Away from home

But spring is certainly in the air, and the occasional showers are welcome proof of that. It's been an exceptionally dry British winter, and the TV news is full of reports of the rivers running dry and the water companies having to go to extreme lengths in order to satisfy the city's need for water. The news is also full of war and politics, celebrities and soccer, bird flu and cartoon fires. But one merely notes these with bemused resignation and flicks on to the next channel, to follow Grissom's latest exploits for the Vegas PD, or some obscure 1950s Western movie playing in the wee hours, the stars on the screen as forgotten today as the stars in the night sky outside the window.

Incongruous as this may sound, the city occasionally reminds me of Dhaka. Not because of the climate certainly, and heaven knows there's enough differences between here and there to fill a book or three. But what the two have in common is a mad metropolitan bustle, millions of people milling in its pavements and shops, pressing shoulder to shoulder (or nose to arm-pit if you're unlucky) in its buses and trains, absorbed in the familiar business of rushing about, of getting and spending. It's that frenetic urban chaos of London that reminds me more of home than any other place I've been perhaps mid-day Manhattan would be another example. This Christmas on Oxford Street, in the city centre, the crowds of shoppers were so thick that you could, in a fanciful mood, imagine that you'd momentarily been taken back to Farmgate or Gausia the weekend before Eid!

What prompts these thoughts on a certain morning in February, while I sit under the anonymous arclights of the office - e-mails and Excel spreadsheets impatiently awaiting me - what prompts these thoughts is that date on the calendar. It's the 21st of February, and I'm a million miles from the Boi Mela, Probhat Feri, the steps of the Shahid Minar and Gaffar Chowdhury's immortal lyrics. Things that were staples of life for 20-plus Februaries in a row. In short, far from home, an exile's life.

But maybe not as far as all that. Last night, walking home around midnight after dinner with friends, I noticed a procession of people ahead of me on the Whitechapel Road. (Whitechapel is in the heart of East London, the epicentre of the immigrant Sylheti community that Monica Ali wrote about in her book.) So many people milling about so late at night is an uncommon sight in this place governed above all else by law and order. My curiosity piqued, I took a slight detour and followed the crowd. And lo and behold! - what soon greeted my astonished eyes were a few hundred people braving the freezing wind, standing there with wreaths and bouquets, waiting to present flowers at the pedestal of London's very own Shahid Minar, built in a patch of green called Altab Ali Park. Sure, there were a score of burly policemen in bright yellow jackets to ensure security. But for a few moments, you no longer felt the chill, you only felt joy and wonder, pride and a knee-buckling love for all that you can't leave behind. This morning, passing by the park again, I took a moment to take a last look at the flowers on the Minar, before the dutiful municipality sweeps them away. I doubt they'll be there by nightfall.