Arid without the <i>addas</i>

Dhaka empties during the Eid holidays. No crowds or traffic snarls. So when the day after Eid I drove to Shere Bangla National Cricket Stadium in Mirpur it felt like I was riding through a dreamland.

Cricket shifted its headquarters in 2006 from the old Bangabandhu Stadium in the Purana Paltan-Gulistan area to Mirpur, 12km away. The old stadium was used for both football and cricket games, and the Bangladesh Cricket Board decided that modern-era, high-profile cricket needed its own exclusive home. Bangabandhu Stadium is now solely for football.

In terms of Bangladeshi cricket I came of age during the 1970s and mid-80s, watching it being born at the three grounds of the "Outer Stadium" area. We ate at the eateries strung along Bangabandhu Stadium's lowest rung: biryani and paratha kebabs and Coke, amid the hum of the incessant adda of sports fans clustered inside them and in the nearby clubhouses.

Now I was on my way to Mirpur to check if the old buzz had been transplanted to the new site.

It had not. The street outside the stadium complex was lined with furniture shops, fruit stands, boutiques and garage motor works. Within its walled-off premises work crews were busy renovating the stadium for the World Cup matches. Furniture stores hogged every ground-level rental space. Not one restaurant here. The guard at the front gate was immaculately polite, but said in reply to my queries that no, there were no eateries, perhaps a couple at the bend on the main road. He explained that food would be served inside the stadium during play and that I could get everything I wanted. No, I was in search of a different story, that of the adda and sports fans and endless tea and shingaras and the excited buzz of the old stadium area. Oh, that, he responded with a rueful grin, no, there's none of that.

I took a walk on the road outside. And drew a blank. Nowhere was that staple of cricket I had known, the Dhaka biryani and sweet chai and shingara, or curried fish-with-rice restaurant, with waiters weaving through packed tables and the broken tap dripping from the hand-wash sink on to the wet floor, voices carroming in the smoke-filled air and the paan-chewing manager ensconced behind an imposing barrier of faux marble.

There would be no buzz here, I thought, just the metronomic order of the modern stadium.

I headed for Purana Paltan, to the old Bangabandhu stadium. In the 1950s and the 1960s, during the Pakistan era, this was the dividing line between the old city and the new. It was mainly in this area that the new restaurants opened near the cinema. Old hands fondly recall restaurants such as Ruchita, Ritz-Rex, the Al Hambra at the Chawk in the heart of old city, Paramount and OK near Mukul cinema hall. Food in these posh restaurants, and in the more common run of eateries, was distinctly influenced by the Old Dhaka palate, shaped by the Dhaka Nawab family kitchen, which itself had zestfully adapted north Indian Mughal cooking, giving rise to various biryani dishes, especially the distinctly Dhaka "kacchi" biryani. Meat bhunas, shammi kebabs, "Mughlai" parathas, bakarkhani, puchkas and chatpati, top-grade halims, chicken jhaal fry, and to top things off, lassi and jelabis. It was a rerun of this cooking that could be found in the stadium eateries.

When domestic league matches began again in the early 1970s in a newly independent Bangladesh, we would cut university classes to go watch them. Lunch meant biryani or naan kebab at one of the four stadium restaurants that were the haunts of local sports fans, journalists, club groupies and hangers on: Islamia, The President, Provincial and Prince. Or if we felt more adventurous, we would go to Café Jheel opposite the Press Club, to Haji's Biryani, or the Star Hotel in nearby Thatari Bazar. But it was in the stadium restaurants that the cricketing adda would flow furiously, taunts and rejoinders shouted, statistics quoted, the batting and bowling analysed to death, all capped off with the hot, watery, sweet stadium tea. Then we would return to the games, to shouts and cheers, interspersed with more tea and cigarettes, jhalmuri, puchkas, and muri. At the end of the day's play, fans would again head for the restaurants to conduct post-mortems. The beehive would buzz late into the night.

But now everything had vanished. Gone were the Outer Stadium grounds, swallowed up by buildings housing the offices of the boxing and racquetball associations, plus the Bhashani hockey stadium. Not even the faintest trace of coir matting remained. The only bit of open ground was being paved over for a parking lot for the World Cup opening ceremonies. I headed for the corner where the old Wari clubhouse used to be, run then by the much-beloved Hashem bhai, and where I had had so many naan-kebab lunches with its cricket team. Nothing. I walked over to the main stadium, to check on the restaurants. Gone. Islamia, Prince and Provincial had closed long ago - "Renting out the space brings in much more money," one grizzled shopkeeper replied when I asked. Only the President was still there, closed for the Eid holidays. "That's going too, soon."

Gone were the old sports adda haunts, the spaces, grounds and clubhouses where Bangladesh cricket had begun. Purana Paltan-Gulistan is loaded with our cricketing history. In fact, the very first cricket match in Bengal, in 1876, which recorded "native" players playing took place not far from where I was standing. Among the names listed there is one name, a "Bashanta Kumar"! Kolkata may have its Calcutta Cricket Club, it may have Pankaj Roy and his nephew, the dashing Ambar Roy; it may have its Eden Gardens and Sourav Ganguly, but we have Purana Paltan and Bashanta!

Bangabandhu Stadium's role in terms of Bengali Muslims playing cricket is indisputable. Cricket in Bengal from the 1870s till the 1930s was the preserve of the Bengali Hindu bhadralok elite. With the partition in 1947 and the migration of Hindus from Dhaka to Calcutta, spaces opened up for the Bengali Muslim cricketer. Even then it was a very slow start since Bengali Muslims came so late to the party, and because of West Pakistani colonial neglect of the game in what was then East Pakistan. But by the late 1960s, East Pakistan teams, which at first were dominated by non-Bengali players, began to include substantial numbers of Bengali Muslim cricketers.

It was a development that was given a tremendous boost by the construction of Bangabandhu Stadium in 1955 in the Paltan maidan - then a vast field with a huge banyan tree in the middle. It was here that Fazal Mahmood held up the new ball before uprooting Neil Harvey's stumps when Harvey was poised at 96. It was here that the crowd roared on first seeing Wesley Hall steaming in to bowl. And it was in and around this stadium that our sporting life began and was nurtured, where clubhouses were built, where flocked Bengali Muslim sporting figures. And in their wake came the restaurants and the eateries to cater to this huge appetite for sports and adda and tea and kacchi biryani.

Independence in 1971 further accelerated this process, and Bangabandhu stadium and its "Outer Stadium" grounds played a central part in the long journey towards a national cricket team consisting of 11 Bengali Muslims. The eateries and the adda have played no less a notable part in this attainment - without biryani and naan-kebabs, without the waiters skipping from table to table alive with sports addas, our path to Test status would have been so much more arid and barren. Without, as Bengalis say, rosh (juice).

Today nothing remains as a testament to those times. Not even the faintest trace of coir matting on which Bangladesh's cricket began. With dusk descending on this bit of Bangladesh sporting gloaming, and with Bangladesh cricket having transplanted itself to a distant place far from its heart and roots, I feel privileged in having been a part, however miniscule, of those unforgettable stadium restaurants and eateries.