stupid you looked fifteen years ago.

It's like a monument to the full catalogue of your childhood trauma.

It's the kind of place where nothing ever changes; except the roads, which only get worse, and routinely disappear under the slightest rainfall.

Here, time stretches, people shrink, and all your dreams feel like they're sitting in a waiting room with no appointment.

So I left. Ran, even, for Dhaka. Thought I'd never look back.

But I hate Dhaka even more.

And yet, here I am again, returning to Dhaka after Eid, after a few short days of pretend peace, boarding a bus for the journey back into the belly of the beast. 

Not because I want to. But because I have to.

This year, the one-way journey from Dhaka to our respective hometowns before Eid took 12 to 18 hours for many of us. I mean, for those of us who could, at least and at last, secure a ticket.

A hellish crawl through highways choked with endless traffic jams, broken-down vehicles, and the occasional roadside tragedy.

A journey that should have taken four to six hours ended up taking almost an entire day and night.

We sat sweating beside crying children and coughing elders, eating stale jhal-muri, and staring at red veins on Google Maps that refused to turn green.

But we endured it. Because staying in Dhaka during Eid was never a choice. Just like staying in our hometowns after the vacation isn't a choice either.

We must come back to Dhaka. Broken, but we must come back. Even though Dhaka doesn't want us back.

The OG Dhakaiyas love their "Faaka Dhaka"—those rare few days when the roads clear, the city exhales, and silence falls like mercy. 

They post bird's-eye views of empty intersections like it's some utopia. "Dhaka now does feel like Europe," they say with the same energy as hero Riaz, sipping iced coffees with no queues.

And sincerely, we too don't want to bother them again with our return. But we do come back. Because life happens only in Dhaka. And for many of us, it only happens here.

But what is Dhaka now? Certainly not a city for people. It belongs to machines, bots, and, of course, autorickshaws.

Humans? We're background noise. An inconvenience.

We dodge traffic like dancers in a war zone, speak in filters, and live on borrowed time. The footpaths are gone. The lungs are full. The pace is claustrophobic.

Dhaka is not a city. It's a system. A trap. A machine that feeds itself with our hours, our bones, our agony.

And what do we even get in return? Not joy. Not meaning. Certainly not rest.

There is nothing remarkable here, except noise and hunger. Nothing to enjoy except, maybe, the Eid cinemas.

Ah yes, "Now showing in your nearest theatre." What a joke. Because in three-fourths of the country, there is no nearest theatre. They've shut down, converted, collapsed. 

But the movie promos still cling to the lingo. Because the film industry, like everything else, lives and dies in Dhaka.

Dhaka hoards the spotlight. It hoards tragedy, too. 

A flood in the north? Barely a news blip. A fire in the south? Silence. But let a wall crack in Gulshan or a tree fall in Dhanmondi, and suddenly it's breaking news.

It's as though everything that matters in Bangladesh must happen in Dhaka. Everything else is a footnote. A statistic. A blur. 

This city doesn't just run the country. It eats it. And still, we return. With blistered backs and empty wallets, we return. 

Not because we love Dhaka. Not because Dhaka deserves us. But because we are caught between two places that will never make space for us.

Our hometowns have no work. Dhaka has no soul. We simply go where the machine tells us to go. And we move when it tells us to move.

Until, maybe one day, it stops us permanently—on a highway, in a fire, under a collapsed building, or in a forgotten corner of a forgotten news cycle.

Because Dhaka is where life happens, yes. But it's also where life stops. And in between, we do the only thing we can do: Survive.