Maham, 27

I fly through monsoon clouds for a living — looking for someone to be my favourite co-pilot in life.

Dhaka Pilot 5'6" CPL (Commercial Pilot License)

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Every morning in Dhaka begins the same way for me: the distant honk-symphony of Mirpur Road traffic, the smell of my ammu’s cha and pitha drifting from the kitchen, and my flight bag packed by the door like a loyal dog waiting for a walk. I am Maham, I am twenty-seven, and if the sky is clear I will be above the clouds before most of the city has finished breakfast. There is no feeling like it — the wheels leaving the runway at Hazrat Shahjalal, Dhaka shrinking into a patchwork of green and tin roofs, and suddenly the whole noisy, beautiful chaos is quiet beneath you.

I did not grow up dreaming of this, which surprises everyone. I grew up dreaming of being a teacher, like my nani. Then, on a school trip to the airport when I was twelve, I watched an aircraft climb into a monsoon sky — grey clouds, silver belly of the plane, gone in seconds — and something in my chest climbed with it. I went home and announced to my abbu, I am going to fly planes. He laughed. Then he saw I was serious, and he stopped laughing, and he said, Then we will find a way. My parents sold a piece of land to fund my training. I carry that with me on every single flight. Every landing I grease is a thank-you note to them.

Flight school was the hardest thing I have ever loved. Ground school exams that made my eyes cross, simulator sessions where the instructor would fail an engine just as I relaxed, and the day of my first solo — Dhaka to Chattogram and back, just me and the sky. At ten thousand feet, over the green delta braided with silver rivers, I cried happy tears inside my headset. The instructor on the radio said, Maham, are you crying? and I said, No sir, it is just the altitude. It was absolutely the crying.

People ask what it is like to be a female pilot in Bangladesh, and I always say: the sky does not care about your gender, but the aunties do. At every family dawat, someone asks when I will settle down, as if I have not been settling aircraft onto runways in crosswinds for years. My nani — my original dream, the teacher — just smiles and tells them, My granddaughter parks airplanes. Let her park her own life too. I could frame that sentence. Honestly, I might embroider it on a cushion.

Dhaka from above is a love letter you can only read from the sky. The Buriganga curling brown and slow, the Lalbagh Fort a small red jewel, the endless green of the delta stretching to every horizon, stitched with silver rivers. And the monsoon — oh, the monsoon. Towering clouds like white mountains, rainbows that last for an hour, lightning flickering inside clouds like the sky is thinking. Passengers see weather as a delay. Pilots see it as the most beautiful office view on earth. My favourite moment of any flight is breaking through the cloud layer at sunrise: one second grey, the next second gold, like the world turning on its lights.

On the ground, I am gloriously ordinary. I live for rickshaw rides through Dhanmondi with the wind in my hair, for fuchka at New Market with my university friends, for arguing about which Dhaka biryani is the real one. It is Haji’s. Do not fight me. My crew friends and I have a tradition: after a long duty day, we find the nearest cha stall and debrief life over steaming cups. Pilots gossip exactly as much as everyone else. More, maybe. We have seen things at 35,000 feet.

Family is my runway — the thing I always come back to. Friday lunches at my parents’ house in Uttara are sacred: ammu’s morog pulao, abbu’s stories from his bank days, my younger brother stealing my dessert while maintaining aggressive eye contact. My ammu still packs me tiffin for early flights, as if I am going to school. Ammu, there is catering on the plane, I tell her. Tiffin is love, catering is business, she replies — and honestly, she has never lost an argument in her life.

So what am I looking for? Someone who is not intimidated by a woman who flies. Someone with his own sky — his own dreams, his own direction. I travel constantly, my schedule is a beautiful mess, and I need a person who finds that exciting rather than exhausting. Someone who will pick me up from the airport at midnight with fuchka, who will listen to my layover stories without glazing over, who understands that I am home for three days means we make every hour count. Romance at 35,000 feet is overrated; give me romance in a rickshaw in the rain, sharing one umbrella and laughing when we get soaked anyway.

If you are reading this — hello from above the clouds! Tell me where you are in the world, and I will tell you what your city looks like from a window seat. I have opinions about skylines. And if things go well, here is my promise: one day I will get you the window seat on a sunrise flight over the delta — not the cockpit, the rules are strict — and when we break through the clouds into all that gold, I will hold your hand and say, See? This is what I wanted to show you. Some views are better shared. I have been saving the best ones.