The cultural officer at the Bangladesh consulate in Kolkata sounded almost indignant as he leafed through my passport.

“You have been to so many countries,” he said reprovingly. “But not Bangladesh right next door?”

My mother felt the same way. She had stories of sailing down the Suez Canal, of being violently sick on the Bay of Biscay, of an ice palace in Interlaken, Switzerland. But she always regretted that she had never made it to Bangladesh next door.

We had no pressing reason to go there. As an old born-and-bred Kolkata family we did not have any “homeland” nostalgia for “East Bengal”. To be honest, I had little curiosity either. Even Nepal felt more exotic than a country full of people speaking Bangla.

Yet I was still not prepared to board an airplane and then land in a city where my mother tongue was everywhere — billboards, licence plates, airport announcements. When the young man who came to pick me up at the airport asked if I wanted to go to the jadughar , I looked at him in wonder. Jadughar — a house of magical wonders. I had not heard that word for ‘museum’ in years. There was an intimacy to that encounter that was hard to explain, but it touched me to the core. I went back every year after that first visit in 2012.

Each time I brought back new memories. The tree-lined Jessore Road made famous by Alan Ginsberg’s poem. The spicy, flaky mashed fish bhorta . The ethno-chic of stores like Aarong and Aranya. Crossing the vast Padma by boat and the little stalls on the riverside selling fried hilsa. The insane traffic snarls in Dhaka. The warmth of strangers who opened up their homes and laid out great feasts. A ritzy rooftop party in Dhanmondi where the bartender gave me his business card. “That’s one of the most important cards you can get here,” laughed a friend. While the gap between haves and have-nots was gaping, there was something I had not expected — a people’s intensely felt relationship with their own history. Even our five-star hotel had a place in it. Foreign journalists were thrown out of Bangladesh from these rooms during the 1971 war. One hid on the premises to report the war.

Now we see the darker side of that relationship. Some in Bangladesh seem hell-bent on hacking that history with machetes. Atheist bloggers. Hindu priests. Liberal academics. Gay activists. Diners at a restaurant. All murdered, and a government that seems to be largely in denial about the monster in its midst. Meanwhile the tragedies keep coming closer and closer to the lives of people I know.

Friends on Facebook post videos of a Bangladeshi woman who died at Holey Café. The gay activist hacked to death was a friend of friends. My friends say that for the first time they feel scared for their own lives. Exclusive addresses in Gulshan and Dhanmondi are not protection enough. An Indian friend posts her relief that her Bangladeshi friend who regularly went to the café had not visited that day. There was an intimacy in my encounter with Bangladesh that I did not expect. Now that intimacy feels dangerous.

The last time I went to Dhaka in 2015 the government was about to hang leaders convicted in the war crimes tribunal. Strikes were routine and went on for days. Facebook and WhatsApp had been suspended. A military vehicle escorted us from the literary festival to the hotel and back. It all felt surreal. But a friend was determined to see the silver lining. “At least thanks to the strike, the traffic is moving,” he laughed with typical Dhaka resilience, cynical yet unflappable.

That silver lining seems harder to grasp now. I remember the Facebook page of a group called Salauddiner Ghoda (The horsemen of Salauddin), reading the jubilant messages exulting over the murders of the gay activists, the commenters cheering them on. I was stunned at how ordinary their profile pictures were — in a park with their children, at a restaurant with friends.

I could have met these people on the grounds of the Bangla Academy in Dhaka just as some of the “elite” Holey Café attackers could easily have been its patrons.

When I see the gory pictures of the dead, hacked to death, I remember one photograph I saw at the Liberation War museum in Dhaka, in a lovely old two-storey house with red oxide floors. It was a clandestinely shot photograph of Rafiq, one of the language martyrs of 1952 — a bullet through his head, shards of his skull scattered around. I recoiled in shock, but now at a time where many are being hacked to death, that bullet almost feels civilised in its brutal efficiency.

Bangladesh has survived many tribulations in its short history. This too, hopefully, shall pass. I keep remembering the harried immigration official at the chaotic Dhaka airport. “What do you do?” he barked. A journalist friend had been refused entry recently. “Writer,” I said with some trepidation. He looked up. “Writer?” He broke into a smile. “Novels? Do you write in Bangla?”

I confessed I did not. But he still allowed me in with the advice that I should try writing in Bangla next. I had never had an encounter like that at immigration before. That seems like a distant daydream now. My mother does not speak about wanting to go to Dhaka again but I hold that immigration official close in my memory. I would like to think that he still has a passion for the novel in this age of machetes.

Sandip Roy is the author of Don’t Let Him Know. He lives in Kolkata

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