by Kathryn Hummel

Being a particularly cool, sophisticated young person of independent means, I’ve sampled a range of cities the world over. Living in a small city in Australia—which is often referred to as a “town” by those in the metropolises of the East—means I am drawn to the smokiest of big smokes (Aussiespeak for the biggest of big cities). For me, the magnetism of urban life lies in the difference between quiet, arty, old-fashioned Adelaide and the magnitude of Tokyo, the worn splendour of Moscow and the frenzy of Beijing. There’s really only one city I avoid: London, which has more to do with the interminable off-putting hours spent at Heathrow on my way to another city rather than London itself.

The city du jour is Dhaka and since it will remain du jour for the next 350 days, I’ve shambled a bit in my efforts to get acquainted with it. I recall arriving on a midnight flight two weeks ago, exposing as little of my Western skin as I could to the insatiable mosquitos, and being driven through the alien streets to my hotel. When I took in the uneven pavement and dusty streets, the first thing I thought was: yes, this is just like Mongolia. Later, when the rickshaws joined the traffic, each a miniature masterpiece of lurid folk art and ringing their bells to vie for patrons—like a flock of parrots in mating season—I thought: certainly, just like China. Then again, when I got to my disappointingly Western-style hotel room, where my window opened out to meet the vista of a dirty wall, I thought: but of course, this is just like any cheap hostel room in Europe.

Overusing comparisons is a method favoured by the unadventurous, who make them to reassure themselves that while they’re removed from that comfortable sphere of things familiar, it is not so removed from them. Anyone who’s ever left their home to travel has either fallen into this trap themselves—irritating their companions by moaning about the lack of Vegemite/liquor/cultural enlightenment—or has become the target of a sticky homesick hanger-on. I know for certain I’ve been both, but in the first case I’ve met with sympathetic people who never once suggested I should have stayed at home and host a slide night of the seven wonders of the world; passing this karma forwards, I’ve never suggested it to anyone else overwhelmed with flight fright, as I know it to be a temporary and unpredictable affliction. Australia breeds many of these serial comparison-makers since multiculturalism, a word so often batted around our national monologue, is the product of comparing cultures, seeking to recreate home in strange surroundings and leading either to diversity or segregation, whatever viewpoint you subscribe to. So it’s being true to form if I admit, with a slight droop of the head, that I’ve started to yield to comparisons myself because I want to keep living a little longer in my comfort zone.

For without the safety of comparing Dhaka to the places familiar to me, Bangladesh drags me into its unique intensity. The minute I step out of my flat, I am out on the street with people who make their beds on the raised flower boxes of the grimy median strips, where barbed wire and weeds substitute for plants. Or I am among the groups of children who spent hours searching through piles of stinking rubbish, collecting whatever treasures they find there. I am there on the street with the women, begging with their oddly healthy babies in their arms, or standing beside the little girl with a lifeless-looking, long-limbed infant strung over her shoulder like a sack. I am sitting in the dirt with the old man whose limbs are swollen and bent with elephantiasis, or alongside the legless man who negotiates the madcap traffic at tyre level on a wheeled platform. Without home as a point of reference, I am left without my level of reasoning. I forget the warnings of well-minded locals, who tell me to only give food to those who ask for alms, as money will be snatched from their hands by the mob bosses of a kind of beggars’ mafia. I smile warmly at the workers in my building, who then call out to me in Bangla and snigger, I have quite scandalously overpaid for a set of five tea towels (a rare sight here).

Without being used to calmly walking down a street at home, I’d be all too exposed to the stares of pretty much all of citizens of this city. Here, I’m one of those rare real life bideshis (foreigners), with a large salary, or with a husband who earns a large salary, and the exotic pale skin local women attempt to imitate with bleaching lotions found on supermarket shelves. I find myself being overcharged by rickshaw drivers and market stall owners, or the centre of attention in every street I walk down and every restaurant I enter. This is probably what celebrities are accustomed to and demand, although it hangs heavily on my ordinariness like an extra head from my neck.

The attention can also mean furtive gropes made by curious hands in crowded marketplaces, or lewd gestures directed discreetly at me from men on the street. There is an emphasis on Western women behaving with the utmost modesty, which includes covering our front bits by a salwar kameez and orna (the local combination of long tunic, baggy trousers and scarf), casting our eyes downwards and generally not smiling at or talking to the people who call out to us on the street. This, by the way, has little or no effect, so ingrained is the conception of Western women equalling filthy-rich porn stars, however unlikely you look.

I could just as easily lose myself amid the noise pollution created by thousands of sharply honking car horns and bicycle bells that sound much louder and more constant than anywhere else I’ve been. I could forget that not all traffic is as lunatic as it is here and step on the street to be run over by a CNG (a motorbike taxi), a rickshaw, a baby taxi, a gleaming chauffeured car of the middle classes, a motorbike. Even the heat, not so different to an Australian summer in temperature, has the ability to dehydrate quicker, to make me sweat more, to make me pong more, to make the dirt of the street stick to me, to make the smells of goats and raw sewerage and rubbish in the street make me hold my orna to my nose.

Why do I feel the need to drift slowly into this city rather than throw myself into it, as I have in other cities, in other travels? It’s not fear that prevents me; I find very little to fear in a country where the people are so poor but so individually cherished as members of a family, or a group of friends, or a band of rickshaw drivers. Every time I step outside I see men of all ages holding hands in gestures of simple friendship, I see families of four piled onto the one rickshaw, parents holding their children on their laps and enjoying the closeness of the ride, and the destitute families who live near Dhanmondi Lake laugh with each other while sitting in the dirt. Down the street from my block of flats is a rickshaw station where the local drivers chill out, take their morning ca (tea) and dahl, and share a laugh before pedalling themselves into astonishing wiriness for another hard day’s earnings.

At the moment I am seeking self-preservation, an important element that cockier, less meditative travellers might forget in their eagerness to be absorbed by the seductive elements of an expatriate life in Dhaka. And despite what I’ve written before (and what in review reads like run of the mill culture shock) there are many: from the mesmerising colours and patterns of the saris and kameezes worn with such elegance by the Bangladeshi women, the authentic and multi-layered flavours of the food, and the rituals of washing and eating with your right hand that accompany it, or the more complicated matter of the exchange rate being so much in our favour, the availability of services beyond our usual means, the unfamiliar power and dangers that accompany it.

I am working out how to get from my flat in Dhanmondi to the non-governmental organisation I call ‘work’ (being a volunteer), is getting in deep in Desh enough for me. Give me another few weeks and I’ll be recounting tales of myself entangled in some kind of “Greenelandic” moral and political dilemma, living in tarnished opulence in a mouldering mansion presided over by mango trees, with a bhay (male servant) bringing me illicit gin cocktails. But here I’ll stop, since I’ve just stooped to making yet another comparison and that’s one of a habit I’m hoping to crack.

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