Travel in Dhaka: The Life and Times of Dhaka in My Eyes

There is a short anecdote about Jug Suraiya, the renowned columnist, which I am fond of retelling.A fellow guest at a party in Greenwich Village told Jug Suraiya that when he visited Calcutta, Satyajit Roy showed him around the city. “I bet I know your Calcutta better than you do” he said. “No,” Suraiya replied. “You know Roy’s Calcutta not mine.” So it is with Dhaka. Anybody who has stayed here or even visited the city has his own pleasures and pains, memories and anecdotes. Though I was born in Calcutta, my first conscious memory is that of Dhaka. In Dhaka I have been moving from houses in Madan Mohon Basak road, to Azimpur, to Dhanmondi and now in Uttara. All these movements have coincided with distinctive eras in the history and development of the city. In the fifties and sixties  I have stayed in  Madan Mohon  Basak road  and then Azimpur, which were at that time the newly developed areas, and then in the  seventies and eighties in Dhanmondi which has now become replete with offices and multi-storied apartments, making it too crowded for my tastes. Uttara is now for me a place with urban amenities and with the quiet of the suburbs. The secret of karate is to turn your adversary's strength to your advantage. Similarly to survive in Dhaka, the secret is to make every adversity, every misfortune, and every misery work to your benefit. At least that is what I have been trying to do in my Odyssey through the city. Perhaps no other place exercises quite the same kind of lure, composed of about equal parts of nostalgia and anger.

In the various decades and the various areas I have stayed in the development of the city I have seen the first paving of roads as Madan Mohon  Basak road transformed from a bed of brick chips to a broad swathe of asphalt, along with others in that area and elsewhere north of the railway tracks. Speaking of the railways , the railway canteen  of Sorabjee's at the Phulbaria railway station was a good place for dining out, as were the ‘cabins’ of Sadarghat, where cutlets-prawn or chicken-were a prime attraction. Then came the Chinese restaurants, first Cafe China and then Chu Chin Chow. This ‘Chinese’ revolution has brought about by now the highly popular concept of eating out in a Chinese restaurant. The Gulistan building housed the Chu Chin Chow, and Gulistan cinema hall itself, which was in the fifties the largest and the first and only air-conditioned cinema hall.

One of our principal recreations in our younger days was to loiter around in that novel market place, the New Market, the first example of a shopping mall in our country. In the evenings a saunter around the New Market, mostly to ogle at women and sometimes to browse in book shops. And then an hour or more of chatting at a tea shop. The chatting is one institution, present also in the neighbouring metropolis of Calcutta, which is most importantly an instrument of cathartic release. All the pent up emotions that the average Dhaka  dweller builds up in the course of his daily Odyssey, careering between  the Scylla of chronic shortages and the Charybdis of chaos rampant, while clinging on to an overcrowded minibus, are poured out in the Homeric epic of the chatting. The daily chatting acts as an emotional armour which protest the participant against the slings and arrows of outrageous urban life. The range of chatting is as vast the city and as small as the closed circle of cronies. From street corners and the tea-stalls there, to the private clubs such as the Dhaka club, and in between the two extremes are the tea shops in the markets and the educational institutions, these are the locales of the Dhaka citizen for his marathon talkfests.

Festivals such as the Eid, the Pujas, Christmas, and also Bengali New Year and fairs of all types such as Ekushe Boi Mela, and Export Fair, are occasions for us to indulge in an orgy of festive activity.  All our bottled-up emotions and sentiments are let loose and we undertake recreational parades around the town and on the fairgrounds. The simple reason is that there are now precious few places to wander around.

The only park worth the name, Suhrawardy Uddyan, is like New York’s Central Park, quite forbidding at night, and not quite enjoyable in the daytime. The same goes for the zoo and the botanical gardens. The minuscule Shisu Park is always overcrowded.

Cultural events in the city are of infrequent occurrence. The most regular amongst these are the theatrical performances, while public musical or dance performances are rare and often relate to events like Bangla New Year, or Boi Mela or visits from artistes abroad. These days cable television has literally opened a window on the world but we are at the same time swamped by the invasions of other cultures.

The city therefore seems to be all past and no future, and so capable of inducing a virulent attack of nostalgia. Random, haphazard, raucous the city has lived through wars and riots, epidemics and floods. But Dhaka, as many of us have discovered, is a movable chatting. In our homes, in the clubs, in tea shops, and on the streets, Dhaka is everyone's childhood, measles mumps and all.