A Dacca Diary

January 20, 1973 ONE almost wishes Sheikh Mujibur Hahman had more than one face. Wherever you meander in this half- composed, semi-arranged city, you cannot avoid the face: it stares down at you from all sundry walls: the wall of the hotel lobby, the wall of the senior civil servant's drawing-room, the wall of the corridor of the cinema hall, the wobbly wall of the rest-room of the steam boat you take to visit your ancestral place, across the river, twenty miles away from Dacca. The face, with the slightly benign, slightly vacuous smile frozen on the lips, infests the electric poles, the street-corner hoardings, the ramparts of the football stadium. Then; is hardly a change that you will be allowed to forget, even for a single moment, that yon have entered the land of the Patriarch. The rest of the universe, one is reluctantly led to conclude, is altogether irrelevant.