The good news, however, is that it was more of the former and less of the latter. For every security guard at the National Assembly who left no stone unturned to make me realise how ‘notorious’ and ‘big-brotherly’ Indians were in their dealings with Bangladeshis, there were ten people who made me privy to their dreams of visiting the Taj Mahal one day. For every irate officer at the visa office, there were a score who invited me to their homes for lunch or offered me a cup of tea or a cigarette – poor people, people with disabilities and on one very special occasion, a mother of a two year old with a hole in his heart.

As Dhaka slowly limbers back to life from its Eid-induced slumber and as the madding crowds troop back to make the city the sensory overload that it is, I leave for India tomorrow, having completed my fellowship at BERDO. There are a lot of things about Dhaka that I will always remember – the colourful rickshaws, the busy streets, doing iftar with a bunch of Maulavis at the Sat Gumbad Mosque, going head-to-head with multi-tonne ferries in a tiny dinghy on the Buriganga (and winning), and of course, the people at BERDO and their efforts to ensure equal rights for the disabled. On a lighter note, I will also miss the katchi biryani, gola kebabs and haleem that had become my staple for the last one month. They deserved more having.

So long, and shine on. 

Bangladesh - people and places

Bashar’s story

In 1994, Bashar Talukdar travelled to Dhaka from Bhola, with his wife and two daughters, in search of a living. The couple had two sons in Dhaka. The daughters were married off and the older son Saddam used to go to a neighbourhood school.

In January 2004, Bashar started to feel a strange rush in his right eye. He slowly started to lose his vision. Routine tasks like pouring tea into glasses became difficult to perform. He would sell the wrong cigarette packet at times. Treatment in Dhaka proved to be expensive. Doctors would charge Tk 200 a visit. The money he had to spend on medicines everyday (sometimes to the tune of Tk 300) meant that his daily expenditure shot up. Bashar could not muster the Tk 5000 that he required for an operation and travelled back to Bhola. At least there the doctor’s fees would be less steep, he imagined. That was the case undoubtedly, but medicines that would cost Tk 25 in Dhaka were sold to him at Tk 200 in Bhola. In short the chemist had chosen to fleece him. Bashar returned to Dhaka. Soon, Saddam who was then studying in Class V was taken off school. He now attends to customers at the stall while Bashar spends most of his time at home. He has registered at Sandhani, an establishment that organises eye-donations. The last time he contacted Sandhani, they told him that there were 2237 people before him on the waiting list.

Bashar at his tea stall with sons Saddam and Younus

The fact that Bashar’s stall lies right outside the gates of BERDO’s head office at Mirpur, matters little. BERDO does not have medical facilities in Mirpur. Nor does BERDO run its Community-Based Rehabilitation or micro-credit programmes there. Sceptics can argue that BERDO should probably make an exception to help Bashar. But where does an organisation draw a line? And if it indeed does decide to help Bashar, what about the blind shopkeeper who has a shop at the street-crossing 200 yards from BERDO? And what about the thousands like him who live remote lives away from the eyes of the State, or those of any NGO for that matter?

Shamima’s story

The intersection (or golchakkar) at Mirpur – 10 is as busy as busy can be. Cycles and rickshaws fight for space with buses and trucks. Pedestrians manoeuvre their way through fruit stalls that have spilled onto the footpaths. The sounds of cars honking horn, vendors selling their wares and beggars making a plea for money rent the air.

Shamima with her begging bowl

Shamima, a fifteen year old girl, spends most of her time at the busy golchakkar, in front of a restaurant. Like all of the beggars there, she too is disabled. Unlike most of them, she is completely immobile. At 8 am in the morning, a man dumps her on the footpath where she begs for money all day. At lunch time, the man collects her ‘earnings’ and goes away. At 9 pm the man carries her with him to his house in Kajipara.

On Eid day, the streets were filled with young girls decked up from head to toe in colourful dresses and sparkling jewellery. Makeshift food stalls that had sprung up for a day were doing brisk business. In the middle of it all, Shamima lay on all fours, waiting for someone to drop a coin or a note into her red begging bowl – aware of the fact that Eid or no Eid, her fortunes would probably remain the same. If Bashar’s was a tough existence, is there any hope at all for Shamima?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3OLbyGA8Cs

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Santosh Kumar Das

In 1996, Santosh tried to get himself treated at the Rangpur civil hospital. The operation amounted to nothing. He took this failure in his stride and shifted base to Dhaka. Work, however, was not easy to find and he found himself shift from establishment to establishment like a rudderless ship. For a year he worked at a chalk manufacturing and packaging unit and earned Tk 600 a month. In the evenings, he would sell newspapers at a street intersection. Disenchanted by work at the chalk unit, Santosh left his job. He took a loan from a local money lender and started a betel-nut shop of his own. He now earned Tk 900 a month. Most of it was exhausted in the repayment of the loan. The shop that Santosh was so optimistic about was failing to generate enough profits. He sold it off and worked as a biscuit and chocolate vendor at the Tongi bus station, earning about Tk 30 a day in the process.

The year 2008 represented a turnaround of sorts for Santosh. In June, he met Saidul Huq from BERDO at a disability rights seminar. That same month, he attended training at the Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) to be a telephone operator. Soon after, the placement wing at BERDO got Santosh a job in a bulb manufacturing unit at Gazipur. Santosh finds work at the factory exciting. “I fix circuits and coils and also do the final packaging”, he said. More importantly for him and his family, the job pays him Tk 2700 per month – reasonably well, considering the lowly wages prevalent in Bangladesh. I asked Santosh about the most significant change that his association with BERDO and the placement at the Energy Packing Company had brought into his life. “Certainty”, he promptly replied.

Santosh's daughter

At the end of our conversation, I asked Santosh if I could take his picture. He rummaged into his bag, fished out an old passport-sized photograph and said, “You can use this one. I have it on my disabled card”. “Do you consider yourself lucky to have one?” I said. “Yes I do. Not every disabled person has one”, he said – with a hint of pride and a tinge of sadness.

They are gaudier than the gaudiest jamdanis, kitschier than the kitschiest Vladimir Tretchikoff and if the fact that they are mass produced nowadays is anything to go by, then they are indeed more Warholesque than Warhol himself. The obvious point of reference here are the rickshaws of Bangladesh. Often the quickest (and greenest) form of transport through the clogged, maze-like streets of Dhaka, these rickshaws also double-up as moving objects of art.

A typical Bangladesh rickshaw

A typical Bangladeshi rickshaw is decorated with myriad embellishments – bright plastic flowers, metal tumblers, tacky streamers and multi-coloured pinwheels are the commonest accessories. Floral motifs and the latest Dhaliwood (when every region of the world has its own ‘wood’, can the Dhaka film-industry be far behind) movie posters are splashed across their vinyl upholstery. Tin-sheets at the rears of the rickshaws are adorned with paintings of movie posters, village scenes, flowers or political personalities.

At one level, rickshaw-art mirrors the undercurrents prevalent in Bangladeshi society. In the more religious south, floral designs are more popular and paintings do not generally contain human forms. The distance that separates the region from Dhaka and its film-industry can be another explanation for this phenomenon. In certain parts, portraits of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and symbols associated with Wahhabist sectarianism have proven to be popular at different times.

The Taj on a lotus - a popular image

The more adorable part of this whole exercise, however, is how most of these paintings are an expression of things that cannot be, or rather are not possible given the present circumstances, in Bangladesh. Village huts often have Ferraris parked outside them. Expensive yachts ply on waterways. The Taj Mahal sits on lotuses. Actors in movie posters are always fair (in fact, a sizeable majority is pink). Exaggerated cleavages are flashed liberally. And vengeful bikini-clad females tote guns in scenes that look like they draw more inspiration from James Hadley Chase novels than from everyday life in Bangladesh.

A young blind boy Mohammed waits for his father to take him home from boarding school. The father who is a widower wishes to remarry and is too embarrassed to say that he has a blind son. He wants his son to stay at school over the holidays. While he waits, the boy flings a stone at a predator – a cat, to save a fledgling that had fallen from its nest to the ground. He cups his hands together and picks it up. He puts it in his shirt pocket and carefully climbs up the tree to deposit it in its nest.

The Color of Paradise (source: www.imdb.com)

Cut to Dhaka, 2009

Mohammed Sajib is the only boy left at the School of Happy World at BERDO. The others have gone home for their Ramadan holidays. He roams the empty corridors of BERDO and keeps himself occupied with dominoes and a tattered ball. At other times, he fools around with a kitten. Sajib’s father is dead. His mother works in a plastic manufacturing unit at Tongi and barely earns enough to feed herself. Will Sajib’s mother come to take him home for Id, is the question on everyone’s mind at BERDO.

The similarities between the opening scene of Majid Majidi’s ‘The Color of Paradise’ and the scenes currently being played out at the BERDO office in Mirpur, Dhaka are difficult to miss.

Sajib was discovered outside the train station at Tongi by a BERDO scout. He had sores all over his body and was begging for food. His mother was contacted and Sajib was brought to the School of Happy World, where he has already spent a year. Tk 2700 was spent on his treatment. Sajib still has marks all over his limbs, but has no other ailment. He is bright and good with schoolwork.

“Where are you going to spend Eid?” I asked Sajib. “Tangail, at my grandmother’s house” – quick came the reply. “My mother is going to take me there”, he added. Little does he know that there is a distinct possibility that his mother might not turn up to take him home for Id. The people at BERDO do not seem to be complaining, however. They fear that once home his mother would send him out to beg. “When he returns, he will be as weak as a reed”, the cook tells me.

Sajib with his dominoes

In the movie, Mohammed’s father, overpowered by his love for his child, makes a mad dash into a raging river to rescue the drowning boy in the end. I realise that Sajib may not get to eat two square meals a day at home during Ramadan; that he, only eight years of age, might have to fast too – not out of the urge to attend to his religious duties, but forcibly, by compulsion. I also realise that there will be no dates in Sajib’s kitchen for him to steal (something that he does at BERDO, while the cook watches secretly with glee). But I still hope that this Mohammed spends Id in Tangail with his mother. For better or for worse.