 December, 2006
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A nostalgia blog
Over a week, Mubin S Khan revisits everything from the Shishu Park to the Smriti Shoudha more than a decade since the good old days when his parents used to take him to those places on the weekends. This is his blog
photo by GMB Akash
I grew up in the 1980s Dhaka. As boys, our lives centred school, school playgrounds during ‘tiffin time’, neighbourhood playgrounds in the evening and cycling along fairly desolate streets in the afternoon. On occasions, usually on weekends, once or twice a year, especially when we had relatives visiting from abroad, my parents would take us sightseeing to the stone-age equivalents of amusement parks: the Mirpur Zoo, the Botanical Gardens, the Shishu Park, the National Monument, the Balda Gardens and the National Museum. Much of my generation’s earliest and happiest childhood memories revolve around these places.
Today, there is Fantasy Kingdom, Heritage Park, Nandan Water Park, Wonderland — a whole new world of entertainment that is light-years ahead of those ancestors. The old places are still there. As I travel past Kakrail towards Shahbagh sometimes, the dimmed concentric-circle neon lights in Bengali marking the entrance of Shishu Park catch my attention and brings back a flood of memories. I wonder whatever happened to the monkeys who picked each other’s lice at the zoo, the bed in one of the rooms at the National Museum which stood so high that you had stairs to climb onto it, the floating lilies at Balda that could apparently carry the weight of a child, the mysterious tunnel at Lalbagh which, legend had it, led right up to the river Buriganga. After all these years I decided to find out and rediscover the places, which, according to reports and hearsay over the years, have suffered more decay than development and seldom caught the imagination of the modern city-dwelling population.
It was an afternoon on a Thursday that I decided to visit the original children’s fantasy park, the subject of numerous ‘nagging at our parents’ and trading in return of good behaviour or good grades, for one afternoon visit, maybe even less, for one trip up the Ferris wheel where from you could get a glimpse of a large part of the city.
The place of our Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, the flying cups, the toy train, I have heard of in recent years, most often in connection with kidnapping of children and hijacking and pickpockets, instead of renovation or addition of new rides as one would have expected.
The first thing I noticed, though, the moment I entered, was that to my grown-up eyes the place looked much smaller than the vast landscape it would appear to me when I was a child. Back then, it would be a suspenseful, holding-your-breath-back kind of wait, as our guardians bought our entry tickets, and the moment you entered you would let it rip and fly, raising both hands and running straight up without any particular direction until you lost your breath.
All the old rides are there (for some reason I had expected the Ferris wheel to come down by now) and possibly the only new addition, at least for me, was the F-16 jet which children under 14 can board and play with a few buttons, with one of the short wings on the back flapping to one of the buttons.
The first half hour of my trip went dry with very few visitors around with power outages hitting the park and apart from the trampoline, where young children jumped up and down, while their mothers, most of them in burqas, looked on.
But then the moment power returned people started pouring in out of nowhere and the rides and the lines for tickets were thronged.
‘Amader deshta swapna puri’, sung in a childish female voice on tape, blared out as the merry-go-round went round in circles with children sitting on the horses and giraffes and their guardians standing by, holding the bars and looking tempted to take up a seat themselves.
My first experience with dizziness and vomiting was the cup ride at the Shishu park, where a cousin and I decided to push the bar while rotating the steering wheel on the cup to the point that when it finished we stepped out staggering like two drunkards. We went home, threw up a few times, were given aspirins and passed out.
I stared at the cup this time not daring to pull the stunt again. Well, yes, it still looks daunting, pushing the steering wheel full throttle, even as an adult.
The children’s helicopter had a four-year old kid stuck inside, trying to jump out and crying at the top of his voice to the point that the operator had to stop the ride. The battery cars looked exceptionally small and worn out, while the rest of the rides, including the electronic swing and the train which made two circles round the park, and a number of other strangely named rides which basically tossed you around this way and that as well as up and down, still looked fun.
On a few occasions back in those days, there would be conditional trips to the Shishu Park set by the parents where we would have a bar on the number of rides you could take. So, after the allotted three or four rides, the usual option to spend more time in the park would be to run up and down the large valley-like ditch beside the Ferris wheel, where if you started from one end the momentum would take you almost up to the other end and you crawled your way through the last few steps.
That isn’t possible anymore because the ditch is now overgrown with brush.
And then to finish it off – the crème de la crème – the Ferris wheel. I take one of those Tk 15 machine cones, with the melting cream falling onto my clothes, to cool my nerves. From below, though, it no longer looks that tall, only as high as the tallest tree at the park, and once you go up there isn’t any skyline view of the city anymore.
Still, going that far up on a small open box with a free fall if anything goes wrong is daunting. The moment I got up, a rush of realisations hit me. At 80 kilograms I could be one of the heaviest things this box had carried in recent years. The metal looked rusted, old and I imagined that my compartment was shaking more than the others. My photographer colleague was not much inclined to pull out his camera up there and I discovered that, out of nerves, he was leaning quiet heavily on the door. Right at the top, you almost lose your breath.
I realised that, with all the accumulated knowledge of accidents, negligence of officials and general mistrust of things that are Bangladeshi, I was more scared going up there than I used to be when I was a child.
When I visited the national zoo as a child, I remember the first thing you saw was a troop of monkeys in the very first cage showing off their antics. On the left were the sleeping crocodiles, after that you kind of lose track in the maze.
The cage is still there, but there are hardly any monkeys. Moreover, the sleeping crocodiles in their fairly open pond have disappeared; there is a three-storey observatory-like cage where cranes, herons and other strange-looking birds wander around.
The rest of the zoo still looks the same. There is the Royal Bengal tiger, the African lion, the panther, the bear – all sleepy, groggy, malnutritioned, with legs so thin that you might even fool yourself into thinking that you can take it on. And they don’t roar… they just don’t have the will to anymore.
The state of our majestic birdlife is not any better. A fellow visitor mistook the gloriously named ‘Crested Serpent Eagle’ for a hen as it sat on the floor pecking at its food. And as usual, you had to struggle to see the animals hiding in dank corners of the rusted, dirty cages, hiding inside their shells.
Basically, the zoo opens with the monkeys and the birds, and as you go inside, one section houses tigers, lions and other felines, another section wild birds, one for snakes, and then there is the horse, deer, zebra, giraffe, donkey, waterbuck, gayal, etc.
In the midst of all the malnutritioned animals it was a pleasant surprise to find the well-endowed zebra. The zookeepers were, strangely enough, treating this animal well. But I later realised this was an African Zebra and it was its natural structure and its cousin, the regular zebra, was your usual bony, lazy animal.
If there is any part of the zoo which is absolutely delightful, it is the museum of stuffed animals. Preserved in jars of formaldehyde are foetuses of Royal Bengal tigers, crocodiles and chimpanzees, and crocodile eggs. The stuffed animals, though unimpressive, the zoo authorities are equally miserly in stuffing material, making them even skinnier in death. In another room of the museum were the aquariums, with tiny fish with ambitious names such as ‘Albino shark’ abounding.
The entrance to the museum is even more interesting with the ticket-seller speaking in an artificial, high-pitched voice, advertising two-headed bulls and 12-legged zebras.
Not a lot has changed with Smriti Shoudha, and not that I had expected it to, though it does look cleaner.
The regular entrance parallel to the monument has been closed down and another has opened on the side which has a vaster landscape. It looks better maintained, the grass is cut to the ground, the flowers are in full bloom. The landscape is made up of open fields, red brick concrete structures, one open-air stage, a pond weaving its way through the park, concrete walkways and symbolic graves in memory of the lives lost during the war.
As a kid visiting the place, the monument had very little meaning apart from the fact that it was the place they showed before the start of the news on BTV. While the same picture every day looks a tad boring and you wonder about the meaning of such a sharp-looking structure, to the naked eye, it always appears majestic, daunting, and impressive.
The park along the place has always been a place for numerous picnics and a child can lose his way inside the monument which works very much as a maze of sorts, with screams, laughter and words echoing high up on the walls.
Making the trip on a Saturday morning, I got the impression that the number of people visiting this place had gone down, though that could very well have been to do with my timing. In fact, an hour’s drive away from the city, there was hardly a rush of people in this place.
The biggest entertainment for the visitors, however, is to defy the instruction that it is a national monument in memory of the martyrs and walk up the isle of the structures.
Most visitors take a few steps, some even climb up the outer-most pillar but there are some brave souls who walk up and down the third or fourth column of the structure which at its peak is higher than a five- or six-storey building with a straight drop onto concrete structures if they slip. Up there, they look like tiny caricature humans.
Most of the crowd on a regular day is made up of dating couples from nearby Jahangirnagar University, numerous school-bunking girls who invariably have white uniforms whichever school they are from, and a couple of burqa-clad girls who, rushing towards the monument seemed to throw away parts of the burqa, and once inside shedding the sandals and letting their hair loose.
The only place nearby where you can get food is the Parjatan restaurant opposite the monument, which has good food but is very expensive. Even parking will cost you Tk 10.
We so often seem to think of the zoo and the museum as places to visit as a child. During this visit, I realised for the first time how wrong I had been. The true majesty of a tiger, lion, python, the architecture of the national monument, only reveals itself once you are old enough to understand and appreciate it.
No other place did I understand that better than the national museum. What might have appeared to me an old piece of paper I now realise is a ‘human sale deed’, signed sometime in the 1800s and another script of the ‘Mahabharata’ and ‘kalika purana’ from nearly 200 years ago.
The museum still has many delights, at least for a person like me who is easily impressed. Since my first visit 20 years ago, I have always wondered how it would feel like to sleep in that bed five feet off the ground. I still wonder.
There are paintings, fabrics, documents, scripts, uniforms, musical instruments, decorative things, porcelain, utensils, battle uniforms, letters written by F Rahman, the first non-English vice-chancellor of Dhaka University, by AK Fazlul Haque, Hussain Shaheed Suhrwardy, etc, as well as many artefacts from war of liberation.
In one of the rooms is the recovered electrocution machine used to torture Bengali soldiers during the war of independence.
The most beautiful exhibit, however, is a ‘dheki’ collected from Khulna which has the resemblance of a minimalist sculpture. A life-size panther stretching across the dhaka is shown bringing down a miniature cow. On the handle is a toy-size hunter aiming at the panther, a hunting dog, a man drinking and another smoking a ‘kolki’. The structures are also curved to near perfection.
At the entrance on the second floor the large map of Bangladesh with small bulbs on top of each district is still there. Back then, you queued up in line to make your request and switch the bulb on your native hometown!
The World Civilisations Gallery on the fourth floor of the museum is a recent addition. The sections taken up by Iran, China, Korea and Switzerland are quite interesting and you can tell even the display must have been directed by the authorities from the countries concerned. There is a copy of the traditional Chinese chimes, the mammoth structure outside temples which you ring with a huge wand and the noise, I believe can reach a few miles, in a fairly noiseless place. The Koreans have put up their war uniforms, musical instruments, the Iranians semblances of the Persian civilisations and the Swiss, of course, instruments to make butter.
The rest of the rooms of this new floor are, however, rather tacky.
There are mostly tacky drawings of world famous personalities including Christopher Columbus, Rabindranath Tagore, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles de Gaulle, etc. and the deputy director of this section of the museum proudly informed me that they are all Nobel laureates!
The International Painting Gallery displaying copies of world famous works of art is also disappointing. Firstly, they are not reproductions but digital prints of the quality sold on footpaths across Dhaka. In addition, the authorities also did not bother to print them to original size, opting for a uniform ‘living-room’ size poster instead.
The section which has things collected from the state treasury has a couple of interesting exhibits with a contribution of dolls from an expatriate lady who had travelled extensively during her lifetime and collected them. On her death, she contributed her collection to the national museum.
Back in those days, a visit to one of these places would constitute an exceptional day, full of nervous excitement and anticipation. We usually woke up a little later than usual since it was not a school day, took a shower and put on nice clothes. Most often, a picnic basket would be taken along on these trips. The first hour would pass in an adrenaline rush as we made our way from one ride to another, from one cage to another, from one showcase to another etc. But at the turn of the hour my young legs would begin to give in. I would first go quiet, then cranky and finally pick an issue for an outburst and demand to go home.
I may have grown older now and opted for the close-by restaurants instead of picnic baskets but the excitement was there, if only to find out what happened to the remnants of my childhood memories. Hearsay is generally highly critical, and all in all, it turned out to be not as bad as I had expected, though I felt the animals at the zoo were being mistreated a bit too much. And once again, at the turn of the hour or may be a little more, my legs began to give in. This time, not so much my legs were still weak, but that the rest of my body had become much too heavy for it to carry.
I got cranky, with no one around to fight with got miffed at myself, and headed home without actually looking at any of these places exhaustively.
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