I Can't Find Dhaka

"May liked it. She said: what a pretty road, it's so much more open than Calcutta. But as for my grandmother, she kept saying: I've never seen any of this. Where's Dhaka?"

In Amitav Ghosh's Shadow Lines, the grandmother returns to Dhaka on a mission: to convince her relative to leave East Pakistan and move to India. It is 1964, and a few pages later communal riots will engulf old Dhaka and her family. But in this moment, it is still the shock of the familiar unfamiliar that devours her. Marinate on becoming strangers in that same city, without the device of physical, political displacement. Forty years after Ghosh's time-frame Dhaka is alien to many. Designed to carry five million, it is now home to fifteen million citizens. And still the numbers swell, desperate for work as entire villages empties out. Those who cannot manage to get to the Middle East, come to Dhaka. But security paranoia swallows public space and shopping malls are the new oases, security guards at every door-- Habermas' prison in reverse.

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