I have had a reccurring thought visiting me since I moved back to Dhaka, and I am pretty sure I am not the only one who has pondered about this particular subject. The thought usually comes to me when I am on a rickshaw, and the rickshaw makes it out of the more privileged Banani/Gulshan area and takes short cuts with slums on one side if not both.
I listen to the contrasting noises of slums living under the shadow of new beautiful apartment complexes. I think about the rickshawallah’s son, the maid’s daughter, and the garments factory worker’s little sister who were born in these slums in Dhaka, unlike their parents who were born in villages and later relocated to Dhaka for work.
I think about how they have seen the growth of Dhaka just like you and I, and with the same eyes they have also experienced the class divide. They experienced insults, have seen their fathers dealt short by their masters for their socio-economic background, their mothers wearing “madam’s” old sharis, and have eaten on plates and drank out of cups which were marked for the poor if they ever visited the homes of their parents’ employers.
No matter how many Bengali movies were made glorifying the rickshawallah’s son, the truth for this particular new Dhaka generation remains the same. They are poor and powerless and the discrimination we throw at them are usually justified by looking at the standards set by the generation past.
But going back to that thought which circles around the rickshawallah’s son and maid’s daughter, I have wondered, would this new less-privileged Dhaka generation kill a few affluent ones if they got an excuse?
Would they rebel in a massive way if the chance arose? Would they hurt the people who have slapped their fathers arguing over short change, or hit their mother for mixing up the whites with the darks while doing laundry? Would they take a chance and be angry enough to get rid of a few lives for whatever sounds like the right reason to them at a given strong moment?
I don’t want to go over the details of Charlie Hebdo. Everyone knows what happened, they have seen all the arguments, positions, points. To me, of course the killings were wrong, and I very much stand for freedom of expression, but I cannot say I agree with some of the anti-Semitic approaches of Charlie Hebdo. And down that same series of thoughts, the slum-dweller younger Dhaka generation and their privileged employers (this includes me) comes to mind.
A friend of mine was recently on a work trip outside the country. She met a tourist from Paris and had extended her condolences, the French tourist responded: “We knew this was coming when we let so many Muslims enter the country.” His words sounded like that of my friends who celebrate the week after Eid in Dhaka, when most people from the lower economic background leave Dhaka for their village homes.
We put up statuses on Facebook about how we don’t want them back. To us they are all village idiots, cramping our styles by getting on the way of our four wheelers, they are “khet,” they are “such wannabes,” they are “uncouth,” and we make sure they know it.
Once, I met a guy who grew up outside of Dhaka. We were standing in front of the then trendy Movenp ick ice cream parlour on Gulshan Avenue, where teenagers and young adults ate ice cream and showed off the kind of freedom only money can buy.
The guy was grinding his teeth: “One day I will kill all of them, let there be a chance. I am from mofoshshol (small town) but we shall rule.” I was stunned by his comment and strangely understood his stand. It scared me and made me wish things were different, and then of course I went back to my own world committing my own crimes, not worried if a few rich kids get hurt by a few angry poorer ones.
I am not trying to be cynical, but I do not think we are far from Charlie. Our educated and progressive minds are never so progressive when we deal with class. We make fun of the way the people of a lower economic background speak, we laugh at dialects, we laugh at their sense of fashion.
The newcomers in our town and the ones who were born into their homes surely missed all the memos of how to be cool, and we make sure we point it out and give each other things to laugh about, in so many different addas, so many different platforms, always assuming they won’t get our “sophisticated” humour.
But can anyone guess how many of these funny comments have been understood and how many seeds of rage have we planted among our new slum generation, or even in the lower-middle and middle class?
A lot of car wind-sills have been damaged in the recent hartal and oborodh time. A driver at work told me the gangs throwing these bricks are mostly unaware of party politics. They are hired goons from different locations around Dhaka, making a bit of money on the side as rock throwers and cocktail blasters.
Some of these kids are probably the rickshawallah and maid’s sons, they have seen numerous fancy cars with fancier people inside, they have stared at the glass windows above, while taking dumps on their open slum toilets.
They have held the smallness they have inherited without any crime, and now their rage has found an outlet. Do you blame them? I actually don’t.
