Tamakumundi: A materialist's heaven

While Nazrul was residing in this maternal grandfather's house of Bahar for a couple of days, Mahbub Ul Alam, writer of Paltan Jibaner Smriti came from Fatehabad, Hathazari, to pay a visit to Nazrul. That was the first meeting between these two First World War veteran writers, and the relationship would continue and grow more, finally leading to Nazruls's visit to Mahbub and Dider's house at Fatehabad in January 1929. (Dider Ul Alam, Mahbub's younger brother, an emerging poet of the time, but who died very early, had established a friendship with Nazrul, and was instrumental in bringing Nazrul to visit Chittagong.)

Mahbub wrote in his book Paltane that Nazrul stayed for two nights (January 26 and 27) at Fatehabad and was much charmed by the thicket of the betel nut trees of the village.

Whether that house of Habibullah Bahar's grandfather is still there or not I don't know, but I know for sure that Tamakumundi, an integral part of the Reazuddin Bazar, has completely changed itself into the prime business district of the port-city, so as to make the thought of the Rebel Poet's staying here very difficult to imagine.

Tamakumundi is now a materialist's heaven and also haven, because everything from an office pin to the latest wide and flat screen TV is available here, fully compact, unopened, brand, and foreign. No complaint! Once I bought an Akai video cassette-recorder from one of the electronic shops here, which proved to be original and functional compared to the other sets bought by friends from New Market or other shopping centers. The days for using a video-cassette privately is over, but my machine is still good, though we don't use it because the video tapes have been replaced by CD's in the video-market.

Such is the quality of things that you can buy at Tamakumundi, which is apparently a long tunnel-like alley, intersected by a maze of by-lanes and sub-lanes, connected with a cumbersomely structured building that has narrow corridors and narrower staircases leading to an upper floor which stores all kinds of electronic goods, both possible and impossible to buy, garments and clothes, crockery and cookeries, toys and games, calculators, telephone indexes, hair-dryers, bangles, bracelets, necklaces, rings, stone ornaments, cosmetics, nail polish, soaps, buttons and needles, all kinds of ladies' wearing and everything, and everything in brand quality and highly fashionable order.

But there is a big 'but'. The butt of this but is that nowadays the fake culture of stocking contraband items, illegal goods, and products of inferior quality has overtaken the market, as fake local items are being sold as the original. As we reported in an earlier write-up about the ship furniture that the market has been corrupted by the grafting of local timber replacing the original wood, so has the market of Tamakumundi been a subject to the gradual invasion of the local items being promoted as foreign goods. Interestingly enough the customers' eyes do not often see through this faking business.