Cacophonies of Dhaka’s late autumn daylight can be paradoxically as sombre as it was vibrant.
To an untrained observer, the city, with its relentless honking, sprawling roadside vendors, and rumbling, smoke-belching buses, would appear a place too frenetic to entertain anything but exhaustion and monotony.
But for Tousef, someone gifted in the ways of words and grief, the thrumming of the city bore a different cadence—a morose symphony, as though Dhaka itself were breathing out his sadness in waves.
He moved through the streets as if detached from the pavement, just a silhouette among shadows, his heart hollowed by years of isolation, betrayal, and the ceaseless pursuit of understanding what made others’ warmth so elusive to him.
The air was heavy, thick with anticipation; even the sunlight seemed to pale against the city’s grimy façades.
Dhaka had a way of preserving its memories, and today, it felt as though it held something in reserve—a haunting, perhaps, an echo of voices unsung and stories unwritten.
Tousef, alone and despondent, had long imagined himself the tragic hero, as much a phantom as the stories he longed to write.
His friends had been fleeting, mere whispers in a tempestuous night, and lovers, too, had left like sand sifting through his fingers.
Even his family felt spectral—barely more than hollowed ghosts of memory who had dissipated, long before he could fathom the warmth of belonging.
As he wandered toward the edge of a 400-year-old dilapidated Christian cemetery, nestled in the older quarter of Dhaka, he sensed an unfamiliar quiet settle over him.
The leaves of the ancient banyan trees, tinged with the dust of ages, rustled a language of their own.
This part of the city, he had once read, was steeped in legends of the ghastly and the haunted—of souls who never found peace and lingered on as shadows in the day. It was here, they said, that the lost ones roamed, forever caught in a macabre limbo.
In this forlorn setting, Tousef’s footsteps slowed. The memories of his own loneliness returned to him with visceral intensity. The ghosts of broken relationships lingered like shards of glass embedded in his skin, reminders of failed love, friendships that faltered, and family ties that had withered before they could bloom.
He took a seat on a worn-out structure, a skeletal relic of past lives, and meandered into a quietness, each breath seemed to call forth memories, shapes in the air that twisted and writhed in spectral agony before dissipating. He sighed, wondering if he, too, had become one of Dhaka’s haunted.
As he sat there, a figure emerged from the shadows under the tree—a man dressed in an old-fashioned sherwani and cap, his eyes bearing a strange, ethereal gleam, as though they had witnessed aeons.
The stranger’s presence was unnerving; his skin was pale as parchment, his fingers thin and elongated, resembling talons more than flesh.
Tousef’s instinct urged him to leave, but a strange compulsion, perhaps rooted in his writer’s curiosity, kept him still.
“Forgive the intrusion,” the stranger intoned, his voice as soft as the rustling leaves. “But you seem like a man familiar with sorrow.”
A hollow laugh escaped Tousef. “That I am,” he replied, his voice bitter. “Sorrow has been my longest companion. A loyal one, even.”
“Then you know the ache of solitude,” the man murmured, his gaze almost mournful. “To know love as an illusion, warmth as a mirage, and hope as a lie.”
The words pierced Tousef’s soul with unsettling clarity. There was something in this stranger’s tone that felt uncomfortably familiar, as though he were articulating secrets buried too deeply to be uttered aloud. “You didn't introduce yourself,” Tousef managed, his voice faltering.
“My name has been forgotten,” the man replied with a hint of amusement, “just as your happiness has been. I am what remains when companionship fades, when family is nothing more than an idea, and when lovers dissolve into spectres.” He leaned closer, his breath cold, a sharp contrast to the warmth of the day.
“I am the ghost of all that you have lost, the shadow of your own undoing.”
A chill skittered down Tousef’s spine as he looked into the stranger’s eyes—dark, hollow voids that seemed to swallow light. His breath caught in his throat as he realised that the man bore an uncanny resemblance to himself, as though he were looking into a mirror held by time itself, a glimpse of a self consigned to perpetual despair.
“What do you want?” Tousef whispered, his voice barely audible.
“Merely to remind you,” the figure said with a slow, eerie smile, “that you are never truly alone. Even in loneliness, we are bound—to the memories that haunt us, to the sorrows that shape us. And sometimes,” he paused, letting the words hang like the final toll of a death knell, “we are bound to those who have crossed the threshold.”
At that moment, the shadows under the banyan tree shifted, and Tousef saw them—figures faintly familiar yet distorted, like faces glimpsed in nightmares.
Lovers who had left, friends who had faded, even family he barely remembered; their forms hovered, disembodied, their features twisted with expressions of longing, regret, anger, and despair.
They surrounded him, a silent audience to his life’s painful refrain.
Tousef felt his pulse quicken, a visceral panic clawing at him. The man’s figure faded into the gathering shadows, leaving Tousef surrounded by apparitions that mirrored his loneliness, amplifying it until it became a deafening roar in his ears.
His heart raced, but he was paralysed, unable to look away from the spectral faces that floated around him.
Each figure whispered his name, their voices weaving a sinister lullaby that resonated with his deepest fears, his darkest regrets.
He rose from the bench, stumbling backward as the apparitions pressed closer, their hollow eyes filling his vision.
And then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they vanished, leaving Tousef alone, the cemetery silent once more, as if the haunting had been a fevered hallucination.
But the chill lingered, burrowing into his skin, a cruel reminder that he could never truly escape his own loneliness.
Struggling to breathe, he looked down at his trembling hands, stained with dirt from the old mausoleums. His pulse pounded in his ears, and a grim realisation crept into his mind.
The ghosts weren’t real in the corporeal sense, but they were all too real in his heart and mind. Tousef understood, with a clarity that chilled him, that he would carry these spectres, these vestiges of a love-starved existence, wherever he went.
But as he walked away from the cemetery, a shadow other than his own trailed him, lengthening as the October sun began to dip below the skyline, and morphed into silhouette of something else.
Dhaka’s haunted wasn’t just the city, but himself—an echo of despair, drifting forever among the city’s ceaseless chaos.
