Two Fathers
Two Fathers#
A confession, not a story — because I have nothing left to lose.
I have two fathers. One no longer speaks to me. The other I carry in my pocket.
The second one is a pink tablet, small as a chickpea, with two letters stamped into its face. On the street it goes by many names — guti, maal — but the most common one will make your skin crawl. Baba. Father. Yes: across this country, hundreds of thousands of boys call that pink thing Baba. It took me twenty-four years to understand why. Like a father, it holds you when you fall. It reassures you. And one day you look up and realize you are nothing without it.
My name is Rafi. A Mirpur boy. I am not writing this story — I am confessing it.
I.#
It was 2023. I was twenty-one, studying CSE at a private university, living on Valorant, Discord chatter, and small logo jobs on Fiverr. Nineteen tabs open in my head at all times: CGPA, clients, the dream of Canada, my father’s blood pressure medicine, my little sister Tinni’s tuition fees. That’s our whole generation, really — connected to everything, connected to no one. A low-battery icon blinking permanently behind the ribs.
And so we all run somewhere. Some into Reels, some into games, some laugh their depression into memes. The elders call us lazy, ungrateful. They don’t understand what you see when you stand in a queue of four million unemployed graduates and look toward the future. None of us are well. I only happened to choose the worst door to run through.
In that blurred life, there was exactly one comfort: Othoi. My classmate — not at TSC, ours was a romance of university stairwells and metro-rail carriages. She’d bring noodles in a tiffin box for two. The plan was simple: graduate, sit for IELTS together, go to Canada, see snow. You just pass your exams, Rafi, she used to say. I’ll handle the rest. Someone wanting to take responsibility for me — that feeling was the best addiction I ever had. I didn’t know that yet.
Othoi had one small madness. When she was happy, she’d trace something on my palm with her finger. I’d ask what it said. She never told me. Pass out first, she’d say. I’ll tell you then. I used to close my fist tight, afraid the words would slip away before I ever read them.
II.#
It happened the week before finals. Three sleepless nights. Two backlogs, a client deadline breathing down my neck. Adnan said there’d be a group study at his flat. I got there and found no books — just cigarette foil on the table, a lighter, and one small pink grain. Adnan grinned. Relax, bhai. One hit and you’ll finish the whole syllabus in a night. Everyone does it. Army boys do it. BCS cadres do it.
I said no. I mean it — I really said no, at first. Then, at four in the morning, eyes burning, half the syllabus still ahead of me, Adnan slid the foil toward me again. Just once, he said. Just once.
Every catastrophe on earth begins with that phrase.
I will not forget that first pull even in my grave. A sweet, burnt smoke sliding down my throat, and ten seconds later it felt like all nineteen tabs in my head snapped shut at once. For the first time in my life — everything quiet. No exhaustion, no fear, no hunger, no need for sleep. Just a current running up and down my spine like electricity. I felt I could memorize not just that syllabus but the entire world if I wanted to. I felt no one had ever been born as happy as I was in that moment. That feeling — that is the trap. It shows you heaven, then it writes down your name and address.
I did finish the whole syllabus that night. The exam even went well. But heaven charges rent. Two days later the crash arrived. It felt like someone had reached into my body and pulled the battery out. I slept sixteen hours straight. When I woke, the color had drained out of the entire world. Everything grey. Everything tasteless. Everyone irritating. And in my skull, a mosquito-thin thought circling: one more and everything’s fine again. That was the equation my brain settled into. Pressure equals pink grain. Once a week the first month. Twice, the next. By the third month, I needed one a day just to stop my hands from shaking, my temper from boiling over, the itch under my skull from driving me to claw it open.
Then came the money problem. Three hundred taka a grain. The Fiverr income went first. Then Tinni’s tuition money. Then the seventy thousand taka my father gave me for semester fees — I never paid it in. At home, one lie after another. Lab fee. Need a hard disk for a project. A friend’s in trouble. Do you know the addict’s one true talent? The voice doesn’t shake when he lies. Only the hand shakes — when it’s time to set the grain on the foil.
I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror. Thirteen kilos gone in six months. Two hollows in my cheeks. Bleeding gums. Two loose teeth. No sleep at night, dead weight through the day. And a whispering in my skull — someone talking about me behind the wall, someone watching through the phone camera. The doctors call it meth psychosis. I call it the trailer for hell.
III.#
Let me talk about Othoi. This is the part that costs me the most.
In its early stage, yaba turns the body into an animal. A hunger rises that isn’t love — it’s appetite. High one day, I pulled her toward me with such violence that her bangle shattered and cut her wrist. She flinched back, and the way she looked at me in that instant — I still see it in my sleep. Fear. My Othoi, afraid of me. You’re not seeing me, Rafi, she said, her voice shaking. You’re eating something else through my body.
She was right. And here is the ugliest truth of all: not long after, even that hunger died. Yaba wakes the body first. Then it kills the body outright. By the end, Othoi could sit beside me and I would feel nothing. Nothing at all. For a twenty-four-year-old boy to feel nothing when the person he loves touches him — there is no crueler joke than that. By then, there was only one door left to all my feelings. Pink.
Even so, Othoi didn’t leave. She knew about the addiction — never told my family. Paid for a psychiatrist out of her own tuition money. Bought the medicine herself. The last time, she held my hand and said, Rafi, I can’t fight your addiction anymore. It’s that, or me. One month. I swore an oath. Seventeen days later she walked into Adnan’s flat and found me holding the foil.
If she had screamed, I could have lived with it. If she had slapped me, I could have lived with it. She did neither. She stood in the doorway a long time, watching. Then, very quietly: Take care of yourself. That’s all. You know, love doesn’t die with a scream. It just closes a door without a sound. On her way out she never once looked at my hand. What was written on my palm — I never learned it. I never will.
IV.#
Let me move quickly through what follows, because the middle chapters of every addiction story are the same, in every country, in every home.
For money, I sold my mother’s earrings. I took Tinni’s laptop savings. My name was struck off the university rolls. And when there was no money left anywhere, Shakil bhai reached out. The neighborhood’s big brother. Carry the stuff, mama, you won’t need cash. Just drop it a couple of places.
I became a courier. Mirpur to Farmgate, packet after packet, my cut coming off the top. Shakil bhai himself had never once put a grain in his own mouth. I asked him once, Bhai, you don’t use? He laughed. Are you mad? This stuff’s for the customer. Not the dealer. That laugh — I still want to kill him when I remember it. Boys like us, they bury alive, and build their palaces on top.
I got caught on a Thursday night, at the Technical checkpoint. Twenty-two grains in my pocket. What happened at the station, my hand shakes to write. Two constables took me to a room beside the OC’s office and beat the soles of my feet with a stick, calling me every filthy name they had. At dawn, my father actually came. A schoolteacher, a man who had walked with his head high his whole life. Seeing handcuffs on his son’s wrists, he stood before the officer with folded hands. I can bear almost anything. I cannot bear that image of my father’s folded hands.
They charged me under the narcotics act. Twenty-three days in Keraniganj jail. Want to know what jail is like? Want to know the single most available thing in a hundred-man ward sleeping on a bare floor? Baba. Yes. The very thing I went to jail for was on sale inside, at double the price. In those twenty-three days I understood exactly where this country’s chain ends. And because I understood it, I say this: if you must hate someone, don’t hate me. Hate the ones who bring the shipment in. The ones who take their cut and look away. The ones who hand free samples to children at the school gate.
My father broke his fixed deposit to hire a lawyer. I got bail. Then I was sent to rehab — a private recovery center near Savar, twenty-five thousand taka a month. The day I was admitted they took my phone, shaved my head, took my belt. Inside, I understood: this wasn’t a hospital. It was a cage. Forty boys in two rooms. Cold-water baths at five a.m. Flies stuck dead in the food. When someone screamed through withdrawal, there was one treatment — a length of PVC pipe. They called it “motivation.” The staff who administered this motivation were themselves ex-addicts. No doctor, no psychologist in sight. The signboard outside read: Love Is the Path to Freedom from Addiction. Whenever the pipe landed on my back I’d read that sign and laugh. One night a boy from the next ward was caught trying to escape. What they did to him needed an ambulance the next morning. You’ve seen the news sometimes — a patient dead in rehab? Believe me. Those are not accidents.
Once a month was Family Day. My mother would come, stroke my shaved head through the grille, and cry. On her way out she’d press five hundred taka into a staff member’s hand: please look after my boy. They’d pocket it and beat me with the pipe that same night. Once a week there was “counseling” — forty of us in one room, a motivational video playing on a projector. That is the entire national budget for treating addiction.
In that cage I met Sentu bhai. Forty-three years old, on his ninth stay in a rehab. He used to work at a bank, posted in Gulshan. Yaba took his job, then his flat, and finally his wife, who took their son and left for Australia. He kept a photograph of the boy under his pillow — five years old in the picture, seventeen now. At night he’d talk to it. He told me once: You understand, Rafi — rehab doesn’t kill the addiction. It just pauses it. The play button is sitting right outside the gate, on the street. I’ve proven it nine times over.
Sentu bhai’s eighth relapse made me sigh out loud when he told it. That time, he’d stayed clean eleven months. Got a job at a courier company. A video call with his son once a week. Then one Eid morning, in an empty Dhaka, an empty mess, sitting alone in his room, it occurred to him: I’ve done so well for so long — what’s the harm in celebrating a little? Eleven months of discipline undone in eleven minutes. Sentu bhai used to say, Addiction is a crocodile, Rafi. It won’t chase you. It’ll sit quietly at the water’s edge. It knows your thirst will come.
V.#
I got out after four months. My weight came back, the hollows in my cheeks filled in. Home, I stayed clean for three real months. Then one afternoon I opened Facebook and saw Othoi’s wedding. A gaye-holud photo. Yellow saree, laughing the laugh that used to be reserved for me. The caption read: And so the new chapter begins. That same night I called Shakil bhai’s number. Sentu bhai had been right. The play button had been on the street the whole time.
What I did next has no forgiveness, no excuse. I put my hand into the house again. My mother’s last treasure — the bangles her own mother had given her. She caught me in the act. She didn’t shout. She just placed the bangles in my hand and said, Here, son. Sell them and eat. Just don’t steal. That night my father stood in front of me and said, in a voice terrifyingly calm, From today, you are dead to me. You have no place in this house. Tinni was watching from behind the door. My sweet sister, who as a child used to eat rice off my plate — she doesn’t look me in the eye anymore.
Now I live in a mess. Shakil bhai doesn’t stand around the neighborhood anymore — he rides in a black car, wears garlands at councillors’ events. Two of his old customers died last year. One jumped from a rooftop. The other was Adnan. Yes — that Adnan, the one who first slid the foil toward me. Twenty-four years old, his heart stopped in his sleep. The doctor said meth had been eating away at it for years. Eleven people came to his janaza. Three days of mourning on Facebook. Then everyone forgot. When our generation dies, it gets one Rest In Peace in the newsfeed. That’s all.
My mother still meets me in secret — once or twice a month, in the alley below our building. She brings rice and curry in a bowl. Says nothing. Just watches me eat. The whole world can give up on an addict. A mother cannot. Mothers don’t have that particular power.
VI.#
Today I am four months and thirteen days clean. I go to recovery meetings. I count the days. I keep a diary. The doctor says it’s possible — that many people come back. I try to believe it. But let me tell you one true thing I have never told any doctor.
There is a pink tablet in my pocket. Has been for a long time. I haven’t taken it. Haven’t even touched it. I just keep it there. At night, when something aches deep in the bone, I press my hand against the pocket and feel it. What can I say — a man always wants to go back to his father. One father has declared me dead. The other whispers to me, every single night.
Pray for me, that I find my way back to the first one.
— Baba Taimur Mahmud Shomik 02/08/2026
If this piece has touched something close to home — for yourself or someone you love — please know that support exists, and reaching out for it is not weakness. It’s the harder, better door.