Shopping for Answers

What better way to celebrate the beginning of Ramadan than with a trip to Bushundhara, “Asia’s (soon to be) Largest Shopping and Entertainment Complex”? The idea behind the excursion was simply to have a brief respite from Dhaka daily life, particularly after having our weekend cancelled last week. What it ended up becoming, strangely enough, was a magnification of one of the most dominant characteristics of life in Bangladesh: intense inequality.

The Bushundhara shopping complex is Dhaka’s version of Vancouver’s Metrotown, Toronto’s Eaton Centre or Montreal’s…well, I don’t know. It’s also a fantastic display of excess; smooth (and slippery) marble floors, shiny new escalators and a towering atrium topped by a stained glass dome. It’s eight massive floors filled with the same goods you can find in any market around town, but at twice or three times the price. The funniest thing about it is that it was opened with much fanfare only a few weeks ago, and it’s still only half completed. It looks as though there are at least sixty shops on each floor selling sarees, men’s clothing, shoes, cell phones, or Pentium II laptop computers, but each floor has a different theme: there’s a saree floor, a cell phone/technology floor, and at the very top, a movie theatre and a food court…with two restaurants. Using my conservative estimate of sixty shops per floor, that translates into approximately 480 retailers spread throughout the complex once all the retail space has been occupied. At this point, however, only a quarter of the available space is actually being used, and only a fraction of those stores showed any signs of doing any business whatsoever. There were certainly lots of well-dressed people; it’s just that none of them were buying anything.

Our colleague Helal told us that we should check this place out before making our way outside of the city to another (outdoor) amusement park, Fantasy Kingdom. “You forget that you’re in Dhaka once inside”, he told us. “They have a water park and a cinema, too”. While I confirmed that their was in fact a water park (which hadn’t been completed yet), as well as a cinema (where I caught Spiderman 2 in English), the only time I forgot I was in Dhaka was when Spidey was swinging from New York’s skyscrapers…until the movie shut off half-way through for ten minutes, once again reminding me where I was. Similarly, I’m not sure why the theatre’s concession stands remained open today, unless they were expecting busloads of Hindu moviegoers bursting through the doorways to catch the matinee edition of Spiderman 2. The popcorn attended insisted that the abstinence from eating and drinking between sunrise and sundown applied only to Muslims, but I declined as politely as I could explaining I didn’t want to offend anyone by consuming a soda and bag of popcorn at the movies (god forbid…).

I took in the feature presentation itself on my own. Marc had already seen it and returned home shortly after we had explored each of the eight floors and realized there was no way he could spend the five and a half hours we had given ourselves wandering aimlessly amongst fancy sarees and cell phones. I joined him after the 250 taka two and a half hour movie had run its course; I was glad to get out of there, too – the air conditioning was making the air almost too cool to bear.

My admission ticket, by the way, granted me pre-assigned (rather than general admission) seat in the ‘premium’ section, being everything above the first five rows of the modern stadium-style, quarter-full theatre. My perceptions of the exclusive nature of the theatre and the entire complex might be slightly exaggerated given how nice a day it was outside, but I think the theatre’s admission price - well outside the range of the vast majority of Dhakaites - is the dominant factor explaining the sparsely populated nature of the complex.

This brings me, finally, to the main point that spawned this entry; once I had had my fill of passing dozens of bored employees in their empty shops, and dozens more working on those still under construction (selection is one thing, but come on – twenty different saree shops on one half of one floor?) I decided the time had come for me to make my way home. Upon stepping outside the meticulously scrubbed atrium and crossing the street to try and find an empty CNG, I narrowly avoided a group of six naked children enjoying whatever game it was that they were playing in the gutter. “Search for the Lost Taka”? I think could have pointed them in the right direction had they asked me to play.