In Dhaka, the trial of Sheikh Hasina has begun—not merely a courtroom drama but a nation attempting to exhume a decade of whispered disappearances. Families clutch photographs; prosecutors brandish lists that some insist were seeded with ghosts. Beneath the legal theatre lie older questions of power, patronage, and foreign influence. Britain, architect of the borders that still bleed, watches from afar with the particular unease of a former imperial parent who never quite left the room. There is, perhaps, a muted lesson here about the long echo of authority and the fragile line between justice and retribution.