(This article is a part of the web-exclusive series from our latest issue 'The Bangladesh Paradox'. More from the print quarterly here.)
It took about half an hour after landing in Dhaka at the beginning of my fieldwork on British Bangladeshi families from London for the feeling to hit me. I shuffled off the flight from Doha in a haze and gradually awoke as a taxi drove me into the city. The sights, smells and sounds of Dhaka took me back vividly to my childhood years spent in the city. The powerful, confusing feeling, I now think of as a combination of nerves about the beginning of my fieldwork, the weary guardedness of being alone in a far away country, and a sense of being at home, as the car honked and made its way through the traffic.
I was on my way to Sylhet to meet a British Bangladeshi family from London who were participating in my research. A brief stopover in Dhaka allowed me to revisit some of the places I had known as a child. Being in Dhaka felt like being in the eye of a ferocious cyclone. All around was chaos of breathtaking scale and complexity. The traffic had swelled to fill every inch of road, but it competed with flows of wires, goods and busy people in a city-system that was dense and diverse, seemingly on the edge of collapse and yet somehow fantastically resilient. The city had exploded into a monstrous megacity, a building site of concrete and reinforcing rods extending in all directions as far as one could see. At the same time, at the centre of this cyclone, inside I felt a sense of calm that I could not reconcile with the surroundings. It came from a subconscious, affective feeling connected with my childhood memories of the place.
I felt simultaneously calm and totally overwhelmed by the sensory experiences and impenetrable logics of Dhaka. I felt both at home and far away, a phenomena one could call 'transnational simultaneity'. What is interesting is the extent to which this feeling mirrored the feelings of the British Bangladeshi children I had come to Bangladesh to study, research that would become first my doctoral thesis and then a book. They too experienced transnational simultaneity, the collapsing of different places and practices into transnational social spaces.