Asad Latif

4 weeks ago | dhakacourier.com.bd | Asad Latif |Sahatthaya Kraikhunthot |Jintamas Saksornchai

I chanced upon the WhatsApp profile of Tahiyat Nazifa Noor Rodoshi recently. She is a 27-year-old Bangladeshi photojournalist who works for the United News of Bangladesh and whom I met during a visit to Dhaka in January this year. Her WhatsApp profile showed a picture of two weeping humans foregrounded by a Bengali text: "Bon jane obhimane/gechhey shey obohele" ("The forest lies ignored in its injured love"). Worried that she could be facing an early-life crisis-in-love, I called Rodoshi.

2 months ago | dhakacourier.com.bd | Asad Latif |Sahatthaya Kraikhunthot |Jintamas Saksornchai

There is a teenage girl named Sonali. More about her later. More about me first. I am 67. Time is almost done with me but I am not yet done with myself. Therein lies my predicament. Too old to dream but too young to die, people like me live in suspended grace between gravitational age and redemptive imagination. We are the human equivalent of geriatric houses that the municipal authorities have declared to be structurally unsafe but which refuse to collapse, here and now.