Altab and Brick Lane
(In memory of Altab Ali, and the voices that rose from silence)

They say he was just walking home,
under a pale May sky,
Whitechapel Road breathing the usual dust.
A boy from Sylhet,
carrying a threadbare bag
and the weight of being brown
In a Britain that still believed
We came to steal its streets.

They did not know his name.
They did not need to.
In 1978,
brown skin alone
could sign your death certificate.
They stabbed him
where the plane trees now whisper
not for what he’d done,
But for what he was.

We remember the blood
not just his,
but the blood of being called Paki,
Whether we came from Karachi, Kolkata or Sylhet.
Of hearing “Go back home,”
when this
This cracked pavement of East London
was home.

But we did not vanish.
We carved names into silence.
Turned funerals into marches,
Marches into memory.

The Battle of Brick Lane.
The mothers who stood like iron
against skinheads and stone.
The curry house waiters
Who swept the broken glass
from their shopfronts
and still served tea
hot,
With grief and grit.

Now in Altab Ali Park,
The Shahid Minar stands
white ribs of stone,
spine of a language
that once bled for breath in Dhaka,
now reaching toward a London sky.
It sings in silence:
for Ekushey,
for Altab,
for every lost name
that still walks with us.

The East End is no longer a wound.
It is a woven thing
a tapestry of salt and song,
of hijab and hoops,
of Rabindranath in reggae rhythm.
Here, black and brown and all between
break bread,
burn sage,
fall in love.

They tried to name us outsiders.
But we are the bricks now.
We are the lane.

And Altab?
He walks with lovers on warm Eid nights.
He rides with poets on midnight trains.
He lingers in the scent
of jhalmuri and rain.
He is not gone.
He is the ground
We refuse to forget.