Dhaka Days

Dhaka, 2006.

I came to Dhaka in the unlikeliest of ways—I flew.

Bangladesh wasn’t the sort of place I imagined I would ever fly into, at least not on my first time there. There was something romantic about tracing the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in the reverse: in the rickety buses of Calcutta, towards Petrapole, cross the checkpoint at Benapole and onwards towards Dhaka. Or I’d come from the northeast—from Cherrapunjee, towards Dauki-Tamabil, into Sylhet, and in to the capital of the world’s most underrated country. My taste for road travel has nothing to do with budget and everything to do with the irrational hunger for travel at 60km/h, if I’m lucky. Landing at Dhaka’s ZIA airport after a 25 minute flight from Calcutta felt stupid, disjointed. Why did I have to stand in this interminable queue, and why did I have to adjust my watch half an hour ahead? I hate airports, and I hate airplanes. I dislike stepping into an airplane, and stepping out into a different country. It does not feel like I’ve travelled, only that I’ve gone to sleep after eating something pretending to be food.

And yet I flew. Biman Bangladesh, no less. Earlier in the week I’d shuffled into our usual internet cafe in a house off Sudder Street, the corner near Free School Street, and asked our internet-wallah to also buy us tickets to Dhaka. It broke my heart to say, no, not the train… the airplane. I will never pass up a rail journey. Trains mean too much to me. At Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Airport, I glumly filed through Calcutta customs for the fourth time in two years, and again the white boy with me got us through the queue quicker by announcing to customs officers that he was, shortly after they stamp us out of India, going to ask for my hand in marriage. Everybody clapped, and looked at me expectantly. Matrimony is, incomprehensibly enough, a big deal in these parts of the world. Someone offered us a rossogulla.

Dhaka, Dhaka. I remember shockingly little of it—I spent much of my time in that country in the toilet, and in the villages; occasionally at the same time. At that time my Bengali had become very decent, after extensive usage that year, and it did not feel like a new country from the Calcutta I loved—in fact it wasn’t, until 1947, when it was arbitrarily partitioned into East Pakistan, and again in 1971 when it fought a brief war of independence against its then-overlord, the current day Pakistan (then West Pakistan), and became Bangladesh. A switch in language is usually my most acute cue that I’m somewhere new. Coming to Bangladesh after weeks in Calcutta, I sensed no change; the roads were cleaner here. Calcutta’s city in extremis proportions had disappeared. The capital of East Bengal felt more like a quiet leafy suburb of Calcutta’s, like Ballygunge, or Park Circus. There were more rickshaws in Dhaka than I had ever seen—and I’ve seen a lot of rickshaws. Unlike India’s rickshaws, Bangladeshi rickshaws were predominantly green, and always had intricately painted motifs on the back. The rickshaw wallahs were similarly scrawny, veins popping out. The chai wallahs were like India’s—thick, milky, delicious tea out of a strainer that looked too much like an old sock. The ‘popular music’ playing out of tinny speakers in Dhaka’s dhabas were the same CDs I used to put on in my ex’s car—they belonged to the father. The Hemanta Kumar Mukhopadhyay songs, I knew and loved; as much as I loved Manna Dey. I felt at home.

Remembering my ex’s delicious home-cooked Bangladeshi meals, I gamely ordered a dish with prawns at my hotel. If you’ve ever been to South Asia, you know the smell of dysentery and diarrhea the moment you eat it—the reeking smell of something dead in the water, transferred to your plate at a ‘high class’ hotel/restaurant, sprig of some dead leaf or other as decoration. Delhi Belly, it’s sometimes called—I had that strain’s close Dhaka cousin. After a memorable afternoon lying face down for several hours at the Apollo Gleneagles Hospital, needles intermittently introduced to my ass, my stomach took on steely qualities and never reacted to anything I ate in that country. Dhaka’s prawns, with my “Singapore noodles”, was my introduction to Bangladesh, and my ticket to five days in the toilet; four of those days being work days in environs far less pleasant than Dhaka’s.

What I do remember: the Hemanta Kumar Mukhopadhyay songs playing on a tape, looping endlessly as we drove the 8 hours to Nilphamari to the leprosy hospital where we stayed the night, rudely awoken mid-shower to see a grown man screaming and killing cockroaches with orange-scented insect repellent (does not work; slippers rule, out here). More Hemanta Kumar Mukhopadhyay songs playing. Loop. Eject. Insert. Repeat. The Bangladeshis like to boast that yes, Mukhopadhyay was a Calcutta boy, but he was theirs at the end: he performed his last ever concert in Dhaka, and returned to South Calcutta only to breathe his last. Loop. Eject. Insert. Repeat. Eject. It was time for dinner, somewhere in Rongpur.

Back home in Singapore, I miss the travelling life, the months on end on the road with my backpack; Trains At A Glance as my Bible, and the secret codes in them I’ve cracked. The life which was mine in fits and starts; the life punctuated occasionally by reality, rather than reality occasionally punctuated by travelling, the life I now miss, the one which feels like my double, secret life, now that I’m back in some remains of normalcy. But every once in a while, I reminisce about my Bengal, and end up writing copious, gratuitous pieces like these that have no point. Two years on, I’m still looking for a Hemanta Kumar Mukhopadhyay album, yet the supremacists running the Little India shops always laugh off the sight of a Chinese girl requesting classical Bengali music, and would I prefer some Hindi, or Tamil pop? No, not really; it’s Amar Shonar Bangla, or nothing, your Bollywood tracks can wait.

Shey je boshe aachhe eka eka, rongeen shopno taar bunte.

More on Bengal: Middle-of-Bloody-Nowhere, Nilphamari, Middle-of-Bloody-Nowhere, Sirajgonj, Sudder Street, Being There Not Here, Amar Shonar Bangla, Strolling Around Bengal, You Could Forgive the Monsoon, Portraits Unphotographable, Rough City, Some Signs That Say You’ve Recently Returned From India.