I once met an elderly Bangladeshi man in Springfield, Virginia, whose presence seemed to carry the weight of a homeland left behind but never forgotten. As I stepped out of my car near the Alif Laila Tavern, he looked at me and asked in Bangla, “Who are you?”
Half-jokingly, I said I did not know.
“We came from this soil, and we will return to it. So, we are children of the same soil, are we not?” he said, smiling faintly.
He motioned for me to follow him. We walked to a modest but tastefully decorated flower shop a little farther down the street. He led me into an even smaller room, which served as a storage space and had only two chairs.
“Bosho,” he said, pointing to one of them. A few minutes later, he brought a small hookah and then cardamom tea with ginger cookies. The warm aroma and the quiet hum of the shop immediately put me at ease. We shared small jokes, laughed softly at nothing in particular, and a gentle connection began taking shape—unexpected, yet strangely familiar.
“So, what do you do?” he asked.
“I write,” I said.
“Oh, one of those,” he sighed.
“How did you know I spoke Bengali?”
“I saw you at a Bangladeshi pizza shop, nodding along to a Bangla song.”
He introduced himself as Moni Mian. I offered him my old Dhaka nickname: “Anu.”
“Oh, everything is topsy-turvy,” he said. “A non-Bengali has a Bengali nickname, and Bengalis call themselves Tom, Liz, and Ronnie.”
“Who calls themselves that?” I asked.
“My children,” he said. Then, a little abruptly: “I want to know what’s wrong with us Muslims.”
“I’m not the right person,” I said. “I don’t know much about Islam.”
“This is the problem with Pakistanis,” he said. “As soon as you see a Bengali, you assume you can teach us Islam. I already know enough.”
What reflecting on Christmas celebrations as an immigrant parent taught me
He explained he had participated in the liberation movement and had no sympathy for Islamists. “But I love Islam,” he added quietly.
Over the next several weeks, we met often. Sometimes he invited me to his home, showing me his plants and the carefully arranged decorations that reminded him of his wife and of Bangladesh. Every piece had its own little story.
Once, he brought me “Patali gur and mishti doi” from a Bangladeshi shop. We joked about which song we would hum to his plants, and he laughed at my mispronunciation of Bangla words. Little by little, the connection deepened.
One afternoon, in the little room at the flower shop—opened by his wife but now managed by his daughter—he recited a poem by Farhad Mazhar:
“O Lord, my girlfriend does not wear a burqa.
The faithful never look at a woman’s body with evil eyes.
Only the lechers and unfaithful demand a burqa.
Let Allah put a black blindfold on their impure sight.”
Then he hummed, “Ami oi noeone noen dia…” and his eyes filled with tears. I joked about my inability to sing; he chuckled.
“Are you afraid of death?” he asked suddenly.
“Perhaps not afraid, but it’s not a comforting thought.”
“The more attached you are to this world,” he said, “the more difficult it is to die.”
Later he played a Bollywood song on his phone—“Yara sili, sili…”—and muttered to himself: “We were together for forty years, and then she left forever.”
I tried to lighten the moment by mentioning Gulzar, who wrote the song. He nodded and added, “He married a Bengali woman.” Then, almost as if thinking aloud: “If Punjabi and Bengali Hindus can live peacefully, why couldn’t the Muslims? Why did you kill so many Bengalis?”
Before I could respond, a young woman entered. “Hello, Liz,” he said. Then, turning to me: “This is Lailun Nehar, my daughter.”
She later walked me to my car, explaining her father had bipolar disorder that worsened after her mother’s death. I told her that everything he said made perfect sense to me.
Our meetings continued in their unpredictable way — sometimes at his home, sometimes at the flower shop, and once again at the tavern, where he insisted that I share a cup of green tea. He often returned to his favorite subject, the national anthem of Bangladesh.
“The Pakistanis wanted us to forget this poem. They banned it,” he said.
“That was foolish,” I replied. “Tagore wrote it in 1905 against the first partition of Bengal. It ends with a condemnation of dividing a land.”
“Don’t bring politics into this,” he said, then softened. “We in the subcontinent have suffered enough. I was born an Indian, became an East Pakistani, then a Bangladeshi, and now an American.”
Will artificial intelligence help preserve endangered languages?
Some days later, I saw them at a South Asian fair. His daughter recognized me immediately and waved, but he looked at me with polite unfamiliarity, unable to place me. The moment stung gently but also made me smile. Even when memory faltered, our bond—built over weeks of tea, stories, laughter, songs, and shared silences—remained real to me.
A few weeks later, Liz called, crying: “He is dead… my Baba.”
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” I recited. “When?”
“I don’t know. He was fine last night. This morning, he was gone.”
She asked if I knew anyone at the local mosque. I said I did and promised to help with the burial.
When the time came, I entered his room one last time. I recited the “kalima” and quietly hummed “Amar Shonar Bangla.” Then I took a small handful of soil from the Gandharaj pot in his backyard—his living connection to Bangladesh—and touched it to his forehead.
Leaving the room, I whispered a silent farewell. His presence stayed with me: a bridge across time, memory, and the enduring ache of a homeland carried in the heart. The sense of attachment that grew between us in those few weeks—through stories, tea, grief, humor, and shared humanity—remains one of the quiet miracles of my immigrant life.
Anwar Iqbal is a seasoned journalist, author and poet based in Washington D.C. He has worked for some of the leading news organizations.
