by Mahmud Rahman

If you spend time around Dhaka, you may come across a place called “Bangla Motors.” Buses will stop there, and rickshaws, taxis or CNGs can get you there. The locality stands at the intersection of New Eskaton Road and Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, halfway between the Sonargaon and Sheraton hotels.
   You won’t find yourself at Bangla Motors in search of a famed landmark. Should you go there, the reason will probably be quite ordinary. You may be meeting someone who lives in the vicinity or you could be looking for some shop or business. You could even be seeking car parts since there are several stores in the area selling such items. Do not, however, go there looking for the business by the name of “Bangla Motors” that lent this neighborhood its name.
   There isn’t one. There never was.
   Bangla Motors is a myth. More precisely, it is the ghost of something that existed once, bearing a different name.
   There was a business here once that gifted the intersection its original name. I was born in a house that lay right behind. When the British left the subcontinent and Dhaka became capital of East Pakistan, my father opened a car dealership and service station. He called it “Pak Motors.” At that time, many businesses embraced names associated with the new country of Pakistan.
   He sold Austin and Morris cars made by the British Motor Company. The BMC, along with most of its trademark car names, would in a few decades itself pass into history. But it too has left some ghosts behind. One of those is the sporty Mini Cooper, made by BMW now, but based on the Austin Mini of the 1960s. Another is the sturdy Ambassador, based on the design of the 1954 Morris Oxford, that’s been rolling off the assembly line at Hindustan Motors in India.
   Pak Motors the business collapsed in a few years. But Pak Motors as place name had already entered history. There is a simple act of democracy through which a place name can become the name of the local bus stop. Once it does, it is stamped on the transport route map in people’s minds until it rolls off the tongue of all who desire to reach that destination. There is no government dictate involved, nor even the desire of any local personality. It may come to be simply because a bus conductor needed a name when he dropped off a passenger on a new route. Or the passenger might have supplied the name. However it happened, within the short years of its existence Pak Motors became the name of the local bus stop.
   What then of the brick and mortar that had been Pak Motors?
   My father was left with a big pukka building that had housed the old business. This building would complete a full life cycle in some fifty years.
   In 1956 it was rented out to the U.S. Consulate for use as their commissary. As a child, I remember seeing my first American. He was black and we called him Cartooz, though his name was probably Mr. Curtis. A pleasant and friendly man, he lived down the road in a house in Paribagh. I cannot recall anything else from the time the Americans used the place, but when they canceled the rental contract a few years later, my brother and I eagerly rummaged through the discards they left behind. It was all junk, but the broken pieces of air conditioners and electrical equipment became materials out of which we fashioned toys for months of play. Loose wires, a/c grills, knobs and switches became treasures for our imagination. You stuck some of those in an empty cardboard box and one day you could have a time machine, the next day something that would transport you into space. In 1994, as an adult I visited the Lawrence science labs at the University of California in Berkeley and there in the lobby they had laid out odd bits of junk – typewriters and other broken machines – and young children were having the time of their lives using mallets and other tools to fashion toys of their own. These toys would not be permanent – they’d be more like the mandalas of coloured sand that Tibetan Buddhists painstakingly create and then destroy – but they were exciting for the kids and no doubt stretched their imagination in unique ways.
   In the leftovers of the American goodam, we also came across some cans of “diet drinks.” My brother and I had no clue what these were for, but since we were thin ourselves, we didn’t care to drink anything that might make us skinnier. The line around the house was that if some food item was suspect we ought to take it over to an uncle who was a communist. He lived in our grandparents’ house just a short walk away. Once after our father had shot a sparrow, we took the bird over to our uncle. It was said he would eat anything. So those diet drinks went to him.
   In the coming years, the government would periodically widen Mymensingh Road. The first time was probably around 1957 and that contract went to an Italian company. They brought in orange-coloured, flat-nosed Fiat trucks. When I take myself back to that time, I can still smell the sweet diesel exhaust fumes of those trucks and even feel the heat of the melting asphalt.
   The pukka building would be shorn of its front and my father decided to convert it into a commercial building with a row of storefronts downstairs and offices upstairs. There was a bakery that sold bread, biscuits, cakes and cold drinks. My mother started up a pharmacy that later passed on to the compounder. A young doctor began his practice in the pharmacy and later he moved upstairs, continuing to serve his many patients with dedication and generosity until a few years ago. A handful of tenants came and went, but many became permanent fixtures on the block.
   Next to this building was another business that my father started and passed on to someone else to run: a petrol pump and service station. It started off as a Burma Shell Station that later became Burma Eastern. After independence, it would sport the Padma brand name. Across the road were Minerva Studio, a tailor shop, and the Hotel Daffodil. The buses traveling north towards Farm Gate would stop in front of the hotel’s entrance.
   In 1971 when Bangladesh became independent, there was no way people would mouth Pak Motors any longer. Overnight, to bus conductors and passengers alike, the name of the intersection now became “Bangla Motors.” The ghost now embraced a new name.
   This was a time when all reminders of the Pakistani period had to go. In the popular mind, Ayub Gate near Mohammadpur had already become Asad Gate to memorialize Asad, the first martyr of the 1968-69 upheaval against Ayub Khan. Jinnah Avenue became Bongobondhu Avenue. At Dhaka University, Jinnah Hall became Surja Sen Hall and Iqbal Hall was renamed after Sergeant Zahurul Haque.
   Such changes happen in most countries. Very few people, in the aftermath of a revolution, accept keeping symbols of the old regime.
   What is curious to me is that while Dhaka obliterated names associated with the Pakistan period, the city continues to preserve many place names associated with the British era. There are Minto and Bailey Roads in Ramna, Curzon Hall at Dhaka University, and English Road in the old town. The English ruled us for over 200 years and that legacy is deep. In contrast, Pakistani domination lasted a mere 24 years and the memory of that time is tainted with military rule and the brutal war they launched against our striving for freedom.
   The persistence of old colonial hangovers has a lot to do with the our own inadequacies in decolonizing our culture and minds. We have our grievances against the Raj but over those two hundred years we also developed a fondness for many things British. And long after worms in their graves were eating Minto and Curzon, place names associated with latshabs like them did not bother us as much as anything linked to Jinnah, Liaqat or Ayub.
   Starting in 2002, in keeping with the trend that has overtaken Dhaka, the original Pak Motors building was torn down. Together with adjoining buildings, it is being replaced with a new high-rise structure. No tangible piece of the old Pak Motors remains any more. Bangla Motors continues to be the name by which the intersection is known. It has become pure cultural artifact, a memorial to history unmoored from any physical object.
   Such changes are not entirely new to this part of Dhaka. I do not know the original name for this neighborhood before it urbanized, but close by is the area called Eskaton that reportedly was once the site of a Scottish missionary settlement. No physical remnant of that heritage remains. Yet the name Eskaton survived.
   When I think of how Bangla Motors came to be, I sometimes wonder, beyond the names of places, signboards, and labels, what is the exact legacy of the Pakistani period in Bangladesh?
   The British left behind strong imprints on the economy, culture and politics of the country. We would have no problem listing the countless ways in which the 19th century British colonial legacy can still be seen in 21st century Bangladesh.
   In the Pakistan period, there was some industrialization and modernization and the establishment of some cultural institutions such as the Film Development Corporation and the government radio and television. The shameful Enemy Property Act by which many Hindus were deprived of property rendered deeper changes in the fabric of society. And of course there were the political activities of Islamic parties inspired from Pakistan.
   On my way to Dhaka recently, I sat down with an old friend at his London restaurant. He and I tried to list the Pakistani legacy. We struggled hard, ending up in food and music. I would say, what about kababs? He replied, it’s Moghal cuisine and it came to us in multiple ways, old Dhaka can testify to that. He suggested ghazals, and I wondered about qawwali. Eventually we concluded, the very fact that we were straining to find examples shows how weak the Pakistani legacy happens to be.
   Is the strongest Pakistani legacy today then to be found in political Islam that continues its drive to impose a communal and theocratic stamp on the country’s political and cultural life? Such politics of course predates the establishment of Pakistan but it dates back to the movement that gave birth to the Muslim “nation” we were once part of and it received state support during the Pakistan years.
   Pak Motors was a business established in the Pakistan period to sell cars made in the land of our former British masters. As a symbol it signified the moment when one colonizer replaced another, though the name was intended to signify pride in a new nation. A new enterprise launched at a moment of hope. That moment passed quickly. The ghost of Pak Motors continued to hover over the intersection, and with another independence, it found a new name.
   The name change was an act of popular will. But a part of me wonders about the total obliteration of old names that marked specific moments in our history. We should not erase those moments from our historical consciousness for we have arrived where we are today passing through all those earlier moments. The new names are here to stay, but a solution might be suggested in something I saw last year in the Museum of Mexico City. There was an installation there that displayed the changes of street names over the course of the different revolutions in Mexico. We could use such a roster in one of our museums.
   All our ghosts deserve recognition.