The road was teeming with people, gaily painted rickshaws, green CNGs and roadside stalls and I sat watching from inside the small cage of the three wheeler which I knew earlier as the ‘baby’ but now christened ‘CNG’ in deference to the fuel it used. I had been in Dhaka many times before but today I was eager in my anticipation of seeing the Buriganga and the Sadar ghat. I had heard stories of this venerable river and also of how the river transport from Sadarghat formed a backbone of the transport system of Bangladesh. Dhaka had always reminded me of Kolkata, the city I grew up in and so my expectation of Sadarghat was that it would be somewhat like Chandpal Ghat or Babughat on the Strand Road. The CNG deposited me in front of a long red and yellow brick building which looked like cross between a warehouse and a railway station. There was not a hint of a river in sight and I asked the driver whether he was sure this was where the Buriganga was. He assured me and I tentatively bought myself a platform ticket from went inside the not so crowded building. Passing through some doorways I walked over a footbridge on to the floating pier or jetty.
It was a mind-boggling sight. The bustling road outside without a glimmer of a river and the quiet, dim interior of the building hadn’t prepared me for the colour, clamour and bursting vivacity of the jetty. It was a world of its own separated from the bank by a twenty foot sliver of fetid water with floating plastic bottles and other flotsam. Huge metal steamers over fifty feet long towered over the jetty which was neatly numbered into berthing platforms. Each of these giant boats had romantic names recalling places that I had heard and read of in my childhood. They were in decked in gaudy colours and the ‘conductors’ were calling in passengers, just like they did for private busses and mini-busses in Kolkata. Just the scale was different –those vehicles were like toys in comparison with these three-storey giants. There were some people who were in a hurry and rushed with their bags and boxes. Some families were waiting patiently in a corner with their luggage. Vendors selling fruits were everywhere. There were others selling cigarettes and ‘paan’. There were around twenty berths, and the jetty was over a hundred feet long, but because it was only 25 or 30 feet wide the crowd seemed overwhelming. But as I rushed from one side to another trying to get a good angle for my pictures I did not feel claustrophobic. There was a sense of liveliness a joie de vivre that is difficult to describe.
The sight that really surprised me on the jetty was a paddleboat steamer. I had seen pictures of such boats in history books and had also seen a couple of stern wheelers or boats with a paddle at the back on the Mississippi river during a visit to New Orleans, USA. Those boats were being used as tourist boats. But this was the real stuff – a 50 foot steamer with two large side-paddles and with the used, tired and antique look which made it jump out of a history book. I took a few pictures and tried to peer inside to see if the internal design was different from the large open spaces of the contemporary boats, but was not successful.
If the people who have come rushing to take the big steamers back home to Barisal or Patuakhali or Kaliganj make one side of the story at Sadarghat, the swollen river, the local Dhaka person stepping on or off the small boats ferrying people across the river and solo ‘majhi’ manipulating the long pole like rudder while he cruised up or down the river formed a different picture. Here the mood was more languid, the pace less hectic, somewhat serene and perhaps eternal. The river has been part of the story of Dhaka since historical times and perhaps generations of passengers and boatmen have had shared similar stories and jokes as they crossed the river.
I spent nearly an hour on the jetty at Sadarghat, busily clicking pictures and soaking in the strange but familiar mileu. I had never seen such a ghat, but the language that I heard around me, the names of the places the crowds were so very familiar. Dhaka today is a very crowded city and the traffic is as chaotic as one can imagine. I did not want to miss my colleagues who were planning to go out in the evening and so I tore myself from this fascinating place and made my way out of the building and looked around for the CNG driver who would be willing to take me back to my hotel in Mohakhali.
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