Old Dhaka

The Internet is out again, so I will post this asap. Even though Sunday is a normal class day here, we get to stay home today because of the hartal (country-wide strike). A few of us may try to go to church this afternoon, but besides that I’m going to stay in Baridhara today. This post is about our trip yesterday.
It rained yesterday morning. The monsoon hasn’t technically started yet, but, as Atif told us, the weather’s giving us a little taste of the rains. It poured for about two hours. We left in the bus about half an hour after it started, and drove all the way to the old part of Dhaka in the rain. Dhaka driving is even crazier in the rain. I felt sorry for the rickshawallahs, who got drenched if they had work.
Our first stop was the Armenian Church. In the 17 and 1800s there was a small but important community of Armenian businessmen in Dhaka. Now there aren’t any Armenians in Dhaka, but the church is recognized as a historic landmark by the government. The bus parked a couple blocks away, and at first we thought that we were lost. Mahfuz went to figure out exactly where it was (it was still raining buckets) and came back to show us where it was. We then hurried along this narrow road huddled under umbrellas until we came to a gated archway on the right. We filed into the archway, which had a platform on the right side and opened out onto a graveyard. The graves were marked with flat slabs on the ground, covered with Armenian writing. After a quick dash through a few meters of rain, we came to the covered side of the church (it had one of those pillared areas on the side) and walked to the front of the church, ending under the belltower. The church is surrounded by a graveyard on three sides, and the property is bordered by normal Dhaka apartment buildings. We took our shoes off and went into the worship space. It was a small church that was nothing special architecturally, compared to other churches in Europe and the US. It was very pretty for Dhaka, however. The church layout was very like old Catholic or Presbyterian churches I’ve been in, with a rail separating the congregation from the front, a decorated altar, a small shrine on the side, and a pulpit. On the left of the altar was a separate room where they performed baptisms. The caretaker told us about his family, particularly his father who spoke fluent Albanian. Before we left he let us ring the bells.
We drove to the next site, the Ashan Manzur (the palace of the Nawabs of Dhaka recently turned into a museum). We were a bit early, and they wouldn’t let the bu in the gate. We were in an area where bideshis didn’t usually come, so there were a lot of people (mostly men) staring at us through the bus windows. Andrew opened his window and talked to one of them in Bangla. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but a rough translation was that the man said that we were white and they were black (dark), and Andrew responded that we are all people. We parked for a little while, and then they let us drive into the grounds. The Ashan Manzur is a big pink building on the Buriganga, the old course of the Ganges. They had it set up as a museum, just like an old plantation house in the US. It was interesting to see the use of both local and English-influenced furniture and dress; in paintings of the nawabs, they invariably wore English pants and shoes with more traditional-looking shirts. The dining room was straight out of 17th-century England. I was most interested in the jalsaghar, which was used to host live entertainment. It was also interesting that the nawab had separate rooms for meeting with Hindu and Muslim visitors. As we were about to leave, some of the people in the program had a rude awakening to the fact that they were, in fact, in Bangladesh: the bathrooms at the Ashan Manzur were just holes in the ground and did not have toilet paper.
Our next stop was the Lal Bagh fort, an unfinished Mughal fort from the reign of Aurangzeb. It was built in true Mughal architecture fashion, and contained three buildings (residence, tomb/shrine, and mosque) within surrounding gardens, fountains, and walls. According to Atif, it’s one of the big places to date in Dhaka. There were a lot of couples there, too. We went into the residence building, and one of the old men who take care of it gave us a tour. He was really excited to be giving these bideshis a tour and practicing his English. Atif showed us a hidden underground escape tunnel in one corner; he said two people got lost in it last year, and it’s now closed up. We then walked to the top of the army barracks and took pictures. I may actually be able to post some pictures with this post, since the internet is working really well right now.
When we got on the bus, one of our teachers, Sharmad, explained the cultural reason why Bangladeshis stare at us so much. Besides the fact that there aren’t many bideshis around, in Bengali culture staring is encouraged; if you look away, you seem shifty and untrustworthy.
We then went to get lunch at a place that was pretty far away from where we were. It turned out to be a bit of a fiasco, because we had such a big group and were each paying individually. By the time we left, it was too late to go to the Hindu temple we were supposed to visit. We had to leave that area by 4 because they didn’t want us anywhere near the hartal demonstrations.
Some of us were dropped off in Golshan Dui so we could visit a grocery store. There’s a bideshi grocery store there called Lavender’s where we can get Western foodstuffs. It’s really expensive. I bought some Jif peanut butter and crackers. Then I decided to take a rickshaw home in an attempt to use my small amount of Bengali. I failed at using Bengali, but I did get to the right place for the right amount of money.