Where the blood doesn’t speak

When Reza was 10, war lived on the rooftop.

He and his cousins built battlefields from bamboo poles and broken furniture. They lined up imaginary frontlines with bricks and played out siege scenes in the warm dust. One would shout, “Fire!” and another would leap back, clutching his packet, ketchup or red nail polish dribbling theatrically. Death was applauded. Strategy was celebrated. They were heroes. They were survivors. They were children pretending to die under the sharp Uttara sun.

Tap Here to Add The Daily Star As A Trusted Source

Back then, Reza believed war was choreography. Something to perform, to master. He loved the way the “blood” dried into a dark, cracked crust on his knuckles—a badge of honour that smelled of solvent and childhood sweat. He would lie on the scorching concrete, eyes wide and unblinking, watching the kites circle the Dhaka skyline, imagining he was a fallen soldier in a grand, cinematic epic.

Now, in his 40s, he knows better. War isn’t staged anymore. It’s televised. And sometimes, it’s televised live.

Dr Rezaul Karim is no longer that boy. Now, he’s a name people whisper with awe in private hospitals across Dhaka—a cardiac surgeon of international repute. He resides in a sleek Banani apartment where the air is filtered to a precise coolness and the floors are lined with Turkish tiles that feel like frozen silk underfoot. The aesthetic is minimalist Scandinavian: clean lines, white walls, soft recessed lighting. Nothing is chaotic. Nothing is out of place. The apartment is a fortress of order designed to keep the humidity and the clamor of the city at bay.

Except the blood, which he sees weekly—and which no longer unsettles him.

It used to. He remembers once, during his surgical residency, throwing up after a particularly messy mitral valve repair. The metallic tang of the spray, the frantic rhythm of a dying heart—it had overwhelmed him. That was years ago. Now, blood is just part of the canvas. Red strokes in his silent art. He slices through flesh and bone with the same composure he applies to setting dinner reservations. Between the scent of cauterised tissue and the soft, steady rhythm of the monitor, something in him has hardened. Or perhaps, something long ago went quiet. He has become a technician of the soul, treating the human heart as a complex hydraulic pump rather than the seat of emotion.

Tonight, he is not in the operating room. Tonight, the world is at war again—and he is hosting a party.

In the living room, the television glows a cold, electric blue, casting long, spectral shadows across the grey leather sofas. Four men lounge there—doctors mostly, a fraternity of the desensitised. Their laughter is low and smooth, muffled by the amber depth of single-malt whisky and the comfortable familiarity of shared status.

On the screen, an Israeli drone circles above Gaza, hunting. The image jitters slightly as the feed stabilises, a grainy, monochromatic eye in the sky. Then—flash. A silent bloom of grey smoke. Faint, distant screams filtered through a speaker system that cost more than a village school.

There is a brief hush, then a round of muted approval.

“Did you see that precision?” the orthopedic surgeon remarks, leaning forward. “Like a scalpel from space. No jagged edges on that strike.”

Reza nods, impressed, swirling the ice in his glass. “Zero collateral. Beautiful. It’s a game of precision, really. The technology finally matches the intent.”

“Your kind of kill,” someone jokes, a dark quip that hangs in the air like cigar smoke.

He raises his glass: “To discipline.”

They toast, eyes glued to the screen as the news anchor moves on to Ukraine. Trenches. Night-vision footage. Another explosion, this one from a tank shell. Civilians scatter like ants in the dark, their thermal signatures glowing bright white before fading into the cold earth.

In the hallway, just out of view, Reza’s mother, Mahrufa Begum, watches in silence. Her hand grips the edge of a mahogany console for balance. She smells of ginger, camphor, and the old prayer beads she keeps tucked in her waist. There was a time she would switch off the TV as soon as war reports began, shielding her house from the “evil eye” of violence. But now, she keeps it on when she is alone. It feels wrong to look away. To her, every flicker of light on that screen is a soul being extinguished.

What wounds her more than the horror itself is her son’s reaction to it. She studies his face—the high cheekbones, the steady eyes that she once kissed to sleep. He watches the destruction not with grief, but with analysis. He looks at a leveled apartment block the way he looks at a chest X-ray—searching for the “pathology,” the tactical error.

The first time she saw him grin during a drone strike, her throat had dried up.

“Reza,” she had asked, her voice careful, “do you… enjoy watching this?”

He had not looked away from the screen. “It’s war, Ma. It’s happening anyway. Might as well understand it. Tactics. Technology. Territory. Winners and losers.”

“You talk like it’s a game.”

He shrugged, a brief, elegant motion of his shoulders. “It is. Life is a series of successful interventions. If you’re not the one with the scalpel, you’re the one on the table.”

She had said nothing after that, but she did not sleep. She spent the night reciting the Tasbih, her heart a heavy stone in her chest.

The heart attack comes during Asr prayer.

All afternoon, the screen showed scenes from Rafah. A girl’s bloodied face. A mother digging through concrete rubble with her bare hands, her fingernails torn to the quick. The camera had zoomed in far too close, capturing the glint of a discarded toy in the dust.

Mahrufa presses her palm to her chest. A tightness blooms under her ribs, spreading like ink in water to her left arm. Pain laces through her shoulder. As her forehead touches the prayer rug in prostration, the world tilts. She tries to call for help, but only whispers, “Allah, Allah,” before collapsing. In that final moment of consciousness, the boundary between her living room and the war zone vanishes. She feels the weight of the concrete; she feels the dust in her lungs.

Twenty minutes pass before Reza finds her. He had called her twice for tea and gotten no response. Annoyed, he came upstairs—then paused. She is lying face-down, her prayer cap fallen to the side. His irritation vanishes instantly, replaced by a cold, crystalline instinct. No panic. No screams. He kneels beside her, his fingers finding her carotid artery with practiced ease.

“Female, sixties. Suspected MI. Call Dr. Sadman. Ready the Cath lab,” he barks into his phone, his voice as steady as if he were ordering a courier.

He rides with her in the ambulance, already pulling on latex gloves. The siren wails through the Dhaka traffic, but inside the vehicle, Reza is a vacuum of emotion. He is already visualising the blockage, the narrow corridor of the artery, the delicate placement of the stent. The hands that once crafted forts from cardboard now guide a wire through his mother’s body.

The operation is flawless. The “Heart Hacker” lives up to his name.

That night, while she lies unconscious in the ICU, Reza sits alone in the waiting room. He is not praying. He is watching a military analyst on YouTube break down the trajectory of hypersonic missiles.

“The Russians are adapting fast,” the analyst says. “You see, precision wins wars now.”

Reza clicks the like button. Then type in the comments: “Surgical efficiency.”

When Mahrufa finally opens her eyes, her son is by her side, adjusting the IV line with a technician’s focus.

“Don’t try to talk,” he says gently. “It was a minor infraction. We’ve stented the blockage. You’ll be fine.”

She nods slowly, her eyes searching for him. He seems relieved, but it is the relief of a man whose machine has been repaired. There is no softness in his gaze—only the clinical calm of a man who has won a round of a game. She feels like a file marked: “Resolved.”

Weeks pass. The wars roll on, more frequent, more vivid.

Reza’s fame reaches its zenith. He has performed a record-breaking seven bypasses in under four hours. Channel i aired a special segment. Netizens call him a hero. When asked by a journalist how he stayed so calm while a human life hung in the balance, he replied with a smile: “You have to shut off emotion. It’s a game of precision. If you feel too much, your hand shakes. And in my world, a shake is a defeat.”

People clapped. His mother turned the television off.

One evening, she finds her grandson—Reza’s nephew—playing a war simulator on a tablet in the Banani living room. The boy is shouting, “Headshot! Triple kill!” The screen flashes red and gold.

She gently takes the tablet from him. Her hands, though aged, are firm. She handed him an old wooden chessboard.

“Think before you move,” she says softly. “There are better ways to win than by destroying.”

In the other room, Reza is sitting in the dark, watching the news. A strike on a refugee convoy has just been aired—dust, fire, bodies scattering across a desert road like chaff in the wind. He rewinds the footage, pauses it at the exact moment of impact. The symmetry of the explosion, the way the light fractured—it was, in a dark way, perfect.

His phone pings. A private message from a former classmate, now a volunteer surgeon in a conflict zone.

“Reza, I need an urgent consultation. Sent you the telemetry and scans for a complex thoracic case. We can’t close the chest, and the shrapnel is near the aorta.”

Reza opens the file. It is a series of high-resolution internal scans. He scrolls through the shattered ribs and arterial ruptures with the hunger of a connoisseur. It is a masterpiece of trauma physics. He looks at the patient metadata to check the age.

There is an identification photo attached to the file.

It is a boy, perhaps 10 years old. He is lying on a cold metal table, his chest flayed open by the “precision” Reza so admired. But it is not the wound that stops Reza’s breath.

It is the boy’s hand.

Clutched in those small, grey fingers is a piece of broken bamboo, painted a bright, flaking red. Not with blood, but with a cheap, familiar nail polish—the exact shade his mother used to wear thirty years ago. The boy is wearing a faded t-shirt with a cartoon logo—the same one Reza had worn on the rooftop in 1996.

The whiskey glass slips from Reza’s hand. It does not shatter; it thuds onto the thick Persian rug, the amber liquid soaking into the wool like a spreading, unhealed bruise.

On the screen, the drone continues its silent, beautiful loop over the desert. But for the first time, the “Heart Hacker” feels a cold, sharp wind blowing from a rooftop he can no longer pretend was just a playground. The blood on the screen finally begins to speak, and for the first time in twenty years, Rezaul Karim’s hands begin to shake. 
 

Haroonuzzaman is a translator, novelist, poet, researcher, and essayist. Besides teaching English in Libya and Qatar for about 12 years, he has had 20 years of teaching experience in English Language and Literature at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).