At nearly three in the morning, the arrivals hall at Dhaka’s airport was a study in fluorescent anticipation. A young woman in a white lab coat, a stethoscope slung around her neck, stood at the barrier as travellers streamed past, their curiosity flickering over this anomaly. She had dressed precisely as her father had asked, years earlier, so that the first glimpse of her in medical attire would be his. But the man she waited for that November night did not walk through the gate. Instead, a polished box emerged, the nameplate reading ‘Shahjahan Kabir’. She had kept her promise to wear the apron, and in that moment the gesture became a ledger of a different kind—a daughter’s debt, inscribed on the body, rung up at the international arrivals belt.

Such unspoken bonds thread through the Bengali narratives of fatherhood that surface around Father’s Day. One woman remembers calling her father ‘juju’, a ghostly figure she feared as a child, only to detect later that the daily terror was the first shape of attachment. Another recalls a parent who, on the day of a failed exam, arrived not with reproach but with ice-cream and the calm instruction that trying was more important than outcomes. Fathers in these accounts are demanding presences: they assign maths problems by the hour, they insist on public speaking, they refuse extra help when a daughter fails to get into medical school, pushing her toward self-reliance. Love, in this emotional dialect, is a grammar of rigour and sacrifice, articulated through late-night phone calls, smuggled milk candies, and the silent withdrawal of consolation so that character might grow. Western psychology has a term for what this kind of care ignites: ‘perceived responsiveness’, the feeling that someone has seen your need without being asked, which amplifies gratitude far beyond the size of any gesture.

Move out of the parent-child dyad and the dynamic twists into more explicitly transactional terrain. A contributor to The Ghana Report lays out the arithmetic of modern heterosexual love: a woman mapping her emotional labour, noting each unanswered message, each unreciprocated effort, until the ledger tips and she walks. Another piece on the same platform advises, with something like tenderness, that it is time to stop fighting for a person who will never fight back. Even between mother and adult son, as described in Business Insider, a holiday together required formal rules—split expenses, separate morning activities—to avoid the old gravitational pull of maternal oversight. Gratitude, too, takes on an uneasy edge. Psychologists studying everyday favours find that people often thank excessively not from warmth but from a drive to neutralise indebtedness, to close a loop they experience as a moral tension. Help without strings can feel, for a moment, less like generosity than an unissued invoice.

That ledger of debt becomes most painful when it can no longer be settled. A columnist in Time confesses that he never asked his dying father the intimate questions about college friendships or first loves. A writer for MSNBC, watching his father decline with Parkinson’s and dementia, admits to wishing for his father’s swift death—and to the guilt that follows. In both cases, the silence passed down through generations becomes its own inheritance, and the longing for a different ending is inseparable from love’s long arrears. The advice dispensed to heartbroken daters—let go of the one who won’t fight for you, stop waiting for a readiness that never arrives—could just as easily be addressed to a son sitting by a hospital bed, hoping for a conversation that will not come.

One contributing writer to Prothom Alo, walking a searing Dhaka street in the middle of a workday, is suddenly accosted by the scent of bela and hasnahena, the white flowers her father loved. She halts. She knows it is not magic—just an olfactory flash of memory, a time machine triggered by nothing at all—but in that instant she offers a quiet salute to the man who taught her that mourning is the fragrance of the world before it was changed. The apron at the airport, the greying hands that massaged a dying father’s feet, the woman who finally walks away from an asymmetrical love: each is a bookkeeper’s entry in a ledger no one ever designed, but everyone carries.