Dhakan decadence

At the hotel I met some other foreigners – imagine! People who speak English and can share my experiences of being stared at! A few slightly irritating Australians and an obnoxious American, but foreigners nonetheless. And the American entertained with me with his travel stories. Which was nice. The next day I spent negotiating the narrow passages of Old Dhaka – dirty chaotic and alive.The smell of the river hits you long before you reach it and then finally the banks eroded from garbage encasing an indigo corpse of water emerge. There are people everywhere, busily loading and unloading the boats, some enormous hulks of metal and some little more than dugouts. The stalls are piled high with intensely coloured oranges, fragrant pomegranates and papayas, dusty grapes and mounds of starfruit verging on ripeness. The market contains the by-now usual labyrinth of enterprise. Seamsters, hawkers, incense and jewellers abound. It takes and age to walk the length of  street for the heaving masses snaking their way through rickshaws and pausing thoughtfully for tea. And then I find the huge pink oasis – a typical remnant of the British, a majestic pink palace overlooking the manky waterside. I lunge inside and immerse myself in the relative silence before slowly making my way out again into the chaos.

That was Old Dhaka. A world and several centuries away from New Dhaka. It may as well be New York or London, there are prim international schools everywhere, soulless shopping malls lining the wide avenues and streams of young people who reek of western superficiality. I wade through these familiar turbulent streets, I could be on any continent and still I enjoy the faint remnants of Bangladeshi culture in this area. It’s still civilised despite the modernity. Eventually the nameless  generic avenue leads me to the parliament – a monster of a building. An ode to seventies architecture with it’s bold lines and imposing concrete structures, it could be an overgrown arts faculty at any Irish university. Maybe that’s why it appeals to me.