Article

 by Pauline Bottrill

We arrived in Dhaka one steamy August day to be greeted by an armed vehicle. It was hartal and we would be escorted to the Sonargoan hotel by an armed guard. The words of my husband’s Bangladeshi colleague resonated in our ears, “You’re not thinking of living there are you?” “You will need a strong marriage to survive Bangladesh”, cautioned another. “Be sure to take at least a year’s supply of toilet tissue with you,” advised a former expatriate.

When we were safely installed in our hotel room, the view from the window presented the stark contrast between wealth and poverty described by Hillary R. Clinton in “Living History” when she recounted her own first impressions a few years earlier. Nothing had changed in this landscape; the rooms looked out onto a polluted lake, with shanties and garbage stacked on the far side of the fence that demarked the cabana and swimming pool where hotel guests could safely swim and sip clean drinking water.

I remember thinking that the traffic was chaotic and that I would never be able to negotiate myself around the city. The feeling of being trapped in the hotel was more so because of the hartal. I soon became used to the rhythm of the traffic and the sounds of the streets. Shunts and fender benders were a common occurrence of the U.S. urban environment where I had been living recently, and when a horn blasted it signaled angrily that you clear out of the way.

My feeling was that in Bangladesh there is a greater sense of spatial awareness grown out of the highly dense living conditions. The prolific use of the horn seems to be a survival tool calling, “I’m here, watch out for me.” There is a code described by William Dalrymple (City of Djinns) writing of traffic in India: ‘Might is Right’, whereby small gives way to large and slow to fast moving. I really wondered why the old system used at sea couldn’t be applied to land: “Sail Before Steam”.

During the first days in Dhaka, I spent many hours gazing out of my husband’s office window. All human life was passing to and fro between Paribagh and Elephant Road. There were the inevitable rickshaw wallahs and baby taxi drivers, snack sellers, bamboo makers, scrap dealers, construction workers, brick breakers, fruit and vegetable sellers and hawkers. All the hardworking subjects featured in “The Unsung Heroes of Bangladesh”, a book that we had been given. The sight and sound that most astonished me was my first glimpse of a chicken seller striding along the street with 15 chirping chickens in a wicker basket on his head. I couldn’t believe the birds didn’t leap out and I telephoned my daughter in England just to tell her what I was seeing.

One of the reasons for wanting to live in Bangladesh and encouraging my husband to take the assignment in Dhaka was the colour and design, particularly of textiles. I was not disappointed; wherever I looked I was dazzled by the richness of cloth in every streetscape. The early evening when the young women garment workers leave the factory is particularly colourful. The sheer range of colour, pattern and texture was textile heaven for me. Having taught textile arts for most of my life, here before me were examples of dyed, printed, stitched and woven cloth in techniques that I and my various students had attempted to emulate in the textile studio.

Textiles in Bangladesh are prized possessions. I witnessed at the top and middle range of the market silk and cotton sari and three-piece salwar kameez being selected with care by girls and their mothers. But I was soon to see scores of poor women waiting patiently during Ramadan for one length of cloth outside the neighbouring home of a wealthy benefactor. Jute, the more utilitarian textile commodity that was an important Bengal export (I remembered from my childhood near the port of Liverpool) is now in decline. I was fascinated to be taken on a trip to see a jute factory near Savar and wondered whether anyone in future might resurrect this natural material through ingenious design.

Our first major decision was to decide on somewhere to live. Should it be a house or an apartment? Which section of the expatriate enclaves of Gulshan or Baridhara? Which area was close to the markets? Where could we walk and take exercise? Everywhere we looked at was in the middle of a frenzy of building construction. What might once have been a quiet house and garden was now overlooked with no privacy. We had just left the United States where the Mac Mansion developers were destroying the suburban landscape. All the construction going on in Dhaka looked and sounded much like home in Washington D.C. with the similar lack of planning and zoning restrictions.

The first apartment we were shown had such a vast reception room that we thought we might need a rickshaw wallah to carry us from one side to another. As we toured around houses and apartments in sticky weather we realized how important air conditioning would be. None was available and we learned that air conditioning and appliances would have to be installed by the tenants. In the end we chose an apartment that featured marble floors and tiled bathrooms, which are now standard in new construction. We then enjoyed ordering furniture to be made, cotton and silk curtains, and stacks of bone china, all commodities that Bangladesh does so well. As for toilet paper, we found this and most household goods we required in the market place.

The smooth transition into our home in Dhaka would have been much more difficult without friends and household help, who saw us through the early weeks.