u/Dr_AK_Myst

I work on the sixth floor of a building with mirrored windows that make the sky look dirtier than it is. I am a junior analyst, and I consider myself an ambitious individual. More like ‘quietly ambitious’, in the embarrassing way people are when they still believe good work gets noticed. I stay late. I reply quickly. I volunteer for things nobody wanted.

What gets noticed in this place, I learned, is usefulness. People can smell that from three cubicles away. I mean, everyone likes a useful guy in the workplace. Maybe that’s the reason everyone likes Rafiq.

Rafiq is our senior manager. He always wears pale shirts with the sleeves rolled exactly twice, the kind of man who remembers your coffee order and whose mother was ill and whose team lead was quietly trying to push you out. He has a lightness to him. He could walk into a tense meeting and make everyone feel they had been overreacting. And I learned that first-hand six months ago.

It was a day I made a mistake in a client model. Not catastrophic, but close. A director named Farhana decided it wasn't incompetence, but pure dishonesty. The meeting where she said it was small, which made it worse. Small meetings give you nowhere to hide.

Rafiq was there because his team had briefly touched the project. He didn't have to say anything. But he did.

He leaned back, crossed one ankle over the other, and said: ‘No. That's not what happened.’

Then he walked them through it. Calmly. With dates. With email timestamps. Just enough criticism of my carelessness to sound objective, but not enough to let anyone call me malicious. The guy saved my ass when he didn’t have to.

Afterward, he handed me a paper cup of coffee in the lift lobby.

‘Careful next time.’

‘I will.’

‘I know.’

He smiled and never mentioned it again. That was part of why I trusted him.

The Tuesday he asked me for the favor, it was raining hard enough that the windows looked like they were melting. He appeared at my desk at 4:12 and walked me to the narrow corridor by the stairwell where people went to take personal calls. It smelled of damp carpet and old paint.

‘I need to ask something slightly awkward.’

‘Okay.’

‘Thursday evening. If anyone asks, tell them we had dinner after work.’

He rubbed the back of his neck. It looked like nervousness, but it wasn’t. His breathing didn't change. No sweat at his hairline. He wasn't waiting for my answer the way anxious people wait. He was waiting the way a man waits when he already knows what you're going to say. Like someone who had done the math on me long before he walked to my desk.

‘Chill. It’s nothing dramatic. Just a sensitive personal matter.’

I have worked in the office for over two years, so I understood what was being implied:

Affair.

It was disappointing, not horrifying. It is the kind of small moral stain the world runs on.

‘What time?’  I asked.

‘Seven-thirty. Dinner nearby. I dropped you home after.’

He named a restaurant two blocks away. We'd both been there with teams before.

I nodded.

‘I knew you'd agree, my good man’ he said.

I remember feeling pleased. That is the part I hate most.

Weeks passed. No wife called. No furious woman appeared at reception. Rafiq remained Rafiq- defending juniors in budget meetings, bringing pastries, saying ‘good work’ when he passed my desk. The lie dissolved. I forgot it the way you forget small debts once they've been paid.

Then a detective came to our office last week. He wore a navy blue shirt and dark trousers, with shoes that were recently polished but walked in rain. Tired in the administrative way of men who spend their days asking questions nobody wants to answer.

There were four of us in the small conference room: Detective Hasan, the HR business partner, Rafiq, and me.

The detective thanked us for our time. He was reconstructing the movements of a missing woman. Last seen Thursday evening, near our building.

He placed a printed photograph on the table.

Young. Dark hair. A small mole beside her left eyebrow. A smile like someone had said something just before pressing the button.

‘Did either of you see her?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied. Because that was the truth.

Rafiq shook his head slowly. ‘I'm sorry. I have never seen this person.’

That ‘I'm sorry’ landed strangely. You don't apologize for not recognizing a stranger.

‘Mr. Rafiq.’ The detective checked his notes. ‘We understand you were in the area that evening.’

He gave the date.

The date entered the room like cold air. My body remembered before my mind did.

Rafiq turned slightly toward me. Not enough for the detective to notice, or maybe enough, and simply waited. Not pleading. Not warning. Just waiting, with that same patient stillness from the stairwell.

‘Yes,’ Rafiq said. ‘I had a late dinner nearby. With him.’

The detective turned to me.

This was muscle memory. The lie already had walls, a roof, furniture. All I did was step inside.

‘Yes,’  I said.

Seven-thirty. The restaurant. He dropped me home around nine.

‘Thank you,’ Detective Hasan said. ‘That's helpful.’

That word has lived in me ever since.

In the corridor afterward, Rafiq caught my eye. He held my gaze for exactly one second longer than relief would require. Not threatening. Not grateful. Just measuring*.* Measuring like a man confirming that an investment had performed as expected.

Then he nodded and walked away.

Two days later, a coffee appeared on my desk. Americano, no sugar. My order. There was no note. None was required, to be honest.

Later that afternoon, the HR business partner sent a thread to the floor. It was a soft, distressed paragraph about how awful the whole situation was, how she hoped it would be resolved soon, how she trusted everyone was doing okay. It was the kind of formal email that you skim through lazily while paying just enough attention to not miss anything important. One sentence of the email made me chuckle-

‘Let us all pray and hope that the detective does not return to our premises again.’

This was oddly specific for an HR email. She has been legitimately spooked by the detective. I found it oddly amusing.

Twelve people replied with varying lengths of corporate sympathy. That was enough bootlicking for the day, so I didn’t feel the need to reply.

Rafiq did reply, at 4:12, with just two words:

‘He will.’

Nobody asked what he meant. I think nobody wanted to.

That brings me to what happened two days back, when I had to access the Shared Drive before a client meeting. I had a legitimate reason to be in his files. He had forwarded me a folder link before the meeting saying- ‘Pull the Q3 deck, I'll be five minutes late.’

The folder opened and I started looking for the deck he asked for. I didn’t know exactly where the file was, so I started browsing the entire directory. Nested inside, between two project folders, was a third one. No label. Just a date range.

I should have closed it. But I didn't.

The folder had photographs. Dozens of them. Women, with different faces, in different settings- a street corner, a restaurant window, a parking lot at dusk. None of them looking at the camera. All of them unaware. The angles too low, too patient, too precise to be accidental. The kind of pictures that make you think that these were clicked without consent.

I didn't recognize any of these women.

Until I did.

Round face. Clear skin. A small mole beside her left eyebrow.

I closed the folder. I closed the laptop.

I sat at my desk for what felt like a long time, looking at my own hands.

Then I heard Rafiq's voice in the corridor. He was slightly out of breath, mid-laugh at something someone had said. I opened a spreadsheet and stared at it until he walked past.

‘Did you find it, good man?’ he called over.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I knew you would’

He didn't know exactly what I had found. Or maybe he did, and he still wasn't afraid. I still don't know which is worse.

I was in the parking lot the following evening when Detective Hasan called.

‘A few follow-up questions. Routine. Nothing to worry about.’

Through the windshield, the office building glowed in neat rows. Somewhere on the sixth floor, Rafiq was probably still at his desk.

Hasan told me they had checked the restaurant. The staff remembered Rafiq on Thursday evening at seven-thirty, having dinner with a man who matched my description. Rafiq was apparently a regular customer, so everyone remembered him vividly. My account was consistent.

'That's all we needed. Thank you for your time.'

I said something. I don't remember what. I sat with the phone in my lap and waited to feel relieved. The feeling didn't come.

My phone vibrated on my lap. I pulled it away.

RAFIQ CALLING.

I didn't answer. Another call came in. Then a third.

I don't know why the restaurant confirmation made everything feel worse instead of better. I've been trying to work that out for hours and I still can't. Maybe you can.

I was clean, at least in the eyes of the police. But my conscience wasn’t. I thought about the woman with the round face and a small mole beside her left eyebrow. I thought about the folder, the date range, the dozens of women, none of them looking at the camera. And I thought about how the restaurant confirmed it, too cleanly and too readily, as if someone there had also been waiting to be asked…

I had to make a decision, and the choices arranged themselves with the clean cruelty of a spreadsheet.

Confirm the alibi, and it becomes permanent. No longer muscle memory. A deliberate choice, made with full knowledge of that folder and every face inside it.

Retract it, and I become the man who gave a false alibi in a missing persons case. The one who waited. The one who accessed a colleague's files and said nothing.

The security barrier lifted. I had two options:

Left towards the main road. Towards the police station.

Right towards home.

The car behind me tapped its horn once.

I turned right.

I've started timing how long it takes me to stop thinking about her face. The record is nine minutes. I set it this morning on the drive in. I don't think I'll beat it today.

I don't know why I'm posting this. That's not true. I know exactly why.

I don't know if Rafiq hurt her. I don't know if she's alive. I don't know what those photographs mean or how many folders there are or how long the date range goes back.

What I know is that I turned right. And I know what turning right means.

If you're reading this and you think I should go to the police- I know. I already know. Tell me something I can actually do something with. Tell me how to walk into that station and explain why I lied twice, why I waited, why I opened that folder, why I turned right when I could have turned left.

Tell me how to do that without destroying the only life I have carefully built.

Tell me.

I'll wait…

 

So Kaarina Kaisar passed away a couple of days ago. I was never really a fan tbh. Never followed her closely. But I did watch 36-24-36 and genuinely liked her performance in it, and caught a few of her videos on Daekho. Some of her content was a bit cringe to me personally, but compared to a lot of her peers in the Bangladeshi social media space, she always seemed pretty harmless.

Which is why the sheer number of people seemingly celebrating her death left me genuinely perplexed.

Now, I get it to some extent. She promoted an unhealthy lifestyle with the excessive eating and the lack of fitness focus. That's a fair criticism. Her habits may well have been a contributing factor to her illness and eventual death, something I understand as a doctor. But here's the thing guys- death is predetermined ! My own father was a military man who maintained a disciplined lifestyle for nearly 30 years. He still died of cancer. Life doesn't always reward the "right" choices with longevity.

So shouldn't the sight of a 30-year-old dying of liver failure make us reflect on our own mortality rather than reach for the keyboard to mock her?

And then there's the "Alhamdulillah" crowd. I genuinely don't know how to process this. Celebrating someone's death with "Alhamdulillah" simply wrong in Islam. I would maybe understand the reaction if we were talking about someone like Doland Scum or Satan Yahoo, you know, the 'villains' of our society. But a 30-year-old content creator from Dhaka? Really?

And the justification is always some variation of "she's going to hell anyway." Okay fine, but did you receive your confirmed ticket to Jannah? Can you guarantee your own place in paradise?

Because the same religion you're invoking to condemn her tells us stories of thieves, bandits, and even a prostitute who were forgiven by Allah purely on the basis of intention and a single moment of sincere mercy. The Quran itself warns us that people we consider the most outwardly pious will be exposed as Munafiqs on the Day of Judgement and sent to hell. I am not an Islamic scholar by any stretch, but even basic common sense tells me I'd rather spend my energy worrying about my own Iman than passing verdict on someone who can no longer even defend herself.

She has passed. Allah is the best and only judge of her actions. Not me, not you, not any of us!

To be clear, this post isn't really about 'Kaarina Kaiser'. You can replace her name with anyone. This is about a pattern I keep seeing where a vocal minority on social media who treat the death of public figures (especially "controversial" ones) as some kind of validation exercise, a chance to feel morally superior, while completely ignoring the basic Islamic principle of humility in the face of death.

What goes on in the minds of these people? I genuinely want to understand. Because from where I'm standing, mocking someone's death while being completely oblivious to your own mortality is one of the most self-unaware things a person can do.

ETA: Not looking for a debate about whether Kaarina was a "good" or "bad" person. That's kind of missing the point entirely.

My therapist said I need to write this down somewhere. Somewhere outside my own head. She originally wanted me to share it with friends and family, you know, the usual advice. Talk to people who know you. Let them carry some of the weight.

The problem is, I don't have much family left to call. Not after what happened. And the friends I did tell, the ones I trusted enough to sit down with and actually explain, they laughed. Not cruelly. Just the way people laugh when they're uncomfortable and don't know what else to do. The way people laugh when they've decided, before you even finish talking, that what you're saying cannot possibly be true.

So here I am. Talking to strangers on a website I don't understand, because apparently that's what's left.

I should probably give some context. That's what you're supposed to do, right? Set the scene. Tell you where I'm from, when this happened, what the place looked like. You know… the district, the approximate year, how far the village was from the nearest town. But I don’t feel like it, because what's the point, exactly? You won't know the place. The name won't mean anything to you. So let's just say: it was a rural area in Bangladesh. It was the kind of place where the land is so flat you can see rain coming from three kilometers away, and everyone knows everyone's business, and a new pond is a cause for quiet celebration.

In our area, ponds don't stay unused for long. If there's land, someone will dig. Sometimes for fish farming, sometimes irrigation, sometimes just because stagnant water feels more natural than dry soil. A pond makes the place feel complete. So when the empty plot behind our house was finally bought and cleared, no one was surprised.

I had just finished college in Canada and come back home. From Vancouver to a village… I know how that sounds. The plan was to stay at my father's until I found something stable in Dhaka. A few months, maybe. Just until I got my footing.

My father was happy I was there. More than happy. He'd been, I don't know how to put this,  quieter… since my mother died. Like something in him had just turned down. Having me around seemed to help. We didn't talk about it directly. We just made tea and sat on the roof together and watched the workers dig.

It was a good few weeks, honestly. Peaceful in a way I hadn't felt in years. I was sending out CVs, half-heartedly arguing with strangers on Discord, drinking too much tea. Normal stuff.

The digging started in late November. It was dry season, the ground cuts easier then. At first, everything was normal. Excavators during the day, workers smoking and talking loudly, piles of wet earth rising on the sides. By evening it went quiet, leaving just a wide raw pit slowly pulling in groundwater from below.

But by the fourth day, the workers started leaving early.

Not all at once. One or two at a time.

No arguments. No complaints.

They just… stopped coming back after lunch.

My father noticed first. "Strange," he said. "They're being paid daily. No one leaves work like that."

The contractor came the next morning with new workers. By afternoon, same thing.

I started watching from the roof. You could see straight into the pit from there. It was deeper than most ponds I'd seen.

Almost too deep.

The sides were cut steep, and the bottom stayed darker than it should have, even under direct sunlight.

One worker stood near the edge for a long time, just staring down. Another came up behind him and asked something. The first one didn't respond. Didn't even turn his head.

That night, I heard splashing. Not loud. Not like someone swimming. More like… something shifting its weight in shallow water.

It was strange, because the pond wasn't even filled yet. I looked out the window, but no one there. Just the dark outline of the pit.

And the sound stopped the moment I opened the window.

The next morning, one of the workers didn't show up. No call, no explanation. The contractor shrugged. "People quit. It happens." But I noticed he didn't make eye contact when he said it. Just looked back at the pit.

By the end of the week, the pond hit groundwater fully. Water started seeping in from below.

But it didn't look right.

It wasn't muddy the way fresh pond water should be.

It was too clear.

Clear enough that you could almost see the bottom.

Almost.

That's when people started talking. Not loudly. Just small conversations across fences, nothing you could pin down. Someone said the land used to sit lower than everything around it- a natural hollow that never fully dried. Someone else said there had been something built there once, years ago, but no one could agree on what. Or when. Or why it was torn down.

I didn't tell my father what I'd experienced. I'm not sure why. Maybe I didn't want to worry him. He hadn't been well physically, and he was still carrying a lot since my mother passed. I told myself I'd mention it if it happened again.

And it did happen again…

My father stopped coming to the rooftop around this time. Blood pressure, he said. The stairs were getting to him. I didn't push it. I told myself it made sense. He was old. He was tired. That's all I could see. Or maybe it was all that I chose to see.

But I do think about it now. The way he stopped eating much at dinner. The way he'd go quiet sometimes mid-conversation, like he was listening for something. I noticed all of it. I filed it under 'he's getting older' and moved on.

That's what hindsight does to you. You replay every moment you dismissed. Every door you didn't open. Every question you didn't ask. And you weren't even doubting yourself back then, because why would you? You were the educated one. The rational one. The one who had been to Canada and knew better.

I didn't know anything.

Three nights later, I heard it again.

The splashing.

Closer this time.

Not from the center of the pond.

From the edge nearest our house.

I didn't open the window.

I just listened.

There was a second sound now. Underneath the water sound. A soft dragging. Like something being pulled across wet soil.

The next morning, there were marks near the edge.

Long grooves in the mud.

Not footprints. Too wide. Too smooth.

As if something heavy had been pulled out of the water and across the bank.

And the grooves just… stopped. A few meters from our wall.

I didn't tell anyone about the marks. I just stood there for a few minutes trying to come up with a reasonable explanation, went back inside and made tea. That was my response. Tea.

It was the neighbor from the house to our left who finally said something out loud. Noorjahan Begum. She was in her seventies, had lived on that street her entire life, and was not the type of woman who spoke unless she had something worth saying. She caught me at the gate that afternoon as I was coming back from the pharmacy. No dramatic approach. No lowered voice. She just stopped next to me like we were continuing a conversation we'd already started.

"Fill it back in," she said.

I asked her what she meant.

She nodded toward the pond. "That plot has been empty for forty years. There's a reason for that." She looked at me the way old people sometimes look at young people. It was not unkindly, but it carried a specific kind of tiredness. "Tell whoever bought it to fill it back in. Pay them if you have to."

I asked her what was in it.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Something that was sleeping."

That’s all she said. She went back inside before I could say anything else. No folklore. No story. No explanation of what it was or where it came from. Just that one sentence and a closed door.

I stood at the gate for a while after she left.

Then I went inside and told myself she was just a superstitious old woman. That the grooves in the mud were probably from the construction equipment. That the sounds at night were frogs, or pipes, or the kind of thing your brain invents when you're half-asleep in a new environment.

I didn't tell my father what she said.

I didn't tell my father a lot of things.

Things shifted quietly after that. The way things do when you don't want to admit they're shifting.

My father started sleeping during the day. Not napping, but actually sleeping. Door closed, curtains drawn. The kind of heavy sleep you don't wake from easily. I'd check on him at noon and he'd be completely out. I told myself he was tired. He was recovering. Old men sleep.

But at night, he was awake.

I'd get up for water at two or three in the morning, and see the light under his door. Sometimes I'd hear him moving around. Slow, unhurried footsteps. Not pacing. More like he was just... repositioning. Finding the right spot to stand.

I knocked once. Asked if he was okay.

"Fine," he said. "Go back to sleep."

His voice was normal. That's the thing I keep coming back to. His voice was always completely normal.

He stopped eating much around this time. Not dramatically, though. I mean, he'd sit at the table, move food around, take a few bites. I asked if his appetite was off. He said he just wasn't very hungry. I made lighter meals. He'd eat a little and thank me and that was that. He was losing weight, but slowly enough that I kept finding reasons not to measure it.

Then came the night I found the footprints.

I was up late preparing for a remote job interview that I had the next morning. It was around 2 when I went to the kitchen for water. The back door was unlocked. I was certain I'd locked it before bed. I'd started doing that deliberately, without fully admitting to myself why. I stood there for a moment, looking at the handle.

Then I looked down.

Wet footprints on the tile. Leading from the back door toward the hallway.

Toward my father's room.

I told myself he'd gone out for air. That he'd stepped in a puddle near the door. That there was a perfectly ordinary explanation and I was sleep-deprived.

I wiped them up. I went back to bed.

I didn't sleep.

A week later, I woke at around three in the morning to silence. Not normal silence, but the kind where you realize a sound you'd gotten used to has stopped. I lay there for a moment, working out what was missing. Then I realized, it was my father's footsteps. The soft repositioning sounds from his room that I'd gotten so used to I'd stopped registering them.

His room was quiet.

I got up. His door was open. The room was empty.

I found him outside.

He was standing at the edge of the pond in the dark, perfectly still, looking down into the water. No shoes. No phone. He'd come out in the clothes he slept in. The ground was damp from earlier rain and his feet were sinking slightly into the mud but he didn't seem to notice.

I called his name.

He turned around immediately. Blinked at me. Looked almost embarrassed.

"Couldn't sleep," he said. "Needed some air."

His voice was normal.

I walked him back inside. Made him wash his feet. Checked that the back door was locked this time, twice. He went back to bed without protest, like a child after a nightmare. I sat in the kitchen until sunrise.

I didn't tell anyone. I didn't tell his doctor. I didn't call a relative. I didn't go next door and knock on Noorjahan Begum's door and tell her that she was right.

I just sat there in the kitchen, in the dark, and decided to wait and see.

That's the decision I think about the most, now.

That specific morning. That specific choice.

Wait and see.

He was gone by the first week of December.

I know the exact morning because I'd finally decided, the night before, that I was going to call his doctor first thing. I'd written a note to myself. Put it on the kitchen counter so I'd see it when I made tea. I was going to describe the sleep pattern, the weight loss, the pond incident. I was going to stop waiting and seeing.

I woke up at seven. The note was still on the counter.

His door was open.

I already knew before I looked. Something about the quality of the silence. The house felt different in a way I couldn't articulate then and still can't now. Lighter, maybe. Like something had been subtracted from it overnight.

His bed was made. Not slept in, but made neatly, the way he always made it in the morning. Which meant either he'd come back at some point and made it, or he'd never slept in it at all.

His slippers were by the back door. Facing the pond. The door was unlocked.

I went outside in my bare feet and called his name. I walked the perimeter of the property. I checked the street. I stood at the edge of the pond and looked in.

The water was perfectly still. Clear as it had been since the beginning. I could see almost to the bottom.

Almost.

I called his phone. It rang from his bedroom.

I waited an hour. I don't know why I waited an hour. I think some part of me believed he'd just walked somewhere and would come back and I would feel foolish for panicking. Some part of me was still waiting and seeing.

Then I called the police.

They came quickly enough. Took notes, asked questions, looked around the property. One of them walked to the pond and stood there for a moment, looking in. He didn't say anything about it. Just wrote something down and moved on. They asked if my father had seemed depressed. If he'd said anything unusual recently. If there had been any conflict between us. I said no to all of it.

Which was almost true.

They dragged the pond two days later. A small team, early morning, barely an hour. They found nothing. The officer I'd been dealing with seemed unsurprised. He said the pond wasn't very deep. I didn't tell him that from the rooftop it had looked almost too deep, even under direct sunlight.

The investigation went quiet after that. Not closed, just quiet. The kind of quiet that means no one knows what to do next.

I noticed the shift in the village around the second week. The way people looked at me at the shop. The way conversations paused when I walked past. An elderly man with health problems disappears from his own property in the middle of the night. His adult son, the one who came back from Canada, is the last person to have seen him.

No one said it to my face. They didn't have to.

Noorjahan Begum was the only one who looked at me the same way she always had. I saw her at her gate one afternoon, maybe a week after the police visit. I expected her to say something- I told you so, or a question, or anything.

She just looked at me for a long moment. Then she went back inside.

That was worse than anything she could have said.

I stayed in the house for another three weeks because I didn't know where else to go. I stopped going to the back of the house entirely. I kept the curtains drawn on that side. I ate at the front of the house, slept with the light on, and did not look toward the pond.

But I could still hear it sometimes. At night.

Not the splashing anymore.

Just the dragging. Slow and patient. Getting closer to the wall…

I booked a bus to Dhaka on a Tuesday morning and left before sunrise. I told myself I was leaving because I couldn't afford the rent on the house alone. Because I needed to find work. Because there was nothing left to stay for.

All of that was true.

But none of it was the reason I left.

I left because whatever was in that pond had found the wall.

And I was not going to wait to find out what came next…

Dhaka is the loudest city I've ever been in, and I say that as someone who lived in Vancouver for four years.

I found a flat on the sixth floor of a building. Small, clean, no view of anything except another building's wall and a narrow slice of sky. I chose it specifically because there was no water nearby. No pond, no canal, no low-lying ground. Sixth floor. Concrete everywhere.

I told myself that mattered.

I got a job within a month. Data entry, nothing impressive, but it kept me busy and busy was what I needed. I started therapy because I wasn't sleeping and my supervisor noticed.

My therapist is a quiet, careful woman who doesn't push. She thinks what I'm carrying is grief- a son who lost his father under ambiguous circumstances and blames himself. She's not wrong.

She's just missing the other part…

The damp patch appeared in my flat three weeks after I moved in.

I noticed it on a Tuesday morning, a small dark oval on the floor beside my bed. I assumed it was a pipe leak and called my landlord. He came, checked, found nothing. I cleaned it up. It came back the next morning, same spot, same size.

I told myself it was condensation. The building was old. These things happen.

But by the second week I was waking up before dawn and looking at it before I did anything else. Before tea, before my phone, before anything. Just lying there in bed, staring at the floor.

That's when I started measuring it.

I used a piece of tape on the floor, marking the edge closest to the bed. The next morning I placed a new piece of tape. Then another. Then another.

It moves. Not every night. But consistently. Always toward the bed. Never away.

I called my friends. The ones I trusted. I explained it as carefully as I could- the pond, my father, the sounds, the grooves in the mud, the wet footprints in the hallway, the way he was standing at the edge of the water in the dark. I told them everything.

They laughed. Not cruelly.

Which is how I ended up here.

My therapist suggested I write it down somewhere public. Process it out loud, she said. Let strangers hold some of the weight.

I've been typing for almost three hours now.

I haven't looked at the floor in a while.

The last time I measured, this morning, it was four inches from the bed leg. Four inches of floor between whatever is following me and wherever I sleep.

I've been thinking about Noorjahan Begum a lot lately. That look she gave me outside her gate, after my father was gone. I understand it now. She wasn't angry. She wasn't saying I told you so. She was just looking at someone she already knew was lost and couldn't do anything about.

I think about my father standing at the edge of that pond in the dark. Barefoot in the mud. Looking down into water that was too clear, too deep, too still.

His voice was completely normal when I called his name.

That's the part I can't let go of.

I don't know if he went willingly. I don't know if that word even applies to whatever happened to him. I don't know if the thing in that water wanted him specifically, or if we were just the house closest to the wall. I've stopped trying to know.

What I know is this- I came home to spend time with my father and I spent that time watching a pond instead. Every warning sign: the workers leaving, the marks in the mud, Noorjahan Begum at the gate, the wet footprints, him standing in the dark… I saw all of it. I filed all of it away. I waited and I watched and I told myself sensible things.

And one morning I woke up and he was gone and the only thing left of him was a neatly made bed and a pair of slippers facing the water.

There's a reason my village no longer digs ponds. I am the reason.

Not because I dug it. But because when it mattered, I chose to be the “educated” one. The “rational” one. The one who knew better.

The patch on my floor moved again last night. I didn't hear anything. I didn't see anything. I just woke up and it was closer.

Three inches now, maybe less.

My therapist says writing this down will help me feel less alone. Maybe she's right. Maybe someone here has seen something like this, knows something I don't.

Or maybe I just needed someone to know.

In case tomorrow morning I'm not the one who updates this post.

I should check the floor.

I already know what I'll find.

I think I've known for a while now….

My therapist said I need to write this down somewhere. Somewhere outside my own head. She originally wanted me to share it with friends and family, you know, the usual advice. Talk to people who know you. Let them carry some of the weight.

The problem is, I don't have much family left to call. Not after what happened. And the friends I did tell, the ones I trusted enough to sit down with and actually explain, they laughed. Not cruelly. Just the way people laugh when they're uncomfortable and don't know what else to do. The way people laugh when they've decided, before you even finish talking, that what you're saying cannot possibly be true.

So here I am. Talking to strangers on a website I don't understand, because apparently that's what's left.

I should probably give some context. That's what you're supposed to do, right? Set the scene. Tell you where I'm from, when this happened, what the place looked like. You know… the district, the approximate year, how far the village was from the nearest town. But I don’t feel like it, because what's the point, exactly? You won't know the place. The name won't mean anything to you. So let's just say: it was a rural area in Bangladesh. It was the kind of place where the land is so flat you can see rain coming from three kilometers away, and everyone knows everyone's business, and a new pond is a cause for quiet celebration.

In our area, ponds don't stay unused for long. If there's land, someone will dig. Sometimes for fish farming, sometimes irrigation, sometimes just because stagnant water feels more natural than dry soil. A pond makes the place feel complete. So when the empty plot behind our house was finally bought and cleared, no one was surprised.

I had just finished college in Canada and come back home. From Vancouver to a village… I know how that sounds. The plan was to stay at my father's until I found something stable in Dhaka. A few months, maybe. Just until I got my footing.

My father was happy I was there. More than happy. He'd been, I don't know how to put this,  quieter… since my mother died. Like something in him had just turned down. Having me around seemed to help. We didn't talk about it directly. We just made tea and sat on the roof together and watched the workers dig.

It was a good few weeks, honestly. Peaceful in a way I hadn't felt in years. I was sending out CVs, half-heartedly arguing with strangers on Discord, drinking too much tea. Normal stuff.

The digging started in late November. It was dry season, the ground cuts easier then. At first, everything was normal. Excavators during the day, workers smoking and talking loudly, piles of wet earth rising on the sides. By evening it went quiet, leaving just a wide raw pit slowly pulling in groundwater from below.

But by the fourth day, the workers started leaving early.

Not all at once. One or two at a time.

No arguments. No complaints.

They just… stopped coming back after lunch.

My father noticed first. "Strange," he said. "They're being paid daily. No one leaves work like that."

The contractor came the next morning with new workers. By afternoon, same thing.

I started watching from the roof. You could see straight into the pit from there. It was deeper than most ponds I'd seen.

Almost too deep.

The sides were cut steep, and the bottom stayed darker than it should have, even under direct sunlight.

One worker stood near the edge for a long time, just staring down. Another came up behind him and asked something. The first one didn't respond. Didn't even turn his head.

That night, I heard splashing. Not loud. Not like someone swimming. More like… something shifting its weight in shallow water.

It was strange, because the pond wasn't even filled yet. I looked out the window, but no one there. Just the dark outline of the pit.

And the sound stopped the moment I opened the window.

The next morning, one of the workers didn't show up. No call, no explanation. The contractor shrugged. "People quit. It happens." But I noticed he didn't make eye contact when he said it. Just looked back at the pit.

By the end of the week, the pond hit groundwater fully. Water started seeping in from below.

But it didn't look right.

It wasn't muddy the way fresh pond water should be.

It was too clear.

Clear enough that you could almost see the bottom.

Almost.

That's when people started talking. Not loudly. Just small conversations across fences, nothing you could pin down. Someone said the land used to sit lower than everything around it- a natural hollow that never fully dried. Someone else said there had been something built there once, years ago, but no one could agree on what. Or when. Or why it was torn down.

I didn't tell my father what I'd experienced. I'm not sure why. Maybe I didn't want to worry him. He hadn't been well physically, and he was still carrying a lot since my mother passed. I told myself I'd mention it if it happened again.

And it did happen again…

My father stopped coming to the rooftop around this time. Blood pressure, he said. The stairs were getting to him. I didn't push it. I told myself it made sense. He was old. He was tired. That's all I could see. Or maybe it was all that I chose to see.

But I do think about it now. The way he stopped eating much at dinner. The way he'd go quiet sometimes mid-conversation, like he was listening for something. I noticed all of it. I filed it under 'he's getting older' and moved on.

That's what hindsight does to you. You replay every moment you dismissed. Every door you didn't open. Every question you didn't ask. And you weren't even doubting yourself back then, because why would you? You were the educated one. The rational one. The one who had been to Canada and knew better.

I didn't know anything.

Three nights later, I heard it again.

The splashing.

Closer this time.

Not from the center of the pond.

From the edge nearest our house.

I didn't open the window.

I just listened.

There was a second sound now. Underneath the water sound. A soft dragging. Like something being pulled across wet soil.

The next morning, there were marks near the edge.

Long grooves in the mud.

Not footprints. Too wide. Too smooth.

As if something heavy had been pulled out of the water and across the bank.

And the grooves just… stopped. A few meters from our wall.

I didn't tell anyone about the marks. I just stood there for a few minutes trying to come up with a reasonable explanation, went back inside and made tea. That was my response. Tea.

It was the neighbor from the house to our left who finally said something out loud. Noorjahan Begum. She was in her seventies, had lived on that street her entire life, and was not the type of woman who spoke unless she had something worth saying. She caught me at the gate that afternoon as I was coming back from the pharmacy. No dramatic approach. No lowered voice. She just stopped next to me like we were continuing a conversation we'd already started.

"Fill it back in," she said.

I asked her what she meant.

She nodded toward the pond. "That plot has been empty for forty years. There's a reason for that." She looked at me the way old people sometimes look at young people. It was not unkindly, but it carried a specific kind of tiredness. "Tell whoever bought it to fill it back in. Pay them if you have to."

I asked her what was in it.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Something that was sleeping."

That’s all she said. She went back inside before I could say anything else. No folklore. No story. No explanation of what it was or where it came from. Just that one sentence and a closed door.

I stood at the gate for a while after she left.

Then I went inside and told myself she was just a superstitious old woman. That the grooves in the mud were probably from the construction equipment. That the sounds at night were frogs, or pipes, or the kind of thing your brain invents when you're half-asleep in a new environment.

I didn't tell my father what she said.

I didn't tell my father a lot of things.

Things shifted quietly after that. The way things do when you don't want to admit they're shifting.

My father started sleeping during the day. Not napping, but actually sleeping. Door closed, curtains drawn. The kind of heavy sleep you don't wake from easily. I'd check on him at noon and he'd be completely out. I told myself he was tired. He was recovering. Old men sleep.

But at night, he was awake.

I'd get up for water at two or three in the morning, and see the light under his door. Sometimes I'd hear him moving around. Slow, unhurried footsteps. Not pacing. More like he was just... repositioning. Finding the right spot to stand.

I knocked once. Asked if he was okay.

"Fine," he said. "Go back to sleep."

His voice was normal. That's the thing I keep coming back to. His voice was always completely normal.

He stopped eating much around this time. Not dramatically, though. I mean, he'd sit at the table, move food around, take a few bites. I asked if his appetite was off. He said he just wasn't very hungry. I made lighter meals. He'd eat a little and thank me and that was that. He was losing weight, but slowly enough that I kept finding reasons not to measure it.

Then came the night I found the footprints.

I was up late preparing for a remote job interview that I had the next morning. It was around 2 when I went to the kitchen for water. The back door was unlocked. I was certain I'd locked it before bed. I'd started doing that deliberately, without fully admitting to myself why. I stood there for a moment, looking at the handle.

Then I looked down.

Wet footprints on the tile. Leading from the back door toward the hallway.

Toward my father's room.

I told myself he'd gone out for air. That he'd stepped in a puddle near the door. That there was a perfectly ordinary explanation and I was sleep-deprived.

I wiped them up. I went back to bed.

I didn't sleep.

A week later, I woke at around three in the morning to silence. Not normal silence, but the kind where you realize a sound you'd gotten used to has stopped. I lay there for a moment, working out what was missing. Then I realized, it was my father's footsteps. The soft repositioning sounds from his room that I'd gotten so used to I'd stopped registering them.

His room was quiet.

I got up. His door was open. The room was empty.

I found him outside.

He was standing at the edge of the pond in the dark, perfectly still, looking down into the water. No shoes. No phone. He'd come out in the clothes he slept in. The ground was damp from earlier rain and his feet were sinking slightly into the mud but he didn't seem to notice.

I called his name.

He turned around immediately. Blinked at me. Looked almost embarrassed.

"Couldn't sleep," he said. "Needed some air."

His voice was normal.

I walked him back inside. Made him wash his feet. Checked that the back door was locked this time, twice. He went back to bed without protest, like a child after a nightmare. I sat in the kitchen until sunrise.

I didn't tell anyone. I didn't tell his doctor. I didn't call a relative. I didn't go next door and knock on Noorjahan Begum's door and tell her that she was right.

I just sat there in the kitchen, in the dark, and decided to wait and see.

That's the decision I think about the most, now.

That specific morning. That specific choice.

Wait and see.

He was gone by the first week of December.

I know the exact morning because I'd finally decided, the night before, that I was going to call his doctor first thing. I'd written a note to myself. Put it on the kitchen counter so I'd see it when I made tea. I was going to describe the sleep pattern, the weight loss, the pond incident. I was going to stop waiting and seeing.

I woke up at seven. The note was still on the counter.

His door was open.

I already knew before I looked. Something about the quality of the silence. The house felt different in a way I couldn't articulate then and still can't now. Lighter, maybe. Like something had been subtracted from it overnight.

His bed was made. Not slept in, but made neatly, the way he always made it in the morning. Which meant either he'd come back at some point and made it, or he'd never slept in it at all.

His slippers were by the back door. Facing the pond. The door was unlocked.

I went outside in my bare feet and called his name. I walked the perimeter of the property. I checked the street. I stood at the edge of the pond and looked in.

The water was perfectly still. Clear as it had been since the beginning. I could see almost to the bottom.

Almost.

I called his phone. It rang from his bedroom.

I waited an hour. I don't know why I waited an hour. I think some part of me believed he'd just walked somewhere and would come back and I would feel foolish for panicking. Some part of me was still waiting and seeing.

Then I called the police.

They came quickly enough. Took notes, asked questions, looked around the property. One of them walked to the pond and stood there for a moment, looking in. He didn't say anything about it. Just wrote something down and moved on. They asked if my father had seemed depressed. If he'd said anything unusual recently. If there had been any conflict between us. I said no to all of it.

Which was almost true.

They dragged the pond two days later. A small team, early morning, barely an hour. They found nothing. The officer I'd been dealing with seemed unsurprised. He said the pond wasn't very deep. I didn't tell him that from the rooftop it had looked almost too deep, even under direct sunlight.

The investigation went quiet after that. Not closed, just quiet. The kind of quiet that means no one knows what to do next.

I noticed the shift in the village around the second week. The way people looked at me at the shop. The way conversations paused when I walked past. An elderly man with health problems disappears from his own property in the middle of the night. His adult son, the one who came back from Canada, is the last person to have seen him.

No one said it to my face. They didn't have to.

Noorjahan Begum was the only one who looked at me the same way she always had. I saw her at her gate one afternoon, maybe a week after the police visit. I expected her to say something- I told you so, or a question, or anything.

She just looked at me for a long moment. Then she went back inside.

That was worse than anything she could have said.

I stayed in the house for another three weeks because I didn't know where else to go. I stopped going to the back of the house entirely. I kept the curtains drawn on that side. I ate at the front of the house, slept with the light on, and did not look toward the pond.

But I could still hear it sometimes. At night.

Not the splashing anymore.

Just the dragging. Slow and patient. Getting closer to the wall…

I booked a bus to Dhaka on a Tuesday morning and left before sunrise. I told myself I was leaving because I couldn't afford the rent on the house alone. Because I needed to find work. Because there was nothing left to stay for.

All of that was true.

But none of it was the reason I left.

I left because whatever was in that pond had found the wall.

And I was not going to wait to find out what came next…

Dhaka is the loudest city I've ever been in, and I say that as someone who lived in Vancouver for four years.

I found a flat on the sixth floor of a building. Small, clean, no view of anything except another building's wall and a narrow slice of sky. I chose it specifically because there was no water nearby. No pond, no canal, no low-lying ground. Sixth floor. Concrete everywhere.

I told myself that mattered.

I got a job within a month. Data entry, nothing impressive, but it kept me busy and busy was what I needed. I started therapy because I wasn't sleeping and my supervisor noticed.

My therapist is a quiet, careful woman who doesn't push. She thinks what I'm carrying is grief- a son who lost his father under ambiguous circumstances and blames himself. She's not wrong.

She's just missing the other part…

The damp patch appeared in my flat three weeks after I moved in.

I noticed it on a Tuesday morning, a small dark oval on the floor beside my bed. I assumed it was a pipe leak and called my landlord. He came, checked, found nothing. I cleaned it up. It came back the next morning, same spot, same size.

I told myself it was condensation. The building was old. These things happen.

But by the second week I was waking up before dawn and looking at it before I did anything else. Before tea, before my phone, before anything. Just lying there in bed, staring at the floor.

That's when I started measuring it.

I used a piece of tape on the floor, marking the edge closest to the bed. The next morning I placed a new piece of tape. Then another. Then another.

It moves. Not every night. But consistently. Always toward the bed. Never away.

I called my friends. The ones I trusted. I explained it as carefully as I could- the pond, my father, the sounds, the grooves in the mud, the wet footprints in the hallway, the way he was standing at the edge of the water in the dark. I told them everything.

They laughed. Not cruelly.

Which is how I ended up here.

My therapist suggested I write it down somewhere public. Process it out loud, she said. Let strangers hold some of the weight.

I've been typing for almost three hours now.

I haven't looked at the floor in a while.

The last time I measured, this morning, it was four inches from the bed leg. Four inches of floor between whatever is following me and wherever I sleep.

I've been thinking about Noorjahan Begum a lot lately. That look she gave me outside her gate, after my father was gone. I understand it now. She wasn't angry. She wasn't saying I told you so. She was just looking at someone she already knew was lost and couldn't do anything about.

I think about my father standing at the edge of that pond in the dark. Barefoot in the mud. Looking down into water that was too clear, too deep, too still.

His voice was completely normal when I called his name.

That's the part I can't let go of.

I don't know if he went willingly. I don't know if that word even applies to whatever happened to him. I don't know if the thing in that water wanted him specifically, or if we were just the house closest to the wall. I've stopped trying to know.

What I know is this- I came home to spend time with my father and I spent that time watching a pond instead. Every warning sign: the workers leaving, the marks in the mud, Noorjahan Begum at the gate, the wet footprints, him standing in the dark… I saw all of it. I filed all of it away. I waited and I watched and I told myself sensible things.

And one morning I woke up and he was gone and the only thing left of him was a neatly made bed and a pair of slippers facing the water.

There's a reason my village no longer digs ponds. I am the reason.

Not because I dug it. But because when it mattered, I chose to be the “educated” one. The “rational” one. The one who knew better.

The patch on my floor moved again last night. I didn't hear anything. I didn't see anything. I just woke up and it was closer.

Three inches now, maybe less.

My therapist says writing this down will help me feel less alone. Maybe she's right. Maybe someone here has seen something like this, knows something I don't.

Or maybe I just needed someone to know.

In case tomorrow morning I'm not the one who updates this post.

I should check the floor.

I already know what I'll find.

I think I've known for a while now….

I'm not someone who believes in signs. But today made it hard not to.

It started at the Gulshan 1 circle tea stall. The small one near the ATM booth that puts enough sugar in their tea to make your dentist personally upset.

I was standing there at 8 in the morning, half asleep, waiting for my tea to cool down. She was two people to my left doing the same thing. Red orna, earphones in, staring at her phone with the focused expression of someone reading something that was mildly annoying them.

I noticed her the way you notice anyone standing close to you in the morning. Briefly. Then I looked away.

She left before me. I forgot about her in four minutes.

The second time was at New Market. Around noon.

I was there to return a shirt my mother had bought me that I would never wear. She was apparently there to do something in the same shop because when I turned around from the counter she was standing right behind me, waiting.

We made eye contact for exactly one second.

There was a flicker of something on her face. That micro-expression people make when they almost recognize someone but aren't sure.

I felt it too.

Then the crowd shifted and she moved to a different counter and I walked out into the afternoon heat and thought- wait, wasn't she....

But I was already outside. And it was hot. And I had other things to do.

The third time was the one that got me.

Evening. CNG stand near Manik Mia Avenue. It had just started raining, that aggressive Dhaka rain that arrives without warning and immediately makes everyone's plans irrelevant.

There was a line. Nobody was moving. Drivers were negotiating prices like we were buying land.

And then I saw the orna.

She was standing a few people ahead of me, bag pulled close, watching the rain with an expression I can only describe as tired but unsurprised*.* Like she and the rain had a long history of this.

I stood there for a moment actually thinking about whether to say something. We had seen each other twice. That's not nothing. That's almost something.

But what do you say?

Hey I think I saw you this morning?

We were at the same shop earlier?

Every version sounded strange in my head. So I said nothing.

She got a CNG before me. As she was getting in she glanced back at the line. Just a quick scan, the way you do... and her eyes passed over me.

I don't know if she remembered.

The door closed. The CNG pulled into the rain and was gone in ten seconds.

I got home an hour later, soaked, thinking about probability.

What are the odds? Gulshan in the morning. New Market at noon. Manik Mia in the rain at evening. This city has twenty million people in it.

I'm not someone who believes in signs.

But I think about the one second of eye contact at the shop counter. The almost-recognition on her face. The way she scanned the line before she got in the CNG.

Was she looking for something?

I'll never know.

And that's the part I can't shake. Not that it happened, but that I had three separate chances and I was too much in my own head every single time.

Dhaka gives you moments. It doesn't give you a fourth one.

I saw her three times today. I never learnt her name.

I wish I did...

I used to move around a lot in my childhood thanks to my father's military job postings. I have been to several districts between 2004 and 2010, never staying in one place more than a year, making my formative years feel like a fever dream. So the other day, I was reminiscing about the black cabs In Dhaka I remember riding in 2006-2007, as well as some blue taxis of the same Maruti 800 model. However, my friends couldn't relate to my experiences, and they said that they only remember seeing yellow taxis on the streets of Dhaka, not the black ones...

I did some digging to check if I had dreamt the whole thing up as a false memory. I came across images of black cabs in a newspaper from 2004, confirming that my childhood memories were not a lie !

So yeah, do you guys remember the (in)famous kaalo cabs? How was your experience riding them? Please share your stories and experiences so that we can walk down memory lane together!

This is coming from someone who has been a doctor for a decent number of years and have also been abroad a few times.

Before everyone comes at me: I’m not saying Bangladesh has a perfect health system. It absolutely does not. We have serious problems with regulation, quality variation, rural access, cost transparency, ICU capacity, overcrowding, and patient safety. Those are real.

But I think a lot of Bangladeshis automatically assume that “bidesh" means better healthcare in every practical sense for every patient. That is just not true.

Here’s what Bangladesh often does better:

1. Speed of access: In Bangladesh, if you have money and know where to go, you can often see a specialist, get an ultrasound, do blood tests, and start treatment the same day. In many developed countries, people wait weeks or months for specialist appointments, scans, or elective procedures.

2. Fewer gatekeeping barriers: A lot of countries make you go through layers of referrals, family doctors, insurance approvals, and appointment systems just to reach the doctor you actually need. In Bangladesh, that system is much more direct. Messy? Yes. But often faster.

3. Diagnostics are relatively easy to obtain: Need a test? In Bangladesh, it is often possible to get it done quickly without fighting an insurer (another pera that we never face in Dhaka), or waiting forever for scheduling. That convenience matters more than people admit.

4. Doctors often rely more on clinical judgment: Because systems are less protocol-heavy and more flexible, clinicians sometimes move faster based on clinical suspicion rather than waiting for every administrative step to align. That has downsides too, but it can save time.

5. Cost can be lower for many services: Not for everyone, and not always fairly. But compared with some countries where one ER visit or scan can financially destroy a middle-class family, Bangladesh can still be dramatically cheaper out-of-pocket for many common services.

What Bangladesh is not better at:

• consistency of quality
• accountability
• infection control
• emergency systems
• rural equity
• protection from unnecessary treatment
• regulation of private facilities

So my actual point is this:

Bangladesh is bad at system reliability, but often surprisingly good at speed, access, and responsiveness, especially for patients in Dhaka who can pay a little extra.

Many developed countries are better at standardization, safety nets, and governance. But they can be painfully slow in ways most Bangladeshis underestimate.

So maybe the truth is not “Bangladesh healthcare is better” or “developed countries are better.”

Maybe the truth is:
Bangladesh is better at getting things done fast. Developed systems are better at making care safer and more predictable.

Curious what people here think, especially anyone who has used healthcare both in Bangladesh and abroad.