Dhaka Plunges Into Blind Growth
From across the lake, we watched them dig the foundations. We thought that it would look like any other house, albeit with a bit more lake frontage than most. Then, as the building took shape, we realized it wasn’t going to be an ordinary house at all, but that rare thing: a landmark — and an architectural monstrosity.
It was 1993 and my parents and I had recently returned to Dhaka, Bangladesh, after 14 years abroad, most recently in Bangkok. We moved into my grandfather’s house, where two of my uncles lived with their wives and children. The house, built in 1964, was a sprawling, two-story brick building, with a wide wraparound balcony. The kitchen was in an outbuilding.
In the backyard, which was wild and unmown, my cousins and I pretended to shoot things with imaginary guns. In the evenings, the air was thick with mosquitoes.
Dhaka was then still a rather sleepy metropolis. You could get across town, between Dhanmondi, where we lived, to Gulshan, the diplomatic enclave on the northern fringe, in about 20 minutes. After Bangkok, where the traffic and pollution were much worse, Dhaka seemed bucolic, even neat, by comparison.
But in the early ’90s, everything began to change. The house across the lake was a sign of things to come. It was about six stories high. It was only after the red tiles had been placed on the facade that we realized the pointy thing was a minaret.
The building was a strange pastiche of the sacred and the secular, for the rest of it looked like a ship, with the outer boundary wall shaped like a curved hull and the roofs looking like sails in the wind. The neighbors nicknamed it Jahaj Bari (the Ship House).
Urban myths about it sprouted. We heard that it belonged to Sher- eKhwaja, a self-styled holy man and philanthropist who had amassed a huge fortune, no one knew quite how, and who was rumored to have deep political connections. No one I knew had ever been inside the building, which was said to have 40 bedrooms.
In the meantime, the landscape of Dhaka was rapidly changing. The roughly 260 square kilometers of the city were not enough for a growing metropolis, but instead of expanding out and creating suburbs, the city planners gave permission to landowners in 1996 to build six-story apartment buildings on their plots. Commercial permits soon followed, and those who were lucky enough to own a piece of land on a main road were able to build shopping malls and office buildings on their property.
This is what happened with my grandfather’s house. In 1999, the family made the decision to tear down the broad, low-slung building; in its place a shopping mall and an apartment building sprang up. My father and his four brothers each got two apartments. Uncles, aunts, cousins, their wives and children all moved into this building, an extended family bifurcated now by stairwells and separate entrances.
Our neighbors did the same, and soon the familiar whine of construction and the sight of cement mixers and bricks spilling out onto the road became ordinary. The price of property in Dhaka has escalated: Over the last decade, the value of homes in our neighborhood multiplied by a factor of five or six. As land has become scarcer, almost every available square meter of the city has been used for apartments, offices and high-rises.
In the upscale neighborhoods like Gulshan, you will occasionally see a fancy house that has remained untouched. But it is often in shade, flanked by taller buildings. The planning authorities did not insist that landowners leave a certain amount of space between buildings, which also means that the buildings are perilously close to one another — a dangerous mistake given that Dhaka is susceptible to earthquakes.
Everywhere is evidence of the haphazard nature of the city’s growth. Even as property values increased, the overburdened roads, sanitation and drainage systems all deteriorated. Traffic is almost perpetually gridlocked, and during every monsoon season the roads flood and become impassable. Worst of all is the urban misery of the slum- dwellers who migrate to the city every year in the tens of thousands.
The city planning authority, known as Rajuk, just announced a new “master plan” for Dhaka that included expanding the city limits, building a series of ring roads and preserving wetlands and areas of conservation. While many stakeholders — such as the mayors of Dhaka North and South, who were not consulted — have criticized the new plan, everyone agrees that it’s time to take radical steps to put the city right.
Meanwhile, Jahaj Bari is due for demolition. Social media are alight with calls to declare the building a heritage site. In a city that has changed so rapidly, where no landmark seems sacred, even a hideous boat-shaped monstrosity can provoke nostalgia.