Very Small Feelings

“Maybe I lost my mind. No one noticed. No one noticed”

from “No One Noticed” by Marias ( Album: Submarine)

“How does it feel to be so passing, Tara?” a stranger acquaintance asked me yesterday at Prospect Park while we were watching an impromptu sunset, the peachy pink sky against the backdrop of nude tree silhouettes. “When I first met you, I didn’t realize you were trans,” she continued. I shrugged and perhaps said, “You didn’t?” with my sunset-soaked, glittery eyes, quietly waiting for the familiar flow of validation that often follows such remarks. And it appeared just as expected. “I thought you were a woman, a cis woman.”

I couldn’t help but shake my shoulders slightly, swallow it as a compliment, and smile in thanks for the affirmation. So passing! It felt strange to hear. A rush of emotions tried to grab hold of me all at once, while I pretended to divert the conversation toward Priyanka Chopra and her film The Sky Is Pink. Films, pop culture, and celebrities are usually my strategy in conversations like this - a small way to redirect the moment before the feelings consume me and I forget the ever-contradicting ordinariness of feelings, the small feelings, the very small feelings.

As I walked back home from the park, after the night quietly settled over Brooklyn, I picked up the phone to call a friend so I wouldn’t have to sit with my small feelings - at least not until I reached the refuge of my bedroom, where I could spiral again into the guilt of welcoming my November 2025 back on an unplanned Wednesday evening in March 2026. After all, feelings are the monsters that corrupt our state of mind, as my November from Long Island said in December: “You have feelings for me, Tara, but I don’t have time for emotions.”

In March, he asked me, “Are you still angry with me?” His face was so close to mine. I felt all my feelings trying to escape as I placed my face near his warmth and responded, “I wasn’t angry. I felt rejected. Are you angry with me?”

“I was never angry with you,” he replied.

I wanted to hear more, but he paused. The silence continued, and I found myself becoming even more consumed by feelings for someone who had already said he didn’t have time for them.

Sunset at Prospect Park: First warm spring evening of 2026

My November wanted me to settle into simply liking each other and fulfilling the desire he hoped to get from me. But instead, I started accumulating many small feelings for him. He suggested that I watch the film In the Mood for Love, and I told him he would enjoy Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together. I don’t know if he felt any urgency to watch Happy Together the next day but with all my obedience, I watched In the Mood for Love the next night. The longing and yearning in Wong Kar-Wai’s film chased my mind for days and triggered the quiet paranoia of the impossibility of what I was beginning to desire.

Desiring shouldn’t be so hard. Neither should small feelings. But it seems that, at times, they are the most impossible things one can look for. Wanting someone. Desiring someone. And then slowly becoming too much for that one person you want.

As I continued to accumulate the impossibility of these small feelings for my November, I also found myself thinking again about passing. If passing could offer legitimacy, if it could guarantee the possibility of being chosen, then why am I still not chosen yet?

What I feel is a constant chase.

I am chasing my desires, and my desires are chasing me. A contradictory, never-ending game we seem to be playing with each other. Me and my Desires.

In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai, 2000

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While thinking about my small and inconvenient feelings over the past few months of early 2026, I also found myself returning to conversations I have had over the years with the Bangladeshi artist and friend Farzana Ahmed Urmi. I have known Urmi for more than a decade now, since my early days as a young art student wandering through the studios of Charukala at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh, moving between studio work, gallery visits, and long afternoons of conversation about art, life, and whatever feelings happened to occupy our minds.

Over the years, our conversations continued, sometimes in person, sometimes across distance. They rarely stayed, only about art. They drifted easily into other territories: desire, friendship, loneliness, the slow disappearance of connections, the strange ways feelings settle into the body, and eventually appear somewhere else.

Recently, I wrote a short piece about her paintings, after many long conversations about her recent body of work, part of a solo exhibition she staged at the artist-run space Kalakendra in Dhaka, titled Witnessing to My Own Absence. Urmi’s paintings carry something quieter about the everyday dealing with small feelings. They do not dramatize feeling. They allow it to drip and dissolve into faces that become almost unrecognizable. Almost the way certain memories remain in the body without demanding explanation.

An Empire of Feelings, as I described Urmi’s paintings in the piece published in The Daily Star this February. You can read the article on this link: An Empire of Feeling: On Farzana Ahmed Urmi’s ‘Witnessing to My Own Absence.’

Past weekend, I was also lucky to catch up with Urmi over an online art chat to talk more about very small feelings, her practice, and the untranslatable emotional labor of artistic practice.

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As I look into my past few months, I can see how the idea of feelings has been quietly following me in other spaces. Earlier this month, I wrote an op-ed for Dhaka Tribune titled “If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution.” The piece reflects on a moment I kept watching unfold on Bangladeshi social media, a young woman dancing freely with friends, and the strange discomfort that image seemed to provoke. I have borrowed the title from Emma Goldman’s writing as a lens to think through questions of female visibility, cultural legitimacy, and the politics of joy in the post-July moment in Bangladesh.

While writing it, I realized I was still circling the same question that had been retoating in my conversations with Urmi and in my own small encounters with strangers over the past few months: the uneasy relationship between feelings, acceptance of others, and the worlds we inhabit around. In the article I wrote,

“Perhaps the deeper discomfort lies in our difficulty accepting multiplicity. We want political figures to remain icons and artists to remain within familiar categories. When someone moves outside those expectations, the response is to question legitimacy rather than to rethink the framework itself.”

The tension between what we feel and what we are allowed to feel. Between the seriousness that politics demands from us and the fragile emotional worlds we continue to carry privately.

You can read the full op-ed article here: ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’

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And to circle back to passing, I have returned to Matilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Nobody Passes after many years, a book I first encountered during my MFA and have carried with me across different places since then. In her introduction, Matilda proposes questions and tells the reader that this collection of edited essays “tears binary gender norms to shreds, and proceeds to embrace, challenge, and transform not only the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ but the categories of femme, transgender, butch, genderqueer, and ‘none of the above, thank you.’”

Nobody fully arrives at the version of themselves that the world asks them to perform or pass. Perhaps we are all moving through small negotiations with ourselves, carrying feelings we do not always know how to place.

And it is difficult not to feel many things right now. The world seems to be shifting constantly, often in frightening and unpredictable ways. Wars and political anxieties are unfolding across continents, but there are also the smaller landscapes of our everyday lives. Lovers who appear and disappear. Friendships that slowly lose their shape. Rejections that stay longer than we expected. Conversations at sunset that trigger emotions we were not prepared to feel.

Sometimes there is no obvious place to deposit these feelings. Our very small feelings.

My Body

The Loneliness and Terror of Being My Kind

I’ve been reading Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body during this holiday season. The holiday season in this part of the world is a time when joy, warmth, gathering, and care seem to be the expected emotional register. As I am reading Emily’s writing and thinking through it, I become more inclined to write about loneliness and the terror of the embodiment of my body. Ratajkowski lingers on the complicated life of a woman’s body, how desire, visibility, labor, and sexual power move through the female body and identity, unevenly; sometimes feeling like agency, sometimes like a violent extraction. Reading it now, I find myself hesitating over what it means to write about the body during a festive moment like now. Part of me wonders whether this is the time to speak about loneliness and the quiet terror that can accompany my embodiment, or whether I should lean instead toward the joy, freedom, and relief of inhabiting womanhood as I experience it at times.

Portrait, December 2025 by Madeline Rosenberg

Emily writes about growing up inside a body that was always being watched, shaped, and interpreted as a woman’s body. My relationship to girlhood arrives from a different direction. As a trans feminine person, I wasn’t born into that knowledge, nor taught how to inhabit it early on. I entered womanhood later, learning its textures slowly, through looking, being looked at, desire, misrecognition, affirmation, and refusal. My body didn’t come with an inherited grammar; I’ve had to assemble one, piece by piece, often in public. Reading My Body has given me a language to think alongside rather than fully within. Emily’s experience doesn’t mirror mine, but it brushes against it in meaningful ways. It helps me think about how I define my body for myself, how I choose to present it, and how those choices feel once they leave me and enter the world. There is pleasure there, and a sense of freedom I don’t want to minimize. But there is also loneliness, a quiet vigilance, and moments of fearful terror, especially around being read, desired, or reduced in ways I can’t fully control.

~ ~ ~

I have come to understand my body less as a stable object and more as a site of negotiation recently. A body that is always being translated, by culture, by class, by gendered expectation, by political fear. My body exists in a constant exchange with the world around it, absorbing projections about desirability, usefulness, legitimacy, and worth. It is not simply seen; it is evaluated. Not simply present; it is measured against an idea of what a body should achieve to be allowed in spaces. This understanding did not come from a single moment of clarity. It came from living inside a body that did not align with the social fantasy it was assigned at birth. Growing up in Bangladesh, my earliest relationship to gender was shaped not by choice, but by refusal. Masculinity was not offered to me as a possibility; it was imposed as a requirement. Femininity, meanwhile, was not imagined as an alternative but as a failure, something excessive, embarrassing, out of place. My body learned early that gender was not a spectrum but a border, and that crossing it carried consequences.

My Body, Lithography Print (Photo transfer on a polymer plate), Circa 2014

Before I had language for myself, there were already languages imposed on me. Terms like hijra, half-lady, maigga circulated as warnings as much as descriptions. Hijra was my first cultural reference to transness, not as identity, but as a social condition. A figure both inside and outside society. Recognized, excluded, ritualized, and stigmatized. Hijra identity in South Asia operates as a structure of belonging and dispossession at the same time: a lineage, a kinship system, a survival economy, overwhelmingly shaped by class and poverty. Hijras are visible, but that visibility is tightly managed. They are allowed presence without power, recognition without protection. For me, hijra was not a category I could simply step into. Class, education, money, and social mobility complicate that belonging. In Bangladesh, gender variance is never only about gender; it is about who is allowed to fail masculinity and still survive. Who is permitted femininity without being cast entirely outside the promise of a future? My body grew up in proximity to hijra existence, learning from it not certainty, but caution. Transness appeared to me first as something possible yet dangerous, sacred yet punished. A way of living outside heteropatriarchal success, but also a reminder of how violently society polices those who do.

My Body, Multiplate Lithography Print (Photo transfer on a polymer plate), Circa 2014

In that sense, my transness did not arrive as self-realization. It arrived as a negotiation. A continuous assessment of risk, desire, class, and survival. What does it mean to inhabit femininity without inheriting its protections? What does success look like when gender itself is measured through productivity, marriage, reproduction, and respectability? My body did not fit those metrics. It still doesn’t. Instead, it moves through a different register; one shaped by refusal, improvisation, and care.

Vaginal Davis, Magnificent Product Exhibition at MOMA PS1, December 2025

~ ~ ~

Loneliness, for me, is not the absence of people. It is the experience of carrying something that does not translate easily. A kind of weight that moves with me. The fatigue of explanation. The repetition of context. The quiet awareness that even in company, even in conversation, there are parts of my life that remain unshareable, not because others don’t care, but because the language is unfinished. We often imagine loneliness as being cut off. I experience it more as being partially legible. To live as trans, transfeminine, immigrant, refugee, artist, working-class, shaped by displacement and by what does not settle, is to move through overlapping systems that don’t quite line up. Each has its own grammar. Living at their crossings produces something messier, more specific, harder to hold together. This is the loneliness of constant translation: of moving between idioms, of watching people try to place you with the tools they have, knowing those tools are never enough. Even recognition can feel lonely when it arrives through approximation.

There is also a kind of relief in accepting that my life will not be fully mirrored. That my body does not need agreement to be real. Loneliness, then, becomes less a lack than a boundary, a way of protecting my will, my body, my spirit. It lets me step outside the demand to be understood on someone else’s terms, and reach instead for something practiced quietly, something closer to divinity, something lived rather than granted.

Joler Gan, Dure Thaka Megh from the album Otol Joler Gan

I kept listening to an old song by the Bangladeshi Band Joler Gan (Song of Water) Dure Thaka Megh (The Cloud That Stays Distant) in all Christmas morning. The cloud that stays at a distance. The cloud that is asked to hold itself together, as much as it can. In the song, the cloud feels like a body, hovering, present, never fully reachable. It is a metaphor for the kind of loneliness that does not come from isolation, but from being suspended between worlds. The body as cloud. The body as divine. The body as portal.

“Clouds that stay far away, stay a little farther still -
hold yourself together, as much as you can.

The mind is a boat that has lost its sail,
no matter how far it drifts, it still belongs to you.
How much is “everything”? Just a speck,
when all words are finished, one truth remains.

In sleepless nights, we must face it -
you, me, all of us, held in one another’s hands.
Still, clouds, stay far away,
when the spring wind comes, hold yourself steady”

— Loosely translated from the original Bangla lyrics by Shaon Akond, “Dure Thaka Megh” (Joler Gan).

The trans body is asked constantly to explain itself, to arrive somewhere legible, to settle into an agreed-upon form. But transness resists arrival. It is a process, a weather pattern, a state of becoming. The song’s line about the heart as a sail-less boat feels especially close: drifting without a prescribed route, carried by currents rather than control. And yet, no matter how far it travels, it remains whole. My trans body is like that, moving without inheritance, without a map, still belonging to itself. Its wholeness does not depend on recognition.

I see the cloud as a portal, open to light, to movement, to change ; but it is also asked to protect itself, even when the winds soften, even when abundance arrives. That feels deeply trans to me. The trans body opens a different way of sensing, loving, and being in the world, but it does so at a distance from what the world expects bodies to be. It is a portal that does not promise arrival, only passage. And there is a profound loneliness in that: to live at the threshold, to move between worlds without fully settling into any of them. Still, the song insists that this distance is not failure. It is a form of staying intact. A quiet divinity.

As the poet Charles Baudelaire once loved clouds for their light and restlessness.

“Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there, Up there the wonderful clouds!”

Clouds, Rokaway Beach, June 2025

~ ~ ~

The terror of being my kind does not only come from the state, from strangers, or from the abstract idea of violence. It also comes from intimacy. From closeness. From being in community.

I think of two friends of mine, fictional names, but real lives, Seema and Anjali. We come from different sides of the Bangladesh-India border, from different class positions, different family histories, different routes of arrival into transness. What brought us together was not shared upbringing or shared politics, but something more fragile and more specific: we are all trans, and we speak the same language. We learned to recognize ourselves through one another. We learned transness not as a fixed identity, but as something negotiated in real time, in conversation, in observation, in comparison. In cities like Dhaka, and later in New York, our transness was not something we simply had. It was something we had to figure out. We watched how each other moved through the world, how we dressed, how we spoke, how we explained ourselves to men, to institutions, to friends. We paid attention to which kinds of femininity were rewarded, which kinds were punished, which kinds were ignored altogether. We learned what passed, what failed, what attracted protection, what invited ridicule. Our bond was formed through this shared labor of deciphering the script.

Love was part of this education. So was longing. So was competition. There were moments when we wanted the same man, or different versions of the same promise. It was never just about the man. It was about what his desire offered: legibility, validation, the sense that our bodies could be read as successful within a cis-heteropatriarchal imagination. When one of us was chosen, the others felt it not only as personal loss, but as displacement. Desire moved like capital, unevenly, unpredictably, concentrating value in one place and withdrawing it from another.

This is something trans communities rarely want to admit, especially when resources are scarce. Under conditions of precarity, desirability becomes currency. Passing becomes leverage. Visibility becomes power. And power, when unevenly distributed, generates fear.

Recently, I reconnected with Anjali after a break. She is now in a relationship with someone who was once Seema’s partner. It would be easy to narrate this as betrayal or rivalry, but that would be too shallow. What circulated between them was not ownership of a man, but ownership of a certain legibility, the same legibility that once affirmed Seema, now finding a new home. Watching that shift is destabilizing. It forces questions none of us want to answer: What happens when recognition moves on? What happens when the thing that once made you visible now confirms someone else?

Whitney Clafling, Forget Marriage, Soot on Celling, MOMA PS1 Bathroom

When I spoke to Seema a few days ago, she sounded exhausted. She told me she no longer wants to be part of queer community. Not because she rejects transness, but because she is tired of being constantly read, assessed, measured. Tired of being told,implicitly or explicitly, whether she is trans enough, visible enough, relevant enough. She spoke about how the very spaces that once helped her articulate her transness now feel hostile. Not loudly violent, but quietly corrosive. Competitive. Territorial. Obsessed with visibility, success, and hierarchy. Her refusal stayed with me.

Seema was not refusing community itself. She was refusing a particular economy of community, one where legibility is mistaken for liberation, where visibility is equated with success, and success with capital. In a city like New York, where trans narratives proliferate, where platforms multiply, where institutions are eager to showcase diversity, this economy becomes especially intense. Voices rise not only because they speak truth, but because they already know how to speak in ways that are rewarded. Visibility today is rarely neutral. It moves through grants, panels, curated conversations, fashionable aesthetics, recognizable language. Certain trans voices emerge because they are fluent in these circuits. They know how to narrate their lives in ways institutions can digest. They know how to translate pain into something legible, inspirational, fundable. Their success then becomes evidence of legitimacy.

For trans people coming from places like Bangladesh, or from South Asian diasporic communities more broadly, this creates a brutal sorting mechanism. Suddenly there is a “right” kind of trans representation and a “wrong” one. The right kind is articulate, polished, culturally fluent, often upper-caste and upper-class, often already holding safety nets. The wrong kind is messy, angry, economically unstable, insufficiently refined, too foreign, too loud, too much.This distinction does not only determine who gets platforms. It determines who is believed, who is protected, who is allowed to rest.

What is most terrifying is that this logic does not come only from outside. It is reproduced inside our own communities. The same heteropatriarchal system that taught us there is only room for one version of success now trains us to enforce that scarcity on one another. Categories multiply. Hierarchies harden. Worth becomes something to defend rather than share.

I see this most clearly in smaller diasporic spaces.South Asian, Bangladeshi, where access is limited and heavily guarded. These communities are intimate and fragile. They are also deeply territorial. Doors are held tightly. Recognition circulates among those already inside. People clap for one another in echo chambers, hoping that proximity to white institutions will secure their place at the table, rather than extending a hand to those still outside.This is the terror of being my kind in this city.

Not only that the world does not know how to hold us, but that sometimes, neither do we. Between Seema, Anjali, and me, we occupy very different positions on the spectrum of trans legibility. Anjali moves with less visibility. Seema carries more clout, more validation. I sit elsewhere, shaped by my own politics, my own refusals, my own constraints. And yet, what we want is remarkably simple: safety. A sense of ease. A life that can move beyond constant survival.

Community, when organized around competition, visibility, and success, makes that nearly impossible. It turns care into currency. It turns difference into threat. It asks us to perform instead of breathe. And yet, I don’t want to abandon the idea of transness as world-making. Because transness, at its core, is not about arriving at a perfect form. It is about building a livable world where one did not previously exist. World-making requires patience, redistribution, and a willingness to remain unfinished. It asks us not only how we appear to outsiders, but how we treat one another when no one is watching.

Before demanding recognition from society, there is a question the trans/ south asian diaspora must ask itself: What kind of world are we actually building for our own?

This question terrifies me precisely because it has no easy answer. But it is the only one worth staying with. Because refusing one another would mean accepting a future built entirely on scarcity. And I am not willing to believe that is the only horizon available to us.

“The mind, the mind, how many things it says.

Hearing its words, someone leaps into the water.

A happiness-bird flies in and settles close,

the happiness-bird sings, does anyone hear its song?”

— Loosely translated from the original Bangla lyrics by Shaon Akond, “Dure Thaka Megh” (Joler Gan).

~ ~ ~

I started this Substack seven months ago out of paranoia, if I’m honest. A paranoia shaped by uncertainty, about immigration, work, safety, belonging, and the larger direction of my life. Uncertainty is not an occasional condition for me; it is a daily passenger. Writing became a way to stay oriented when nothing else felt stable.

Over this year, I have been surprised by how this space has opened into connection. People read. People unsubscribed. People got angry. People felt moved. Some were glad to see me writing, producing, thinking out loud. I am grateful for all of it, the friction, the care, the disagreement, the quiet recognition. I am grateful for having a space where I can articulate my thoughts beyond social media, beyond glitter and glimmers, beyond the constant performance of success. This Substack has become a place where thinking can linger, where uncertainty does not need to be resolved immediately, and where connection can happen without spectacle. For that, and for everyone who has encountered this work in whatever way they could, I remain deeply thankful.

Recipes for Broken Hearts

I first encountered “Recipes for Broken Heart” not as a metaphor but as a curatorial proposition in Diana Campbell’s Bukhara Biennial statement, a context in which heartbreak was not framed as personal collapse, but as philosophical gravity. Campbell on her proposition on curating the public art project does not reduce the heart to sentimentality or emotional debris; her language insists that the heart is not secondary to the mind but constitutive of our world-making — that what the heart experiences has ontological weight.

In her words:

In many mystical traditions, the heart is the key to connecting with the higher frequency of the divine. Perhaps even more so than the brain, the heart contains an “imaginative intelligence that is so powerful that it can change the world in what it manifests through the combination of knowing and loving… Art facilitates insights into how humans participate in worldmaking—how our words, thoughts, and actions impact us, as well as how we shape and are shaped by our environments.” The heart’s pervasive awareness means that we feel it breaking with extreme intensity.

When I read Diana’s words a couple of months ago, my fascination with it wasn’t because of the Binnale she is curating, but rather it felt like a language and articulation that I know I can extend on my own articulation. So, this essay, the reference point of Diana’s curatorial proposition, is more to help me establish an analogy around the framework instead of writing about the Art Event. Its true, when I read the text, I did not realize then that this vocabulary would become the structure through which I would later interpret a very ordinary November, a brief encounter with a man, and its quiet dissolution, not in a way to process difficult emotions but to rather meaning to reach a higher possibility as it often for my life as a trans and queer migrant, need to extend into the intellectualization of the state of being to count towards the paranoia of the existence.

My first day of November began with an uneven choreography: a man I will call T in this essay drove from Long Island to Brooklyn in one sudden night, had a minor panic attack before entering my apartment, and sat awkwardly in my living room sipping water, telling me he was nervous to see me but glad he took the chance. As our encounter unfolded that first night and extended into a conversation, from how I map sexual geography to my reading list to his fascination with my skin tone, it naturally led to exchanging numbers and follow-up texts. What was meant to be a chance encounter extended into a month-long chance we kept giving each other, across midweek evenings and half-planned weekends. I told him he made me feel safe, and he agreed.

The frequency translated smoothly from URL to IRL without much effort or performance; it felt like the best kind of routine. He arrived, he stayed, he returned. The predictability was not romantic, but it was stabilizing, and stabilization is a form of intimacy even when neither party names it. What unfolded between us was not a narrative arc but a recurrence: a patterned presence that rearranged how I distributed emotional attention. Our worlds were unknown to each other, but still I wanted him to know mine, even when he kept his carefully compartmentalized.

Our extended encounter ended on the first rainy morning of December, on a quiet Brooklyn street, against the backdrop of brownstones and his brick-red SUV, the same one that carried him to me from Long Island. As the rain slid between our words, and our mutual refusal to continue even as friends, he fumbled through his admission of liking me, overwhelmed by whatever he could not articulate. I walked back alone, and he drove away. I sat in my apartment with an absence that had already begun accumulating in the preceding days. As I processed this breakup, which was never quite a relationship, never fully named or recognized as one, I kept returning to Diana Campbell’s formulation of the heart as a world-making engine.

If the heart has “imaginative intelligence,” then heartbreak is not a failure of discernment but an overextension of private architecture: the capacity to build a world faster than the world can accommodate its terms.

Image: Portrait of T, acrylic drawing on paper from the Boy Drama series, 2025.

In parallel to this emotional interval, I was Working a drawing series titled Boy Drama, which I installed not in a gallery but in my Crown Heights apartment on the night of my birthday November 18 with T present among the shoe pile, oven baked cheesy pasta, clustered conversation and in between me and T testing out a chemistry while he hanged on my wall as a drawing from the “Boy Drama” series. The drawings contained T’s outline — not literal likeness, but the gesture of him: his posture, the way he leaned, the slightly self-conscious stillness of someone unsure how to inhabit being seen. When I started working on the “Boy Drama” drawings, it was not to draw romantic ephemera of the men I had been meeting; I was documenting a system of asymmetrical desire before the asymmetry had fully expressed itself.

In my argument, as I often think about the failure and the productivity of desiring and being desired as a trans fem and queer person in an ecosystem that often disqualifies us to be loved and to document our love.

Being Trans, Femme, Non-Binary, Hijra, Kothi, or anything outside the cis binary comes with a lifelong conditioning to believe our desires are worth less. Inside and outside the so-called queer community, we are taught to accept scraps of intimacy, to stay in relationships (romantic and friendship) that are uneven, opaque, or emotionally manipulative, because somewhere deep inside, we fear that this is the best we will be offered. We carry both the external judgement and the internal wound: the sense of “failing” masculinity and “failing” femininity, the fear of losing someone who holds more desirability capital, someone more cis-legible, more socially validated. So we tolerate ambiguity, inconsistency, even small violence, just to keep the connection alive.

But there always comes a point when the imbalance becomes unbearable. When we finally see that we will never meet the other person in a place of equal power, that reciprocity won’t arrive under the existing rules. And at that moment, the only way forward is to confront the grief and reclaim our own worth, even if it means letting go of something that once felt beautiful.

The work (academic/political exercise/ art practice) becomes a tool, not to gain cultural capital but as a lived practice of survival. The scripts we were given, refusing the hierarchies we internalized, noticing how even the people who devalue us still desire us when it is convenient for them. It means asking hard questions about our own complicity, redefining what intimacy and care can look like, and slowly rebuilding a life on terms that don’t reproduce the same harm. And still, even with all that rebuilding, we carry the scars. We carry the losses. We keep trying again and again, through despair and renewal, through the grey spaces in between, to make a life that can hold us.

Image: Hijra Guru Jaina Nani (born before 1947 to October 17, 2025) of Bhadrak, Odisha, Image from: Varta Trust Facebook Page.

And as I tried holding me into this moment between the arrival and disappearance of T in my life, In searching for referents, not for consolations, I reread Vaibhav Saria’s “The Pregnant Hijra: Laughter, Dead Babies, and Invaluable Love”, which situates a narrative articulation from rural Orissa, among Hijras who navigate desire with young men and their parasocial relationship where the HIjra’s are positioned into the self accepted category to acknowledging and forced to offer the caregiving work to settle the hetreonormative life and sexual reproductive life of their male companion. The ethnographic scenes that are portrayed in Vaibhav’s writing are about a social economy of attachment without futurity. In this text, the Hijra guru figure Jaina articulates the absolute pragmatism through which hijra desire is understood:

“A hijra can never set up a house with a man. He is a man, he requires children, heirs, he requires din-duniya (religion/world). With a hijra, he won’t have any children, he won’t be able to set up his duniya with her… Every man, no matter how much he loves a hijra, and no matter how long they live like husband and wife, must leave her to set up din-duniya.”

Jaina and her wisdom/word do not speak of abandonment as betrayal; she speaks of it as cosmological realism. As a recipe for the broken hearts, it is not that hijras and trans individuals are unworthy of permanence, but that permanence is coded within heterosexual futurity: inheritance, lineage, family continuity, respectability, religious order, social reproduction, and the gendered labor of legitimacy. What ends is not affection but eligibility.

Indya Moore as Angel and Evan Peters as Stan in “Pose” TV Series.

As I move from the hijra pragmatism recipe in Vaibhav’s text to the 2018 American televisual imaginary of Pose, I look for assurance of my November experience on its two protagonist characters, Angel and Stan, and the narrative of their racial, sexual, and social dynamic that has been showcased in the show. In Pose, Angel is an Afro-Latina trans woman whose desirability is contingent, aesthetic, and ultimately disavowable. She is fully “passing” within the universe of the show, but passing does not grant futurity; it only grants access to desire without guarantee of social continuation.

Her lover, Stan, on the other side of the dyad, is an upper-middle-class, New Jersey, white, conventionally masculine heterosexual man who arrives at Angel not because he is ready to abandon his world, but because she offers a temporary suspension of it. He is not merely closeted in his desire; he is structurally obedient to what Jaina calls din–duniya, the world of lineage, wife, dinner table, suburban furniture, Christmas routines, and the aspirational (and racialized) American middle-class timeline.

Moving from Vaibhav Saria’s account of hijra–man dynamics to Pose Series, the relationship between Angel and Stan mirrors the same structure in simpler terms: Angel is deeply desired but never granted a place in Stan’s real life, which remains tied to wife, home, and the expectations of white suburban adulthood. Stan wants her, but only in the hours that don’t threaten his public world.

Angel names this imbalance directly in one scene: “That’s all I ever wanted. But when I had it, I just felt like I was nothing until he decided to come home and play with me,”... …

On this recipe from Pose, the point is not that Stan is cruel, but that he never has to choose between wanting Angel and keeping his life intact. That is the parallel to my November with T, as I think about it on the emotional after-hours: real enough to want, too real to keep. The failure of our heart is not as trans women we are not desired or wanted, but rather the world has not built a legal, domestic, reproductive, or economic room in which that love can attach to futurity.

Image: White Dhokla with Green Mint Chutney, watercolor on paper, 2025

The emotional recognition of this imbalance arrived through a text message from my friend Sameer, after I relayed that T and I had parted. His message:

“He is a man. What do you expect? We are dumb with our hearts by nature.”

Sameer frames the repeated labor of queer and trans feminine attachment not as naiveté but as compulsion toward imaginative world-making — the same force Dina Campbell ascribes to the heart’s “higher frequency.” It is not stupidity; it is fidelity to affective possibility.

Shortly after our text, I met Sameer at a queer bar that night. I was still wearing the fishnets T had preferred on me, and walked into the bar in Brooklyn, to a more fully clothed mid-30 to late-40 queer crowd. As I walked in wearing my mini skirt with a fishnet stocking, I ignored the few curious eyes. Sameer, on the other hand, arrived between his laundry break, not with another analysis but with food: white dhokla soaked in green mint chutney. I am definitely not sentimentalizing Dhokla; as I bite into the chutney-soaked white dhokla, I am contextualizing it. As I thought about Diana’s curatorial framing of the heart’s imaginative intelligence, the white dhokla moment becomes less a scene of consolation than an instance of world-making, where the heart, even in disappointment, still acts as a site of meaning rather than collapse. The dhokla moment did not negate that; it made it metabolizable. Mint chutney-soaked white dhokla made by Sameer, highly recommended for broken hearts!

A national piece on the history of queer migration in the USA in The 19th News also circulated at the same time, featuring some of my reflections on trans migration and worldmaking. The report by Journalist Kate Sochin was clear, careful, and specific. When it was later reposted on a Texas based Facebook page, OutSmart Magazine, it received 552 comments majority of which were filled with anti trans and anti-immigrant sentiment and opinion on my personal journey as a trans immigrant.

Reading these Facebook comments from the online strangers felt like its own version of a din-duniya (a world): policing who is allowed futurity, legality, belonging, safety, and citizenship. The heart, again, was treated as content, not consciousness. The social and media economy through which trans and migrant pain is legible, consumable, and circulated for ideological reinforcement, but rarely protected or materially supported.

I want to return to Diana’s articulation of the heart, not as metaphor, but as an organ that holds the intelligence to bridge what is spiritual and what is material, what is flesh and what is form. If November offered anything, it was not an answer or revelation but a series of recipes to deal with a man who could not stay, friends who did, learning from the hijra ancestors’ wisdom, soft humiliation of online strangers, and the white dhokla that tasted like repair without promising a cure.

For trans feminine hearts, the line between fragility and force is never stable. It bends, it snaps, it sutures, it glows—at times it is unbearably brave. It knows it is endangered and still insists on recognition. It stretches toward love even when the lover cannot house it. It absorbs projection, fetish, disappearance, and yet it continues to make: drawings, dinner tables, text threads, dhokla, theory, kinship, desire. It is the ongoing world-building of the broken heart in the absence of any guarantee. If I cannot locate a singular meaning in my recent experience, I can at least recognize that it is not an isolated one; it is part of the ongoing pattern of how trans femme bodies, desires, and hearts are held, categorized, and disciplined in the world. The heart, as Campbell writes, possesses “imaginative intelligence”—it generates its own cosmology. Mine will continue to do so: across minor intimacies, the fleeting generosity of men, the small terrors of comment sections, the brownstone rain, and the drawings pinned to my wall.

Hold It Against Me: Presenting Queer Art in Bangladesh

Misrepresentation, Emotional Difficulty, and a System that Fails Queer and Trans Artists

Last month, in late October, I accepted an invitation to participate in a group exhibition in Dhaka on censorship and surveillance. The event was organized by a youth-led Bangladeshi queer platform using their project funding to translate “Art” into visibility, in collaboration with a Pathshala-connected artist-curator, someone who presented herself as a cis-heterosexual female photographer turned curator; and staged at the rented space of Drik Gallery, an institution long praised for its social-justice orientation and its glorified icon artist visionary Shahidul Alam. The terms of the invitation seemed simple, even hopeful: send materials, coordinate context, and find a way to be present without being present. What unfolded over the following week, however, was not a reunion with Dhaka’s art scene after nine years of absence, but a quietly painful study in artistic and emotional difficulty; an anatomy of how queer art is asked to perform visibility without receiving care.

I write this not to settle a personal score, but to document a pattern, to record how the architecture of Bangladesh’s institutional art world continues to misread, misrepresent, and extract from queer and trans lives while calling the process inclusion. To name the frame is part of the work; to make visible the system that calls our participation “solidarity” is to expose how visibility itself is structured by inequity.

Image: Documentation of the durational gallery performance “AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (ASAP)”, an anonymous docent performer performing the pink-veiled figure named SYSTEM, following the performance score.

I have not lived or returned to Bangladesh for nearly ten years now. The details and the context behind this long absence can be found on my past substack from October 15, Writing Queerness in Bangladesh. Saying and documenting these details matters. A new generation of queer and trans artists and activists is working in Dhaka today, improvising forms, building collectives, testing what can be said and how, but the institutional legacy that many of us knew remains stubbornly intact. Straight-passing artists continue to be platformed for producing “queer themes,” and our wounds continue to circulate as research material. The difference is that the system has become smarter. It now knows how to curate its empathy, how to perform allyship, and how to write the right press release. It can speak the language of solidarity fluently. What it does not yet know is how to share authorship, or how to take a genuine risk.

Over the past decade, what has passed as “queer” or “trans representation” in Bangladeshi art has followed a consistent structure: trans and queer lives appear as subject matter but almost never as authorship, power, or voice. A generation of Pathshala-educated, well-connected, mostly heterosexual artists learned that queerness and Hijra stories could function as aesthetic capital, emotionally charged enough to feel urgent, politically risky enough to appear brave, and globally legible enough to travel through biennials, grants, and curatorial circuits. The imagery varied: documentary-style portraits of Hijra communities, tender black-and-white photographs of queer bodies, and metaphors of butterflies, mirrors, sky, and cages. Yet the logic stayed the same; the camera, the funding, the exhibition wall, and the institutional language all belonged to the artist, not to the community being represented. The images travelled well; the subjects stayed behind. Visibility became a one-way transaction: the subject gave their story while the artist received their career. Institutions such as Pathshala and other NGO-inspired photojournalistic ventures have amplified this dynamic for years, staging inclusion as a theme while keeping queer and trans creators structurally outside the room. The queer subject is invited into exhibitions as a body, never as an author.

Image: Screenshot from an interview with Bangladeshi cis female photographer Sumi Anjuman, whose “ethically positioned” images of Bangladeshi LGBTQI+ communities now circulate smoothly through European photo festivals. In the interview, she frames this work as a moral responsibility, yet the boundary between allyship and extraction remains blurred. Her success is a reminder of how queer and trans pain in Bangladesh becomes artistic capital for cis-heterosexual artists; circulated, awarded, and archived, while the lives it depicts remain structurally unchanged, a familiar pattern.

What makes this pattern so troubling is not empathy itself, but its conversion into value. Pain, when rendered beautifully, circulates easily; power does not. The system rewards the performance of allyship rather than the redistribution of access. It mirrors the older machinery of colonial anthropology, where representation was never neutral but always a form of possession. After a decade in which transness and queerness have been repeatedly used as symbol, case study, motif, and metaphor by others, the question becomes: what would it mean to move from representation to authorship?

Not another artwork about trans life, but an art world where trans and queer people in Bangladesh hold the camera, write the wall text, curate the exhibition, direct the funding, and shape the archive. The issue is no longer whether trans bodies appear; it is whether they are allowed to decide what those appearances mean.

The exhibition I participated in Dhaka, was framed as a timely exploration of surveillance and censorship, a safe theme for a risky time. “Surveillance” is easy to curate into an exhibition. But creating security : emotional, communal, curatorial; is harder. Since the murders of queer activists Xulhaz and Tonoy in 2016, the word “security” has haunted every queer project in Dhaka. It organizes space, polices participation, and justifies absence. In practice, it often means: we want your politics without your body; we want your testimony without your terms. To be invited into such a frame is to negotiate not only what you show, but what you will allow to be done to your work, and your name, in the name of safety.

Image: Documentation of the installed large-format prints of my articles. The original installation concept, meant to create visual intimacy rather than simply illustrate the text, was not followed through, and the execution suffered as a result.

For this Exhibition at Dhaka, I shared the works I felt could travel without me: large-format prints of recently published op-eds on trans visibility and the politics of post-uprising Bangladesh. I think of these documents as Dolil, paper architectures of witness, and a performance score that can be read when the room cannot hold a trans body on its own terms. These are not compromises but design decisions. In hostile contexts like Bangladesh, the work must anticipate its own abandonment. The text must know how to stand up, to speak without a mouth. The instruction becomes the performance; performing through a docent performer from a distance becomes the defense.

Image: AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (ASAP) performance poster, entails the schedule and description of the work. The performance was carried out by an anonymous docent-performer, lasting one hour per day over three consecutive days.

What followed in the execution of my work into the exhibition was a choreography many queer and trans artists will recognize: messages with excuses of logistics, the slow shifting of tone, the subtle drift of curatorial framing without consent. My work became illustrative rather than dialogic, translated into digestible fragments for a presumed audience. When the structure began to feel extractive, I withdrew trust.

The curator’s message that landed on my WhatsApp group, “I know I failed you, and I understand why you don’t trust me.” It was true. It was not nothing. It was also, finally, not repairable. Confession is not accountability; recognition is not redistribution; guilt is not a line for repair. So when the curator wrote: “I’ve failed you, and it makes sense that you don’t trust me anymore.” I didn’t know what to do with that sentence. It felt honest, but also too small. Not a failure of intent, but a failure of a system. Not only her as a curator, but the entire system that teaches them to care about the object before the body, the wall label before the life.

There is an entangled terrain in making queer art as a Bangladeshi trans artist in exile; a longing to return, to be read at home, to be seen not as an exception but as belonging. That longing complicates our consent. It makes us more forgiving of institutions and systems that fail us, because we wish they would not. It makes the politics of representation inseparable from the politics of love.

To recover from this, reading the art critic and scholar Jennifer Doyle becomes necessary for me as a method. In Hold It Against Me, she insists on emotion as a medium in contemporary art: not theatrical feeling attached to a work, but the very substance through which art performs its social and political labor. Difficulty, Doyle writes, is not a failure of communication but a tool. If we take that seriously, then the emotional overwhelm of these exchanges, the fatigue, the vigilance, the grief of misreading, is not outside the work; it is the work. It maps where the institution ends and where my life begins. It reveals the limits of a frame that wants my art but not my mess. The difficult emotional register of this exhibition is part of the artwork, even when the artwork no longer wishes to be part of the exhibition.

Thinking of a trans scholar and critic who cares for artists, like Jack Halberstam’s account of failure from the book “The Queer Art of Failure,” offers another language for this moment. Failure, he reminds us, is not a verdict but a method, a queer refusal to meet the metrics of institutional success: clarity, comfort, closure. By that logic, this exhibition failed productively. It failed to reabsorb me into a local art narrative where queer content is welcome but queer autonomy is not. It failed to translate discomfort into something more then inclushion. It failed to disguise structural inequality as interpersonal misunderstanding. And in failing, it clarified. It revealed what the room could not hold, what the institution would not build. Because the question is not whether a curator or organizer is individually good or bad. Some of the organizers in this case identify as queer; many were earnestly trying. I do not doubt this. But when the frame itself is heteronormative and classed, when institutional risk is outsourced to the artist while reputational gain is retained by the institution, we are not negotiating with people so much as with a system. The system loves the appearance of difficulty. It loves the word “censorship” because it makes the institution look brave. It loves to say “we platform queer voices” because it values the sound of inclusion. What it does not love is to place the queer artist at the center of authorial control, to insist on queer decision-making power, to build the protocols that would let a trans artist shape the terms of their safety rather than be shaped by someone else’s panic.

So I translate. If the exhibition cannot hold the work, the essay can. Writing is another form of agency to express. It circulates differently; it can name what the wall cannot; it can build context for readers who do not know Bangladesh. For decades, queer and trans expression in Bangladeshi art has oscillated between erasure and appropriation. The archive bears witness to hetero-authored projects with “LGBT themes,” to the grief economy where our lives become evidence but our authorship is erased, to institutions that have learned how to perform inclusion while keeping decision-making in the same hands.

What would it mean, for example, for Drik, Pathshala, and other global-facing Bangladeshi art organizations/institutions to treat “security” not as a veto on queer presence but as a mandate for queer governance? What would it look like to begin with the premise that queer and trans artists define the risk protocols for their own work rather than absorb the anxieties of an institution managing reputation? What would a budget for care look like if it were not an afterthought? What would it mean to say: the curator’s apology is not the end; it is the start of a material reorganization?

If emotion is a medium, as Doyle proposes, then the medium’s ethics matter. The institution that extracts emotion as a spectacle of bravery (“look what we dared to show”) has one kind of ethics; the institution that absorbs emotion as an instruction (“what must we change to be hospitable to this artist?”) has another. In the first case, the difficulty of the work legitimizes the institution. In the second, the difficulty of the work reorganizes it. The former is a performance; the latter is a practice.

Image: Installation view of the exhibition at Dhaka.

I return to Halberstam because the word “failure” still holds in my emotional afterthoughts. Queer art is often described as failure because it resists the formats of success we have been taught to recognize. But there is a failure I want to insist on as refusal: the failure to make myself legible on terms that betray the work. If the exhibition cannot sustain the politics of the life that made the piece, then letting the exhibition fail me clarifies the next step. The failure is not the end of the work; it is the beginning of a different form. The essay, the score, the print, these become not backups but primary architectures, designed exactly for this contingency.

Some may ask why name institutions and artists at all if the problem is systemic. Because a system is not an abstraction hovering above us. It is built out of rooms and schedules, of names and reputations, of budgets and bodies. Naming Drik and Pathshala is not to single out villains but to refuse the fantasy that the global-facing art world in Bangladesh is innocent of its own habits. These are the rooms where many of us learned to speak. They can become rooms where we learn to listen. But listening will require more than apologizing. It will require ceding control.

The productive part of this failure sits elsewhere. It sits in the way I can now describe the maze more clearly, the way “security” bends the corridor, the way “inclusion” tilts the floor, the way apology opens a door that does not yet lead to a different room. It sits in the way the work insists on other routes: a newspaper page scaled to a wall; a performance score folded into a booklet; a conversation that lives in the mouth of a reader I may never meet. It sits in the way a generation, those working underground now, might no longer accept the old bargains and might design frames that are less polite and more just.

I want to end by asking what the questions need to be. If an institution can admit failure, who holds the plan that makes repair possible? If “security” is the first word, what does it hide, and what would the second word be if queer artists wrote it? If emotion is a medium, whose body budgets for it, and how is that budget paid? If visibility is offered, what form of authorship must accompany it to count as participation? If an invitation arrives without the power to shape context, is that an invitation at all? If the exhibition succeeds on paper but fails in care, what do we call the object that remains?

I know that writing this turns misrepresentation into a record. That the work does not end where the wall ends. That failure, if we inherit it as a method rather than a verdict, can be a way of refusing to be tidied up. And that the next time a room calls itself brave, I will ask to see the blueprint.

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Works Cited

Doyle, Jennifer. Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Duke University Press, 2013.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

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About the Author: Tara Asgar is a Bangladeshi trans artist, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her work spans performance, text, and community-based art, exploring queer embodiment, exile, and the politics of representation across South Asia and the diaspora.

Writing Queerness in Bangladesh

A decade of risk, exile, and the careful permission to speak

My latest op-ed essay, “Reclaiming the Street: The Curious Case of Sahara Chowdhury and Queer Citizenship in Bangladesh,” was published in The Dhaka Tribune on October 14, 2025. It is one of the very few times that a Bangladeshi national daily has carried an in-depth commentary on queerness and citizenship written by an openly queer artist and writer.

You can read the full article here:
Reclaiming the Street: The Curious Case of Sahara Chowdhury and Queer Citizenship in Bangladesh

Screenshot of the article published in The Dhaka Tribune, October 14, 2025.

Publishing this essay was not a simple act of writing; it was the culmination of more than a decade of navigating censorship, displacement, and the fragile space between safety and speech. The reflections that follow are not a retelling of that article, but the story behind it: how my life as a queer artist, writer, and activist has been shaped by visibility, survival, and the ongoing struggle to locate a place where I can make art and speak without fear.

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The Dhaka Tribune publication stands on its own, but for me, as a queer artist, writer and someone who still holds a citizenship of Bangladesh, it represents much more than an article; it marks a rare moment when a national daily in Bangladesh published a feature that directly and analytically engaged with queerness, queer citizenship, and trans rights in public, as I had mentioned above, something which was unimaginable on my early 20’s when I started my art practice at Dhaka.

For those unfamiliar with Bangladesh’s media landscape & political context, this is not a small thing. The Dhaka Tribune is one of the country’s leading national dailies, with a wide readership and visibility. To have an article like this appear in its opinion section, amid rising censorship, surveillance, and moral policing, is a hard-won step forward. Yet, behind this publication lies a story that spans more than a decade: a long negotiation between safety, self-censorship, and location, between where I can make art and write from and where my words can safely appear.

Before this essay was accepted, I had approached three major newspapers in Bangladesh. All declined to publish it. None mentioned queerness as the reason, but the silence spoke for itself. When editors say “space is limited” or “it may not fit our current editorial direction,” one learns to read what remains unsaid: that queerness remains too dangerous to print in Bangladesh, too costly for editors, too visible for comfort.

That quiet rejection echoed something familiar from my early years as an artist in Dhaka. Back then, I faced scrutiny not only from conservatives but also from within the liberal artist and activist circles who claimed to champion freedom of expression. My insistence on naming queerness publicly, through art, writing, and performance, was seen by some as excessive, too loud, or self-serving. At times, people speculated that my openness about sexuality and gender was merely a strategy to “leave the country,” as though queerness could be reduced to a visa category or a tool of aspiration. Someone once told me, not unkindly, that perhaps I was “using queerness as a ticket to the promised land”, that promised land, of course, being America.

This suspicion, where queerness becomes weaponized against those who embody it, is not unique to Bangladesh. It’s how heteronormative systems police the boundaries of legitimacy. The queer subject is tolerated only when abstract, aestheticized, or contained within NGO discourse; once visible, once personal, they become a threat. To survive, one must perform a careful version of queerness, palatable enough for liberal sympathy but not radical enough to disturb the social order.

This is the psychic economy of queerness in Bangladesh: visibility as both necessity and liability. My ability to publish this piece today is not a measure of progress, but of privilege, a privilege I earned through distance, through exile, through surviving long enough to be heard.

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My engagement with queer activism began in 2008–2009, when I joined Boys of Bangladesh (BOB), a hybrid online and in-person platform for LGBTQ+ individuals, now renamed OBOYOB. I was young and full of faith that change was possible through collective language. We gathered in small apartments, cafés, and anonymous chat rooms, trying to invent a vocabulary for feelings and bodies that had no public expression. We were not making history; we were trying to exist. Yet, those meetings became a quiet archive of a generation that learned to imagine freedom without ever being promised it.

By 2012–2016, my art practice had become more explicitly political. I produced video works, performances, and participatory pieces that explored the fragile relationship between visibility and belonging. Contrary to what some assumed, I never avoided the word queer. I used it openly, in gallery spaces, in interviews, and in my own writing.

My first published Bangla article, for Roopbaan ( Read Here: প্রসঙ্গ: বাংলাদেশে ক্যুয়ের আর্ট + অপ্রাসঙ্গিক আলাপ ) directly challenged liberal Pathshala-schooled artists who profited from the imagery of queerness while excluding queer artists from their own narratives. I questioned how the aesthetic of suffering could be commodified and how that aesthetic capitalism disguised itself as progressivism.

The cover page of the “Shameless” exhibition catalogue (February 2016)

Mainstream art institutions and the community in Bangladesh treated queer art as either pathology or novelty. There were no precedents. To speak about the queerness conceptually was seen as unintelligible, as if queerness could only be legible through pain or spectacle. Working in that isolation meant being misunderstood by both allies and the artist fraternity. For me, queerness was not ambition; it was exile - a form of life lived perpetually in translation.

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In April 2016, my life changed irreversibly. I was in Dhaka, at the apartment of my friends and colleagues Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy, when they were brutally murdered by muslim extremists in front of me. They were not random victims; they were targeted for who they were: queer men, activists, publishers, and volunteers of Roopbaan, and public advocates of LGBTQ rights in Bangladesh.

What I saw that day is not something I can ever unsee. Their bodies, their voices, the silence that followed, it redefined what danger meant. When violence enters the domestic space, the place of friendship, it alters your sense of safety forever.

In the aftermath, I went into hiding for nearly three months. I was supported by a network of known and unknown allies who helped me move between safe houses, avoid surveillance, and find food and medication. Each day was spent questioning what survival meant after witnessing such violence. I could not sleep. I could not make art. I could not look at a mirror without seeing death reflected back.

During that period, I understood what it meant to live as evidence, as someone whose body holds proof of what the state refuses to acknowledge. I kept asking myself: What does it mean to be alive, to still be queer, after seeing your friends butchered for being queer?

In a later interview with The Daily Beast (Read Here:My Gay Friends Were Hacked to Death In Dhaka. I Escaped), I spoke about that experience, about the dissonance between surviving and belonging. Survival felt like betrayal, because living meant leaving.

When I finally left Bangladesh in June 2016, it was not migration; it was escape. I left behind three months of hiding, paranoia, and uncertainty. I did not leave because I wanted to; I left because there was no alternative. Friends vanished. Organizations collapsed. Fear replaced speech. Those of us who survived became symbols of caution rather than courage, reminders of what could happen if you spoke too loudly.

Since then, people often ask me, “When are you coming back to Bangladesh?” as if return were simply a matter of distance or desire. But for someone who has lived through that moment, return is not a metaphor; it is a risk. Leaving was not easy; returning is not simple either. To go back means to step again into a place that once tried to erase you, to relive the old fear that your visibility might once more become fatal.

Even now, nearly ten years later, I carry the residue of that moment. People in New York, even queer people in Bangladesh, often remember Roopbaan as a symbolic event but forget the names, the faces, the witnesses. Sometimes they mention Xulhaz and Tonoy casually, as if their deaths have become historical shorthand rather than a lived trauma. In those moments, I shrink into silence. The shame and guilt of survival return.

For years, I stopped speaking publicly about that day, not because I forgot, but because remembering demanded too much of me.

Exile has not healed that wound; it has only transformed it. Living in the United States has allowed me to write and make art again, to speak without immediate threat. Yet that freedom is conditional. I am visible, but never entirely safe. The queer immigrant body here exists in a different register of surveillance, through bureaucracy, tokenism, and legislative erasure. America offers language but withholds belonging. It grants space, but not permanence.

I live in between: physically here, spiritually and politically elsewhere. My art and writing remain tethered to Bangladesh, the country that made me, erased me, and continues to haunt everything I create. So I find myself in an in-between place: physically located in the U.S., but creatively and emotionally rooted in Bangladesh. My work, my writing, and my sense of community remain tied to that context.

Writing about Sahara Chowdhury’s hunger strike is therefore not merely solidarity; it is a form of return. Each sentence is a way to reclaim the street I once had to flee.

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Every piece I write about Bangladesh is part of an ongoing archive of survival, a record of what it means to insist on speaking after silence has been enforced. For queer and trans people in Bangladesh, there is no institutional archive, no protection of memory. The personal essay becomes the only site of historical preservation.

The cost of publishing this kind of work is rarely visible. Behind every article are the years of loss, censorship, and displacement that made it possible. To write from exile is to constantly translate, to make grief legible, to justify one’s own persistence. What I feel now is not triumph, but a cautious acknowledgment of what endurance looks like.

Publishing an essay like this in 2025 remains dangerous for many in Bangladesh. I can take that risk only because I have distance, a privilege earned through loss. This is not liberation; it is survival with vocabulary.

So when I call this publication a victory, I mean it carefully. It is a victory ten years in the making, built from grief, exile, and persistence, a victory that belongs to all those who continue to speak, even when the world refuses to listen.

If this reflection resonates with you, share it forward or leave a comment below. Each act of reading and remembering helps keep our stories alive.

About the author

Tara Asgar is a Bangladeshi trans artist, writer, and activist based in Brooklyn. Working across performance, text, and video, her practice explores queerness, displacement, and the politics of belonging between Bangladesh and its diaspora. She writes about the intersections of visibility, risk, and care in postcolonial and transnational contexts.