Dear Jahan,
It has always been evident to me that Dhaka and Rome are sister cities. It is not just the booming Bangladeshi population of Rome, nor the Pizza Roma motorbikes zapping around Dhaka that instill this feeling in me. Oh, I can see you raise your skeptical eyebrow, but wait, follow me down the road that leads from Dhaka to Rome and I promise to do my best to avoid the potholes of generic negative comparisons. After all, call it traffic or traffico, it’s bad and boring.
Some similarities are hard to grasp – like the way the light falls in winter or the improvised rhythm of time. There is the risk of driving this letter into poetic ground without license and I can hear you saying, ‘No matter how much you try, you will never make Dhaka rhyme with Rome’. But there are some concrete bonds to this theory, hold that eyebrow!
Food. For Romans and Dhakaites the sacred things in life are edible. Both Bengalis and Italians are food-enthusiasts, spending about 55% of their lives at the table and 80% of their airtime talking about food.
‘Hey, what should we do?’ in both cities means ‘Hey, what should we eat?’
Eating is so primary that titles and place names are often mistaken for restaurant names. Rome, is that a restaurant?
Family. There is no excuse for not showing up for lunch on a Sunday/Friday in Rome/Dhaka. In both cities, lunch after prayer is sacred and reserved for family. This is a time to talk about life and food, to recall memories and play a word game or two over mom’s cooking. And then, after the table is somewhat cleared and the gossip has thinned, as with all humans that eat carbohydrates, it’s naptime.
Natural Order. Here I will try to touch the intangible. Both cities function in accordance with an organic sense of law and order. Appointments are always made at an ‘ish-hour.’ Everything happens on time, but its own time. Driving is instinctual. The wiggle room of every rule is enough to store a ton of contraband and an elephant. The power of no is only an invitation to debate. The cities grow and function as organic systems, sensitive to whim and desire.
Extroversion. When you take a call in Rome, you sit down and get comfortable – it will be long. Conversations spurt out everywhere, mostly as a demonstration of the wit muscle. Similarly in Dhaka, talking is a pass time and an art form. The cities are constantly vibrating with the milling of millions of words, the echoes of variously pitched laughs and all the other sounds that are used to express the endless array of feelings and thoughts that the inhabitants are subject to.
Music. The breeze of Rome and Dhaka is tinged with melody. This is not another one of my hyper-romantic fantasies, it is a fact. In Rome, how many times a day do you hear an aria being sung somewhere in the distance? As many times as here in Dhaka, I hear the bamboo flute from God-knows-where. If there is one thing that can make these two cities stop, it is music.
Music and…Poetry. Rome and Dhaka lie on the same romantic fault lines, sentimental to the marrow of the bone. Everything and every person is part of this urban lyric (I saw a woman selling peacock feathers in traffic today). Residents of Dhaka and Rome know all too well, that when poetry hits the spot, when it strikes the key that pleases the lords and the ladies, it reveals the invisible truth of things, the city within the city.
That eyebrow…If the world was flat and you folded it over and over again into a pocket square, Dhaka would overlap with Rome. The two cities would be superimposed onto each other harmoniously; Dhaka’s potential over Rome’s legacy. The residents of both cities would find themselves living in the same neighborhoods; they would exchange recipes and songs, laugh at each other’s jokes even after they and the jokes got old. This would be a sepia-lit city made of feelings and fantasies, marble and red burnt bricks, cobblestones and footpaths. Where each day at sunset, thousands of mothers call out of their windows to their children “Come home. Come home.” Where burners are always fully lit, hearts are always spinning, tongues are always witty. Where, I would walk across the street, up a flight of stairs to ring your doorbell and we would go out to listen to Momtaz sing in the Coliseum. This city is eternal.
Katerina Don