12
Rickshaws on the traffic-plagued streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2007.
I was in Dhaka, which is to say I was stuck in traffic. The proposition might more accurately be phrased the other way around: I was stuck in traffic, therefore I was in Dhaka. If you spend some time in Bangladesh’s capital, you begin to look anew at the word “traffic,” and to revise your definition. In other cities, there are vehicles and pedestrians on the roads; occasionally, the roads get clogged, and progress is impeded. The situation in Dhaka is different. Dhaka’s traffic is traffic in extremis, a state of chaos so pervasive and permanent that it has become an organizing principle. It is the weather of the city, a storm that never lets up.
Dhakaites will tell you that the rest of the world doesn’t understand traffic, that the worst congestion in Mumbai or Cairo or Lagos or Los Angeles is equivalent to a good day for Dhaka’s drivers. There is data that supports the claim. In the Global Liveability Index, a quality-of-life report issued annually by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Dhaka routinely ranks at or near the bottom of the 140 cities. Its infrastructure rating has been the worst in the survey for a decade running.
Dhaka is home to nearly twenty-two million people. Yet it almost entirely lacks the amenities and rule of law that make big cities navigable. Just 7 percent of the city’s land is covered by roads. (In places like Paris and Barcelona, models of nineteenth-century urban planning, the number is 30 percent.) There are too few sidewalks in Dhaka, and those that exist are often impassable, occupied by vendors and masses of poor citizens who make their homes in curbside shanties. Pedestrians are forced out into the roadways to march alongside vehicles, exacerbating the congestion. Dhaka has only sixty traffic lights, and they are more or less ornamental—few drivers heed them. Intersections are manned by traffic cops, who gesture halfheartedly, like dancers running through desultory hand-jive routines.
Fundamentally, traffic is an issue of density: it’s what happens when too many people try to squeeze through too small a space. And density is the great Bangladeshi affliction. Bangladesh is the twelfth most densely settled nation on earth, but with an estimated 164 million citizens, it is by far the most populous of the countries at the top of the list. (The places that rank higher in density are small, affluent city-states and island nations: Macau, Monaco, Singapore, Bahrain, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Vatican City, etc.) To put the matter in different terms: the landmass of Bangladesh is 1/118th the size of Russia’s, but its population exceeds Russia’s by more than 20 million.
Bangladesh’s density problem is magnified in Dhaka—in part because, practically speaking, Dhaka is Bangladesh. Nearly all of the country’s government, business, healthcare, and educational institutions, and most of its jobs, are concentrated in Dhaka. Larger global and geopolitical forces are also to blame. Erosion from rising sea levels is devastating coastal Bangladesh and the Ganges River delta, driving an exodus of rural Bangladeshis to Dhaka’s slums. The fact that Bangladesh itself emits just 0.3 percent of the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change is an academic point. The nations most responsible, like the United States and China, have shown little interest in one of the world’s largest unfolding climate refugee crises. Each year, four hundred thousand migrants arrive in Dhaka—a relentless tide of humanity flooding the already inundated capital.
Those new Dhakaites find themselves in a city of contradictions and extremes. Dhaka’s vitality—its thriving manufacturing sector, its growing middle class, its lively cultural and intellectual scene—is offset by misery and misrule: poverty, pollution, disease, crime, violence, municipal corruption and incompetence, and, at the level of national politics, a zero-sum battle between the ruling Awami League and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), a rivalry, commentators assert, that has forced Bangladeshi voters to choose between authoritarianism and extremism. The city is suffering—wilting—from the effects of climate change. A 2021 study by American researchers, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, determined that Dhaka is the world’s worst affected city by “extreme heat exposure from both climate change and the urban heat island effect.”
Yet it is traffic that has sealed Dhaka’s reputation as a symbol of twenty-first-century urban dysfunction. Traffic has made Dhaka a surreal place, a town that is both frenetic and paralyzed, and has altered the rhythms of daily life. In 2015, a Dhaka newspaper published an article titled “5 Things to Do While Stuck in Traffic.” Suggested activities included “catching up with friends,” reading, and journaling.
My own journal begins on the Dhaka-Mymensingh Highway, which runs south from Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport into the center of town. If you do a web search for this stretch of road, you may come across a Facebook page titled “Highway to Hell, Airport Road.” Photographs posted online reveal the nature of the hell, aerial shots capturing a scrum of automobiles strewn at odd angles across eight lanes of road.
These images had me prepared for the worst. Yet on my flight to Dhaka I was told that traffic in the city would be unusually light. For weeks, Bangladesh had been gripped by a hartal, a nationwide general strike and “transportation blockade.” The hartal, called by the BNP to protest the policies of the Awami League, had disrupted the capital, with street demonstrations and sporadic violence causing Dhaka’s denizens to curb their normal routines. It had accomplished the seemingly impossible, breaking the logjam on Dhaka’s streets. A Bangladeshi on my flight explained the situation. “In Dhaka, you have either horrible traffic or really horrible traffic,” he said. “But with the hartal, there will be almost no traffic. Traffic will be okay.”
Horrible traffic, really horrible traffic, almost no traffic, okay traffic. It takes just a few minutes in Dhaka to realize that these are not scientific terms. When my plane touched down I caught a taxi, which exited the airport into a roundabout before making its way onto the highway. There, unmistakably, was traffic: cars and trucks as far as the eye could see, stacked in a configuration that bore no clear relationship to the lane lines painted on the blacktop. My cab edged into the convoy and a crawl began.
The traffic rolled south for twenty seconds. The traffic stopped. We idled for a couple of minutes. Then, for mysterious reasons, we crept forward again. Occasionally, the traffic would run unimpeded for a minute or so, reaching a clip of perhaps fifteen miles per hour. But soon we would lurch to a halt again. It was the kind of stop-and-go routine I’d experienced on American interstates—the bumper-to-bumper conditions that traffic reporters detail on the radio, shouting something about a jackknifed tractor trailer over thumping helicopter blades. But there was no accident here. There was simply the inscrutable, indomitable phenomenon that everyone in Dhaka describes with an English monosyllable: a “jam.”
In fact, Airport Road may be less plagued by jams than anywhere else in Dhaka. It is one of the city’s best-maintained roadways, and one of the most shrewdly planned, with interchanges and overpasses that help ease the flow of traffic. It is when you leave the highway and gain the city proper that the bedlam of Dhaka presses in.
There are Dhaka’s municipal buses, London-style red double-deckers of ancient 1970s vintage, which shudder along, spouting exhaust, looking like they might at any moment emit a last wheeze and topple over. There are privately owned bus coaches, too, so crammed with passengers that many are forced onto the exterior, clinging to open doorways or half-ejected through windows. Buzzing all around are the small vehicles that Dhakaites call CNGs, because they run on compressed natural gas. They’re auto-rickshaws of the kind you find across urban Asia: small metal boxes propped atop three wheels and divided into two tiny compartments, one for the driver and another, slightly larger but still a tight squeeze, for passengers. CNGs are painted forest green, nearly all of them are dirty and dinged up, and they make a lot of noise, snarling through the streets like junkyard dogs. They’re ornery little machines, the barbaric cousins of golf carts.
I watched as my cabbie maneuvered through the swarm. It was an impressive performance, with a distinct vernacular flavor. Dhaka’s drivers may be the most aggressive on earth. They may also be some of the best, if your idea of skillful driving is expansive enough to include the lawlessness that Dhaka demands. The novelist K. Anis Ahmed, an acclaimed chronicler of life in Dhaka, has described the tricks practiced by local motorists:
Juts and jags to fill up any bubble of navigable space that opened up, lane-cutting and lane-straddling, bivouacking through supposed shortcuts, light-bumping non-motorized vehicles, threatening to run over peddlers and pedestrians with a set of tires rolled onto pavements, turning without signals into one-way streets, running red lights, and ignoring the sign language of the ill-paid traffic cops…. All the while one tried to drown out the protests of all competitors with the dumb, brutish, incessant bleating of their electric horns.
Some claim that Dhaka’s name derives from the dhak, a big drum with a clattering sound. There’s no mistaking the pounding that the city gives to your auditory nerves. Studies have determined that street noise in Dhaka on working days vastly exceeds the 70 decibels that the World Health Organization considers “extreme sound.” Traffic is Dhaka’s inescapable music, a theme song of groaning engines, braying horns, and bellowing motorists. Perhaps the cry most often heard from Dhaka’s drivers is the Bengali word aste. “As-tay, as-tay, as-tay!” they shout, leaning on horns, shaking fists, pressing the gas pedal and plowing forward. Rough English translation: “Gently.”
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There is one form of transportation in Dhaka that might be deemed gentle, at least by the city’s hard-as-nails standards: the three-wheeled, pedal-driven cycle rickshaw. Dhaka has been called the rickshaw capital of the world. The claim is probably justified, but the particulars of the matter are sketchy. There are about eighty thousand licensed rickshaws in Dhaka, but most of the rickshaws on Dhaka’s roads are not officially accredited. Conservative estimates have put the number of rickshaws, legal and not quite, at around three hundred thousand; a 2019 study by the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies gave an estimate of 1.1 million. The sociologist Rob Gallagher, the author of a comprehensive study, The Rickshaws of Bangladesh, addressed the conundrum by invoking an Indian parable in which an adviser to the king, asked to identify the number of crows in the royal city, replied, “Well, sir, there are exactly 999,999.” The courtier explained that if someone were to count the crows and find fewer than 999,999—that would mean that some crows had recently flown away. If, on the other hand, the figure were to come out to more than 999,999, the reason would be obvious: some crows are visiting from out of town.
There are lots of rickshaws in Dhaka, in other words, and to calculate the total is an impossible task. If we extend the count to encompass all the people who work in the rickshaw trade, the numbers grow astronomical, taking in well more than 999,999 souls, in a variety of satellite industries. (The Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies report estimated that three million citizens of Dhaka subsist on income gained from rickshaw industry work.) There are the men who pedal the rickshaws, the so-called rickshaw pullers—in Bengali, rickshawallahs. There are the tradesmen who build and maintain and decorate the vehicles. There are roadside rickshaw mechanics and tire repairmen, and the other vendors who service rickshaw pullers from street corner stalls, ladling out cheap food and cups of sweet tea. There are the middlemen and the moneymen: the garage owners who rent out rickshaws and operate depots, and the low-level political bosses, police officers, and other bureaucrats who get a cut of the action, taking bribes and protection money at various levels of the rickshaw food chain.
In short, the Dhaka rickshaw game is a big business, and an essential one. The cycle rickshaw is by far the most popular form of public transport in Dhaka, a service patronized by nearly everyone in town, with the exception of the very rich and the desperately poor, a category that includes the rickshawallahs themselves. In 1992, Gallagher estimated that there were seven million passenger trips taken by rickshaw in Dhaka each day, covering a distance of eleven million miles. These totals, Gallagher noted, “nearly double the output of London’s underground railway.” In the decades since, Dhaka’s population has more than tripled, and the statistics have surely spiked accordingly.
But numbers cannot convey how rickshaws dominate the cityscape. They are omnipresent—rarely out of sight and never out of earshot, even when unseen, their bicycle bells pealing above Dhaka’s din like crazed songbirds. They move through the congested avenues and alleyways in multitudes, jostling and pitching alongside motorized traffic. The manner and extent to which rickshaws contribute to Dhaka’s transport crisis is hotly disputed, but no one denies their iconic status—they are universally recognized as symbols of Bangladesh. They are simple, gearless machines, with a single wheel at the front and a chain drive that loops under a rear subframe to turn two rear wheels. The accommodations for the passenger are spartan: a cushioned seat, an adjustable hood, a footrest. Yet the rickshaws’ colorful, elaborately adorned frames give them a queenly appearance.
There is another kind of cycle rickshaw in Dhaka, the cargo vehicles that locals call “rickshaw vans.” These are tricycles, mounted with large wooden platforms, which transport towering piles of anything and everything: metal pipes, stalks of bamboo, watermelons, huge spools of cloth, cartons of eggs, propane tanks, jugs of water, garbage, live animals, groups of children commuting to and from school, day laborers heading to a work site. To the extent that Dhaka can be said to function at all, it is propelled by pedal power. When people or things travel from point A to point B in Dhaka—when a university student or a dozen two-hundred-pound sacks of rice make it through the gridlock and arrive at their destinations—you will usually find a man bent over the handlebars of a cycle rickshaw, hauling the load.
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The bicycle is a beast of burden. For as long as bikes have existed, people have been stacking things on top of them and carting stuff around. In Karl von Drais’s original 1817 design, the Laufmaschine had both a rear-mounted “luggage board” and fittings for panniers akin to those slung over the backs of packhorses. The various Laufmaschine-derived two-wheelers that appeared in the years immediately following Drais’s invention likewise all featured cargo racks. The same is true of nearly every bicycle manufactured in the two centuries since. Bikes have front racks and rear racks and beam racks; cargo boxes and baskets; panniers and saddlebags; horizontally and vertically oriented carriers; trailers and sidecars that hitch to frames; holdalls that attach to the handlebars or mount in the back; seats and carts and platforms for transporting children. Of course, there are many varieties of bikes expressly designed as freight vehicles—“cycle trucks,” porteurs, Long John bicycles, and other bikes whose frames, drivetrains, and wheelbases are engineered to accommodate payloads. The more remarkable fact, from an engineering standpoint, is that even the spindliest conventional bicycle will support a load of many times its own weight, assuming the stuff is properly balanced and secured. Bikes are built to schlep.
History has turned on this principle. On February 2, 1967, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas convened a special hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the state of the American intervention in Vietnam. The star witness was Harrison Salisbury, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, who had recently returned from a trip to Hanoi. It was no secret that American forces were struggling in Vietnam, but Salisbury’s testimony startled the committee. The United States was losing the war, he said, and it was being beaten by bicycles.
Salisbury told the senators that the North Vietnamese Army’s supply chain—the munitions and matériel that flowed from north to south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail—was largely conducted using bicycles. The bikes were single-speed roadsters, manufactured in China. But the Vietcong reconfigured them. They widened the handlebars, welded broad platforms to the frames, and reinforced the suspensions, transforming the bicycles into rolling cargo pallets capable of bearing loads of several hundred pounds. They also wreathed the bikes in leaves, for camouflage. Traveling in teams of dozens, the bicycles could transport the same volume of supplies as trucks, and they were stealthier, nimbler, more maneuverable. American forces strafed the Ho Chi Minh Trail with Agent Orange to strip away the jungle cover; they bombed roads and bridges. But the bikes were hard to spot, and unlike larger vehicles, they could negotiate the narrow bamboo footbridges that the Vietcong had thrown up to replace those the Americans had destroyed. “I literally believe that without bikes [the North Vietnamese Army] would have to get out of the war,” Salisbury told the Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Fulbright was incredulous: “Why don’t we concentrate on bicycles?”
In fact, bicycles had been utilized as military supply vehicles since the nineteenth century. More widespread still was the commercial and industrial use of cargo bikes. “The corps of bicycle newspaper carriers in London, slipping, heavily loaded, with enormous rapidity and eel-like dexterity through the London traffic, is a never-failing source of wonder,” wrote a British journalist in 1905. Such sights were becoming commonplace in the cities of Europe and North America at that time. It was another instance of bicycles taking over work previously done by horses: although a horse-drawn cart had greater freight capacity than a cargo bicycle, the difference in maintenance costs—the fact that bicycles were cheap and easy to store and didn’t need to be fed—made them a good bargain for movers of low-bulk commodities like newspapers.
In Europe and the United States, the cargo cycle’s heyday lasted some four decades, reaching a peak in Europe in the 1930s. This was the period of the butcher’s bike and the baker’s bike, of mail and milk deliveries by bicycle, of bicycle-borne fruit stands and patisseries, of knife sharpeners and glaziers pedaling around town towing mobile workstations. The trend was encouraged by the development of the cargo tricycle, whose extra wheel afforded greater stability. To ride these bikes and trikes required strength and stamina, and a culture of machismo developed among the tradesmen. In France, newspaper-delivery cyclists faced off in events like the Critérium des Porteurs de Journaux, an annual competition in which “riders raced cargo tricycles loaded with up to 40 kg of ballast.”
The use of cargo bicycles declined with the rise of motorized alternatives, first in the United States and then, after World War II, in Europe. Changes in commercial culture and the patterns of goods distribution also contributed to the cargo cycle’s demise. But some freight bikes stuck around, even in those places most in thrall to automobiles. To this day, street vendors in American towns and cities sell ice cream, hot dogs, and other foodstuffs out of triporteurs, carrier tricycles with squat rectangular carts that sit between two front wheels. In the cycling meccas of northern Europe—especially the Netherlands and Scandinavia—cargo bikes remain a popular means of household transport.
The cult of Dutch- and Danish-style “cargo cruisers” has spread in recent years to city dwellers in the United States and western Europe. Cargo cruisers have two or three wheels, with long wheelbases and containers roomy enough to store all sorts of freight, including, often, child passengers. In the United States, especially, these cycles make a political statement: to choose a cargo bike as a family vehicle is to signal skepticism about car culture and an inclination toward progressive “European” values. Of course, the bikes are also markers of social class. Cargo cycles are expensive and, with their bulk, a bit ostentatious. They are status symbols, in other words, favored by the kinds of bourgeois bohemians who inhabit gracious urban neighborhoods lined with bike lanes. The history of the cargo cycle is a parable of gentrification: the manual laborer who hauled loads through the industrial city has become a knowledge worker pedaling genteel streets with a storage hold full of kids and kale.
But this is just part of the story. Elsewhere on the planet, commercial-freight cycling continues on a staggeringly vast scale. In South and East Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, millions of cargo bikes and trikes transport billions of pounds of goods and raw materials each day. The vehicles vary widely in type and design, according to local traditions, available materials, and the whims and improvisations of individuals. A common trait of all these bicycles and tricycles is their ability to hold loads of extraordinary size, which, invariably, is what they are called upon to do. The spectacle is familiar across the developing world: a solitary cyclist dwarfed by a payload of boxed goods or lumber or metal or textiles or you name it, piled to the height and breadth of a two-story house. It’s a marvel and a sight gag. It is also an indelible image of human toil: a man moving a mountain.
The economics of cargo cycling are not well understood. It is clear that cargo bikes are woven into the informal economies of some of the world’s largest cities, a crucial link in the proverbial “last mile” journey of consumer goods. But statistics point to a larger story. According to a recent estimate, there are “between 40–60 million working tricycles” in China alone. This astonishing figure exceeds by many times the combined worldwide tally of all other freight vehicles—trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes. The sheer number of cargo bikes, and their prominence in countries with large export markets such as China, India, and Bangladesh, suggests that the humble cycle may be playing a more integral role than we realize in the mechanics of global trade. Certainly the existence of a massive cycling workforce, pedaling for their bread on the streets of the Global South, exposes the provincialism of bicycle discourse in places like the United States, calling into question our quaint First World assumptions about bikes and biking. For millions in Dhaka and Chengdu and Lima and Kampala and elsewhere, the bicycle signifies labor not leisure, livelihood not “lifestyle” or “quality of life.”
By some accounts, the most widespread form of freight cycling is the one devoted to human cargo. “The passenger-carrying cycle—in its various passenger rickshaw forms—is almost certainly the most numerous type of working cycle in existence today,” wrote the scholars Peter Cox and Randy Rzewnicki in 2015. Cycle rickshaws serve vital public transit roles in several African nations; they can be found in large numbers in Latin America and the Caribbean, in places like Peru and Cuba. In recent years, cycle rickshaws have become a presence in European and American cities, mostly as a novelty aimed at sightseers. But Asia is the rickshaw heartland. Some rickshaws are configured like those in Dhaka, with the puller in front and the passenger seated behind; others have the opposite setup or situate the passengers beside the puller in a sidecar. They go by various names: bikecab, pedicab, velotaxi, beca, becak, trishaw, trisikad. Madagascar’s rickshaw is the cyclo-pousse, Mexico’s is the bicitaxi, Thailand’s the samlor. The bicycle taxis of Malawi—technically not rickshaws at all but two-wheeled bikes with padded longtails that passengers straddle or ride sidesaddle—are called Sacramentos, an ironic moniker taken from the name of a bus company that is famous in Malawi for its comfortable coaches. The word “rickshaw” derives from the Japanese jinrikisha, “man-powered carriage,” which cuts to the crux. All rickshaw passengers must reconcile themselves to the stark inhumanity of the arrangement, the fact that their comfortable travel inflicts strain and, often, suffering on another human being.
The rickshaw was invented in Japan, probably in 1869. It may initially have been conceived as a kind of wheelchair, a device for invalids, but it took hold as a means of transport. Early designs were primitive: a sedan chair resting on an axle, large wooden wheels, a pair of handles that the puller gripped to lug the contraption over the roads. The addition of ball bearings, rubber wheels, and other features improved the functionality, and by the late nineteenth century, rickshaws were features of urban life throughout East Asia and India.
From the start, they were controversial. They represented democracy, of a sort. In earlier times, elites were borne through the streets on litters; now the rickshaw made a nobleman of anyone who could afford a modest fare. Of course, that taste of luxury came, literally, on the back of the rickshaw puller, a fact that troubled consciences even in harshly class-stratified societies like British India and late Qing dynasty China. The development of the cycle rickshaw in the 1930s revolutionized the trade and made the puller’s job less physically onerous. But it is still punishing work. For some critics, human-rights concerns trump all others: rickshaws are simply an anachronism, they insist, a vestige of the Age of Empire and of antiquated caste systems, with no place in the twenty-first century.
In Dhaka, the rickshaw’s history tracked the larger historical pattern: hand-pulled rickshaws first reached the city in the late nineteenth century, and the pedal-driven kind arrived in the 1930s. Today, arguing about rickshaws is nearly as popular a pastime in Dhaka as riding them. Some contend that rickshaws are the machines best suited to negotiate the city’s traffic-choked roads, and the most environmentally friendly. Others say they are inefficient, pointing out that four rickshaws rolling abreast take up the square footage of a bus while transporting just eight passengers. There are the familiar moral questions. Is rickshaw-pulling dignified work, a path out of abject poverty for some of Dhaka’s most downtrodden? Or is it an abomination, a job that turns men into mules who bear crushing weight across blighted streets?
There have been various proposals to ban rickshaws in Dhaka, but these efforts have always been beaten back. Some intriguing arguments have been advanced in the rickshaw’s favor. The researchers Shahnaz Huq-Hussain and Umme Habiba make a populist and feminist case, arguing that Dhaka’s poor and middle class “are highly dependent on non-motorized transport” and that women especially “would be immobilized if it were not for the convenience, safety, security, and privacy afforded by the rickshaw.” The rickshaw is often defended on sentimental grounds. Rickshaws are deeply entangled with the history and mythos of Dhaka, and they hold poignant associations for Dhakaites. For many, rickshaws are romantic: countless love affairs have blossomed, unnumbered furtive kisses have been shared, beneath the dropped hoods of cycle rickshaws.
Dhakaites also romanticize the men who pull the rickshaws, which is curious given the intensity of the pity and disdain rickshawallahs inspire. The workforce is exclusively male and largely composed of migrants from the countryside. There are pullers as young as twelve years old, not surprising in a nation with an estimated five million child laborers. Many rickshawallahs work in Dhaka between the sowing season and the harvest, return to their home villages to work the land, and migrate back to Dhaka to repeat the cycle. Rickshaw pullers’ living conditions are generally abysmal. Their health is often poor, and rates of drug abuse among rickshawallahs are high. The Covid pandemic brought new, deeper miseries, as Dhaka locked down and fares dried up, leaving rickshawallahs with virtually no income for months on end. The city came back to life in 2021, but competition got fiercer as thousands of new migrants, rural Bangladeshis who had lost their jobs during the pandemic, arrived in Dhaka and took to rickshaw-pulling. Ask a rickshawallah about the difficulties of the job and he will relate a woeful catalog: traffic accidents, bad weather, pollution, crime, police brutality, verbal and physical abuse by customers and passersby, low earnings—the list goes on.
The rickshawallah looms large in the Bangladeshi imagination. He is a heroic and pathetic figure, a perennial protagonist for writers and poets, and a ready all-purpose metaphor. The rickshaw puller is to Dhaka what the dockhand and the factory worker were to Victorian London: a proletarian everyman, embodying the dream and the nightmare, the ambitions and the degradations, of city life. In “Hafiz and Abdul Hafiz” (1994), the poet Mahbub Talukdar portrayed the rickshawallah as an Odysseus of Dhaka—a doomed nomad, traveling everywhere and going nowhere, stuck in an existential traffic jam.
I ply a rickshaw in the city of Dhaka,
From Sadarghat to Nawabpur, Bangshal Road, Chawbazaar…
The wheels of the rickshaw revolve along with the wheel of time.
Time passes, but I remain in one place.
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Mohammed Abul Badshah is not a poet, and I suspect he would put the matter differently. Badshah does not complain about remaining in one place, no matter how long he spends mired in jams. His problem is the opposite one: too much moving, too many miles, too many hours under the scorching sun and the lashing rain. Badshah has been pulling a rickshaw in Dhaka since 2008. He has crisscrossed the city thousands of times and reckons that he can picture nearly every road in his mind. When he sleeps, the streets, sights, and riotous traffic of Dhaka invade his dreams. He sometimes kicks himself awake at night, when his feet reach to turn phantom pedals.
Badshah was already forty-four years old when he began working as a rickshawallah. Now in his fifties, he is an old-timer, decades older than most of the men who pull rickshaws in Dhaka. His age tells, he says, in sore muscles. He says his legs are stronger than they have ever been, but they are wearier, too. His calves cramp; his back seizes up. When this happens, he does some stretching exercises and pushes through the pain. Sometimes, out on the road in bad traffic, tempers flare and coarse words about Badshah’s age are thrown his way. Once, he had a confrontation with a young rickshawallah outside a medical center, where dozens of pullers were jostling in a queue, awaiting customers. The young man called Badshah “father-in-law,” a grave insult. More curses were exchanged; there was a scuffle, and the young rickshawallah sank his teeth into the older man’s right hand. The bite left a scar that Badshah displayed to me like a trophy. “I punched him and I slapped him,” he said, grinning. “He stopped biting.”
The first time I laid eyes on Badshah, he was in another queue of rickshaw pullers, this time in the busy Kawran Bazar district, in a little triangular area delineated by traffic barriers where the top of the Sonargaon Road meets a roundabout. It’s a place that rickshawallahs referred to as “the Tigers,” because of the large sculptures of a Bengal tiger and a tiger cub that stood there, on a raised platform. One August morning at 4 a.m., the larger of the two tigers, twenty-five feet long and made of concrete, came crashing down on top of a rickshaw van puller, pinning him to the ground and killing him. In the days following the accident, recriminations flew. The Dhaka South City Corporation, the local government body, cast blame on the company it had contracted to mount the statues, while the press and the public raised a hue and cry: the statue had been shoddily engineered and improperly maintained, and what’s more, the tigers were hideous; they didn’t look anything like real tigers. It was a textbook Dhaka kerfuffle—both tragedy and opéra bouffe.
But on the March day that I met Badshah, that mess lay months in the future. The monument was intact and, I thought, beautiful, in a garish way. The tiger sculptures looked like gigantic folk art tchotchkes, brightly painted and lavishly lacquered, with bared teeth and wild cartoon eyes. Below these creatures, a crowd of rickshawallahs milled around in the heat, attempting with varying degrees of aggression and apathy to scare up fares.
Badshah was one of the laid-back types. When I first saw him, he was sitting motionless on his rickshaw’s passenger seat, impassive and regal. He might have passed for a statue in his own right. A translator I had hired to assist me with my reporting asked him to take me to Old Dhaka, and the two engaged in a gentle version of the ritual haggling that precedes all rickshaw rides. Visitors to Dhaka are often unaware that they’re expected to bargain or perhaps are daunted by the prospect; but the failure to do so is a breach of etiquette and may be met by rickshawallahs with disdain, even though they stand to benefit, receiving their full asking price. As for Badshah: he handled the negotiation with a sense of ceremony, squinting into the distance while revising his rate as if calculating according to a precise system, which he may well have been. A price was settled on, I climbed into the rickshaw, and Badshah steered south toward Old Dhaka.
It was the first of many trips I took in Badshah’s rickshaw. While we rode, I asked about his job and his life. Every so often, a trace of irony would steal into his tone and a hint of annoyance would flash in his eyes. It was clear that I’d asked him something dumb. If the conversation pointed in a direction even vaguely sentimental—a subject that seemed to demand some expression of piety or self-pity on Badshah’s part—he would chuckle and wave it away. He didn’t go in for that sort of thing. One day, Badshah pulled his rickshaw over to offer charity to a group of imams who were seated at curbside stands, soliciting funds for their mosques. When I inquired about his own religious practice, Badshah shrugged. “I am a Friday Muslim,” he said.
The trip to Old Dhaka that morning was slow going, a two-mile-long creep in tight traffic. Badshah picked his way through jams on main arteries—Sonargaon Road, Shahbagh Road, Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue—before moving onto narrow streets that were hemmed in on either side by five-story buildings. Overhead, crisscrossing electrical wires and laundry lines sliced the skyline. We were in Old Dhaka now. It is a historic place, the core of the city that arose during the period of the Mughal Empire and was proclaimed the capital of Mughal Bengal in the early seventeenth century. Today it is a maze of roads and alleyways that wend along the northern banks of the Buriganga River. The area retains a medieval flavor: bustling marketplaces, wafting scents of chilies and fish and raw meat, pedestrians everywhere darting and yelling, clanging sounds from storefront workshops. Horse-drawn “tomtom” carts roll in the streets, and untethered dogs, goats, and cows wander freely. Along the Buriganga waterfront are more scenes of commotion and commerce, thousands of passengers boarding and disembarking from ferryboats on the wharves of Sadarghat, one of the world’s largest and busiest river ports. In Dhaka, waterways offer no relief from traffic.
In recent years, Dhaka has instituted regulations barring non-motorized vehicles from certain thoroughfares. While these rules are often ignored, they have reduced the number of rickshaws on some of the city’s most traveled streets. But 85 percent of Dhaka’s roads are too small to accommodate large motor vehicles, and rickshaws predominate. In the labyrinths of Old Dhaka, there are legions of them. They jockey for running room in conditions more clotted than anywhere in the city.
Rickshaw-pulling is rugged work, a contact sport. On Dhaka’s chockablock streets, rickshaws knock and scrape; a newly built rickshaw that sets out, gleaming, will end its first working day scuffed like a jalopy. Pullers develop repertoires of moves, dips and swerves and quick stops, to avert crashes. But they also learn to collide on purpose, aiming their wheels at other vehicles to bash their way through. Badshah’s means of gaining clearance in packed conditions resembles an American football stiff-arm: a reach and a shove, executed instinctively and fluidly, while his legs pump the pedals. I saw him do this several times in the gauntlet of Old Dhaka, stretching to push back at rickshaws that had veered too close for his liking or were inhibiting his progress. Once, on a road near the Chawk Bazar, a famous Mughal-era market, Badshah performed this maneuver on the hindquarters of a cow that had taken up a languid position in the middle of the road, indifferent to the traffic seething on all sides.
As rickshaw pullers go, Badshah is mild-mannered. He does little yelling or mouthing off and generally shies from conflict, the occasional brawl outside a medical center notwithstanding. His bursts of aggression are tactical and professional. Once, in central Dhaka, we found ourselves in a frustrating jam, marooned for several minutes in an unmoving column on a side street called Garden Road. At last, the jam dissolved and wheels began to roll, but the rickshaw directly in front of us remained motionless. This would not do. So Badshah bulldozed forward, ramming his front wheel several times into the rickshaw’s rear bumper, delivering a series of vehement jolts. It was a collegial gesture: one guildsman telling another to get with the program, to look alive.
Even when rickshaws aren’t crashing into each other, there are no smooth rides. In Old Dhaka and in the city’s vast slums, the roadways are poorly paved or unpaved. Rickshaws must navigate rutted dirt paths and streets strewn with garbage and broken concrete. In the monsoon season, roads become lakes; when the floodwaters recede, feet-deep mud is left behind. Often, pedal power isn’t sufficient to produce momentum, and rickshaw pullers are forced to dismount and, indeed, pull—dragging the vehicle by the handlebars through slop, up inclines, across potholes, over rubble.
But even the most immaculate road would pose difficulties for a rickshawallah. The Dhaka rickshaw is a lemon, an engineering disaster. Experts have concluded that the machines are “overweight yet lacking in strength and reliability, poorly braked, unstable, difficult to steer and, because they have no gears, hard work to propel.” Elsewhere in Asia, cycle rickshaws that make use of small motors and battery power are reducing the physical torment of rickshaw-pulling. But Dhaka is lagging behind. There are thought to be thirty or forty thousand battery-powered “easy bikes” on the city’s streets, but they are operating in defiance of a ban imposed in 2015 by Bangladesh’s High Court, and authorities have seized and destroyed thousands of them. In June 2021, Asaduzzaman Khan, the Bangladeshi Home Minister, redoubled the government’s anti–easy bike stance, announcing a new ban on the machines on the grounds that they are “very risky” and cause accidents. The rickshaw capital of the world is a bastion of rickshaw traditionalism, to the detriment of its rickshawallahs.
Badshah performs the grueling routines of pedaling and pulling, dismounting and remounting, with impressive spryness. When he isn’t riding the rickshaw—when he stops at a roadside stall for a cup of tea or a plate of food—his eyes cloud over, and his body goes limp with exhaustion. But on the road, he is a picture of keenness and efficiency. Once, as we entered a small roundabout in fast-moving traffic in Old Dhaka, Badshah swerved violently to an outside position, a lurching lane change that shot us laterally through a tiny opening between two hard-charging rickshaws, with maybe an inch to spare on either side. A second later, the reason for this move became clear: a cop was stationed in the center of the traffic circle, urging rickshawallahs along by swatting at them with a wooden baton. I must have let out a gasp, because Badshah started laughing and threw me a glance over his shoulder. He was amused by my greenhorn ways. I was an American and a journalist, in theory far worldlier than Badshah, an uneducated man who almost certainly will never set foot outside Bangladesh. But Dhaka had made my eyes go wide. “It’s a crazy city,” Badshah said. “It’s a crazy job.”
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He was born in the countryside, in a small village in the Barisal District of what was then East Pakistan, where his family had a small patch of land. His father worked in a rice mill. In 1971, Badshah’s family was among the forty million Bengalis displaced by a cataclysm: the Pakistani military junta’s genocidal crackdown on Bengali nationalists, a campaign that led to the Bangladesh Liberation War. The Badshahs fled to Dhaka. The city was hardly a safe haven. It was the site of some of the worst violence of the war, including the event that had instigated the conflict, the massacre of students and staff at Dhaka University on March 25, 1971. But it was preferable to settle in among Dhaka’s crowds than to sit vulnerable in the sparsely settled countryside. Young Mohammed Abul Badshah was seven years old when the family arrived in the city. Today, Badshah still speaks Bengali with an accent that betrays his Barisal origins. But the decades he’s spent in Dhaka distinguish him from the recent rural migrants who pull rickshaws, and must in part account for his cool in the face of the city’s maelstrom. When Bangladesh gained its independence, on December 16, 1971, Dhaka’s population was just over one million. Badshah grew up along with Dhaka, watching its transformation from backwater to megacity. His internal metronome long ago fell into sync with Dhaka’s antic tempo.
His schooling ended at age seven, with the move to Dhaka. He went to work, earning small sums as an errand boy in street markets and scaring up other odd jobs when possible. In his late teens, Badshah found work on an assembly line in a ballpoint-pen factory, a job he kept for several years. At twenty-five, he married Shahnaz, a teenage girl from his home village whose family had recently arrived in Dhaka. They soon had a daughter and moved south, to the coastal city of Chittagong, where Badshah scrapped out a living hawking clothes. He disliked the work and missed Dhaka. After five years, the couple returned to the capital, now with three daughters in tow.
It was then that Badshah first began pedaling rickshaws. For several years, he sold ceramic items, mostly plates and bowls, off the back of a cycle van. It was a good experience, but not good business. “I learned to pull the rickshaw, I learned some roads,” Badshah said. “But there is no money in selling these things.”
Badshah is a handsome man with lively dark eyes. He has thinning brown hair and a neatly trimmed white mustache that arcs over his upper lip. His smile reveals several missing teeth. He typically wears a lungi, the traditional sarong-like cloth wrap that is knotted at the waist, and a loose-fitting oxford shirt. When Badshah rides the rickshaw in the midday heat, he ties a cotton scarf over his head to keep cool.
He is gaunt, as nearly all rickshawallahs are, a testament to the cruel mathematics of the job, the lopsided ratio of calories expended to calories taken in. Effectively, rickshaw pullers earn a starvation wage: an insufficient amount to meet their costs of living while maintaining a healthy body weight. The problem is widespread in Bangladesh. Billboards and television advertisements in Dhaka tout the professional and romantic benefits of “weight gainer” supplements. (gained weight…got my soulmate! thank you, endura mass!) The ubiquity of cycle rickshaws ensures that abject poverty is never out of sight in Dhaka, even in the upscale neighborhoods—Uttara, Lalmatia, Gulshan, lake-front Baridhara—where the city’s well-to-do retreat to fine homes. Everywhere, always, there are rickshawallahs, presenting a feudal spectacle: convoys of the emaciated, struggling and straining while healthier, better-fed passengers sit back at their ease. Writers have likened the bodies of rickshawallahs to skeletons and vultures. “We eke out our living in this country / Men laboring like cows and horses,” wrote the poet Dilip Sarkar in “The Rickshawallah’s Song.” “We pull this human burden on our backs, / To calm the burning in our stomachs / To get two square meals a day.”
Badshah rides the rickshaw from ten in the morning to eight at night, every day but Friday. He averages between fifteen and twenty fares per day, earning about four hundred Bangladeshi taka, roughly five dollars. His spends fifty-five taka a day on food and drink at roadside stalls: forty for a simple meal of rice, vegetables, and fish, and an additional fifteen on three teas, one revitalizing cup every few hours, at five taka each. On especially good days, he can net six hundred taka, a bit more than seven dollars. It’s very little money, but it’s the best living he’s made. Badshah doesn’t know how to read, and the only word he can write is his family name. He remembers enjoying his first day as a rickshawallah, but has liked the work less each day since. He continues at it, he says, because he has no better options. “I will pull the rickshaw for many more years,” he said. “It is the best job I can do.”
Workdays end with a crawl home. Badshah lives in Kamrangirchar, a peninsula on the Buriganga River that holds Dhaka’s largest concentration of slums. An estimated four hundred thousand people inhabit an area of just over one and a half square miles. Many live in conditions akin to those in refugee camps, crowded into shacks that sit atop dirt floors, with walls and roofs patched together from corrugated metal, wood, thatch, pieces of linoleum, plastic tarps. Rates of malnutrition and infant mortality in Kamrangirchar are high; skin afflictions, diarrhea, and respiratory ailments are rampant. In 2014, a spokesman for Doctors Without Borders called Kamrangirchar “one of the most polluted places on the planet.”
The neighborhood was formerly a public landfill, and when you cross the bridge that links the southeastern end of the peninsula with Old Dhaka, the stench of garbage and sewage hovers heavily. Along the Buriganga banks, huge dumping grounds remain. Ragpickers—women and children, mostly—sort through the rubbish, scavenging plastic recyclables and other scraps for resale. Acrid trash fires burn in the riverside dumps and in the streets and alleys of Kamrangirchar, where residents cook meals over open fires kindled with whatever flammable stuff is at hand, wood or paper or plastic.
The water that sloshes the Kamrangirchar shoreline is filthy. From the river’s edge you gaze down on a toxic goulash: vast flotillas of garbage riding a viscous brown-green current. Nevertheless, many people in Kamrangirchar wade into the river to bathe and to wash their clothes. For decades, a main source of contamination were the dozens of leather tanneries situated just downriver from Kamrangirchar, which disgorged hundreds of gallons of pollutants into the Buriganga everyday. The government finally intervened in the spring of 2017, forcing the tanneries to relocate to a suburb northwest of the city. But industrial pollution is still a scourge in Kamrangirchar. The neighborhood is home to hundreds of small-scale factories—plastics and electronics recyclers, aluminum casters, smelters, manufacturers of car batteries and PVC drums and balloons. These businesses operate virtually unregulated, exposing workers to hazardous conditions while spilling poisons into the air and the groundwater. In many factories, the workers are children as young as six. Kamrangirchar’s blight is a local problem, but its causes lie far away. Like the billions of dollars’ worth of garments made by workers toiling in Dhaka’s sweatshops, many products manufactured in Kamrangirchar’s factories, like balloons, are shipped overseas. Meanwhile, a large portion of the toxic e-waste and plastics that are recycled in Kamrangirchar flows into Bangladesh from distant places, including the United States. Dhaka is where the world does much of its dirty work.
Badshah’s living situation is better than most in Kamrangirchar. His home is in Boro Gram, a dingy but vibrant market area in the center of the peninsula. To reach his house, you slip through an arched entrance on a busy shopping street and head down an alleyway that tapers, fifty yards on, to a passage flanked on either side by small one-room dwellings. Space here is tight. There are seven homes in total, and those seven households share a single toilet, a shower, and a stove, open to the air. The passage separating Badshah’s home from his neighbor’s facing door is just a couple of feet across; when residents heading in opposite directions meet in the passage they must flatten their bodies against the walls to slide past. It isn’t easy living, but it’s not squalid, and the atmosphere, for Kamrangirchar, is serene. In the alley, Dhaka’s clamor fades to a faint background howl, giving way to local sounds, homely domestic music: clanking pots; children shouting and singing; family arguments; someone hammering on metal, repairing a broken chair.
The buildings in the alley are decently built. Badshah’s home has concrete floors and walls and a sheet-metal roof that rarely leaks, even during the monsoon season. The house is wired for electricity and cooled in hot weather by a ceiling fan. It is a tiny place, a windowless box of about 150 square feet. Most of the space is occupied by a large bed. In one corner there is an old-fashioned sewing machine, powered by a foot treadle. (Shahnaz, Badshah’s wife, brings in extra money by working as a seamstress.) On a cabinet at the foot of the bed sits a fifteen-inch television that flickers at all hours, showing Indian soap operas or cricket matches or whatever else happens to be on. There are a couple of shelves, packed with clothing and kitchen implements. The walls are painted a pretty shade of light green. The rent costs 3,000 taka per month.
The family has lived in this home for eighteen years. There was a time when the room was home to six people, but now Badshah’s three eldest daughters, all in their twenties, have married, freeing up elbow room and easing Badshah’s financial burden. One child remains in the house: Faima, a shy, bright girl of twelve. Faima is a good student and has progressed further in school than anyone else in her family. (Her sisters all dropped out after grade five, at age eleven.) In another year, when Faima is thirteen, she will finish grade eight, and it is a foregone conclusion that her schooling will end then. I asked Badshah what Faima will do when she stops attending school. He said that she will probably help out at home and then go to work, perhaps in a garment factory, as her sisters had prior to their marriages. In all likelihood, he said, Faima, too, will marry before long. I asked if there was any chance that Faima would continue her studies. She had already defied the odds. In recent decades, Bangladesh has made progress in public education, increasing rates of primary and secondary school enrollment, especially among girls. Yet more than half the children in Dhaka’s slums never attend school. With persistence, Faima could go on to complete her secondary schooling and might even attend a university. But such possibilities seemed to Badshah too remote to entertain. Maybe his grandchildren would be able to go to a university, he said.
He has five grandchildren, and counting. His eldest daughter, twenty-five-year-old Yasmin, lives nearby in Kamrangirchar with her husband and three children; two others, Nazma, twenty-three, and Asma, twenty-two, live just outside Dhaka. Badshah does not conceal his pride in his children. His daughters are intelligent, he says, and hardworking, and sensible. He takes a dimmer view of his sons-in-law. Yasmin’s husband, in particular, is a sore point. For years he worked at a factory making wall clocks, but for the past few years he has pulled a rickshaw. It hasn’t gone well. Badshah said: “He isn’t really a working type guy.” On two occasions, Badshah gave him money to buy used rickshaws, but each time the son-in-law wound up reselling the machines when he ran short of cash. He currently pulls a rented rickshaw, and he complains bitterly about the hardships of the job. “It’s not a good job for him,” Badshah said. “He should go back to clocks.”
Badshah’s own rickshaw was a gift from his daughter Asma, who bought it used, for 7,000 taka, with money she had saved from her job at a garment factory. It is by far the most valuable piece of property Badshah owns. Rickshaws are expensive and highly coveted. A new rickshaw costs 25,000 taka, well beyond the means of most pullers, who purchase used machines or, more often, rent them from garages for 100 taka per day. There is a brisk black-market trade, and rickshawallahs must remain alert to the risk of theft. A puller who wanders a few steps too far from his parked machine may look up to see three wheels disappearing in the distance. Rickshaws have been hijacked at knifepoint in broad daylight; the weapon of choice for some thieves is Tiger Balm, the chili-based muscle rub, which they smear on their victims’ eyes to disable them. To have a rickshaw stolen can be ruinous. Badshah found this out a few years ago when he picked up a crook posing as a plainclothes police officer. When Badshah pedaled past a traffic cop, the passenger politely asked him to pull over and run twenty yards back down the street to fetch his uniformed “colleague.” By the time Badshah reached the traffic cop, the impostor had moved from the rickshaw’s passenger seat to its saddle and pedaled away, vanishing into the throng. Suddenly, Badshah had no rickshaw and a monstrous debt—the cost of the stolen vehicle, which he had to repay, at an extortionate rate, to the garage owner from whom he’d been renting.
It was then that Asma emptied her savings to buy her father the used rickshaw. Badshah has been pulling that rickshaw ever since. He keeps the machine at a garage in Kamrangirchar, not far from his home. Dhaka’s thousands of rickshaw garages function as depots, safeguarding vehicles for a fee. (Badshah pays 200 taka per month.) Nearly all garage owners maintain their own fleets of rental rickshaws. Some garages offer lodging to rickshawallahs. These accommodations, called tongs, are crudely constructed scrap boxes, often set on bamboo pilings above the rows of parked vehicles. Here, rickshawallahs sleep wall to wall in what amounts to an urban campsite. Typically garage owners provide this housing gratis, in exchange for a puller’s rental business. For a garage owner, the arrangement carries a fringe benefit: the lodgers serve as a security service, guarding against thieves, who are known to strike rickshaw depots overnight.
The garage where Badshah stows his rickshaw is on the smaller side, a ramshackle rectangular lot that provides storage for fifty or so vehicles, including its home stable of a dozen. I went there with Badshah on a sultry afternoon when temperatures in the mid-nineties pressed down on dusty, malodorous Kamrangirchar and the whole neighborhood seemed to be drooping. The exception was the owner of the rickshaw garage, who was so spirited that the heavy air around him practically pulsated. He was a middle-aged man, about Badshah’s age, with a potbelly, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and a sprouting of stubble on his cheeks and chin. He wore a sweat-stained brown shirt unbuttoned halfway down his torso; his fingers were caked in bike-chain grease. The only time he stopped smiling, oddly, was when I asked him to pose for a photograph.
He’s a decent man, Badshah told me, more honest than other garage owners. This didn’t mean he wasn’t a bullshitter. He was slick, in the manner of a politician on the stump, greeting each new visitor to the garage like a long-lost relative. It’s the kind of exaggerated bonhomie that warms some people’s hearts and prompts others to keep a hand on their wallets. He was a businessman, in other words, and a successful one, by Kamrangirchar’s standards. Like many garage owners, he was a former rickshawallah who had purchased one used rickshaw, then another, and eventually graduated from wage slave to entrepreneur.
Seated to his left under the sheet-metal roof that covered the front half of the garage lot was a rickshawallah with a full beard and a grave countenance who appeared to inhabit his own spiritual microclimate. He was a man enveloped by black clouds. He looked physically stronger than most rickshawallahs, huskier and better fed. But his shoulders slumped, and his whole being seemed to have been dragged downward by melancholy. Badshah settled in alongside the two men, and they fell into conversation. They made an odd trio. The garage owner was garrulous and upbeat; the bearded man, brooding and lacerating; Badshah, a mostly silent observer, offering little more than the occasional grunt or head shake. I asked them about the state of the rickshaw trade. “It’s a good business,” the garage owner said. “It’s not so bad. For years I pulled a rickshaw. And now look. I own many rickshaws.” I asked about the public image of rickshawallahs, about the way they are treated by their customers. The garage owner said, “The customers are not so bad. They are usually respectful. We are respected. The day that there are no more rickshaws—everyone knows, on that day there will be no more Bangladesh.”
But the bearded man was having none of it. Most rickshaw riders are middle-class people, sometimes very rich people, and they look at pullers as the lowest of the low, he said. Passengers hurl insults and call names; sometimes they even beat rickshawallahs, knowing there are no consequences for doing so. Often the riders stiff rickshawallahs for their fares, refusing to pay the amount they had negotiated at the beginning of the trip.
The bearded man was reciting a litany now. The work is too dangerous. The roads are in terrible shape, there are accidents all the time, traffic is horrible, rickshaw pullers are injured and killed. A bus driver, a guy in a CNG, they will run over a rickshaw and drive away without thinking twice. Dhaka is full of crime—muggings, hijackings, bombings, murder. Nothing you see in the street surprises you. The police are corrupt. They’ll beat you, they’ll puncture your tires, they’ll rip out the passenger seat of your rickshaw so you cannot work. There is no legal place to park your rickshaw in Dhaka, and at any time the police can decide you’ve pulled over in the wrong spot and impose a fine, or worse. In fact, they’ll fine you for any little thing; if you’ve done nothing wrong, they’ll make something up. It’s terrible. You can’t make a living like this.
The bearded man’s voice had risen; he was thundering like a prophet. The garage owner let out a laugh and threw up his hands in exasperation. Badshah just sighed and shook his head, and it was impossible to tell who or what he was disagreeing with, or if he was disagreeing at all.
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Dhaka’s rickshaws are known around the world as objets d’art. Their frames carry colorful paintings and elaborate ornamentation; they have been called “moving museums.” Nearly all the rickshaws you see in Dhaka are battered, with chipped paint and fraying appliqués. But their mystique is inseparable from their weather-beaten appearance, and from the way they rattle and judder as they travel. They have a funky majesty.
Dhaka’s rickshaw-building mecca is Bangshal Road, a slender strip that runs east to west through the commercial heart of Old Dhaka. There, you can catch a rare glimpse of rickshaws in pristine condition and view the various phases of rickshaw construction: workers welding the iron chassis, bending bamboo to hold the hoods that shield passengers from the sun and the rain, fixing tinsel and tassels to handlebars. There are little workshops where artisans wrap plywood seatbacks with bright plastic, hammer decorative nails, sew hood coverings, and festoon the hood coverings with beads and sequins.
And there are the rickshaw painters, whose work covers the frames. Observers of the rickshaw business will tell you that frame painting is a dying art: before long, they say, cycle rickshaws will bear mass-produced images and signage. But for now, painters still ply their trade on Bangshal Road. Their specialty is back-plate work, paintings in lurid shades that are fixed to the vehicles’ rear bumpers. These take on a variety of themes. There are portraits of Bollywood movie stars and other celebrities, like Barack and Michelle Obama. There are images of beautiful women whose drowsy, half-lidded eyes stare back seductively—or is it indifferently? There are historical panoramas. A popular subject is the 1971 Liberation War: battle scenes, heroic freedom fighters on the march, grisly depictions of Pakistani army officers assaulting Bangladeshi women and girls. There are images of animals, avian and floral motifs, slogans and religious maxims rendered in ornate Bengali script. There are pastoral tableaux—soaring mountains, idyllic villages, swans drifting on lakes spangled with moonbeams. And there are pictures of cities. The back-plate painting on Badshah’s rickshaw shows a dreamy cityscape, with a sunset blazing above turreted towers and an enormous domed building that resembles the Taj Mahal. Beneath these edifices is a road unlike any you’ll find in Dhaka. It is tidy, tranquil, and entirely traffic-free.
One day I climbed into Badshah’s rickshaw and he pedaled to the University of Dhaka, where I had an appointment with a man named Syed Manzoorul Islam, a novelist and a critic who is an English professor at the university. He is a shrewd observer of Bangladeshi politics and culture, and he has written perceptively about rickshaws and rickshaw pullers.
For a student of rickshawallahs and their folkways, Islam’s office is well located. The university sits in the center of town, in the Shahbagh district, a kind of borderland between Old Dhaka and the newer parts of the city. The traffic situation here is not bad. On Nilkhet Road, Shahbagh’s main east-west thoroughfare, the procession of rickshaws and motor vehicles flows thick, but it flows; the streets rarely jam up. Most rickshaws pass over these roads a couple of times a day. The university campus itself is pleasant and quiet, shaded by massive trees. It is a popular rickshawallah gathering spot, a place to eat, socialize, and rest. There are rickshaw repairmen here, and food and tea vendors. Badshah told me that he sometimes detours to the campus to take a nap, and when we turned off Nilkhet Road and came to a stop just inside the university’s main gate, I saw a half dozen sleeping rickshawallahs. They had pulled their rickshaws to the side of the campus driveway and draped their bodies across the vehicles: heads resting on the passenger seats, legs stretched over saddles, feet propped on handlebars.
Chaos can intrude in Dhaka’s most peaceful places. Just five hundred yards east along Nilkhet Road lay the traffic circle where, in 2015, the Bangladeshi-American writer Avijit Roy was murdered by militants from the Islamic extremist group Ansarullah Bangla Team. Roy, an atheist and a free-speech activist, was sitting with his wife in a cycle rickshaw when he was ambushed by men armed with machetes. On our ride to the university, Badshah pointed out the site of a memorial that had sprung up after the attack. But now, inside the campus gates, the wildness of the city seemed remote. The day was sweltering, but the campus had its own weather. Mahogany, tamarind, and rain trees stretched overhead to form a cooling canopy. Their boughs bent in the breeze, waving above the dozing rickshawallahs like the wings of gigantic, beneficent birds.
Badshah had no plans to nap that day. An afternoon’s work lay ahead of him. Later he might make his way back to the university area and stop for a cup of tea. Perhaps we would run into each other then, he said. For now, it was goodbye. He shook my hand, gripped the handlebars of his rickshaw, and walked the machine back through the university gates, onto Nilkhet Road.
Once a rickshaw has come to a standstill, it is not easy to get the thing moving again. To start the wheels rolling, Badshah lowered his back and shoved, like a man launching a rowboat from a muddy riverbank. He then swung his right leg over the saddle, stood upright on the pedals, and began pedaling. Slowly, the rickshaw gained speed. I watched Badshah glide into the traffic, and I kept my gaze fixed on him for another thirty seconds or so, until I could no longer pick out his slender form and striped shirt among the rickshaws and rickshawallahs that had enveloped him, six hundred or so wheels turning beneath two hundred or so men, streaming east on Nilkhet Road. They were moving toward the intersection of Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, exiting the relative calm of the university zone and heading back to some of Dhaka’s unruliest streets, a river emptying into a roiling sea.
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I found Syed Manzoorul Islam’s office up two flights of stairs in the Faculty of Arts building. Islam is one of Bangladesh’s most esteemed intellectuals. He looks and sounds the part. He is a small man with sparse salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache, and searching eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses. He’s one of those preposterously erudite people who seem to have inhaled all history and literature, and mastered countless more arcane subjects as well. He can whip from a disquisition on Dickens to a discussion of bicycle mudguards. His office was crammed with books, stacked in teetering piles, which appeared to have been introduced to the room by a bulldozer.
One of Islam’s favorite topics of conversation is Dhaka and its discontents. In this, he is not alone. “Nowhere else do people talk as much about their city,” Islam said. “Everyone in Dhaka discusses Dhaka endlessly. Everyone finds faults. There are many faults to find.” When Islam looks at Dhaka, he sees shocking depths of governmental ineptitude and venality. He sees the legacy of colonialism and war, and the cruelty of the global economy. He sees a city that visits indignities on the daily lives of its most privileged citizens and afflicts its least fortunate with intolerable suffering.
But Islam also looks at Dhaka and sees a new world coming into view. “Of course Dhaka is a mess. But there are great changes happening here. Women are putting behind the shackles of family obligations and patriarchal considerations. Everywhere, women are working. They are taking charge of their own lives and their own bodies. In fact, I’m not so worried about the messiness of the city. I’m more worried about what people are doing with their lives. How are they taking stock of their lives? Are the people of Dhaka becoming stakeholders in the city? Are they simply passing shadows? No, these people are owners of the city, and they are clamoring. I see Dhaka as a restless city. A city of vitality. This is a place where the future lies.”
Whether that future will include rickshaws is one of the questions Dhakaites debate ad nauseam. The garage owner had his opinion: the day there are no more rickshaws, there will be no more Bangladesh. Islam takes a different view. Eventually, more efficient mass transit will arrive in Dhaka, immeasurably improving the lives of the city’s citizens. What will be lost when the rickshaw goes, Islam says, is a talisman. “Rickshaws embody tradition,” he said. For the millions who labor in the garment factories and on the construction sites of the globalized “new Dhaka,” rickshaws are comforting relics. They are reminders, Islam has written, of the “form of life threatened by the chaos and alienation” of the twenty-first-century megacity. The rickshawallah tows two hundred pounds of wood, rubber, and steel, and hundreds more pounds of human cargo. And he carries the weight of collective nostalgia.
Nostalgia is inscribed in the images that adorn the vehicles themselves. Like rickshaw pullers, most rickshaw painters are migrants from rural Bangladesh, and their artworks—those blooming flowers and verdant fields and tender scenes of village life—hold visions of a world left behind. More curious are the urban panoramas, like the one on Badshah’s rickshaw, with its elegant towers and improbably orderly streets. Islam has published studies of rickshaw painting. He told me that the image on Badshah’s back plate is typical of rickshaw cityscapes.
He said: “When you look at these pictures, you have to ask yourself: What city is this? Usually, it’s a city that looks a bit like Singapore, a very beautifully designed city with tall buildings. Often, the paintings will also show a plane, either taking off or landing. The roads are absolutely quiet, without any transport. Maybe one or two cars. It’s a city with fantastic traffic regulations, a city with discipline. Rickshaw pullers, more than anyone, realize the importance of discipline on the roads. They are the victims of indiscipline, of a city with an insane traffic system, where no municipal rule exists. And so these paintings show a fantasy city, a soft city, a disciplined city. It is the imaginary city that everyone carries in their mind when they migrate to Dhaka.”
Islam said: “I think this also explains the images of planes. That’s the highest level of transport, isn’t it? In the mind of the rickshaw puller, maybe, that represents a different kind of fantasy. It is an aspiration, a dream of the future. If I do this backbreaking work—if I pull this rickshaw in this unyielding, insane city—perhaps then someday my children will fly in that plane.”