by Angela Starita
During the pandemic, my 11-year-old neighbor, a lonely headstrong child from Bangladesh, came to my place daily. She’d walk right into the house and upstairs to my office once she realized that we rarely locked up in those months of seclusion. At first, I’d encouraged her visits hoping I could help her learn to read in English. Her mother had hoped the same but, no teacher of young children, I soon gave up. Her will to make videos, teach me the right way to make milk tea, and rummage through my makeup was far greater than my will to get this kid educated. She wasn’t my long-term problem, and for that I was relieved.
She began to come by more often, rarely keeping her mask in place, but I never sent her home. She was the youngest of four children, with a 21-year-old brother and two sisters, 19 and 18, who did everything together. They lived in a small, hot apartment on the top floor of a house down the street, so I knew I provided her with a break from her tight living quarters and maybe a lab for testing out new ideas or versions of herself. As for me, she fulfilled some excessive need in to insert myself as “helper” whether needed or not. Once she told me she dreaded getting her period and then having to wear a hijab, a claim I wondered about: was it true or was she looking for my reaction? Another time, she sat at my kitchen table and bemoaned her fate as a girl with a hopelessly backwards family. The issue at stake was her desire to become a “sad song singer” and her family’s dismissal of her dream. “Other girls can be sad song singers, but not in MY family!”
Why a sad song singer, I asked her? Why not a singer…you know, in general? She ignored my irrelevant question to launch a pained soliloquy worthy of a Douglas Sirk heroine while she adjusted my pepper grinder to its finest setting. I returned it the coursest grind and suggested she ask her brother, Abir, if he’d let her take a Bengali dance class I’d found in the neighborhood. No singing involved, but still in the realm of show business, I thought. Again, I was missing the point: she wanted to be like Gogon Sakib, her idol and a first-rate sad song singer.
Later I did some research and found that Gogon and the other singers she liked, Niloy and Munna, were part of a genre of Bangla singer who dedicate themselves to ballads about heartbreak and distance. A google search for Gogon will turn up sites like this:
GOGON SAKIB All Top Sad Song 😭 or Best 90 Sad Song. This seemed about right for a country where by 2020, more than 7 million nationals went abroad to make any sort of living at all—often in construction in the Gulf States. Sadia’s family had arrived in the neighborhood in 2018, the same year I had. But while I’d moved from north Brooklyn to south, a move I found challenging enough, they’d flown from Dacca to New York through the UAE, a fact I knew because Sadia often mentioned the trip and when, in a fit of pedagogical ambition, I’d pull out an atlas, she’d ask to see Dubai. We also located her home in Sandwip, an island in the middle of the Bay of Bengal, where her father grew rice and raised cows on their farm. When one of Sadia’s older sister’s was born, their mother had almost died from blood loss and needed to take a speedboat to Chittagong, the nearest city with a hospital, to get an emergency C-section.
Back during the pandemic, with no kids her own age and no school, she’d walk in and upstairs to my office, no matter how many times I told her I was working remotely. If I could get her to leave, it was only a few hours before she’d return, usually at dinner time. She’d critique how I cut carrots, try her hand at cooking rice, and make ransom videos on my phone that she’d send to my cousin, demanding a million dollars in exchange for my freedom. She’d inspect the state of my cupboards, asking about new foods and a heat pack, which she proceeded to blow up in the microwave. She spent long periods in our bathroom where I imagined she was preening and taking photos of herself. Her vanity made me crazy, and I became a disapproving matron out of a ‘30s movie as she pored over makeup and hair videos. Theoretically, I wanted to encourage her self-exploration, wanted to be nonjudgmental and open to whatever direction her sexuality was taking her, but in real life, there in the middle of my kitchen, her girly pursuits embarrassed me.
At one point, Sadia had hoped to test out hairstyles on me, but a brief attempt at combing my fine hair discouraged her: “Why is your hair is so wee-ly?” she demanded. My oily, short locks wouldn’t do, and she solved the problem by hiding my hair under a hijab and doing my makeup. Later, I discovered she stole the makeup, her little fingerprint still in a container of creamy highlighter. She continually denied it until I told one of her sisters, who seemed unperturbed by her theft. Eventually she returned the one article I wanted back—a jar of powder that had belonged to my mother—with a note that said “I’m sore” as many times as she could fit it on the 8-1/2 x 11–inch paper.
Over the years, I often went to their apartment where I was fed endless dishes of chicken, beef, and rice made by Nasrin, Sadia’s mother. There was much teasing and giggling with various relatives and neighbors regularly streaming in while Nasrin, with newspaper laid across the floor, would eviscerate a kobocha squash with a wood-handled sickle or chop dozens of onions for a massive dish to be brought to the annual Kurbanir festival. Ali, the children’s father, wore two hearing aids, spoke little English, laughed easily, and occasionally doted on his children by hand-feeding them.
In the company of her family, Sadia constantly fought with her oldest sister, Sharmin, who for no reason I could tell, seemed to enrage the child. The whole family found Sadia’s sour mimicry of Sharmin more or less hilarious and her rage was generally met with calm and amusement. The one time, she’d gone too far came after a rare fight with Fariya, that had resulted in Sadia purposely smashing her sister’s new iPhone. Abir, usually gentle if weary as the family’s main breadwinner, scolded his mother. Fariya translated his words: “You have to get control of this girl!” Though I was affronted for Nasrin, I couldn’t help but feel that Abir had a good point; I’d started to wonder if Sadia was a budding sociopath. When a few days later, I told her she should apologize to Fariya, Sadia shouted, “She should say sorry to me!”
We got through these tense episodes once Sadia began obsessing over Gogon Sakib. Somehow this side of her, the recognizable qualities of an adolescent trope I understood, mollified my irritation. She showed me his videos and told me about his various trials as a sad song singer and as a man with his share of romantic heartbreak. In those days, Gogon’s face was slender and sharp, a Rodent Man, in today’s parlance. In the ensuing four years his face has grown rounder, and he frequently poses with a cigarette. But what remains consistent is the middle-distance stare conveying “In the Wee Small Hours” heartbreak.
As I cooked, she’d play his videos on my computer and translate the lyrics. She never sat for any of this but stood at a counter hovering over the keyboard. I learned about Gogon’s confreres and their life in Dhaka as she frantically checked their Facebook pages to get hints of their lives. She reminded me of my own preteen obsession with Dustin Hoffman, mostly acted on via research in the stacks of my central New Jersey library. Thanks to The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, I tracked down movie reviews and profiles to read on microfilm. Somehow, I even found the name and address of Hoffman’s agent, to whom I sent a letter addressed to the actor. (In an effort to hide my love, I posed as a mere music fan writing to ask who had sung the songs in Midnight Cowboy, which incredibly no parent objected to my watching.)
One evening as I prepared yet another salad (a few months before, Fariya earnestly asked me if I ever got tired of eating the same things), Sadia stood up straight and clutched her hand to her throat. “Gogon wrote me!” She was breathing hard, and my heart started beating a little faster.
“How could he write to you?”
“Facebook messenger.” She paced in a circle and shrieked before reading the message again.
“What did he say?”
“He said hello. Who are you?!”
Could he really be writing to her? Isn’t he famous? Is it an assistant? I immediately began worrying about her Facebook page and the photos she’d posted of herself in makeup and sari—she could easily be mistaken for a 17-year-old girl, possibly older. I’d given the account little thought, but I did know that she didn’t have her own phone, and she had very little privacy at home, one of her ongoing complaints. Until then I found her web surfing harmless since I always had full view of her screen. But of course I can’t read Bangla, an essential obstacle to my surveillance.
She wrote back a short message to Gogon, and this time both of us were nervous and waiting for the response. In the midst of preparing my predictable favorites for dinner, I suddenly remembered—felt—the painful lust and frustration of fandom. I was back at my childhood home opening the mailbox and finding a manila envelope with the name Dustin Hoffman embossed on the return address.
Gogon wrote again, one line; she wrote back and then nothing. I grilled her about the messages: was this a real account? What had he written? She eventually headed home and I immediately put the messages into Google Translate. Benign stuff: she said she liked his singing; he said thanks; she said I’m from Sandwip; he didn’t write again.
But for me and Sadia, this was most definitely not the end. She waited for more messages and even tried to track down his phone number. She wrote to Niloy and Munna, hoping to get word to Gogon. She dressed herself in saris, put on makeup (rather expertly), and posted videos of herself dancing to Bangla music, emoting like a silent film star. I could see all of this because she never signed out of the stealth Facebook accounts she’d opened. I checked them at least twice daily, with the translator always open on my browser. She was equally adept at online trickery: my husband caught her sitting on our porch with a laptop to use our internet connection and have the privacy denied her at home. He sent her away, told me this was all quite a bad business, and that we needed to curb her internet use if she continued to visit.
I don’t recall how long her Gogon fever lasted but mine went on for at least two months. He never contacted her again, but there was a creepy man who commented on her photos. I was relieved she never responded and worried I should tell her family. I watched Gogon’s videos, surveyed the comments to see if I recognized any of her aliases. And while all this sneaking did have an altruistic component—I hated to rat on her and thought my obsessive monitoring was sufficient to protect her—I also got a kick out of watching her photos and videos, deeming them idiotic and mortifying, then watching them on repeat.
When schools reopened, Sadia had to attend the junior high school across the street from my house. Her English hadn’t improved much during the pandemic, and she’d been friendless in grammar school where her little cousin, who’d come to New York as an infant, made fun of Sadia’s accent. I feared the year would be a horror for her considering the added element of hormones. I told her she could come visit at lunch if she needed a break. But the year turned out to be an extraordinary success. By Thanksgiving, her spoken English had improved exponentially and in December she earned Student-of-the-Month status. For the school’s “culture day,” she and a few other Bengali girls choreographed and performed a dance to a Bangla pop song. By seventh grade, I’d see her on the corner with a group of girls, laughing and talking, and at her 13th birthday party I met two beautiful 8th graders who’d invited her to be part of their dance group.
The one tragic note of her junior high school years shocked me: Niloy, another sad song singer and friend of Gogon Sakib, had committed suicide. Though her school is a mix of kids from Uzbekistan, Russia, Pakistan, and Brooklyn, there were enough Bangladeshi students that one of Sadia’s teachers took a class period to let students talk about Niloy. After school, a few kids gathered in groups of 3 or 4; some looked like they’d been crying. Sadia ran across the street to tell me the news. Somehow I couldn’t quite believe this. Was I misunderstanding or was she getting her vocabulary confused? She ran back to her friends and I pulled out my phone to check on Google. Yes, it was true. He’d died in Dacca the day before.