Masks by Saidul Haque Juise

Of all the things I expected to do in Bangladesh (watching cricket, eating wonderfully spicy Bengali food, sweating through four shirts a day) something that didn’t make it on the list was being surrounded by Bangladeshi art. In fact, I hadn’t the slightest interest in or conception of Bangladeshi art. Well, I’m not alone: it turns out that Bangladeshis don’t know much (or, apparently, care much) about their own art, either.

Or so I was told last night during a wonderful, if slightly off-balance, evening at the home of the painter Fareha Zeba, her husband the sculptor Saidul Haque Juise and the eminent art historian Professor Enamul Haque, former director-general of the National Museum and Minister of Culture.

The evening was off-balance not because of the company, nor even because of the extraordinary range of original and collected artwork that turned every wall into a kind of concerto of visual activity. No, this was the evening before the notorious two-day general strike or hartal, which was busy throwing everything and everyone off balance even before it started. For one thing, the traffic, always…um…intense, was virtually at a standstill as some people tried to stock up ahead of  the shop-closings, while others got ready to leave the city for what, with the Muslim weekend of Friday and Saturday and then two more days of hartal immediately afterwards, amounts to a six-day weekend. The strikers were adding to everyone’s nervousness by getting a kind of Cabbage Night jump on today’s strike by reportedly setting on fire eight buses, two private cars and a covered van, just to show they’re serious.

(I say “reportedly” because I saw no such thing, and having been in these situations before I know how vigorously rumor fans imaginary flames.)

So a seven o’clock dinner was pushed back and back as everyone’s trips home were held up, and it was after nine before my friend’s driver turned up at the guest house where I’m staying. I hopped in, half-expecting the worst, but the rumors had done their job: Dhaka, which normally has more traffic on any given street in one day than the whole of Burlington, Vermont sees in a year, was almost deserted. The dark, leafy streets felt eerie, and for the first time I thought we might actually move fast enough that I’d need to put on my seat belt.

It hadn’t actually rained during the day (thanks to all of you who emailed me to ask if the weather was still as saturated as it was when I landed) but it was still humid enough that when I got out of the car my glasses fogged up with a tenacity beyond ordinary shirt-polishing, so I was standing like a fool with my specs in hand when the door opened and I was ushered into a home that I can convey only by embedding a dozen photos or more into what follows.

Fareha Zeba’s paintings, some in acrylics, some in watercolor, had a kind of sketchbook spontaneity to them and more than a hint of magical realism: it was as if the guests were surrounded by another set of guests, the spirits of Frida Kahlo and dozens of other long-lost friends.
These faces, though, were only the most conventional of those looking out from the walls and past the guests. Saidul Haque Juise makes masks. He started out making what might be called life-sized festival masks, crisp and colorful with a certain birdlike quality, but then he began using local sands, rust-colored and gray-green, creating a basic structure and then painting it with glue and paint before sprinkling the sand on top. The results were amazing, timeless and simultaneously somber and humorous.

And all the other walls were covered with all kinds of other pieces of folk art: more masks, more faces, birds, animals, gargoyles.

The whole wallscape left me feeling exhilarated but pretty stupid. How come I’d never seen or even heard of exhibitions of Bangladeshi art? Professor Enamul Haque cleared things up for me. Of course there is Bangladeshi art, from contemporary to seriously ancient, but Bangladeshis have spent most of their history pretty much ignoring it. Not a single college or university, he said, offers courses in Bangladeshi art.

This reminded me of a conversation I’d had with a very bright young tour guide in Egypt. Egyptians have no interest in their own history, he told me. I was flabbergasted. What country has a longer and more colorful history than Egypt, much of it still visible from miles away? No, he said, he wasn’t taught anything about Egyptian history in school; what little he knew what what he had picked up in his training as a tour guide. The reason why Egyptians in general are so well-disposed toward the English and the French, he said, was that it was the foreign archaeologists who not only unearthed Egypt’s art and history but declared it to be of value. Even today the vast majority of Egyptian art a visitor sees is either (a) 3,000 years old or (b) tourist crap. It’s like Egyptian food: I spent weeks in Egypt looking for good Egyptian food, but Egyptians who like to eat go out for French, or Italian, or Thai. It’s a kind of national self-diminishment I found quite dismaying.

Back in Bangladesh, meanwhile, a different dismaying trend has begun: Bangladeshi art has at last come to be valued–by smugglers. Even though in theory it’s illegal to traffic in, say, thousand-year-old stone icons, the trade is as lively as the African trade in ivory or rhinoceros horn. By far the top destination, he said, is the United States.

Even at his advanced age, Professor Haque has started a project that, he hopes, may help to slow this grim art-drain. Deciding that trying to enlist the help of politicians or academics was a waste of time, he chose a remote region in the north of the country a recruited–children. About 180 of them, in fact, all pledged to respect and preserve their country’s history and artistic heritage by reporting any trade they saw taking place in their immediate vicinity in icons, statues, sculptures, paintings, figurines. A kind of Neighborhood Art Watch.

It’s early days, but he believes his Baker Street Art Irregulars are having a significant effect. He hopes to set up similar projects in other areas of the country. 

And then it was time to leave, before the hartal proper got going at midnight. I said my goodbyes and headed back to the guest house, my mind full of faces.

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Rush Hour on Road 12

I have no idea what day it is. I suspect Sunday. Locally, everyone knows it as the day of hartal (which seems to be a combination of strike and, if everything comes together, a demonstration), and therefore a holiday. Apparently, one group has declared a half-day hartal, another a full-day hartal, and a full-day hartal trumps a half-day hartal, so a full day it is. In practice, this means, as Haroun at the guest house says, it is a holday, and the shops are shut. Certainly, the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), where I’m supposed to meet my medical friends, is shut, and I have nothing to do.

Today is not actually raining, as far as I can tell, but everything (myself included) is slick with moisture. I’ve made two excursions, stepping carefully among the puddles and the acreage of mud, and heaps of bricks and dogs and small children who look up to grin mischievously and call out “Hello!” over and over. As soon as I get back to the guest house, I peel off my shirt.

My reconnaissance so far has taught me:

I am on Gulshan Road 12. Gulshan is, as one of the students from ICDDR,B called it, “the posh district,” which means we have mud and bricks and half-finished buildings, but we also have established residences with gates and slim figures in pseudo-military uniforms and paved courtyards with new cars and the usual rash of single-building academic centers, some of which are quite genuine, some of which (such as the one advertising all manner of courses and degrees and announcing its website, www.theprinceton.edu), are probably less so.

My reconnaissance notes:

L outside the gate, then R: Catalina Island Restaurant, Bookshop.

R outside the gate, then L to Sunny Dale Apartments, then L: road of rickshaws. At the end, turn R past series of one-car-garage shops, cobblers squatting on the pavement, leads to major chaotic intersection I shall call Piccadilly Circus.

On an insane whim, knowing that I should probably be doing some kind of reading or editing, I decide to Google Map the city of Dhaka.

This really flies in the fact of experience and common sense. When I was following the polio eradication program in Karachi, I discovered that Karachi, like many cities in South Asia, has no reliable street maps. (Nor census, nor most other items of informational infrastructure.) When we went off in search of a meeting at the Town Health Office, or even in search of the WHO headquarters, the driver would head off in roughly the right direction and then repeatedly ask passers-by if they knew where the THO or the WHO was. No street names. No building numbers. Barely any street, in some places. And even the locals didn’t know their locality: we spent 45 minutes within half a mile of the WHO headquarters, asking if anyone knew where it was, before we found it.

Incredibly, typing “Gulshan, Dhaka, Bangladesh” into Google Maps actually delivers what looks like an authentic street map. Having long ago learned that the map is not the territory and the Internet is not the map, I zoom in with cautious fascination.

What I find has that wonderful combination of plausible fact and plausible fiction. Road No 12 is indeed shown, though on the Google Map it is a clear, purposeful, finished corridor rather than a combination of construction and collapse amid mud puddles, laborers and small children. A number of local landmarks are spelled out, ranging from the impeccable (Transparency International Bangladesh) through the possibly dubious (International Educational Counselling Centre, Inc, which might be entirely genuine, entirely bogus or just trying to make a living any way it can), the mysterious (Amazon Lily Residence) to the delightfully vernacular (Banani Community Centre Cum Bazaar).

I love maps, and I love navigating by maps, but this map leaves me completely adrift for the simple reason that I have not yet seen, and may never on this trip see, the sun. Everything is cloud, sans direction. Normally, I can tell you at once, even if I’m indoors, which way is north, south, east or home. Here, I have no clue.

(Google Earth, by the way, simply backs up Google Maps, like mid-level executives covering each other’s asses.)

Consequently, I have no idea if the Catalina Island Restaurant is on Road No. 11 or on the curiously-named Kemal Ataturk Ave. (Why is the great Ataturk commemorated in Dhaka?) Haroun, giving directions from the front desk of the guest house, refers simply to “main road,” and I’ll bet a thousand taka that if I stepped outside the guest house compound and ask the first passer-by for Kemal Ataturk Avenue he’d have no idea. The map is not the territory, and the internet is not, whatever it may look like, the map.

Above all, anyone who uses an onboard GPS navigation system or an online map finds out sooner or later that the information is only as good as its human on-the-ground updaters. How often do the guys working for the mappers head out here, their clipboards floppy with damp paper, their shirts sticking to the fabric of their car seats? Can’t see it, myself.

Finally, in search of lunch, I’m forced to do some on-the-ground exploring: Road 12 actually runs between Road 7, home of the Catalina Island Bistro (of which more in a moment) and Road 9. Google Maps includes both 7 and 9 but in the wrong place and without a 12 running between them. Piccadilly Circus is in fact Gulshan (Roundabout Number) 1, not identified on Google Maps.

Mushtuq, the Principal Scientific Officer at IEDCR, explains the snag. At some time in the cartographic past, perhaps as much as 20 years ago, all the road numbers in Gulshan were changed. For a while, in fact, people’s addresses literally ran “House #12, Road #8 (old Road # 2).”

I was right: it was hard enough to get the GPS team to seethe in the traffic and slosh through the mud around here just once. To get them to come back and update was just too much. The map has been made: long live the map. Anything wrong with it must be the fault of reality.

Don't believe a word of it.

As it’s the only place I know to have lunch, I walked around the corner to the Catalina Island Breakfast Bistro and Barbecue, featuring Live Entertainment.

In this part of the world, the rural idyll, the exotic getaway, is a popular concept in even the most unlikely settings. Stepping gingerly around a mud puddle on what I now knew to be Road 7, I crossing the faux footbridge over the faux lagoon, passed the concrete wall painted with the faux blue waves, and found myself the only customer inside a largely featureless interior. As in most places in the developing world, underemployment is a fact of life, and four people showed me to my table.

As usual, the western-style dishes were expensive, and as usual I wasn’t interested in them anyway. Stepping gingerly around the brain masala, I opted for chicken masala, palak paneer and butter naan, with a side of mango juice.

These dishes are familiar, by the way, because what I grew up in the U.K. thinking of as Indian food is in fact Bengali food.

Service was leisurely, and as I waited for my meal I realized that the bookshop next door (where I had just bought Lands of Glass by Alessandro Baricco, its cover already curling up from the damp, and Davd Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, prudently hand-wrapped in transparent plastic) had as much custom as the restaurant—rarely a good sign for a restaurant. A waiter went out to sweep the Astroturf bridge with his whisk broom, and as he did so I saw to my surprise that the faux lagoon actually had fish. Their darting this way and that, and the wind flirting with the leaves of the palm trees and ferns, were today’s live entertainment.

The mango juice arrived, complete with both pulp and froth from the juicer. It was neither heavy nor sticky, and I remembered that monsoon season is also mango season.

Several people brought me clean plates, and my lunch, forking the naan onto a side plate, spooning up my chicken and paneer.

One bite—best naan ever. Fluffy, not greasy.

The chicken seemed to have been cut along Eastern rather than Western geometries, each bite featuring rather more bone and rather less meat that I expected, but all the same it was delicious, with just enough kick from the cardamom, and the palak paneer was the star of the table, with perfectly crispy chunk of fried cheese in a sauce that was colored by spinach but not overwhelmed by it. The whole meal came to just over 1,000 taka.

All morning my head had been congested. I walked back to Road 12 with my sinuses running wild and free.

At the risk of sounding relentlessly self-promoting, if you liked this piece you’ll almost certainly like my book Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment, available directly from me or from fine bookshops everywhere.