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. Read more »