There’s a Reason Why My Village No Longer Digs Ponds. I am The Reason.

My therapist said I need to write this down somewhere. Somewhere outside my own head. She originally wanted me to share it with friends and family, you know, the usual advice. Talk to people who know you. Let them carry some of the weight.

The problem is, I don’t have much family left to call. Not after what happened. And the friends I did tell, the ones I trusted enough to sit down with and actually explain, they laughed. Not cruelly. Just the way people laugh when they’re uncomfortable and don’t know what else to do. The way people laugh when they’ve decided, before you even finish talking, that what you’re saying cannot possibly be true.

So here I am. Talking to strangers on a website I don’t understand, because apparently that’s what’s left.

I should probably give some context. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Set the scene. Tell you where I’m from, when this happened, what the place looked like. You know… the district, the approximate year, how far the village was from the nearest town. But I don’t feel like it, because what’s the point, exactly? You won’t know the place. The name won’t mean anything to you. So let’s just say: it was a rural area in Bangladesh. It was the kind of place where the land is so flat you can see rain coming from three kilometers away, and everyone knows everyone’s business, and a new pond is a cause for quiet celebration.

In our area, ponds don’t stay unused for long. If there’s land, someone will dig. Sometimes for fish farming, sometimes irrigation, sometimes just because stagnant water feels more natural than dry soil. A pond makes the place feel complete. So when the empty plot behind our house was finally bought and cleared, no one was surprised.

I had just finished college in Canada and come back home. From Vancouver to a village… I know how that sounds. The plan was to stay at my father’s until I found something stable in Dhaka. A few months, maybe. Just until I got my footing.

My father was happy I was there. More than happy. He’d been, I don’t know how to put this,  quieter… since my mother died. Like something in him had just turned down. Having me around seemed to help. We didn’t talk about it directly. We just made tea and sat on the roof together and watched the workers dig.

It was a good few weeks, honestly. Peaceful in a way I hadn’t felt in years. I was sending out CVs, half-heartedly arguing with strangers on Discord, drinking too much tea. Normal stuff.

The digging started in late November. It was dry season, the ground cuts easier then. At first, everything was normal. Excavators during the day, workers smoking and talking loudly, piles of wet earth rising on the sides. By evening it went quiet, leaving just a wide raw pit slowly pulling in groundwater from below.

But by the fourth day, the workers started leaving early.

Not all at once. One or two at a time.

No arguments. No complaints.

They just… stopped coming back after lunch.

My father noticed first. “Strange,” he said. “They’re being paid daily. No one leaves work like that.”

The contractor came the next morning with new workers. By afternoon, same thing.

I started watching from the roof. You could see straight into the pit from there. It was deeper than most ponds I’d seen.

Almost too deep.

The sides were cut steep, and the bottom stayed darker than it should have, even under direct sunlight.

One worker stood near the edge for a long time, just staring down. Another came up behind him and asked something. The first one didn’t respond. Didn’t even turn his head.

That night, I heard splashing. Not loud. Not like someone swimming. More like… something shifting its weight in shallow water.

It was strange, because the pond wasn’t even filled yet. I looked out the window, but no one there. Just the dark outline of the pit.

And the sound stopped the moment I opened the window.

The next morning, one of the workers didn’t show up. No call, no explanation. The contractor shrugged. “People quit. It happens.” But I noticed he didn’t make eye contact when he said it. Just looked back at the pit.

By the end of the week, the pond hit groundwater fully. Water started seeping in from below.

But it didn’t look right.

It wasn’t muddy the way fresh pond water should be.

It was too clear.

Clear enough that you could almost see the bottom.

Almost.

That’s when people started talking. Not loudly. Just small conversations across fences, nothing you could pin down. Someone said the land used to sit lower than everything around it- a natural hollow that never fully dried. Someone else said there had been something built there once, years ago, but no one could agree on what. Or when. Or why it was torn down.

I didn’t tell my father what I’d experienced. I’m not sure why. Maybe I didn’t want to worry him. He hadn’t been well physically, and he was still carrying a lot since my mother passed. I told myself I’d mention it if it happened again.

And it did happen again…

My father stopped coming to the rooftop around this time. Blood pressure, he said. The stairs were getting to him. I didn’t push it. I told myself it made sense. He was old. He was tired. That’s all I could see. Or maybe it was all that I chose to see.

But I do think about it now. The way he stopped eating much at dinner. The way he’d go quiet sometimes mid-conversation, like he was listening for something. I noticed all of it. I filed it under ‘he’s getting older’ and moved on.

That’s what hindsight does to you. You replay every moment you dismissed. Every door you didn’t open. Every question you didn’t ask. And you weren’t even doubting yourself back then, because why would you? You were the educated one. The rational one. The one who had been to Canada and knew better.

I didn’t know anything.

Three nights later, I heard it again.

The splashing.

Closer this time.

Not from the center of the pond.

From the edge nearest our house.

I didn’t open the window.

I just listened.

There was a second sound now. Underneath the water sound. A soft dragging. Like something being pulled across wet soil.

The next morning, there were marks near the edge.

Long grooves in the mud.

Not footprints. Too wide. Too smooth.

As if something heavy had been pulled out of the water and across the bank.

And the grooves just… stopped. A few meters from our wall.

I didn’t tell anyone about the marks. I just stood there for a few minutes trying to come up with a reasonable explanation, went back inside and made tea. That was my response. Tea.

It was the neighbor from the house to our left who finally said something out loud. Noorjahan Begum. She was in her seventies, had lived on that street her entire life, and was not the type of woman who spoke unless she had something worth saying. She caught me at the gate that afternoon as I was coming back from the pharmacy. No dramatic approach. No lowered voice. She just stopped next to me like we were continuing a conversation we’d already started.

“Fill it back in,” she said.

I asked her what she meant.

She nodded toward the pond. “That plot has been empty for forty years. There’s a reason for that.” She looked at me the way old people sometimes look at young people. It was not unkindly, but it carried a specific kind of tiredness. “Tell whoever bought it to fill it back in. Pay them if you have to.”

I asked her what was in it.

She was quiet for a moment.

“Something that was sleeping.”

That’s all she said. She went back inside before I could say anything else. No folklore. No story. No explanation of what it was or where it came from. Just that one sentence and a closed door.

I stood at the gate for a while after she left.

Then I went inside and told myself she was just a superstitious old woman. That the grooves in the mud were probably from the construction equipment. That the sounds at night were frogs, or pipes, or the kind of thing your brain invents when you’re half-asleep in a new environment.

I didn’t tell my father what she said.

I didn’t tell my father a lot of things.

Things shifted quietly after that. The way things do when you don’t want to admit they’re shifting.

My father started sleeping during the day. Not napping, but actually sleeping. Door closed, curtains drawn. The kind of heavy sleep you don’t wake from easily. I’d check on him at noon and he’d be completely out. I told myself he was tired. He was recovering. Old men sleep.

But at night, he was awake.

I’d get up for water at two or three in the morning, and see the light under his door. Sometimes I’d hear him moving around. Slow, unhurried footsteps. Not pacing. More like he was just… repositioning. Finding the right spot to stand.

I knocked once. Asked if he was okay.

“Fine,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

His voice was normal. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. His voice was always completely normal.

He stopped eating much around this time. Not dramatically, though. I mean, he’d sit at the table, move food around, take a few bites. I asked if his appetite was off. He said he just wasn’t very hungry. I made lighter meals. He’d eat a little and thank me and that was that. He was losing weight, but slowly enough that I kept finding reasons not to measure it.

Then came the night I found the footprints.

I was up late preparing for a remote job interview that I had the next morning. It was around 2 when I went to the kitchen for water. The back door was unlocked. I was certain I’d locked it before bed. I’d started doing that deliberately, without fully admitting to myself why. I stood there for a moment, looking at the handle.

Then I looked down.

Wet footprints on the tile. Leading from the back door toward the hallway.

Toward my father’s room.

I told myself he’d gone out for air. That he’d stepped in a puddle near the door. That there was a perfectly ordinary explanation and I was sleep-deprived.

I wiped them up. I went back to bed.

I didn’t sleep.

A week later, I woke at around three in the morning to silence. Not normal silence, but the kind where you realize a sound you’d gotten used to has stopped. I lay there for a moment, working out what was missing. Then I realized, it was my father’s footsteps. The soft repositioning sounds from his room that I’d gotten so used to I’d stopped registering them.

His room was quiet.

I got up. His door was open. The room was empty.

I found him outside.

He was standing at the edge of the pond in the dark, perfectly still, looking down into the water. No shoes. No phone. He’d come out in the clothes he slept in. The ground was damp from earlier rain and his feet were sinking slightly into the mud but he didn’t seem to notice.

I called his name.

He turned around immediately. Blinked at me. Looked almost embarrassed.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Needed some air.”

His voice was normal.

I walked him back inside. Made him wash his feet. Checked that the back door was locked this time, twice. He went back to bed without protest, like a child after a nightmare. I sat in the kitchen until sunrise.

I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell his doctor. I didn’t call a relative. I didn’t go next door and knock on Noorjahan Begum’s door and tell her that she was right.

I just sat there in the kitchen, in the dark, and decided to wait and see.

That’s the decision I think about the most, now.

That specific morning. That specific choice.

Wait and see.

He was gone by the first week of December.

I know the exact morning because I’d finally decided, the night before, that I was going to call his doctor first thing. I’d written a note to myself. Put it on the kitchen counter so I’d see it when I made tea. I was going to describe the sleep pattern, the weight loss, the pond incident. I was going to stop waiting and seeing.

I woke up at seven. The note was still on the counter.

His door was open.

I already knew before I looked. Something about the quality of the silence. The house felt different in a way I couldn’t articulate then and still can’t now. Lighter, maybe. Like something had been subtracted from it overnight.

His bed was made. Not slept in, but made neatly, the way he always made it in the morning. Which meant either he’d come back at some point and made it, or he’d never slept in it at all.

His slippers were by the back door. Facing the pond. The door was unlocked.

I went outside in my bare feet and called his name. I walked the perimeter of the property. I checked the street. I stood at the edge of the pond and looked in.

The water was perfectly still. Clear as it had been since the beginning. I could see almost to the bottom.

Almost.

I called his phone. It rang from his bedroom.

I waited an hour. I don’t know why I waited an hour. I think some part of me believed he’d just walked somewhere and would come back and I would feel foolish for panicking. Some part of me was still waiting and seeing.

Then I called the police.

They came quickly enough. Took notes, asked questions, looked around the property. One of them walked to the pond and stood there for a moment, looking in. He didn’t say anything about it. Just wrote something down and moved on. They asked if my father had seemed depressed. If he’d said anything unusual recently. If there had been any conflict between us. I said no to all of it.

Which was almost true.

They dragged the pond two days later. A small team, early morning, barely an hour. They found nothing. The officer I’d been dealing with seemed unsurprised. He said the pond wasn’t very deep. I didn’t tell him that from the rooftop it had looked almost too deep, even under direct sunlight.

The investigation went quiet after that. Not closed, just quiet. The kind of quiet that means no one knows what to do next.

I noticed the shift in the village around the second week. The way people looked at me at the shop. The way conversations paused when I walked past. An elderly man with health problems disappears from his own property in the middle of the night. His adult son, the one who came back from Canada, is the last person to have seen him.

No one said it to my face. They didn’t have to.

Noorjahan Begum was the only one who looked at me the same way she always had. I saw her at her gate one afternoon, maybe a week after the police visit. I expected her to say something- I told you so, or a question, or anything.

She just looked at me for a long moment. Then she went back inside.

That was worse than anything she could have said.

I stayed in the house for another three weeks because I didn’t know where else to go. I stopped going to the back of the house entirely. I kept the curtains drawn on that side. I ate at the front of the house, slept with the light on, and did not look toward the pond.

But I could still hear it sometimes. At night.

Not the splashing anymore.

Just the dragging. Slow and patient. Getting closer to the wall…

I booked a bus to Dhaka on a Tuesday morning and left before sunrise. I told myself I was leaving because I couldn’t afford the rent on the house alone. Because I needed to find work. Because there was nothing left to stay for.

All of that was true.

But none of it was the reason I left.

I left because whatever was in that pond had found the wall.

And I was not going to wait to find out what came next…

Dhaka is the loudest city I’ve ever been in, and I say that as someone who lived in Vancouver for four years.

I found a flat on the sixth floor of a building. Small, clean, no view of anything except another building’s wall and a narrow slice of sky. I chose it specifically because there was no water nearby. No pond, no canal, no low-lying ground. Sixth floor. Concrete everywhere.

I told myself that mattered.

I got a job within a month. Data entry, nothing impressive, but it kept me busy and busy was what I needed. I started therapy because I wasn’t sleeping and my supervisor noticed.

My therapist is a quiet, careful woman who doesn’t push. She thinks what I’m carrying is grief- a son who lost his father under ambiguous circumstances and blames himself. She’s not wrong.

She’s just missing the other part…

The damp patch appeared in my flat three weeks after I moved in.

I noticed it on a Tuesday morning, a small dark oval on the floor beside my bed. I assumed it was a pipe leak and called my landlord. He came, checked, found nothing. I cleaned it up. It came back the next morning, same spot, same size.

I told myself it was condensation. The building was old. These things happen.

But by the second week I was waking up before dawn and looking at it before I did anything else. Before tea, before my phone, before anything. Just lying there in bed, staring at the floor.

That’s when I started measuring it.

I used a piece of tape on the floor, marking the edge closest to the bed. The next morning I placed a new piece of tape. Then another. Then another.

It moves. Not every night. But consistently. Always toward the bed. Never away.

I called my friends. The ones I trusted. I explained it as carefully as I could- the pond, my father, the sounds, the grooves in the mud, the wet footprints in the hallway, the way he was standing at the edge of the water in the dark. I told them everything.

They laughed. Not cruelly.

Which is how I ended up here.

My therapist suggested I write it down somewhere public. Process it out loud, she said. Let strangers hold some of the weight.

I’ve been typing for almost three hours now.

I haven’t looked at the floor in a while.

The last time I measured, this morning, it was four inches from the bed leg. Four inches of floor between whatever is following me and wherever I sleep.

I’ve been thinking about Noorjahan Begum a lot lately. That look she gave me outside her gate, after my father was gone. I understand it now. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t saying I told you so. She was just looking at someone she already knew was lost and couldn’t do anything about.

I think about my father standing at the edge of that pond in the dark. Barefoot in the mud. Looking down into water that was too clear, too deep, too still.

His voice was completely normal when I called his name.

That’s the part I can’t let go of.

I don’t know if he went willingly. I don’t know if that word even applies to whatever happened to him. I don’t know if the thing in that water wanted him specifically, or if we were just the house closest to the wall. I’ve stopped trying to know.

What I know is this- I came home to spend time with my father and I spent that time watching a pond instead. Every warning sign: the workers leaving, the marks in the mud, Noorjahan Begum at the gate, the wet footprints, him standing in the dark… I saw all of it. I filed all of it away. I waited and I watched and I told myself sensible things.

And one morning I woke up and he was gone and the only thing left of him was a neatly made bed and a pair of slippers facing the water.

There’s a reason my village no longer digs ponds. I am the reason.

Not because I dug it. But because when it mattered, I chose to be the “educated” one. The “rational” one. The one who knew better.

The patch on my floor moved again last night. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. I just woke up and it was closer.

Three inches now, maybe less.

My therapist says writing this down will help me feel less alone. Maybe she’s right. Maybe someone here has seen something like this, knows something I don’t.

Or maybe I just needed someone to know.

In case tomorrow morning I’m not the one who updates this post.

I should check the floor.

I already know what I’ll find.

I think I’ve known for a while now….