Amar Shahpur

Over a long weekend recently I went to Shahpur, the birthplace of my mother. I had four fantastic days and the trip was more than worth it. Everyone who missed out so far will never experience the beauty of this village.

Shahpur is a place, where you can shower under the open sky and feel the warmth of the sun, where strangers know you when you say who your grandfather is, where the milk tastes like fresh milk, where you can experience what real mosquito bites feel like, where little school boys will take you on their boat along the river into the rice fields to earn some pocket money, where dragon-flies accompany you on your boat ride, where you can take a walk and realize that within a few hours you have walked all the borders of the village, where people are happy to see you and ask how your family is doing, where your aunt makes homemade pastries, where the sunset is incomparable, where you can drink the water of green cocos from your own tree, where little kids ask you to take their photos, where goats chill on the walkways, where your baby cousin is amazed by baby goats, where you just greet random people on the way to the bazaar, where the bazaar is probably the size of a western playground, where you pump the water from wells, where tourists would pay a lot of money to spend their vacation at, where eagles fly in the sky and frogs walk on the earth, where people sometimes don’t bother too much about time, where Jute is hung up on trees to dry, where tea at little stalls is made with real milk and not milk powder, where old ladies tell you that they have seen you when you were “sooo little”, where people meet to chat and update on who has been doing what recently, where “peace” really has a meaning, where you just don’t care and take things as they come, where I should go more often, where hardly any cars or CNGs go, where at sunset you see farmers riding home on the river, where the silence at night is only interrupted by the sound of birds and crickets, where you can watch stars and fireflies at night, where you can flash the torch light into people’s faces and ask with a big smile who they are. Shahpur is a place where I wanna go again.