In the Dhaka of my childhood, Eid-ul-Fitr arrived with the smell of semai and the careful rustle of new clothes. But that particular day also came with something rarer for a child: a temporary expansion of freedom.
Like many children who grew up in the 1990s, I measured Eid by a subtle, unwritten relaxation of rules. Those invisible fences drawn by our parents and murubbis (respected elders) otherwise governed the geography of our days.
Back then Dhaka still possessed something people call para culture. A para (neighbourhood) was a universe with its own invisible borders and social constitution. Children between seven and twelve lived inside these limits like citizens of a small republic. The rule was simple. Play anywhere within the para but do not cross its edges. Return home before darkness thickened into night.
Cricket in the alley, football in dusty open patches, improvised games like Saat-chara, King-queen, or whatever variation our imaginations invented. These filled the hours between school and dusk. Our movements were supervised not only by our own parents but by the entire para. Every shopkeeper, every rickshaw puller, every elderly uncle sitting on a wooden chair outside his house possessed a kind of quiet jurisdiction over us.
Where I grew up, that para culture was even stricter. It was the teachers’ colony of BUET, a place that felt both privileged and oddly cloistered. The colony was leafy and orderly, dotted with generous fields and shaded by trees that seemed older than the institution itself. Children there had more than enough space to run wild inside the walls.
We played endless cricket matches on open grounds, staged football tournaments that felt, to us, as consequential as the World Cup, and wandered through quiet lanes lined with faculty housing. In theory, we had everything.
But just beyond the wall — a literal wall — lay a world that seemed far more alive.
On the other side began Old Dhaka.
Inside the colony we lived in a kind of academic calm. Many of our parents were professors or lecturers, people whose lives revolved around lectures and departmental meetings. The air carried a subdued rhythm: bicycles rolling down shaded roads, the occasional whistle of a pressure cooker from someone’s kitchen, the quiet discipline of a campus community.
Outside, from what little we glimpsed, Old Dhaka throbbed with colour, noise, strange smells and an energy that seemed mythic to our young minds.
Even within the BUET housing clusters (Red Colony, White Colony, and Yellow Colony) there were small physical reminders of that tantalizing proximity. In Red Colony there was a small gate. It was easy to miss if you didn’t know where to look. But if you slipped through it and crossed the boundary wall, you emerged into Lalbagh, not far from Bakshibazar chowrasta. It felt like stepping through a wardrobe into another country.
Yet that gate might as well have been guarded by dragons.
Our parents, like many academics raising children in a tightly knit campus environment, had strict ideas about safety and propriety. Venturing into Old Dhaka alone was discouraged, sometimes outright forbidden. To them, the colony represented order and security; beyond the wall lay unpredictability: crowded streets, traffic, noise, strangers.
To us it looked like all the fun in the universe. We would stand near the wall sometimes, hearing faint echoes of loudspeakers, distant music, the restless hum of people living life at full volume. On one side: shaded pathways and careful routines. On the other: a dense labyrinth that promised endless adventure.
For most of the year the wall held firm. Except on Eid.
Something about Eid-ul-Fitr softened the rules. Perhaps it was the communal spirit of the day or the fact that many colony uncles preferred to attend Eid prayers in the historic mosques of Old Dhaka. Families would gather early in the morning, dressed in crisp panjabis and freshly ironed pajamas, and head out together through that little gate.
For us children, this was the opening of a forbidden city. Once the morning prayer ended, the invisible leash that normally kept us inside the colony loosened. Groups of us — colony kids in shiny new Eid clothes — would spill into the streets of Lalbagh, Khajedewan, Bakshibazar, sometimes even venturing as far as Chowkbazar.
The difference in atmosphere hit you at once. In the narrow alleys, clusters of men gathered in spontaneous addas. Plastic stools and mismatched chairs formed loose circles around enormous soundboxes placed in the middle of the lane. From these speakers blasted Bollywood songs at heroic volume: “Hawa Hawa o Hawa, Khushbu Luta de” or “Hay mere, ham safar.” The music bounced off old brick walls and drifted through balconies draped with laundry.
People lingered everywhere. Conversations stretched lazily. Laughter rolled through the streets. There was also the ritual of collecting salami at the local Panchayet clubs. In places like Khajedewan Panchayet Club or Posta Panchayet Club, elders sat like benevolent magistrates while children and young men dropped by to offer Eid greetings and receive small notes of cash. The clubs functioned like tiny civic centres, where the neighbourhood’s social life condensed into a festive ceremony of greetings and generosity.
One year, wandering through those lanes, I stumbled upon something remarkable: an Eid procession.
It moved slowly through the street, a cheerful crowd of elderly men and younger boys. At the front marched a group of singers whose voices rose above the murmur of the crowd. Only later did I learn they were qasida singers.
Throughout Ramadan, these singers walked the streets before dawn, performing sehri songs to wake people for the pre-dawn meal. Their melodies floated through the sleeping city like gentle alarms, equal parts devotion and neighbourhood service. On Eid day they gathered together, moving from lane to lane before assembling in front of the local Panchayet club.
There, amid cheers and greetings, they received their collective Eid salami.
The procession had a buoyant rhythm. The singers’ voices rose in melodic waves, and people joined in clapping or humming along. For a child who had grown up within the quieter confines of the colony, it felt like witnessing a festival inside a festival.
Old Dhaka cannot be remembered without its food.
During those Eid wanderings I tasted combinations that seemed strange to my colony-bred palate. One of my closest childhood friends lived in Khajedewan, and visiting his house during Eid was a culinary expedition. Their family served bakorkhani with dudh shemai (rich milk vermicelli) whose sweetness balanced against the flaky, slightly salty bread. They also paired bakorkhani with a pale, creamy chicken roast. I had never imagined that bread associated with tea could accompany roast chicken, yet the combination worked.
There was also shemai sharbat, lightly scented with rose water, which arrived in tall glasses and cooled you from the inside out.
Then there was Chowkbazar.
For us colony kids, Chowkbazar occupied a place somewhere between rumour and legend. It was famous for its iftar market during Ramadan, but reaching it from the colony required venturing deeper into Old Dhaka than most parents would comfortably allow. By the time we were twelve or thirteen, however, curiosity had grown stronger than caution.
A few days before Eid, on the 28th or 29th of Ramadan, we began making secret expeditions there. We might tell our parents we were going somewhere nearby. In truth we were on a mission. Firecrackers.
For the younger children of the colony, Chaand Raat (the night when the Eid moon is sighted) meant one thing: fireworks. Our colony boro bhais (elder brothers) bought elaborate assortments of crackers with names that sounded mysterious and thrilling: Murras, chocolate bombs, shalta. The younger ones followed them around all evening, watching in awe as sparks erupted and echoes bounced off the colony buildings.
We longed for the day when we would be old enough to buy our own.
Once we crossed that invisible threshold of age — eleven or twelve — we joined the hunt ourselves. Chowkbazar was the place to go, though the process had the excitement of a treasure hunt. Firecrackers were not sold openly. Shops dealing in dried fruits, spices, or wholesale goods might stock them somewhere in the back.
You had to ask the right person.
Sometimes a shopkeeper would glance around, then disappear behind a curtain and return with a dusty cardboard box filled with explosives disguised as toys. Negotiations followed in hushed voices. The thrill lay in the discovery itself, like finding contraband artefacts in a secret market.
On one of those expeditions we heard about a small Eid mela near Chowkbazar chowrasta. We returned on Eid day.
The fair was modest — nothing like the large melas we read about in books or saw on television — but to us it felt special. Stalls displayed cheap plastic toys we had never seen in New Market. Strange candies in improbable colours, balloons, spinning pinwheels, tin whistles, and tiny battery-powered gadgets.
We wandered through the fair with pockets full of Eid salami, buying things that probably broke within hours but felt priceless in the moment.
What remains most vivid now is not any single object or meal or firecracker. It is the feeling of crossing that small gate in Red Colony and entering another world.
Inside the colony, life was calm. Outside, Old Dhaka pulsed with improvisation and noise and generosity. Eid became the bridge between those two worlds, a day when boundaries softened and a child could move freely between them.
Those brief adventures — slipping through the gate into Lalbagh or Khajedewan, following music through narrow lanes, tasting unfamiliar foods, hunting contraband firecrackers in Chowkbazar — formed a map of wonder in my memory.
Even now, when Eid arrives, I think of that small gate in Red Colony and the city waiting just beyond it.