The Garden of Eden

"Just get down to the launch ghat and tell any rickshawala, 'take me to Munshef Quarter.' You'll be here. Everyone knows Munshef quarter, it's opposite to the D. C's office cum residence."

My Facebook messenger tinkled a couple of times. All good on a Saturday morning. After all, while Facebook is a swirling fog of people's achievements – someone got married, had a baby, passed a degree, landed a dream job, published a book, the messenger option offers some personal space sharing. 

First one was a typical family chat – too long a trail. I could catch all of it over a phone call, so I left it there. 

The second one: a photo of a dilapidated house – yellow algae in colour, barren in shape and clearly uninhabited. The sender is a brother from the USA. The messenger bubble appeared, know this place? 

A haunted house, and he was asking whether I knew the place. I live in London, and throughout the pandemic, the only place I visited was the Windsor Legoland. I don't go to the so-called English heritage sites, from where this house seemed to crop up. Yes, I could remember, William Wordsworth's house in Lake District was like that, but they kept it well, even built a little museum in it. 

Na, I replied in a typical pseudo code. 

Hmm, I thought so. The text bubble appeared. 

Just a child then. He continued.

Now, I can't remember when I was a child for a very long time. I can't often remember which year I left school and college to be an adult. So I kept quiet, but of course, the 'seen' sign was clear. Messenger's random notification signs always baffle me: 'sent' (grey), 'seen' (blue), and then 'replied' (the text turns blue). In the eras of letters, if we did not receive a reply, we would like to assume that the letters were lost. It made us feel good about ourselves. But now everything is bare and naked. Your email was sent, but you never got a response; your message was seen but not being replied. Google says, 'it means that the person is ignoring you.' But that was not the case here. I didn't know what to reply, so I kept quiet. 

I'm actually in BD right now. The bubble, thankfully, moved.

I went to Munshigonj yesterday, he continued.

Conversations these days are normally fragmented. I finally can make sense of Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

I see, I typed hastily to express my eagerness. 

And this was your house, the reply came. 

The false bubble circled before the text appeared: remember Munshef Quarter, where we all lived? 

Now I could connect 'nothing with nothing.' This was a photo of a house we used to live in nearly thirty-five years ago in Munshigonj. But this cannot be true. Ours was a … I hastily wrote, do you have more photos? 

Four photos appeared: 

One was a pond with explosively green water. I was not sure whether it was the untreated algae or the digital colour effect. 

Another was a road running beside the pond. A crumbling wall stubbornly stood on the other side of the road, clearly a lost battle against time. 

The third one was a close shot of a house with coconut or betel nut tree (I can't now differentiate). But all I could clearly see was some shabby washouts dangling in a rope tied between two trees.

The Final one captured the pond and its surrounding – the crumbling wall, a couple of dilapidated houses, trees and washouts. 

Very bad condition, the bubble moved. 

Nobody lives, some caretakers only. They are destroying . . . I turned my mobile wi-fi off to leave the chat altogether, abruptly. 

Munshef Quarter. 

"Just get down to the launch ghat and tell any rickshawala, 'take me to Munshef Quarter.' You'll be here. Everyone knows Munshef quarter, it's opposite to the D. C's office cum residence." That was how my father would instruct any of his friends in Dhaka if they wished to visit Munshigonj for a day or two. In those days, vacations did not mean Cox'sBazar, Khagrachari, Penang or Bali. Most people used to go to their grandparents' gramer bari. But you know the catch we had? We used to live in a muffashal called Munshigonj, and our dada-r bari was in Dhaka. So, we could take a reverse journey to the centre, and our chachas (real and my father's friends) would visit us in Munshigonj on many Fridays. 

Munshef Quarter. The heart of Munshigonj's civil service – even as someone slightly older than a toddler, I knew the ranks of the detached one-storey houses: the first one was sub-judge chacha's, after that magistrate chacha, then other magistrate chacha, then our own, our opposite was another sub-judge chacha, and the road ended with a big name: district judge chacha. Strange how we now think that kids these days are very smart just because they know the names of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. I even knew the positions, not only names. 

When we lived, we just lived. But now I reimagine its history. May be in the 19th century, Hindu Babus used to live here to manage this once Hindu-dominated community, close to then Dacca (now our Dhaka), the Centre of East Bengal. Or maybe from the mid-20th century, newly educated Muslims took over and lived in Munshef quarter and walked to their offices with their Hindu counterparts. Or could its history be traced back to the lost time of Muslim rulers in Bengal? Maybe there were documents in a shabby public library where we had to go with our father to attend some events. Those were dreary hours as men would just talk and talk. In the end, a dampened shingara with balushai would make us forget our pain!

The houses were sprawling and lavish. Each house had two beds of land at the front and one at the back. It had a servant quarter. But oh, the challenge! The lavatory was a walk away from the house. The house only had a bathroom (literally) with a ground urinal where one could pee but not poop. But we were used to it. If we had to poop at night, our mother would carry a torch or a hurricane accompanying us.

 Each winter, we used to have a gardening competition among the neighbours. Ours would often be the winner because our father really had green fingers. Scarlet rose, mild cosmos, sensual dahlia, alert sunflower, velvety chondromollika – my vocabulary of flowers in Bangla and English started and ended there. I now know there was another reason why our garden was the top. We were an exception in that little community: my father was not a government bureaucrat. He was a government college teacher. I don't know how we started staying in that posh place, because my father's colleagues used to live in other parts of this semi town. We sisters were para-berani girls.  Part of our responsibility was to get to know the incoming families, or to spread the news that another magistrate chacha would leave Munshigonj. We did not go anywhere. Not until 1988, when the nearby pond raged with the devastating flood and our house became an extension of that once quiet and benign pond. Not until my mother started thinking that Dhaka would be better for our education. Not until I turned 7 and still was as unruly, uncontrollable and unwashed as I used to be at 4. 

Our garden would look like the Garden of Eden because we never had a gardener. We used to garden ourselves. We wanted to be the winner to belittle the government gardener who used to mow the grasses and planted the seeds for our neighbours. 

Munshef Quarter, my only Garden of Eden, is now a damaged, decaying, dystopian reality. Is that how Harappa and Mohenjadaro also became lost cities? 

Rifat Mahbub works as a research programme manager (Social Care) at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), England, and lives in London.