By Azeema Anhar
I was born
between a load-shedding and a lightning strike.
The power went out before my first photo could be uploaded.
But the algorithm found me.
Buried beneath monsoon-wet bedsheets,
in a house made of rusted tin and borrowed time.
It reached through the grime of the city
with one glowing finger
and whispered,
“Swipe.”
And I did.
I swiped past unpaid rent,
past my father’s factory hands trembling over minimal wages,
past my sister’s ration of pad, prayer, and shame.
I swiped through the hunger.
It looked so clean in other countries.
Even poverty there has better lighting.
They told me I could be anything
if I just performed it right.
So I became a brand.
Took English lessons from captions.
Said “hustle culture” like a spell
to forget I was paid in exposure.
You know what it’s like to dream in third-world bandwidth?
To edit your ambitions into 15-second hope-bites
because your battery’s on 8%
and you are almost out of mobile data?
Once, I tried to post about the river that stole our village.
Facebook flagged it as political.
But when I did a mukbang with floodwater in the background,
they gave me 3.4k likes
and a repost by an NGO.
Global visibility.
Local extinction.
They call us digital natives.
But I was born from analog mud.
My country is a patchwork of signal towers and screaming bodies.
The government hands us digitalization in one hand,
and media propagandas in the other.
They measure literacy
in SIM activation.
My cousin, she got into trouble.
Wrote a post about gas prices.
Said too much.
Now her name doesn’t autocomplete.
Not even in search.
That’s how erasure works now-
not with bullets.
With silence
so smooth it feels like forgetting.
But they love our despair.
Package it in docuseries.
Feed it back to us with subtitles in Dhaka-accented English.
I watched myself cry in 4K
on a European panel.
I looked so authentic.
So digestible.
The shepherd leads me-
past real hunger,
towards virtual validation.
I harvest those likes like my life depends on it.
Literally.
I used to write poems.
Now I write captions.
I used to protest.
Now I optimize.
No one comes to the street.
We wait for the comment section
to fill with rage.
My body belongs to the state.
But my face?
My face belongs to the algorithm.
It knows my angles.
Knows the soft decay in my voice.
Knows when I’m about to break
and queues the perfect soundbite
to go viral with my grief.
And you think this isn’t holy?
You think this isn’t prayer?
The new Mecca is the Explore page.
The new azaan comes with notifications.
And I bow five times a day
to the screen
because at least it listens.
At least it sees me.
Or pretends to.
My dreams have data caps.
My language is monetized.
My mother still thinks I work in tech support.
She doesn’t know
I sell myself
pixel by pixel
to a world that only sees us
when we burn or dance or cry
in vertical format.
The algorithm is my shepherd.
It makes me lie beside dead rivers.
It sells me clean water
one ad at a time.
It restores my reach
for its name’s sake.
And when I die-
because the rain came too fast
or the boat too slow-
bury me beneath a 5G tower
so the next child
can livestream my funeral
in 1080p.