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Published : 22 Nov 2025, 01:42 PM
Last week, my boyfriend’s phone was snatched on his way to work. I partially blame him, since his phone is perpetually hanging halfway out of his pocket, yearning to slide out and finally taste freedom. I also feel a little sorry for the snatcher, because stealing his Grameenphone-branded Atom probably took more effort than it would fetch in the black market.
In a way, it turned out to be a blessing. When his old phone died, he began using his dad’s eight-year-old Atom and never got around to replacing it. Two days ago, he finally bought a swanky new one, all kitted out with a matte black exterior and internal software that doesn’t freeze if someone calls in the middle of watching reels.
Yet the phone still isn’t fully operational, since the snatchers weren’t kind enough to leave his SIM behind. Locked out of his Gmail account, he resorted to listening to the radio and sending me blurry, 2010-era photos from his laptop while listening, as if documenting his descent into 20th-century technology.
I laughed when he told me. I’d assumed radios were obsolete by now, or maybe barely alive as a front for money laundering. Sure, Bangladesh Betar is still around, but only because it’s state-sponsored. As for the private ones, who in their right mind would keep pouring money into a white elephant purely for nostalgia’s sake?
This morning, we made plans for breakfast. I arrived at 7am at a crowded restaurant and immediately realised I had no way of contacting him in the sea of people. I collected my token and began hovering around every table in the hope of finding a familiar face, since he’d left long before me and was supposed to arrive earlier.
I haunted every corner, nook, and cranny of the place, but he was nowhere. It dawned on me that I’d told him everything about the menu and food, but completely forgot to mention the name of the restaurant, just a vague idea of the location, because he could always call and confirm. Except he couldn’t, thanks to this primitive lifestyle he’s been forced into for a week.
After an hour and still no sign of him, I decided to order a couple of dishes, expecting very little chance of him arriving before I left. And yet, right as my brain masala and rumali roti reached the table, he walked through the door, earphones in.
We laughed about our telepathic connection. He told me he’d been waiting at a different spot, unable to reach me, and that after an hour he finally connected to some shady public Wi-Fi to search for nearby breakfast places to find me.
“What were you doing for an hour? It must’ve been brutal,” I asked.
“I was listening to the radio. They play really groovy music in the morning, took me right back to our school days,” he replied, dipping his paratha into creamy semolina pudding.
We enjoyed breakfast and reminisced about the stations we used to listen to when radio was still popular. We even sang the Radio Foorti and Radio Today jingles out loud, to the surprise of the patrons sitting next to us.
Afterwards, we parted ways. He went straight to sleep, not wanting to miss out on a weekend doze. With nothing to do at 10am on a Saturday, I decided to give the old radio a spin myself.
My phone, it turns out, has a radio app so overlooked I didn’t even know it existed. I tapped on it and was greeted by a familiar screech. I had to pick a station before I went deaf.
“Radio Fooortiiiii, eighty-eight point oh FM!” I sang in my head as I slid the tuner to find my station. And just as I stopped, I heard Minar singing his cult favourite “Shada”, as clear as day.
It took me back to school commutes, to the way the RJs spoke in their “smart” voice, to the jingles and song requests: people dedicating carefully chosen tracks to friends, family, and loved ones.
“Sadia, please pick up my calls, I can’t live without you,” one listener would plead, followed by a romantic pop song to appease the moody girlfriend. Or “Dosto ra, this song is for you,” before a friendship anthem kicked in.
I waited for the RJ to read out the hotline number so I could make a request too. But I guess they don’t do that much anymore. The songs kept rolling in with only short ad breaks.
I started browsing through stations, some familiar from my avid listener days, and some newer ones with surprisingly good programmes. At the end of the band, I found Radio Amber on 102.4 MHz, playing their weekend morning lineup of Bengali songs.
Manna Dey was nearing the end of “Oi Mohasindhur Opar Theke” when I joined. I caught the last few lines, “come running, come fast, there is no death, no disease.” Fitting words for a service loved by many and still surviving, without death and without disease.
I’m still listening as I write this, shuffling through Rabindra Sangeet and 70s and 80s classics by Manna Dey, Kishore Kumar, and Hemanta Mukherjee. Maybe one of these days I’ll even put fresh batteries into my grandfather’s old transistor radio, the one I rescued (fine, stole) during a 2016 home renovation so it wouldn’t vanish into the rubble. I kept it as a keepsake, though much like the radio itself, perhaps it still has more life left in it than I realised.
But right now, I wish I could hear an RJ one more time, asking for dedications. It’s a cliché, but I wouldn’t mind spending a slice of my phone credit to dedicate a song to the mighty radio, just to let it know: “Radio, someone still loves you”.
