adminDevashish Fuloria
DHAKA. — Everything they say about Dhaka traffic is a lie. It was supposed to be gnarly, lifeless, immovable, not smooth and free-flowing.
The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel is more Delhi than Kolkata, the city I was told Dhaka was a mirror image of. Some things they say about Dhaka traffic may be true.
It has been dark for over four hours (since my arrival) and the residential streets have gone quiet.
The buses, straight out of a dash derby, have horns as well as lights to announce their presence now.
Come close to a traffic signal and the vehicles assume a fish-like nature: it’s impossible to predict who is going to move which way, though the road is lined in one direction.
Every possible space is swallowed — by rickshaws, slow unpredictable unemployment-busters.
Cheap and reliable, necessary too — fast-moving vehicles kill, slow-moving ones create jams.
Rickshaws crowd the road at the signal. They are slow to take off, and they start a chain reaction, where everyone goes slow and the honking gets wild.
Being at the bottom of the transport food chain means they are open to abuse from police and by other road users.
My rickshaw-puller gets hit by a policeman’s baton as he tries to cut across traffic.
By the time I intervene, the policeman’s fist has hit the guy’s jaw — a scene all too familiar to anyone in the subcontinent.
The signal is green again and the rickshaw makes a dash. A smile on his face. You are annoyed and sad, but in a weird way you also feel at home.
I arrive at the Shere Bangla stadium early.
I see the Bangladesh players walk out of their dressing room, then walk to the other side and disappear into a hole.
A friendly soul walks up to me, asks me who I am, and then it’s mostly cricket from then on in.
Tendulkar, Lara, attitude, temperament, humility, Bangladesh, deficiency, Yuvraj, cancer are the few words that stick.
He says he loves cricket, wants to be a commentator.
He keeps talking but I get dry in the mouth.
I pull out my bottle of water, ask him if he needs some, he says no, but points to the label. Says it’s made by a sister concern of the place he works for.
An hour later I walk into the BCB director’s office with a local journalist.
The place offers the best view a cricket lover could want. In some other grounds, they would convert such spaces into corporate boxes to make more money. Not here.
The director says that Shere Bangla was purpose-built for football, while Bangabandhu was always a cricket stadium — it hosted Pakistan’s first home Test.
He points to the dressing rooms, at square leg, rather than straight. “Built for football,” he says again.
Numerous turns through crowded and narrow streets in Dhaka’s old town, the air is a mix of dust, cement and spices, the smells range from garbage to biryani to fish.
After zig-zagging for half an hour, we come to a lane flanked by giant river boats.
It’s the harbour — a row of big steamers on my side, a stepped bank on the other. There are small wooden boats making short trips to transport people from one end to the other.
A day later, I am on a bus to Khulna.
The bus gets on a ferry across the Padma, the river that bisects Bangladesh.
The Padma, assimilating the combined forces of the Jamuna (Ganges) and Meghana (Brahmaputra), is one of the lifelines of the subcontinent, the cradle of civilisations.
A few weeks ago I was trekking in the Uttarakhand Himalayas.
There I drank from a small rivulet called Neelganga, which flows into the Pindar, which adds to the Alaknanda, which merges with the Bhagirathi to create the Ganges.
I may be a thousand miles away, but the water helps me feel the connection. — Cricinfo.
Online Reporter