The subcontinent shuffle

Arrival
Everything they say about Dhaka traffic is a lie. It was supposed to be gnarly, lifeless, immovable. Not smooth and free-flowing. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel is more Delhi than Kolkata, the city I was told Dhaka was a mirror image of.

Ten hours later
Some things they say about Dhaka traffic may be true. It has been dark for over four hours and the residential streets have gone quiet. The buses, straight out of a dash derby, have horns as well as lights to announce their presence now. Come close to a traffic signal and the vehicles assume a fish-like nature: it's impossible to predict who is going to move which way, though the road is lined in one direction.

The second evening
Many things they say about Dhaka traffic are true. They are amplified when you approach an intersection. Every possible space is swallowed. By rickshaws. Slow, unpredictable unemployment-busters. Cheap and reliable; necessary too. Fast-moving vehicles kill, slow-moving ones create jams.

Rickshaws crowd the road at the signal. They are slow to take off, and they start a chain reaction, where everyone goes slow and the honking gets wild. Being at the bottom of the transport food chain means they are open to abuse from police and by other road users. My rickshaw-puller gets hit by a policeman's baton as he tries to cut across traffic. By the time I intervene, the policeman's fist has hit the guy's jaw. A scene all too familiar to anyone in the subcontinent. The signal is green again and the rickshaw makes a dash. A smile on his face. You are annoyed and sad, but in a weird way you also feel at home.

The stadium
I arrive at the Shere Bangla stadium early. Too early, in fact. I see the Bangladesh players walk out of their dressing room, then walk to the other side and disappear into a hole. Must be the indoor nets. Need to wait for the BCB officials to come in and sort my IDs.

A friendly soul walks up to me, asks me who I am, and then it's mostly cricket from then on in. Tendulkar, Lara, attitude, temperament, humility, Bangladesh, deficiency, Yuvraj, cancer are the few words that stick. He says he loves cricket, wants to be a commentator. He is young but talks philosophy. Tells me the difference between an education and a good education. He keeps talking but I get dry in the mouth. I pull out my bottle of water, ask him if he needs some. He says no, but points to the label. Says it's made by a sister concern of the place he works for. Then he shows me their product catalogue - food products mainly: pickle, vermicelli, biscuit, jam, soy sauce. He is a young and energetic salesman. I look at my watch. It's been 40 minutes. He takes out a small pack of biscuits from his pocket and offers me some. He points to the name. It's called Time Pass.

An hour later I walk into the BCB director's office with a local journalist. The place offers the best view a cricket lover could want. In some other grounds, they would convert such spaces into corporate boxes to make more money. Not here.

The director says that Shere Bangla was purpose-built for football, while Bangabandhu was always a cricket stadium - it hosted Pakistan's first home Test. He points to the dressing rooms, at square leg, rather than straight. "Built for football," he says again.

The history refresher
I try to take a CNG (rickshaw) from outside the stadium. I struggle to explain "liberation war museum". The drivers only speak Bangla and do not know the English name. I leave one auto, I leave the second. Then I wait and wait for an empty one. There are a few on the other side of the road, so I cross over but by they are gone when I get there. Then I wait and wait. Now there are free autos on the other side of the road. Should I go back? Crossing is an ordeal. You need to plan. Some vehicles do not want you to cut across, even when they are stationary - they leave no gap. So you have to go around them. After much deliberation, I cross. Finally, 40 minutes later I find an auto. The driver doesn't understand but asks me to call someone and check. The problem gets sorted with a phone call. I am off to the War Museum. It takes more than an hour to get across the city.

The museum is in a beautiful early-20th-century house, dwarfed among characterless concrete and glass towers. The house has a small driveway, three rooms on the ground floor, three on the level above.

It starts with a history of Bengal - dates back a couple of thousand years; a few rock samples to prove it. Then a few other rocks. It could be one of those ill-kept museums back in India, I think. I move along. Images of a Buddhist past, of a Bengali who went to Tibet to preach, some references to the early kings, then the Nawabs, followed by a painting of the Battle of Plassey. Then the British rule, Gandhi…

Pictures of leaders of the Indian freedom struggle, prominent Bengalis, the Lahore Convention, the famine of 1943, a grim image of a family of skeletons, the Partition.

I follow a red-and-yellow line that takes me out on to the open verandah. "Annihilate the Demons," a poster says, below a caricature of General Yahya Khan with big teeth. Strong words. I look at the poster again. Ideal for my room, I think. It has a bit of a pop-art feel, like Che Guevara's omnipresent face.

Next room. We are in the 1950s and the '60s. Pictures of Sheikh Mujibur have appeared. The language movement. The Agartala conspiracy.

Pictures of refugee camps in India. Of sections of sewage pipe, about a metre across, used as shelters. A caption says there were around 10 million refugees in India.

I get a call. A judgement on someone who committed war crimes is to be announced. Trouble expected in the area. I am told to get out as soon as possible. I think of leaving but I am in the moment. I carry on.

I take the staircase to the room upstairs. The pictures get grimmer. Martial law. The Pakistan army starts cracking the whip. I think of whether some of the pictures are too graphic for kids. More pictures of dead bodies. Three men, lying next to each other. Bullet wounds in their chests. A revolutionary, head blown off by a bullet.

I move to the sixth room. Skulls, a rack of them, staring at you. In the case next to them, femurs. It's overwhelming.

I am taken a bit aback by the scale of the violence. All the deaths I never knew of. I walk past the souvenir shop and the poster of Yahya Khan. It hits me hard this time. Annihilate the Demons. Not for my room.

Water
Numerous turns through crowded and narrow streets in Dhaka's old town. The air is a mix of dust, cement and spices, the smells range from garbage to biryani to fish. After zig-zagging for half an hour, we come to a lane flanked by giant river boats.

It's the harbour. The river is not as wide as you might imagine Bangladeshi rivers to be, but it is busy. I walk down a pier, a ten-foot-wide steel bridge construction with wooden planks as floorboards, for a view. A row of big steamers on my side, a stepped bank on the other. There are small wooden boats making short trips to transport people from one end to the other.

I remember 19th-century drawings I've seen of river traffic on the Thames, under Blackfriars bridge in London. Dhaka's Sadarghat brings those scenes to life. One can imagine it's a place that hasn't changed in decades. Same wooden planks. Same river boats. Same shops by the side.

A day later, I am on a bus to Khulna. The bus gets on a ferry across the Padma, the river that bisects Bangladesh. The Padma, assimilating the combined forces of the Jamuna (Ganges) and Meghana (Brahmaputra), is one of the lifelines of the subcontinent, the cradle of civilisations. A few weeks ago I was trekking in the Uttarakhand Himalayas. There I drank from a small rivulet called Neelganga, which flows into the Pindar, which adds to the Alaknanda, which merges with the Bhagirathi to create the Ganges. I may be a thousand miles away, but the water helps me feel the connection.