The wooden deck on the third floor of the house, sandwiched between a swimming pool suspended in a night sky and a bar managed by a barman who, never once, got off his mobile phone, thronged with Dhaka’s bright and beautiful and – as someone in our cynical Indian circle pointed out – “flighty and social”. There was a sixties glamour to the scene, in the way the women dressed their hair and held their vodkas and smoked their cigarettes while the men paid court to them in an old-fashioned way.
Dhaka’s drinking habits, though, seemed different from New Delhi’s. “A vodka tonic,” I asked the bartender. “No tonic water,” he pointed out firmly, as though I’d cast a slur on his capabilities. “Perhaps a little lemon juice with soda then,” I told him. “No lemon juice,” he shrugged, “but there’s mango juice.” We argued some more and he tried to convince me to settle for a screwdriver but I coerced him into fixing the vodka and soda with a slice of grapefruit.
That was the easy part. “I’d also like a white wine and a red wine,” I told him, ticking off orders for the group I’d found myself conversing with. “Red or white?” he persisted, as though two glasses of wine simultaneously was an offence. “First,” I said, “white,” which he poured, “next, red,” at which he sighed, removed the glass of white wine and handed me a red. “Can I have the white back?” I requested. He took the white, took the red, looked at me and asked, “Whisky?”
“Let me help,” the girl on the barstool beside me laughed, issuing instructions in Bangla so I soon had my hands full of drinks that I distributed before coming back to chat with her. She had studied in Wharton – in fact, everyone gathered by the poolside seemed to have had their education outside Bangladesh, retaining their accents to prove it – but was now “helping mum”, a fashion designer. Certainly, her group seemed better behaved than youngsters in Delhi and Mumbai, or maybe it was the ambience of the house that had awed them, I suggested to my new friend. “Lots of homes are like this in Bangladesh,” she informed me – speaking perhaps for the country’s minuscule elite – “and from the outside you can’t tell what they’re like inside,” which, given the nature of the potholed roads and mad traffic, was absolutely true.
We’d been to another house the previous evening where, again, the bartender had been addicted to his mobile phone — perhaps it was because fewer Bangladeshis clung to their glasses the way Indians do. They certainly took the trouble to introduce themselves to any new faces, and appeared to enjoy conversing instead of trying to catch the eye of someone more important. Because the newspapers had no page-three pictures, the paparazzi were missing and no one posed for photographs, reminding me of a time before India acquired its tacky social sophistication.
The food was as excellent as it was different from Indian: beef and chicken, mutton and fish, but barely scraping by for vegetarians who, warned beforehand, had carried their puri-chutney from Delhi like small-town cousins. For ignoring spreads such as this, though, they deserved castigation, not symapthy, and if they had a problem with it, good luck getting their own vodka-sodas — because the barman was on his mobile phone again.
