Do the blind have need of beauty
Is it but a conceit of the eye?
Is it but the act of
blossoming
And even the rose must die?”
From Receipts for Deceits by Bachchoo

My first impression of Dhaka — collecting my bag from the airport baggage reclaim, with hundreds of men, three or four deep, jostling and nudging around the endless seeming line of carousels — was that it was Kolkata with beards.

Half the baggage area was nothing but a godown with mountains of wooden crates and cardboard and tape boxes probably containing refrigerators, television sets and other bits of ware that immigrant labourers bring back from their hard-working spells in the Gulf.
I had seen minor manifestations of the same pile-ups in Tiruvananthapuram. My hosts, the Dhaka Film Society, had fast-tracked me past immigration though a corridor marked VIPs, making me feel unduly privileged till later I spotted the faster conduit for VVIPs.
The traffic-jammed streets looked like any of a clutch of Indian cities — Bengaluru? Mumbai in bits? except for the fact that the two-seater cycle rickshaws were everywhere, upright and moving at their own pace like flocks of penguins in the Antarctic, only not black and white but painted and patterned like India’s more extravagant “OK Tata” trucks.
The symbol for the Dhaka International Film Festival’s poster, displayed all over the town, is a camera with a cycle rickshaw mounted on top of it. I am asked whether I would like a long rickshaw ride as it’s a feature of the city. I say I am uncomfortable with the notion of a man pulling my weight. I have all my life seen humans pulling ploughs and carts and bearing bales on their heads. I have often wished for the acceleration of technology, which would abolish such labour, but my concern has stopped at wishing. Still, I can refuse to be pedalled.
I am then told China has fitted its cycle-rickshaws with motors that take the strain and these are soon going to be offered to Bangladesh.
There are autorickshaws of course, green with grilled doors which jail the passengers. These, I am told, are for protection against ride-by bag-snatchers. They snatch bags from passengers on cycle rickshaws too, but those presumably have less precious cargo to loot.
The autorickshaws are universally referred to as “CNGs”. The fact that they use gaseous fuel has become their name. As I observe this linguistic curiosity a peanut-seller approaches us and I have to tell my hosts that in Mumbai the peanut-sellers on the local trains call their paper-cones of peanuts “time pass”.
Endlessly waiting at traffic lights in the jam, we are approached by men selling books, mostly in English. In with the Paul Coelho novels and the ubiquitous Harry Potter titles, there are several copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I ask one of my hosts, a senior civil servant what that’s all about. Why is Dhaka selling Hitler’s infamous text?
His explanation is quite ingenuous or perhaps plain disingenuous.
“You see these fellows are selling pure pirated books and what they do is look on the Internet to see which are famous books and they find 10 of all-time best-selling titles and in this is also included this particular book, so they print it. They are not readers, so they don’t know what it is at all.”
“But they must be selling copies or they wouldn’t continue to print it.”
“Sure, someone must be buying not knowing what it is or anything about fascism,” he says.
A few days later I am invited to address a group of “intellectuals” to discuss my biography of CLR James. I am intrigued that there is a group of anyone in Dhaka who has read or even heard of the subject of my Nineties biography. CLR was a Trinidadian, a Marxist theorist and a writer on cricket. Perhaps the cricket is the clue? But no. The enquirers had read some of James’ more obscure Marxist works and wanted to discuss those ideas.
The discussion of Marxist perspectives led to chit-chat about current affairs and one of the intellectuals was of the opinion that the US, Israel and India (he referred to it as “the Delhi Sultanate”) were intent in some way on dominating or destroying Bangladesh. I didn’t feel that entertaining this observation, by asking what these countries could possibly gain by such domination or destruction, would lead anywhere so did some artful conversational dodging.
The comments from the group then and subsequently gave me the distinct feeling that there was a strong streak of Islamist anti-Israeli feeling amongst the intellectuals and perhaps by inference amongst other readers of English prose, which would perhaps account for the continuing sales of Mein Kampf.
The seminar that I have been invited to give is about screenplay writing. The participants, mostly students and professionals who want to turn filmmaker, are extremely enthusiastic, frighteningly attentive in that they take down my phrases and challenge me with them, catching me out in contradictions. They have all seen every art and commercial film going and can recall the stories of obscure Iranian, Hungarian or Tunisian productions. They pronounce the names of European writers and filmmakers in unconventional ways and I have to concentrate on a sort of Bangladeshi de-filtration to understand that “Pfosh-o-linny” is Passolini and “Fitter Booroksh” is Peter Brooke. I get it quickly and find myself saying “Hommitob Bhoshon”.
Being shown around the parks and viewing the monuments I remark that there is no tribute to the assistance that India gave Bangladesh in the armed freedom struggle of 1971. No mention of Field Marshal Sam Maneckshaw or Lt. Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora? My young students who are showing me their proud monuments have never heard of them and haven’t in their historical instruction been given the impression that India played any role.
So here it is: history not written by the victors but by the victimised.