How Childhood Longing Becomes the Most Expensive Currency We Carry
They say people do not buy products; they buy emotions. After two decades working in development and human behaviour, I would amend that: people do not buy emotions; they buy wounds. They buy memories. They buy repairs for things they never learned to name.
My own wound begins in 1986 on Elephant Road. I was a schoolboy trailing behind my father, dreaming of Adidas sandals with three white stripes—the kind that made boys walk differently, with accidental swagger. But my father, practical to a fault, bought me a pair of expensive leather sandals instead.
He wasn’t wrong. Leather lasts longer. Leather is sensible. Leather is what fathers who know hardship choose.
But childhood rarely understands logic. That night, I cried quietly not for the sandal, but for the feeling that my dream had been dismissed. The wound planted itself quietly, like a seed waiting decades to bloom.
Fast forward to Ramadan 2022. My wife said, almost casually, “You need new sandals.” She meant it pragmatically. But my brain, trained in emotional archaeology, knew there was something deeper clawing under the surface.
So I dragged an MBA student with me—poor soul—through Dhaka’s humidity in search of something I refused to articulate. After hours of wandering, a Bihari shopkeeper pulled out a pair.
Navy blue. White stripes. Size 39.
The exact sandal I never received.
I didn’t buy footwear that day.
I bought closure.
When I gave them to my son, my heart thudding with nostalgia, he stared at them blankly. Days later, I found them soaking wet by the bathroom door—relegated to slipper duty. A familiar ache pulsed inside me. History, it seems, is circular. Pain, hereditary.
But the story isn’t just about sandals.
It expands into fish markets in Mohammadpur, where my father went every Friday. He insisted I wait outside, in heat or rain. At fourteen, I finally asked why. He smiled—tired, kind—and said, “Let me protect you while I still can. Life will make you stand in enough lines later.”
Decades after his death, I still go to that market—not for fish, but for the ghost of a hand that once shielded me. Some places aren’t destinations; they’re pilgrimages.
We misunderstand love because we expect it to be tidy, eloquent, cinematic. But love is rarely poetic. It is practical, clumsy, misaligned. Fathers love through restrictions. Children love through rebellion. Nobody speaks the same language, but everyone keeps trying.
Economists talk about supply and demand, but they miss the most powerful economic force of all: longing. Longing shapes purchases, decisions, identities. A sandal becomes a scar with a sole attached. A market becomes a memorial disguised as routine.
Love is always a strange economics.
We either overspend on what we never had or underspend on what we desperately needed. What remains constant is this: even the smallest objects carry the weight of our deepest stories. And healing sometimes comes disguised as a size 39 slipper.