Juxtaposed Realities

By Mehreen Ahmed

I wake up, somewhat disoriented, by the sound of a vendor calling out on a cold winter morning.  Reaching for my shawl,   I manage to fumble out of my bed half asleep, as I make my way through the roof-top bedroom.  With my eyes still squinting, I bend over the brick railing to see the vendor halting in front of a six storied building with a van full of green vegetables: beans; spinach; carrots; cucumber and cauliflower as he hears a yell coming from the top, “hey!stop!stop right there”. Looking up, the vendor sees a woman who is now giving him the orders, “give me one kilogram of beans, carrots and cucumber.   The fresh looking vegetables seem as if they have just been plucked from an adjacent vegetable patch with the cauliflowers looking as white as snow while the greens, lush and rich.   The vendor screams back “twenty takas”.  “Too much”, says the woman in a commanding voice... “Not at all”, he answers back, in a conciliatory tone. “Everything is too expensive, amma, surely you understand that”.  “True, how about fifteen takas” she bargains, trying to be a bit more accommodating. “Eighteen” he answers promptly. “O.K,” nods the woman in agreement thinking that she has struck a hard bargain.  A little servant girl comes downstairs to pick up the vegetables from the vendor.  The woman throws two twenties out of her window towards him which fly through the air like a kite descending gently on the dirt.  He picks them up and gives the little girl back her change.  Off he goes again, pedalling his cycle van hailing, ‘spinach; beans; cauliflower ‘, stopping and selling his greens through the dusty streets of Uttara in Dhaka.
 
Although a little ashen from the mist, the visibility is quite clear from the bright sun.  As I look at the orchard garden in the back-yard, I am just as thrilled to see the ripened fruits as I am astonished to find the tarnished leaves. None of the mango; the coconut; the guava; the date and the betel nut trees has escaped the onslaught of the pollution.  The leaves have lost their true colour to thick dust and masses of black and brown spots.  The actual colour does not return until the monsoon season.
 
The market is not that far, but for an average family in Dhaka this is a hassle free way of getting fresh hand-picked vegetables for the day.   I am soon called downstairs for break-fast and to my delight there is a good spread of chappaties, vegetable curries: presumably bought from the same vendor, omelettes; sweets; fresh coconut juice and tea.  After a hearty break-fast I sit down with a sugary cup of white tea by the window.
 
Apart from a few rickshaws, there are also some cars honking desperately and quite unnecessarily on the road to get past.  Indeed!  How little things have changed.   People have the same menu for break-fast, lunch and dinner.  Still the deafening blare of honking and the tinkling of the richshaw bells pervade the atmosphere.  As the idle morning rolls by, the drivers, the paan-wallas (sellers of betel leaves) and the street people gather as they always did under the lamp-post in the pursuit of futile political discussion.  Smoking a cigarette or occasionally spitting betel juice on to the smelly open drains, they compare the performances of the present and the past governments.  Topics, usually limited to grocery prices, and the law and order situation, these unending debates go on for hours until someone is summoned to report back to duty. If one is to typify a place, then perhaps, these are the moments that need to be captured.   Even the odd crow sitting on a saggy electric wire or the lonely mal-nourished dog running along can be added to this picture.   Time, seem to move like a slow bullock-cart, burdened by hundreds of years of tradition --- a mammoth load that cannot be shed.  Modernisation either cannot eradicate this cultural sloth.
 
On their kitchen floor, the little servant girl whom I saw earlier, sits cutting her vegetables bought from the vendor.  This is performed on a primitive tool called the boti.   A boti looks like a machete and is a very interesting knife with a curved sharp blade, two tiny legs and a short narrow extension.  While the blade is supported by the legs, the extension slides down from the blade allowing the boti to be stable on the floor.  The extension is flat which helps the user to put one foot on it for a good grip.   People in Bangladesh have used it for generations and it is impossible to use it on a western style counter-top as the two arms must be free to hold the objects on either end.  Evidently, the little girl has a lot of practice, observed from the precision of her cuts as she slices through the carrots and the beans: some thin, some thick.  
 
Not that I already do not know ...  I still venture out for a ride in the rickshaw to the main road. Gridlocked in the middle of the road, cars; trucks; buses; crowds of people; rickshaws; sit helplessly.   The traffic lights change in vain, as the police continue to whistle for some discipline.    Mostly Toyotas, but also a few new models of  BMWS and Mercedes are in sight. My rickshaw crosses the intersection as it narrowly escapes a huge bus which decides to use its brakes at the very last minute.  Following no safety margin, the idea is to keep on going until one is stopped by an on-coming vehicle.  Slanting and slippery, the seats of the rickshaws do not often make for comfortable seating either. Passengers on the rickshaw, therefore, sit precariously as it makes its way through the horrendous traffic jam.  People do this, day in and day out, but to my surprise, the number of accidents is quite low as, “it could have been much worse”, I am told.
 
Once on the other side, I carry on with my tour with a sigh of relief. Admittedly, I am a little disconcerted to see a large number of women wearing the hijab.  It is on the rise undoubtedly, but why?   This radical change is shocking when Bangladesh has always been a liberal and a trendy place.    In the past, the hijab was restricted only within certain religious families of the mullahs and the muftis. Now, it is almost everywhere.
 
Thwarted by an abrupt bump, I wake up from my thoughts as my rickshaw collides with a BMW in front of me.  Suddenly, I am surrounded by a huge crowd of people and through the crowd I notice a smaller group of men engaged in a heated argument.   A captive audience of this street drama, I witness an accident. A van has hit the BMW and has knocked its head lights out.  In the car, a young girl in western clothes: pants and a T-shirt, sits with an elderly woman in an expensive sari.  The driver of the BMW demands compensation which the offending vehicle tries to negotiate.  Eventually, it concedes by paying two-hundred takas at which the BMW quietly drives away. No police is spotted.  The people take the matter in their own hands apparently, acting the police, the judge and the jury.  Whether or not this is mete out by poetic justice, only the audience can tell.  
 
Further down the road there is another car, parked beside a slum where the street- dwellers live.  This time around it is a Toyota.  A woman in a hijab is handing out boxes to her driver which in turn is given to the slum-dwellers.  The dark hovels, in which they live, are built from used plastic and straw in an amateur patch work.  Indeed, they are very small, probably the size of a tiny tool shed but inhabited by at least five or six people.  Happily, the men, woman and the children open their respective boxes and. what they find inside simply takes their breath away.  It is Biriyani!  A delicacy in Bangladesh, rich in flavour, prepared with meat, rice, and potatoes.
 
By now the western sky is red from the departing sun.  Remembering T.S Eliot, I set off reciting, ‘’Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherised on a table;” --- a splendid juxtaposition, I chuckle.
 
 

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