The first time they got his name wrong, it was on a plastic visitor’s badge at a grey building near London Bridge.
He stood at the reception desk, the fluorescent lights humming overhead in that particular way that made you feel tired even if you had just woken up. The woman behind the desk didn’t look at him when she spoke; her fingers were already typing.
“Name?” she asked.
He swallowed. “Naeem Uddin Ahmed.”
She frowned at the screen. “Slowly, please.”
He repeated it, one syllable at a time, the way his father once taught him to recite Qur’an. Na-eem. Ud-din. Ah-med.
She nodded, tapped, printed, and slid the badge towards him without lifting her eyes.
He pinned it to his shirt as he walked away.
Only when he sat down in the waiting area did he glance at it, more out of boredom than curiosity.
NAME: NAYIM AHMAD
The letters stared up at him, rearranged, careless. A small thing. Easy to ignore.
Naeem traced the misspelt name with his thumb. A strange, familiar ache moved in his chest—the same ache he felt when people said “Nah-eem” or “Ni-am” or, worse, didn’t try at all and called him “Nick” because it was easier.
He looked around at the people in the waiting room: some clutching brown envelopes, others staring at their phones, everyone carrying invisible stories that were heavier than their documents.
On the wall, a flat-screen TV silently played footage of a river somewhere in England. Calm, slow, obedient.
Naeem shut his eyes.
When he thought of a river, he never saw something tame like that.
He saw the Kushiyara—wide-mouthed, restless, always hungry.
The river that stole his house.
The river that stole his father.
The river, he sometimes thought, that had started the long, slow theft of his name.
The River at the Edge of the World
When Naeem was eight, the river was still something they joked about.
It sat at the far edge of their village in Sylhet, a shimmering creature of water and light that changed moods with the seasons. In winter it grew slim and polite, exposing sandbanks and shy islands of grass. In monsoon it roared and swelled, muscling up against the earth as if testing how much it could take back.
Their tin-roofed house stood a safe distance away, or so everybody said. Between them and the river were rice fields, a dirt road, and the old mango grove that everyone in the village used as a landmark.
“If you get lost,” his mother used to tell him, “just find the mango trees. Our house is behind their shade. See? We’re protected.”
Protected. The word sounded sturdy, like the big clay jars that his grandmother used to store rice.
His father, though, always looked at the river with a different kind of attention. As if it were an old friend who had become unpredictable.
On late afternoons, when the light turned the water the colour of melted copper, Baba would stand at the edge of the fields, hands behind his back, staring.
One day, Naeem went to stand beside him, mimicking his posture.
“Why do you look at it like that?” Naeem asked.
“Like what?” Baba replied without turning.
“Like you’re waiting for it to say something.”
His father smiled faintly. “Maybe I am. Rivers remember things, you know.”
“What kind of things?”
“Everything they swallow,” Baba said. “Trees, houses, people, secrets.”
Naeem frowned. “How can water remember?”
“Have you ever heard it at night?” Baba asked. “The sound it makes when it hits the banks? Like it’s talking in another language.”
Naeem had heard it. On some nights, lying on his thin mattress, he would listen to the distant rush and slap of water and imagine the river trying out names, rolling them in its mouth.
“Naeem,” it seemed to say sometimes.
Or maybe he was imagining it.
Children imagine many things.
The First Bite
The year Naeem turned ten, the rains came early.
It began with small, harmless changes. The dirt road became muddy sooner than usual. Frogs sang louder at night. The air smelled of wet leaves far into what should have been the dry season.
The grown-ups grew more serious.
“Look at the edge near Banikandi,” an uncle said at the tea stall by the banyan tree. “The river took six feet last month alone.”
“Rubbish,” another replied. “It’s always done this. Erosion, they call it. The fields will come back.”
But they didn’t.
Day by day, the river chewed more of the earth away. It was patient about it. A nibble here, a bite there. A little slide of soil that everyone pretended not to notice, until one morning an entire row of banana plants sank with a sucking sound, their leaves briefly waving like drowning hands before disappearing.
Naeem and his cousins watched from a distance.
“It looks hungry,” his cousin Rafiq whispered.
“It’s just a river,” Naeem said. “It doesn’t get hungry.”
But his words didn’t feel true, even as he spoke them.
That evening, Baba came home with mud on his feet and a quiet storm in his eyes.
“We need to think about moving,” he told Amma in the kitchen.
“We’ve lived here all our lives,” she said. “Your parents are buried here. Their names are on the stones. How can we just walk away?”
Baba didn’t answer, but later that night, Naeem heard him outside, talking softly towards the river as if trying to negotiate with it.
The Graveyard
The village graveyard sat close to the water, on a raised patch of ground that people believed the river respected.
“It won’t touch this land,” Nani had always said. “Not where the dead sleep. Even rivers fear some things.”
But the river did not seem to be afraid of anything that year.
One afternoon, Naeem followed Baba to the graveyard. The air was thick, heavy. The river’s edge, which had once been far from the graves, now crept alarmingly near. The soil at the lip of the bank was cracked in jagged lines.
Baba crouched next to his father’s grave and touched the stone that bore his name.
ABDUL HAKIM
“Your grandfather built this house,” Baba said, not lifting his eyes from the stone. “He used to say our name is like a tree. It needs roots in the ground to stay alive.”
Naeem looked at the river. It gurgled and slapped against the bank, the sound oddly mouth-like.
“What happens if the river takes the graves?” he asked quietly.
Baba’s jaw tightened. “Then our names float away.”
Naeem imagined them—letters dissolving, drifting downstream. Names bumping against boats, slipping past sleeping fish, mixing with other names from other villages.
“What about us?” he asked.
“We’ll still carry the names,” Baba said. “In our mouths. In our prayers. That’s the only place a name truly lives.”
Naeem nodded, but his eyes stayed on the river.
For the first time, he felt afraid of it.
The Night the River Changed the Map
The night the graveyard began to slide into the river, the sky was strangely clear.
There had been no heavy rain that day, no great storm. Only a thin drizzle in the morning, like absent-minded tears.
It was just after midnight when the first crack sounded—a deep, tearing groan that woke the entire village. Naeem bolted upright in bed, heart pounding.
Then came the shouting.
“Get out! Get out!”
“It’s taking the bank!”
“Wake the children!”
He stumbled out onto the veranda, the floorboards cold under his bare feet. The river roared louder than he had ever heard it, an angry animal against the dark.
Baba grabbed his arm. “Stay with your mother,” he said. “Do not move.”
He ran towards the graveyard, joining the stream of men running with torches and shovels, as if they could hold the earth together with tools and willpower.
From the safety of the veranda, Naeem watched torchlight bobbling along the river edge.
Then, as if someone had sliced the ground with an invisible knife, a massive strip of land broke away and slid towards the water. The sound was like a giant sigh. The first row of graves cracked and crumbled, stones tilting. One toppled silently into the water.
A few men shouted “Allahu Akbar!” as if to remind the sky that they were still there.
Naeem clutched the railing so tightly his fingers ached.
He saw Baba standing at the edge, his figure outlined against the river’s furious shimmer.
Then another slab of earth gave way.
In the chaos of sliding soil and shouting men, the river stole something that no one could see clearly at the time.
By dawn, when the water had calmed into a swollen, deceptive smoothness, the villagers began to count.
Three graves gone.
A portion of the banyan roots.
And Naeem’s father.
The Silence After
They never found his body.
“It pulled him in,” someone said.
“He slipped,” another added.
“He tried to save the stone,” a third whispered.
But all Naeem really knew was that one moment his father was a shape against the night, and the next he was nothing at all.
The adults spoke to him in careful sentences.
“It was Allah’s will.”
“He died trying to protect what mattered.”
“He is a martyr of the earth.”
None of it sounded like enough.
The river, for its part, returned to its usual rhythm within days, as if nothing had happened. The water frothed around new curves in the bank. Children were told not to go too near. Old men spat into it and cursed under their breath.
Naeem just stopped looking at it.
At night, in the absence of Baba’s steady breathing from the next room, he would lie awake, listening to the river’s murmur.
Sometimes he thought he heard his name in it.
Sometimes he thought he heard his father’s.
He didn’t know which frightened him more.
Leaving the House
After Baba’s death, the village changed.
Not because people became unkind, but because pity sat on their faces like a second expression. Women arrived daily with food and advice. Men came with talk of compensation, government schemes, resettlement.
“The river will take more,” they said. “It doesn’t stop with graves.”
Amma’s eyes grew hollow. She moved through the house like a shadow, doing everything she had always done but as if her hands no longer belonged to her.
“We should go to Dhaka,” an uncle suggested. “Or to town. You can’t stay here. The bank is too close.”
But it was another uncle, one who had left for the UK years earlier, who changed everything. He called one evening, his voice thin and crackling on the phone.
“There’s a way to bring you over,” he said. “It won’t be quick. It won’t be easy. But there’s nothing left for you by that river. Let me try.”
Naeem watched his mother listen, nod, cry, listen some more.
He didn’t want to leave. The idea of going somewhere where people spoke another language, wore other clothes, asked other questions—it terrified him.
But the river was no longer a distant neighbour. It lurked at the edge of his dreams, greedy and unsatisfied.
When their house finally developed its first long crack across the courtyard, Amma folded up her sarees, put her jewellery into a small cloth bag, and said quietly, “We’re going.”
The Air Over London
Years later, Naeem would stand in front of a London council flat window and think: The sky feels thinner here. As if it were just a painted ceiling he might accidentally touch.
The air smelled different. No wet earth, no cow dung, no notes of smoke and jasmine and fish. Just a kind of metallic chill, sometimes sharpened by the smell of fried chicken from the shop downstairs.
School was a battlefield of newness.
Teachers said his name wrong. Classmates laughed, not always cruelly, but enough.
“What’s your name again?”
“Nye-em? Nee-yom? Can I just call you Nate?”
The first time a teacher suggested this, she smiled as if she were offering a gift.
“It will be easier for everyone,” she said.
Naeem hesitated. Baba’s voice stirred in his memory: Your name is a tree. Don’t let anyone cut it down.
“I prefer Naeem,” he said.
She tried. For a week, maybe two. Then the old habits crept back.
In the register, he was Naheem.
On his library card, Naim.
On a school certificate, someone typed NAEM AHMED.
“Does it matter?” one of his friends asked when he mentioned it.
“It’s just letters.”
But letters were all a name was. Remove enough of them and you were just a mouth opening with no sound.
At home, Amma clung to the old ways as best she could. She cooked dal the way her mother had taught her. She folded prayers into the quiet corners of their flat. She wrote his name on his exercise books in careful Bengali script: নাঈম উদ্দিন আহমেদ.
“Don’t let them change you,” she would say. “The river took your father. It doesn’t have to take you too.”
But it felt like he was being eroded from both sides—river on one shore, bureaucracy on the other.
Paper Names
By the time Naeem turned seventeen, the UK felt both familiar and alien, like a jacket that fit but never felt truly his.
One day, an official-looking envelope arrived in the post. Inside was a letter about his immigration status and the small plastic card that came with it.
The card bore his photograph, slightly grainy, and beneath it:
NAME: NAYIM AHMAD
There it was again. The mangled version. The one that had first appeared on a school form and then, somewhere in the system’s intestines, become the official truth.
“This is wrong,” Naeem said, showing it to his mother.
Amma squinted at the card, then at him.
“It’s not that different,” she said uncertainly. “Is it a problem?”
“It’s not my name,” he replied, anger rising like heat. “Baba named me after his friend Naeem from madrasa—the kind one who shared his food.”
He could hear Baba saying it the day of his aqiqah: Naeem, meaning comfort. Ease. A softness after hardship.
“This says ‘Nayim’,” he said. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“Maybe it’s just pronunciation,” Amma suggested weakly. Years in England had worn some fight out of her. “We know who you are.”
“But they don’t,” he said. “And their papers decide everything.”
He thought of the river again, how it had quietly changed the map of their village, so that one day people would say:
“There used to be a house there. A tree. A boy.”
But the earth would show no sign of it.
Paper could do the same thing to a name.
The Visit Office
And so, years later, he found himself in that building near London Bridge, waiting for an appointment to fix what the system thought he was called.
When his number flashed on the screen, Naeem entered a small office where the air smelled of carpet cleaner and old conversations.
A woman in a navy blouse looked up from her computer.
“Good morning… Mr… Ahmad,” she said, glancing at the file. “Or is it Ahmed? We have both here.”
“It’s Ahmed,” he said. “A-H-M-E-D. And my first name is spelt N-A-E-E-M. But some of your documents say ‘N-A-Y-I-M’.”
She peered at the screen, frowning.
“Well, in the Home Office system you’re ‘NAYIM AHMAD’,” she said. “Changing that is not straightforward.”
“But it’s wrong,” he insisted.
She sighed, more with fatigue than malice.
“I understand,” she said. “But names are recorded from original forms. If they were written incorrectly at any stage—visa application, school records, GP registration—our system mirrors that. Corrections require evidence, time, and sometimes legal procedures. It’s… complicated.”
Complicated. The word people used when they meant, We don’t want to unravel this.
She looked at him more kindly.
“Does it make a big difference in your day-to-day life?” she asked.
He thought of his father at the graveyard, touching the stones. Our name is like a tree.
“I suppose it depends what ‘big’ means,” Naeem said.
She hesitated. “You could use the wrong spelling legally but still use your preferred spelling in daily life. Many people do.”
Two names. One for the world, one for himself.
He nodded slowly.
“Thank you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for.
When he left the office, London seemed louder, more insistent. The rain had started outside, fine and cold.
For some reason, he thought of the village again, of the river, of the piece of land where the graveyard used to be—now just water with no memory, unless you knew what had been there once.
He realised that if he didn’t go back soon, even his own memory would start to erode.
Back to the Water
The chance came two years later.
A cousin was getting married in Sylhet. Tickets were cheaper in the off-season. Amma had grown more fragile, her sighs longer, her eyes distant.
“It might be my last chance to see home,” she said.
Naeem booked the flights.
When the plane began its descent into Osmani International Airport, his heart beat faster, like a drum someone was trying to remember how to play.
From the window, the landscape looked bewilderingly green. Rivers snaked across the earth like silver handwriting.
He wondered which one was theirs.
At the airport, the air wrapped around him—humid, alive, smelling of betel leaves and dust and fried snacks.
They stayed with relatives in town for the wedding, but Naeem knew he couldn’t leave the country without going back to the village.
“It’s changed,” people warned him. “The river took a lot. You might not recognise it.”
He went anyway.
A distant uncle drove them on a narrow road that curved through fields and small markets. The closer they got, the quieter Naeem became.
When they finally reached what used to be the beginning of the village, he felt a jolt in his chest. The world looked… wrong, like a dream you remembered inaccurately.
The mango grove was gone.
The dirt road turned abruptly into a new embankment, reinforced with rocks and sandbags in some places, left to faith in others.
He walked, leaving the older relatives behind, following an instinct more than a map.
Where his house once stood, there was nothing but air and water.
The river had moved forward, claiming the land like a debt collected late. It slid past, calm now, its surface indifferent.
Naeem stood at the new edge of the world, the soil loose under his shoes.
He closed his eyes and tried to superimpose the old image—the courtyard, the tin roof, the guava tree, Baba’s silhouette.
Nothing matched.
He knelt and picked up a handful of damp earth. It crumbled in his fist, streaking his palm.
“Baba,” he said softly, not sure if he was speaking to his father, the river, or the land.
The water murmured.
He picked up a stick and, on a patch of wet sand a little away from the edge, he began to write.
N
A
E
E
M
The letters looked strange on the ground, vulnerable to the slightest change.
He added the rest.
U
D
D
I
N
Then, after a pause:
A
H
M
E
D
His full name, written on the skin of the place that had almost taken everything.
A small wave rolled up, licking the bottom of the letters. The edges blurred.
“You stole my house,” Naeem whispered. “You stole my father. You nearly stole my name. But I’m still here. I remember.”
He wasn’t sure who he was accusing or forgiving. The river? The system? Himself?
Another wave came, stronger, and the letters disappeared completely, smoothed away as if they had never been.
He thought he would feel anger, grief, something heavy and sharp.
Instead, he felt… light.
Because although the sand now held no trace of his name, he still did. In his mouth. In his chest. In the way Amma said it when she was tired, in the way his cousins shouted it across crowded wedding halls, in the way the mosque imam intoned it in the supplication.
The river could erase land. Papers could misspell letters. But there was still one place that his name lived intact: inside him.
For the first time, he believed that might be enough.
Two Names, One Person
Back in London, when he returned to his job and his routines, the world looked slightly, imperceptibly different. As if someone had adjusted the focus on a camera.
At work, his ID badge still said NAYIM AHMAD.
His colleagues still called him Naeem, though, because he insisted on correcting them until they did.
On social media, he put his name in both scripts:
Naeem Uddin Ahmed / নাঈম উদ্দিন আহমেদ
In his notebook, where he scribbled thoughts late at night, he wrote the name in full at the top of the first page, like the title of a book he hadn’t finished reading yet.
Sometimes, on rainy evenings, he would close his eyes and hear the river again, rolling against erased banks, carrying fragments of broken headstones and stories.
He no longer imagined it stealing names.
He imagined it carrying them gently, like whispers.
Names from villages drowned and villages thriving, names from boats and cities and graveyards, all flowing into the same sea.
He thought of himself as a river too, now—his life winding between two countries, two ways of writing, two pronunciations.
One registered in government systems.
One planted in the soil of his memory.
He decided that both could exist.
The river had taken much.
But it had also left him with something:
The understanding that no one could truly own his name without his consent.
On some nights, when the London traffic hummed like distant water, Naeem would lie in bed and say it out loud, slowly, the way his father once had.
“Naeem. Uddin. Ahmed.”
A tree, he thought.
Still standing.
And somewhere, very far away, a river turned in its sleep and remembered too.
Disclaimer
This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.
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