Doe, a deer, a female deer/ Ray, a drop of golden sun/… / Tea, a drink with jam and breada very old time favourite song of our childhood from the most popular Julie Andrews movie The Sound of Music. As old a time as when we used to play on the street in quiet afternoons where the only sound was the chirping of children which would soon be followed by birds and finally by the tranquillity of the end of any ordinary day. Ti (tea) is the seventh note of an octave which is used as a drink in the song for the children to make them familiar with the most common form of breakfast food around the world. But truly bread and jam have different meanings. For most people in the world jam is a spread to have on toasted or not-toasted bread, rolls, cakes, etc. To cater for every craving tongue it is made of all exotic fruits like strawberry, cherry, plum, even from carrots. Jam can also mean congestion or blockages of substances. Similarly, bread is a phrase that is very widely used in English to mean earning for living, not just a mere food item. Even in Bengali we refer to the same idea as 'rooti-rooji' to mean bread winning or bread earning, that is, means of subsistence. Like breakfast mix 'bread and jam' for the world it is an inseparable mix for lives in Dhaka.
Though most people around the world enjoy the start of the day with jam made from all exotic fruits, Dhaka dwellers struggle all day of every day with jams made from cars, buses, trucks, rickshaws, carbon monoxides, dust, heat, noise and many more ingredients to make life miserable enough. Jam is an everyday word people would use in every conversation either for caution or for causes, to the critique more appropriately, excuses. And this is the most convincing, readily accepted excuse any one can use in any situation. It probably is a more accepted excuse for being late these days than grandmother's death syndrome which is commonly used by students for not doing their home work.
The trauma of traffic jam is not so light as mentioned above. There are real unbearable consequences faced by general people every day. More for the expatriates, who may have been to the world's most populous cities and wanted to stay with their loved ones in their beloved Dhaka city for a short time, but have never seen such mayhem that jam really is the middle part of the sandwich which has life and death on either side. The death toll in the last year alone in Dhaka city from road accidents was as high as 324. New York, London, Madrid, Singapore, Hong Kong even Kolkata are severely populous cities and they don't have a separate flagging column in the statistics for death by road accidents. Since I dared to live abroad or being punished to live abroad for perhaps doing something not so good in my childhood, the onus is of course on me to go and visit people everyday and more often than not more than once a day and literally had the opportunity to taste a little bit of jam, that middle part of the life and death sandwich. It gave me the true values of a religious person who is supposed to think about death at least once a day, that is to realise this world is not the true world, there are more things in the heaven. Well I certainly did that many times in a day. This may seem sarcastic just because most people are sheer lucky to be alive and able to read this piece. One would only see the lighter side of traffic jam when at home or somewhere safer, but listening to a sad outcry of an ambulance is not very far in the past or future. It is a common phenomenon that an ambulance would be stuck in the middle of Dhaka street and continue its ineffectual baby cry to its incapable parents of traffic jam.
There isn't much need for describing all the different types of misery people face on the street of Dhaka city, the capital of Bangladesh and pretty respectable name for various reasons. Thinking of capitals like Canberra, Washington DC, Wellington, Beijing, New Delhi where you wouldn't find business centres, mushrooming universities, readymade garment factories, banks, army barracks. But in Dhaka its a centre for everything and as a result the relatively scarce streets for high demand are sad and silent spectator of the sufferings of daily Dhaka dwellers. This helplessness goes beyond measure that nothing is being done by the authority or our people have become too complacent that they only greet the authority on daily basis, if alive and if not then who cares! It is about time we estimate the (monetary) value of traffic jam starting from being late for everything to feeling helpless, from frustration to sickness, from miserable life to death. Everyday how much valuable time gets lost in the jam, the usual discipline of daily lives are lost, people are opting for after hours communication to avoid jam, this nation seems to become nocturnal and sleeping through the beautiful mornings. How much production losses is faced by every entrepreneur, how much health and environmental hazard is made in the jam, not to mention the lost lives, surely a proper statistical estimate will signal the most urgent attention for the benevolent authority.
A very innocent question would be why would people then savour jam, well the simple answer is earning their bread. Once I was stuck on airport road for an hour and then found out three RMG workers died under a truck while crossing the road and now the near by RMG factory are almost in a riot with everyone on the street including the people on the truck. There was no indication when this can be resolved which left thousands stranded, kids being hungry, needing to go to the bathroom, fear of fuel run out, we had a heart patient in the car, the list goes on. There was no way someone can go out of the car and walk to the road side to take a fresh breath. After another hour or so police came to the scene and handled the situation when voices raised to say those girls died for being careless. Didn't they have love for their own lives? Well, surely they did, but the fear was greater for loosing the job than loosing lives. People are made that desperate these days to lack the love for their own lives or feel their worth. People go to work for living and to win bread if they have to spread poisonous jam then what it is worth for, people are dead anyway.
It's hard to understand why traffic jam is not given the priority in bills, the only reason any sensible person would say that this jam is not tasted by the authority. For them it is made from exotic fruits, they haven't seen the breads so close to both life and death. Well what can we do? When authority is not resolving the issue can other bodies do something? The good daily newspaper Prothom Alo raised a voice, 'be the change, make the change' (bodley jao, bodley dao), it should rather be self proclaiming by 'bodley jai, bodley dei' in line with Gandhi's words, 'lets be the change we want to see in the world'. Would any RMG factory start a move saying lets leave Dhaka to save lives for themselves and others? Would all private universities together move to a different location which we would one day proudly call our university city? Would schools only allow the students from neighbouring surroundings so that they can walk to the school? Would the cantonment sacrifice their untold comfort for the society which is crying out for a bit of oxygen? Would general people be more sensible and organised to maintain car pooling or refrain from being susceptible to that poisonous jam, as for an example not going shopping everyday?
Everyone needs to do their bit to resolve the situation when our authority is failing to restore any order in traffic or they don't see it as a big problem since when they go places to places the already lame traffic are totally stopped from moving to make their path smoother and acquired immunity from toxic jams. For the authority to win bread they use power and protocol, for the general people, who are compelled to the vulnerability of jams, earning bread only comes by using sad desperate streets of this cursed city the one I still call home, where my most beloved childhood days are only sweet memories of not so distant past.
Nahid Khan is at the University of Melborne.