Nothing happened to my city. Everything remains unaltered. I heard the same lawless sound while I was in Banglamotre; I faced the same speed of vehicles while crossing roads. The rickshawalas didn’t show willingness to take me as they do often. They didn’t know I was in hurry carrying medicine for my father. I passed one whole night lying with my laptop. Father and I were lying on separate beds in a cabin of Holy family.That night I forgot to take warm cloths . At midnight I  comprehended my father slowly covered me with ‘Katha’. I pretended I was in deep sleep.

Few days back I was actually in Shoronkhola to take photos on hurricane SIDR. I never saw a war, but I know what it can do. As I went inside of Saudkhali I got the feelings of passing a village harshly damaged by bombing. Crying, mourning, dead bodies, hungers, injuries all captured me.  I had to put my eye in view finder and made that disgusting sound ‘Ghaz’….Someone was telling how he could survive whole night holding a tree. He was not alone I found many who could survive by same way. People who couldn’t hold anything were washed away by the wave.

I returned to Dhaka when I heard the news of my father’s illness.

I am in Dhaka now. I don’t know what is happening there, how people pass lives. Sometimes I made call to Jaid Bhai, Sazzad Bhai, Deba, Asad to know the current situation. Sisters in the hospital take care of my father and he is getting well. I don’t know how people in Saudkhali will recover.

Shihab is a 15 year old boy with his own thoughts, solitude, love, anger, and laughter, among which solitude predominates. When Shihab was two years old, his parents learned that he had autism. Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins Hospital used the term autism in 1943 for the people who are suffering from a developmental disability that results from a disorder of the human central nervous system.

I used to see Shihab in 2005 whenever I visited his sister Tumpa who was my student. When I met Shihab’s brother Shanto a year later he told me about Shihab, that Shihab can immediately tell the day-of-week of a particular date. Whenever he is given a new calender he converts it into the Bangla and Hejira calender. That was the first time I heard the term autism and started to think about Shihab.

To me Shihab belongs to two different worlds. One is his very own: at times he loves to be alone in it and nobody else is allowed inside, even his parents. But whenever he is with his family, he also belongs to our world, a world in which we demand normalcy. But sometimes he loses himself and goes back to his own world although physically he remains within his surroundings. So there is always a transition between two worlds. Shihab’s two worlds were my main focus point whenever I was taking photographs.

When I remember Einstein and Newton, the two greatest scientists who were also suffering from autisim, then I feel Shihab will be an Einstein one day.