I am enraptured by Dhaka. Every 5 ft. is another new and
exciting photograph. Some of the pictures are happy scenes, some are sad and
some are quite tragic but they are all beautiful and exciting in different ways. My greatest
anxiety is missing a single amazing picture. Today I missed so many and I am
filled with frustration and regret.
Today I went to the club for lunch and a swim. I also had
some errands to run prior to going and it seemed impractical to take my camera.
This is ALWAYS a mistake. I learned this lesson the hard way.
Nebraska is home to the world renowned Henry Doorly Zoo. It is filled with amazing exhibits. We lived in Bellevue for
many years and I went to the zoo dozens of times. I even taught a couple of
classes there on taking natural looking pictures of the animals.
Over the years I became quite paranoid about not taking my
camera each and every time I went. It went something like this: Take my 15 lb
beast of a camera and absolutely nothing unusual or amazing would happen, but
leave my camera behind just once, and a giraffe would don a top hat and do a
tap dance to All That Jazz. I’m guessing I’m not the only one to experience
this phenomenon.
Today hurt. There is no better way to see Dhaka than by
rickshaw. Harrowing near misses aside, it is a slower pace than a car and you
are out in the middle of everything. There is more time to see and hear and smell each tiny detail all around you.
As we wound our way through the dense traffic, over to my
left was a beautiful young woman dressed in a peacock colored salwar kameez.
She was pushing a sort of wooden, flat bed wheel barrel and resting in it was a
venerable old woman who looked to be about 200. She too was dressed in the
vivid colors of a traditional kameez. She was crippled and looked tiny in the
wooden cart and you could see that it was an effort for the young woman to push
the cart up the curb as she came off of a side street, but the girl was smiling
still and talking brightly to the old woman. That is a picture I would have cherished.
In front of a tall office building stood a man with woven baskets
filled with beautiful spices and nuts in earthy colors.
A couple of streets down was a boy probably not yet into his
teens perched atop a bamboo and wood scaffolding, probably 8 ft high. He was
kneeling precariously on top of the platform with mortar and a lathe, laying
bricks on the top of a concrete wall. He was so young but he looked strong and
worked quickly as though he had been doing it his whole life.
In the middle of the street amidst the cars, rickshaws,
battered buses and scurrying people another young man, little more than a teen
at most, pulled a huge bamboo flatbed perched on huge rickety wooden wheels, piled
four or five layers high with bags of concrete mix. It looked impossibly heavy
and his muscles strained until they looked like they would burst but he made
steady progress through the traffic.
It’s like this here every day. I hate missing a second of
it. I suspect my camera resents my going without it each time I leave it behind
and secretly gloats at the certain knowledge that I will regret the betrayal.
I’m sorry to have failed today. I’m sorry that I couldn’t
post amazing pictures, but who leaves an expensive camera all alone by the
pool, right? I’m starting to wish I had!
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