Squares

Home; can be anything surrounded by five (six including the ground) sides. A square that gives meaning to life –a dreamer’s nirvana. Dhaka is home to fifteen million. Historically it has attracted people who found home associated with its culture, vanity, trade, politics, etc. It remained an ecstatic hub of the greater subcontinent. Vanity ended with the Moguls, Nawabs; and with it the whole charismatic epicenter that drew people from distant places. But it still remains the hub for the people of Bangladesh. Chaotic the city maybe, the whole systematic chaos runs an economy which deludes people to believe that this is heaven and you feel heavenly when you are in Dhaka. Believe in it; you maybe living in your Dhaka for your whole life but you necessarily do not think like this. But to an outsider the blazing billboards and smiling faces in it is an inspiration that drives them all the way from the simple life to the city life –‘Dhakai ghore garir chaka, batashe bhasey taka’. The magnetism is so traumatic that people often leave their most valuable wealth –however small, to live a dream that often becomes a nightmare. Few people make it through a hardship, if not a very prominent and prosperous life. Most regret, and degrade towards a life that has little meaning or purpose. The city harbingers a disparity so vast that stratification blinds people. You do not look back upon the destitute to see their well being twice. City life is harsh and cruel. And cruelty is a sly dog that eats from your hand but bites it as well.
A rickshawala sat by the other day at the tea stall (tong). He sat on a square throne laid out of bricks –courtesy the adjacent construction site. His back leaned against a lamp post. It did not mind the man wearing down on it; a gasp of tiredness shared with a metal pillar. He was poised as if a true king, slowly taking bits of the bread in his grasped palm. Sipping the tea silently, as if it was made in a winery in Italy –a 1965. His cloudy eyes has a lot to tell –marrying the daughters, putting a smile in the sons hungry face, repaying a burden of debts, and maybe a long lost home that gave life a different meaning. The silence was endurance to the cacophony of millions of shattered dreams. A whole life led in streets and among passengers who pays thriftily. At night he parks by the side of a pavement, the same depicted spot everyday and rests on the same seat where his passengers often seat on and treat them vilely.
Half past twelve, a slender figure stands in a corner of the Square street. The effeminate stance and the body language is inviting to the people of lust. The nail polish is imperfect but has a tender touch of a steady hand. The makeup reflecting the colors of the trade. She waits for the wolves. A sacrificial sheep; she has little alternative to live a lifestyle other than her current social stigma. The city drew her promising an aspiring life as a garments factory worker, but life had a different story to tell. Her discreet life is quite unknown to her family; the hardship does not reach them. Only the money does. In return, nothing is given back but sometimes blessing or sometimes scorns to earn more. Less is never enough. If that is not enough to worry about, than there are the issues of getting enough trade to pay the clan head and policemen their share and sometimes biscuit for the little Tommy who keeps guard and howls a bark to two. He was a puppy when she found her estranged in the same spot she has been standing for years now. She stopped counting.
Amazing smiles on those little mischievous square faces. They scamper about the traffic light selling popcorn or ‘poppon’ as they say it. Some of them carrying flowers or a bunch of de-shaped balloons, however colorful. They have the utmost confidence of an experienced salesman and the wit that shames adverts that you hear on television. From morning to late night, they runabout the traffic signals hailing at you to buy some more. Some of them are lucky to afford a chance at the evening school. But right after, they are back in the streets living off the sales they make. Now they lie back on the pavement curled up against one another not counting star as they go to sleep, but setting the target for tomorrow’s sale. Thriving little businessmen they have become. Fields do not attract them, neither to the storybooks, and everything that is of being children. They are adults, way ahead of their time.
His job starts at three in the morning. His sword is the broom that sweeps the streets clean. The pillage of the city must be cleansed making it ready for the next day to start all over again. Amazing things people throw away. His prized collection includes a broken transmitter (radio), a pair of ray bans (made in Jinjira), a collection of blue films, and a red scarf with a name written in one corner. He swipes it all –little Tommy does not mind him, nor does the children sound asleep, and neither does the rickshawala parked in one corner. His task remain unnoticed to the greater part of the city expect the stars above and the patrol car scanning the streets for miscreants. A howl at the other end –Tommy acknowledges an intruder. His family is also in the same business as was his father and maybe forefather. He sweeps; they collect –routine work and much mechanical. Later they gather the loot and scavenge for valuables. Often they are lucky; seldom have they found anything lucrative. They also have a space next to the children and their spiteful moms. Untouchables as they are, their square corners often mark their spaces with the spoils they gather. The placid smell and foul décor does not bother them much anymore. A part of life; often which is often short-lived.
A stranger twitches in another side of the pavement. He hums a baleful waning of illicit uttering that hardly makes sense. By day, his trade is borrowing; he borrows almost everything that has not been secured. By night he is emaciated by the chemicals that take hold of his rather cut square body. He quivers and clenches as the night bring the pleasures in his hysteria. Often, he gets up and runs up and down, screaming out the pain that has been long silenced by this disease he believes to have engulfed him.
The pavement is home to millions. It is not as square as you think but people do spend their whole lives in the same square feet they find so dearer to their lives. Often they are driven off by the elites who consider these people lesser than the dogs they doodle about. Often they fight among themselves for the same space. Sometimes it is harsher in the rain and in winter, but mostly they sleep covered head to tow often by a very thin cloth of the little they have. The children complain and grumble of the mosquitoes that sing lullabies in their ears. The parents, often comforting them with a false dream of a home of closed walls and a bed or a mattress in the near future from a dreaded city that has brought little or no change in their life.