Chattogram
A seafood kitchen in Chattogram that refuses to rush
At a family-run kitchen near Firingi Bazar, the day’s catch is decided by the tide, not the menu. We spend a morning by the pans.
Cover story
Cover story · Food
The Long Breakfast of Old Dhaka
Before the traffic wakes, the lanes from Chawkbazar to Nazira Bazar run on nehari, bakarkhani and tea poured from a great height. We walked them from first light to the first call of the fruit sellers.
The kettle on the corner where Nazira Bazar meets the flower sellers has been on since half past five, and the man tending it has the unhurried authority of someone who has never once been late. Around him the lane is still blue with dawn. A boy carries a tray of bakarkhani, warm and crackling, stacked like saucers, and nobody looks up.
Continue readingTravel
02
Cox’s Bazar in the off-season
The longest beach on earth, with almost nobody on it.
Home
03
The rooftop gardens of Gulshan
What grows eleven floors up, in paint drums and patience.
Culture
The tea-stall hour
A small ethnography of standing around with a glass.
Recipe
Bakarkhani, layer by layer
The flaky Old Dhaka bread has outlived Mughal courts and survived modern ovens. A baker on Lalbagh Road shows how thin is thin enough.
Seasons
The fruit wallah’s calendar
Litchi in May, jackfruit in June, the first hog plums of the rains: a year of Dhaka told entirely in what arrives on the cart.
Cox’s Bazar
Cox’s Bazar in the off-season
When the tour buses stop and the rain comes in sideways, the longest natural sea beach on earth returns to the fishermen, the crows and a handful of surfers. Tanvir Ahmed stays a week and learns to love a closed hotel.
Sylhet
A slow weekend in Srimangal
Two nights among the tea estates, a lesson in seven-layer tea, and very little else on the schedule.
Barishal
By launch to Barishal
The overnight launch from Sadarghat is slower than the bus and worth every hour. A cabin, a deck chair and the Meghna at three in the morning.
Home
The rooftop gardens of Gulshan
On the eleventh floor, a retired schoolteacher grows aubergines, chillies and a papaya tree in old paint drums. A tour of the city’s quietest gardens.
Craft
The ceramicist of Savar
Shamim Ara fires her stoneware with rice husk in a kiln she built by hand. Twelve years in, the bowls are on tables from Dhanmondi to Copenhagen.
Style
Monsoon dressing: a field guide
Cotton over silk, sandals over everything, and why the humble gamcha deserves a place in your bag from June to September.
Wellness
In defence of the afternoon nap
The post-lunch lull is not laziness; it is the body’s answer to thirty-four degrees and ninety per cent humidity. A doctor and a grandmother agree.
Rituals
The tea-stall hour
Why the best conversations in Dhaka happen standing up, with a glass in hand and nowhere in particular to be.
Craft
Rickshaw art after the painters
As printed panels replace hand-painted ones, three of the last rickshaw artists in Old Dhaka talk about colour, film stars and tigers.
From the editor
Why we made a monsoon issue
Every year the rain arrives and every year the city acts surprised. Streets become canals, umbrellas become currency, and the tea stalls do their best trade of the year because nobody can go anywhere. It is, we think, the most honest season Dhaka has.
So this issue is built around it: the food that tastes right only when it is pouring, the trips that are quieter for the weather, the gardens that drink it in and the naps it makes unavoidable. We have kept the pieces long and the pace slow. Read them with a cup of something hot.
Farzana HoqueEditor, The Sunday Tiffin
The Tiffin Box, every Sunday
One note from the editors before breakfast: three stories, one recipe and a place worth leaving the house for. No noise, no clutter.