PART 2 EIGHT In the hours that followed, headlines screamed, advisors, king's party NCP, their street fighting brotherhoods and influencers ─ home and abroad ─ scrambled like startled crows of Dhaka. Spaces in prisons, emptied since July by convicted Islamists and criminals, were now being filled with detainees from the opposition Awami League. The grass pellets of the plain-lands suddenly began revealing deceased bodies, hidden among small bushes and gardens — like decayed morals pouring out from a collapsing social status quo. The air felt thick. Not with dust, nor with smog, but with something slower, heavier. A silence pressed against people's skin. Tension stirred underneath, slipped between tea stalls in narrow lanes, breathed across newsroom floors in Kawran Bazaar, leaned against embassy gates in Baridhara, and spilled like floating things from a vandalised fair of the new year into the restless currents of social media. It threaded from the heart of the Delta to places the stars barely knew.
Something quieter set in. Something had shifted. Something had begun. Between official denials and unofficial panics, I found myself stepping out of the noise and into something else entirely. A slower current. A deeper breath to pause. The kind of pause that comes just before time changes shape─softly, almost imperceptibly─and no one notices until the change is visible. In Delta, that March morning was warmer─the kind where rickshaw bells ring like distant memories, and in the gloomy air of dawn, people begin to miss the sight of tea steam rising as it does in winter ─ like incense offered before a headless god, a haunting symbol of the ongoing wave of temple attacks across the country. But here, far away, the cold made a different kind of presence. I cracked open the French window of a flat the Swedes call a lägenhet, and an emboldened icy air froze me almost instantly. My hot lal cha was moments away from freezing.…
