Short Story: Dhaka Haunts No One

Iluka Chayan narrates a poignant tale that takes you back in time and makes you ponder if everything you see is what it is… or is truth far from fiction?

Editor’s Pick of the Week

(As the Editor’s Pick, this piece will be available for free reading this week)

Prologue: The Weight of Orders

June 1857

Major Edward Talbot signed his name with a swan-feather pen, the ink still wet with morning dew. Outside his window, the boy waited in chains—no more than sixteen, caught stealing rice from the British garrison. The sentence was death by hanging.

Edward’s hand trembled. Not from conscience, but from the fever that had been eating him alive for weeks. His wife Mary’s letters lay unopened on his desk; he couldn’t bear to read about English gardens when his world had narrowed to signatures and executions.

The boy’s name was Rashid. Edward had asked, though protocol didn’t require it.

He signed anyway.

Three days later, Edward would die of cholera in this same chair, his body wracked with guilt and dysentery, calling out for his mother and Mary and someone—anyone—to forgive what he’d become.

But first, he would watch a boy swing from a rope.

And the boy would look at him—not with hatred, but with something far worse.

Pity.

The Stirring Below Fort Walls

Beneath the moss-slicked stones of Lalbagh Fort, in a chamber sealed so long ago even the rats had stopped whispering about it, something stirred.

First a sigh, like the wind had forgotten its name. Then a shiver through the mortar. A single bone rolled in its grave, tapping against the curved inside of a ribcage. The skull followed, slow as memory, tilting upward toward the brickwork above.

Edward Talbot, formerly Major in Her Majesty’s Colonial Infantry, blinked in the dark. He had no eyes, no eyelids, and yet he blinked, for such was the habit of the remembered dead.

What day is it? He thought. What year?

The last thing he remembered was heat. Fever. The taste of copper pennies dissolving on his tongue. Mary’s face dissolving with them.

His first breath in two centuries was not air, but scent—humid, iron-rich, faintly sweet. Brick dust, river fog, mango peel rotting somewhere aboveground. And something else. Motor oil? Horns blaring? That wasn’t right. That wasn’t his Dhaka.

When he reached up, his hand passed through the stone ceiling like smoke. He pulled himself forward anyway, rising through layers of earth and memory until he stood beside the broken cannon where he’d once drilled recruits.

No one screamed.

No one bowed.

No one ran.

College students smoked on the ramparts. A girl posed for a selfie atop the sandstone turret where he’d once watched executions.

The ghost straightened his translucent collar and frowned. I built the gallows behind that wall, he thought. I held the keys to this city’s silence.

But now—even the shadows didn’t stop to greet him.

From behind the banyan tree, a pigeon cooed.

And nothing more.

The City That Remembers Nothing

Edward drifted through the streets like fog without permission.

His boots—once thick with brass and blood—no longer struck the earth. They passed through it. The city offered no resistance, and somehow that was worse than chains.

The road outside Lalbagh Fort pulsed with three-wheeled rickshaws and motorcycles spitting blue smoke. Women in flowing kurtis walked as though the land belonged to them. Young men slouched with cricket bats, laughing at jokes he couldn’t hear.

He entered a glass-walled café called Salt & Sage. Inside, couples shared desserts that sparkled with edible gold. The walls shimmered with photographs—birthday cakes, graduation parties, marriage proposals. Where were the oil paintings of governors? The mahogany desks? The portraits of dead queens?

Edward tried to step inside, but the glass repelled him. The building had remembered how to keep him out.

“Sir?”

He turned. A small girl—six, maybe seven—squinted at him with coal-dark eyes. Her mother pulled her hand, hurrying toward the bus stop.

“Bhoot dada?” the girl whispered. Ghost uncle?

Edward’s spectral heart leaped. Finally—

The girl tilted her head. Her voice dropped to a whisper that cut like broken glass: “Apnar shomoy shesh. Apni kichu na.” Your time is finished. You are nothing.

Then she skipped away, leaving Edward frozen in the street.

A bicycle passed straight through his chest. The rider didn’t flinch.

Edward spent the next week learning the architecture of his own irrelevance.

At the old officer’s club—now a bridal boutique called Dreams & Sequins—he stood behind a bride trying on her wedding lehenga. He screamed into the mirror. A hairline crack appeared in the corner.

“Must be the humidity,” the shopkeeper muttered, adjusting the air conditioning.

At the colonial bungalow that had become The Empire’s Tongue restaurant, he tried to blow out anniversary candles. The flames flickered, then steadied.

“Strange breeze,” one diner said.

“Must be the ceiling fans,” replied the other.

Even his rage had gone spectral.

But it was at the Dhaka University Library—built on the grounds where he’d once interrogated prisoners—that Edward finally understood.

He found the history section, shelf after shelf of books about Bangladesh’s independence. He reached for one titled The Colonial Shadow: Forgotten Voices of 1857.

His hand passed through it.

A student—barely eighteen, wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt—pulled the same book from the shelf. Edward watched him flip to the index, scanning for names.

Talbot wasn’t there.

Not even a footnote.

The boy slammed the book shut. “Boring,” he muttered. “Just more dead white guys nobody cares about.”

Edward crumpled to the floor, though floors meant nothing to him now.

I had a name, he thought. I signed orders. I mattered.

But names, he was learning, were just ink. And ink faded.

The Old Chaa-Wala

Down a narrow lane stitched between two apartment blocks, tucked behind the rear wall of Lalbagh Fort where the moss grew thickest, Edward found it.

A banyan tree, its limbs knotted with red ribbons and faded prayers, sagged over a tea stall that looked more memory than matter. A single clay stove hissed gently in the dusk. Glasses clinked. Cardamom seeds popped in boiling milk.

And on a low wooden bench sat the tea seller—ancient, stooped, wrapped in a faded lungi and sweater too thick for the heat. Cataract eyes, the color of fogged mirrors, blinked without urgency.

Edward stopped.

The man stirred tea with a bent-handled spoon. Without looking up, he said:

“Back again, sahib?”

The ghost’s throat tightened. “You can see me?”

“No, no. But I remember how the air bends when your kind sits. You came here before, during the fever. You bought tea with shaking hands. Asked me to pray for you.”

Edward had no memory of this. But ghosts, he was learning, remembered differently than men.

“What’s your name?” Edward asked, settling onto the bench.

“Mokhlesh Mian. Though names are just breath, sahib. You had plenty of those once.”

A glass appeared before Edward—warm, solid, real. Steam rose from it in quiet spirals.

“I don’t understand,” Edward said. “Why can I touch this?”

Mokhlesh smiled. “Because this tea is made from forgetting. And you’re what gets left behind.”

They sat in silence. Children ran past. A cat coiled under the bench. Somewhere distant, a mosque’s call to prayer began.

“I was a Major,” Edward said finally. “Edward Talbot. Queen’s own.”

“Once,” Mokhlesh replied. “But queens die, sahib. And you’re not far behind.”

“I signed orders. I built the gallows. I…” Edward’s voice cracked. “I killed a boy named Rashid.”

Mokhlesh nodded slowly. “I know.”

“How?”

The old man leaned forward. His breath smelled of burnt sugar and old sorrows.

“Because he comes here too, sometimes. Still sixteen. Still wearing chains. But he doesn’t sit angry like you. He sits… waiting.”

Edward’s spectral blood ran cold. “Waiting for what?”

“For you to stop trying to be remembered.”

The Weight of What Was

That night, Edward tried to haunt with purpose.

Not for fear or drama, but because he needed to know—if he couldn’t be remembered, could he at least still matter?

He started at the spot where his gallows had stood. Now it was a children’s playground, complete with swings and a slide painted like a rainbow. A security guard dozed in a plastic chair.

Edward concentrated every ounce of his remaining essence. The temperature dropped. Frost formed on the swing chains.

A small boy, no older than Rashid had been, ran toward the swings. He stopped, shivering.

“Mama,” he called. “It’s cold here.”

His mother appeared, wrapping him in her dupatta. “Just the evening breeze, beta. Come, let’s go home.”

As they left, Edward heard her whisper: “Some places hold old sadness. But sadness passes. Everything passes.”

Edward stood alone in the playground until dawn.

At Mokhlesh’s stall the next evening, Edward found he was not alone.

A figure sat on the far end of the bench—translucent, young, wearing the simple cotton shirt of a peasant. Chains hung loose around his wrists, no longer binding.

Rashid looked exactly as he had the day he died.

“You remember me,” Edward whispered.

The boy nodded. “I remember the fever in your hands when you signed. I remember how you closed your eyes when they put the rope around my neck.”

“I’m sorry,” Edward said, the words hollow as his chest.

“Sorry is for the living,” Rashid replied. “We’re past that now.”

They sat in silence while Mokhlesh prepared tea for three glasses—one for forgetting, one for remembering, one for the space between.

“Why haven’t you moved on?” Edward asked.

Rashid smiled. It was not kind, but it was not cruel either. “Someone had to wait for you to stop trying to matter.”

“And now?”

“Now you know what I knew when I died. We’re just ink on a page that got wet.”

Edward lifted his glass of tea. The liquid was clear as water, but it tasted like everything he’d ever lost—Mary’s laughter, his mother’s lullabies, the weight of decisions unmade.

“What happens to us?” he asked.

Mokhlesh spoke without looking up: “You become what you always were, sahib. A story someone chooses not to tell.”

The Ceremony of Dissolving

The next morning, Edward noticed it.

His reflection in Mokhlesh’s teakettle was fainter. The edges of his uniform were unraveling into mist.

“Time?” he asked.

“No,” Mokhlesh said. “Just gravity catching up to memory.”

For three days, Edward felt himself thinning. His anger dissolved first, then his pride, then his names and ranks and signatures. What remained was something smaller, quieter—the part of him that had shaken while signing death warrants, the part that had called out for forgiveness in his fever dreams.

On the fourth evening, Mokhlesh prepared a different tea. Not the usual chai, but something older—darker leaves, thicker milk, cloves split by hand. The steam came out slow and heavy, curling in shapes that almost looked like faces.

“This is for remembering,” Mokhlesh said. “One last time.”

Edward leaned in. Breathed the steam.

The scent hit him like a confession:

Blood on iron. A child’s scream by the riverbank. Mary’s letters, unopened and yellowing. His mother’s hands cooling on a Yorkshire morning. The weight of a pen. The sound of rope. Rashid’s eyes, not accusing but pitying. The fever burning through him like justice. His last breath, calling for someone—anyone—to forgive what he’d become.

“I wasn’t a good man,” Edward whispered.

“No,” said Mokhlesh. “But you were still a man.”

Rashid appeared beside them, no longer chained. He placed a spectral hand on Edward’s shoulder.

“Ready?” the boy asked.

Edward nodded.

Together, they stepped into the steam and dissolved.

The Silence After

At sunrise, the banyan tree was gone.

Not cut—gone. As though it had stepped away in the night, taking its prayers and memories with it. Where the tea stall once stood, a bright blue café had opened overnight, serving matcha lattes and “deshi fusion wraps.”

A road crew was already filling the single crack in the pavement where the tree’s roots had been.

Inside the new café, two college students sat by the window.

“Wasn’t there something here before?” one asked.

“Probably just another old stall,” the other replied. “Good thing it’s gone. This place is much cleaner.”

Across the street, Dr. Nasreen Ahmed—a historian researching colonial records—looked up from her laptop. For a moment, she’d felt compelled to search for information about a Major Edward Talbot. But when she typed the name into her database, nothing appeared.

She shrugged and moved on to more documented histories.

The city yawned. Stretched. Continued.

No one noticed the empty space beneath the missing tree.

No one remembered the tea seller’s name.

No one knew the ghosts had gone.

Inside Lalbagh Fort, tourists gathered. Guides spoke in three languages about Mughal architecture and independence movements. No one mentioned gallows or boys who died for stealing rice.

The city had outgrown its need for those stories.

It had newer ghosts to worry about—traffic accidents, factory fires, floods that took whole neighborhoods. The living had enough hauntings without borrowing from the dead.

A cat stretched on the red brick ledge of the fort. A pigeon cooed from the ramparts.

And in the space where steam had once carried the weight of centuries, only air remained.

Clean.

Clear.

Unremembered.

“Dhaka haunts no one. Not anymore.”