Literary Life in Dhaka: of an anti boi mela and Auden

Enough of new books, enough of book fairs and debut authors, I thought. Let's get perverse, let's go where no self-respecting Bengali goes in this month of February, to an anti-boi mela, to where they sell old books, English books, where it is unfestive, ill-lit, musty, deserted. Let's go roam some secondhand bookstores and see if we can't get something good for a few bucks.

'Ah, you got magazines to sell?' the retired Bihari schoolmaster would ask me, blinking behind his taped-up eyeglasses, making the schoolkids from St. Jose prick up their ears. He meant Western girlie magazines, Playboys and Penthouses. Even though he knew the answer, yet he would ask me every time I went scrounging in his secondhand bookshop in a back lane of Mohammedpur Town Hall bazaar. Two decades back.

'No.'

Nobody ever got rich in Dhaka selling old books. But they had to eat too. And so some money was made on the side in Dhaka's secondhand bookshops by renting out those mags and occasionally fencing books lifted from the city's libraries. Fact of life, dude..

'You got anything new?' it would be then my turn to enquire.

‘Idher,' he would answer, jerking his head towards the shelves by his side. Since the shop was a shotgun shop, long and narrow, and he would sit halfway back with his older, 'regular' stock of books arrayed in front, the only method of browsing through the 'newer' stock of books was to kneel, lean forward uncomfortably on both hands and squint sideways at the crooked ladder of book spines. In all the years I went, he never changed this system of browsing, never conceded an inch to customer comfort. And I never asked why. Not once. Secondhand booksellers can be quirky fellows, and you have to either take it or leave it. Hard by St. Pancras station in London, off Eustace Street, about two alleys away just where the neighbourhood starts to flake into sex shops and mean streets is a wonderful anarchist used books store in the basement of a house. Which you can only get to by going through the bookshop on the ground floor, and which displays the most outrageous evangelical nonsense on God's earth. So on one level are tracts inviting sinners to the Second Coming, and directly below it are hosts of old-line Bolshie manuals on Molotov cocktails for blowing up, among other things, churches. But as I said, don't ask questions. Just love it or leave it.

And so, with knees pressed painfully on the frayed pati, if you spotted something that caught your fancy, you asked for it, whereupon with a sigh redolent of barely imaginable hardship, of the stinking lanes of the Geneva Red Cross camp, of bootleg liquor in bicycle tires, the Bihari bookman would pull it out from among the stack and hand it to you.

And right there in the din of the marketplace, among lungi salesmen and runny pigeon droppings, in between rotting chicken feathers and elaborately hawked-out gobs of rust-red paan spit, I would come upon Pirsig and Penguin New Writing, Isaac Deutsher and Evelyn Waugh, Gogol, Barbara Pym, Ibsen and Henry James. Kushwant Singh and Dom Moraes. And once, Auden, his The Sea and the Mirror, a slim volume which I have been unable to find again, and which I bought because I loved the title and went home in a delight and opened it to find that I couldn't understand it, couldn't make out what the hell it was about, but something about some of the lines sounded enchanting and so I memorized bits of it:

Sweetly, dangerously
Out of the sour
And shiftless water,
Lucidly out
Of the dozing tree,
Entrancing, rebuking
The raging heart
With a smoother song
Than this rough world,
Unfeeling god.

Only later, after I had really learnt to read Shakespeare (as opposed to merely thinking that I knew how to read Shakespeare) did I begin to comprehend this homage to The Tempest, that the 'sea' in the title represented life, and the 'mirror,' art, that the lines were an invocation to Ariel, that it was Prospero speaking to his Muse. And it was only much later, when I began to enjoy reading English poetry, that I heard the lines of accentual verse in Prospero's address to Ariel. And even later than that, mucho later, compadres, I began to comprehend that the poet was making the case for a kind of theological dialectics, for a particular view of God: Without Prospero's shipwreck, there is no rescuer, without Caliban, no compensatory enchantment, where the pairs are the 'entrancing/raging' and 'smoother/rough', where without cruelty, there is absent the quality of mercy, without which there can be no true religious belief. And what better illustration of the argument than the fact that I had stumbled upon this adversarial view of godhead in the middle of chickenshit, had chanced into another pairing: 'the sea and the mirror/mohammedpur bazaar'.

There were other places, other bookshops, too, genuinely good ones in Nilkhet and Purana Paltan, especially a corner shop in the latter area owned by a cheerful, fat, paan-chewing guy constantly flicking a dustrag on his pile of goods. But even before I had left Bangladesh, the Bihari man had closed his shop, and so on this February morning I headed for Nilkhet. Where once upon a time, on hot afternoons searching for a rickshaw to take me home after teaching Dhaka University classes, I would stop among Bagehot and Ruskin ( yellowed, with tiny termite holes drilled right through the hard original British covers), where one time I had bought, if memory serves me correctly, Doris Lessing and George Gissing.

But that old Dhaka is history! Gone are the old secondhand bookshops selling books in English. I enter the maze of narrow lanes at Nilkhet and see shelves stuffed to the gills with what the market presently will bear: textbooks, ordinary pirated copies of textbooks and dictionaries, how-to-read-and-write English manuals, boatloads of the local versions of Cliff Notes, exam guides. But no fiction in English. The sun beats down, around me the crowd chafes incessantly, like some great, hurt beast worrying its wounds, a traffic policeman whacks a rickshawallah on the back and instantly raises a welt, small knots of thin young men in skinny jeans flick their hard eyes over me, assessing watch, T-shirt, sweats and sneakers. Finally, I find the few bookshops that sell English books. Two pitiful, bone-thin rows. Torn paperbacks, thrillers and pulp romances, and except for Dom De Lillo's White Noise and a biography of Pepys, it's all trash, garbage. Ancient copies of Gray’s Anatomy, stuff on nutrition, fashion magazines, furniture catalogues.

I bend down to check the titles on the lower stacks, only to be interrupted by the bookseller in the neighbouring cubicle. 'Uncle, uncle,' he shouts at me using the street slang of the day, ‘Edikay ashayn. Ki chaiee?'

Uncle? I give him a look.

'Brother,' he corrects himself, and gives an ingratiating smile. ‘Kee chaiee?'

Ki chaiee? A few sampans to sail by, a river to swim in, an ant- boi mela to dance in by myself. Dr. Johnson on Marlowe, I think. Burgess on Joyce, Ken Kesey. Auden again would be cool. G. Allana, the Pakistani poet writing in English. The Asiatic Society journal issue on Ishwarchandra Gupta. But there is nothing here, it’s beyond zero!

The bookseller on the other side then holds up a faded coffee-table book on birds and asks 'You want this?'

'No.' I look at the young fellow and say to myself, brother, you're too young to know, you'll never understand, will you, about how it used to be?

And for the first time, I return empty-handed from a visit to a Dhaka secondhand bookseller, clattering over the bumps in the road in a rickshaw pulled by a bearded, gaunt puller from Rangpur driven to the city, he said, by hunger and debt. Bumping and thinking of the lovely closing lyrics, Ariel to Caliban,

Never hope to say farewell
, For our lethargy is such
Heaven's kindness cannot touch
Nor earth's frankly brutal drum
;This was long ago decided
, Both of us know why
,Can, alas, foretell
, When our falsehoods are divided
, What we shall become
, One evaporating sigh

where Ariel whispers that man is imperfect in mind and body (the 'our falsehoods' in the eighth line of the above), and therefore we all, yes, you, me and agonized rickshawallahs from Rangpur, are doomed to be existentially anxious until death -- when, as the echo-rhyme fadingly suggests, with a 'sigh', the evaporating "I" will finally know wholeness.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.