dhaka thrifted: a dizzy, fabric-soaked day in the old city

so i landed in dhaka with one goal: find a 1970s sindhi topi before the humidity ate my camera. the air's sitting at a humid 19 degrees, feels like someone's breathing on your neck, and my *deodorant already gave up. i just checked and it's...there right now, hope you like that kind of thing. this city doesn't whisper, it rickshaw-horns at you until you listen.

my mission? the labyrinthine alleys of old dhaka. i'm a vintage clothes picker, which means i chase ghosts in cotton and linen, and dhaka is a freaking haunted house. the streets are a bazaar of everything: fake ray-ban shades stacked next to hand-loomed jamdani saris that cost more than my flight. i bargained for twenty minutes over a bandhani dupatta that smelled faintly of mothballs and chai. the seller, a guy with a grin missing a tooth, kept saying "special price for you, madam," while his uncle sized up my camera bag. classic.

[overheard from a guy sharpening knives on a wheel]: "the good punjabi suits from the 80s? they're all in narayanganj now. the factory overruns. if you want real theft, go to the embroidery lanes behind the mosque at dusk."

午餐 was a bucket of biryani from a stall where the steam fogged my glasses. the guy next to me, a textile broker with a ledger covered in sindhi script, told me to skip the new market fake levi's.

> "everyone sells the same made-in-turkey jeans. look for the hand-stitched pockets. real old bangladeshi denim is stiff like cardboard and breaks in like a good relationship."

i listened, took notes on a receipt from my paan vendor. my feet are already blistered from cobblestones that haven't seen love since the british left. the humidity is 68%, which means my cotton shirt is now a second skin. but i found something: a vintage dhaka weavers' union pin, tarnished, in a box of buttons. score.

if you get bored, narayanganj and manikganj are just a short drive away-textile towns where the air smells like dye and loom oil. i'm crashing at a guesthouse where the ceiling fan sounds like it's arguing with the generator. the neighbors are a family that runs a sari draping school; i heard the daughter practicing ghungroo bells through the wall at 6am.

pro-tips i learned from a chemist selling herbal hair oil:
- don't wear white shoes here unless you want a mud map on your feet by noon.
- the best haunt for 70s polyester kurtas is the back of babu bazar behind the telephone exchange. ask for rasel. he'll show you his secret basement.
- tripadvisor's "top" restaurants are a tourist trap. find the queue of lawyers in crisp salwar kameez around 1pm. that's your lunch.
- if someone says their handicraft is "fair trade" here, ask for the certificate. 9 times out of 10 it's a photocopy from a ngo that closed in 2010.

i'm meeting a screen printer tomorrow who supposedly has vintage bangladesh cricket team t-shirts from the 90s. the pressure outside is 1015 hpa, which feels like the city's own heartbeat. i'm wired on sweet milk tea and insomnia. this place is a jungle of stories, and i'm just trying not to get lost in the static.

> "my great-grandmother weaved muslin for the mughals. now i sell polyester dupatta to salon owners. times change, bazaar doesn't."

- an old woman in phul bazar, wiping dye from her wrinkles.

yeah. i heard that too. now if you'll excuse me, i have to haggle with a man over a disco-era kurta that might be real vintage or might have been washed in a river yesterday. the thrill is in the guesswork.

[useful links that aren't ads]: the dhaka tribune's food crawl list, the bangladesh tourist board's hidden craft trail pdf, and a substack by an expat textile conservator who calls old dhakai jamdani "liquid gold." also, yelp is useless here. just follow the smell of ghee and coal.

night. the generator hums. i'm going to dream in cotton threads and rickshaw* bells.

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