It turned out that saving the world was a bit of a let down, there was just so much crap to deal with. When he was at the Madhom yard (and when he had had the energy to think about it), it had seemed simple: Remove the bloatware management goons, up the base-level day rate by an order of magnitude, and decree a 5-day working week. Not without a substantial amount of irritation he learned the same lesson that a thousand previous owner/managers had learned the hard way: the hundred and one ills and wrongs committed by the management are just the poorly articulated output of a deeply imperfect machine.
It was almost a personal insult to realise that the vast majority of crushing and repeated inequities of management drip-down were the unthinking and retarded reflexes of a floundering behemoth. Not quite the blueprint that Janahara had in mind when he started building his own new world, but a clean slate helped, he was a quick study and he had made some headway.
His concept was sound though (if unconventional by Dhaka standards): a four pod industrial postaghar with (unusually generous) living facilities for up to thirty workers. The postaghar structures had become the dominant urban structural form in Bangladesh in the last few years—the annual monsoon, combined with ever-increasing meltwater flow from the Himalayas, meant that periodic flooding had eventually given away to a near permanent state of high water. The stilted postaghar dwelling was ideally suited to the brackish shallows that now covered over half of modern Bangladesh: a variable height telescoping stilt structure combined with state-of-the-art meteorological forecasting meant that Janahara could cope with the floods and all but the worst weather that the Bay of Bengal could throw at him.
The cityscape of Janahara’s (dimly remembered) youth was long gone. The tuk-tuk a rare sight now, replaced instead with shoals of aluminium-hulled open top outboards, most with PV solar panel generators flashing blindingly in the sun, other less legal variants still touting wheezing two-stroke engines running on a mish-mash of hydrocarbon variants. Climate change and pitiful international funding had forced Dhaka to replace its gated communities and shanties with another type of island—a squabbling archipelago of low atolls trading loudly and querulously in a meagre marketplace of diminishing fresh water, flu stricken fowl, and custom code.
Janahara’s postaghar compound was a beacon of hope in Dhaka: a three storey cutting-edge design of genetically modified bamboo and smartweave, providing a much-needed source of employment in an insanely competitive job market. The latest cofferdam tech (one of the few growth areas in lowland Bangladesh) utilised by Janahara meant that the compound also provided an excellent venue for one of the best restaurants in town, the Baily Garden Restaurant, late of the now (mostly) submerged New Baily road.
Janahara had cycled past the Baily countless times in his previous life, the smells wafting from the kitchen a torture to his empty purse and stomach. The Money had not made him profligate, but he had indulged some extravagances. On the proviso of promised commercial resurrection he had bought, for a single taka, the entire outfit—the chefs, the waitrons, the décor—and had it transplanted to his clave. Now he eats shukti and chapati whenever he wants.
Perched on his own stool in the corner of the second-floor restaurant balcony, four meters above the stagnant flood water, he can nearly ignore the nightmare that Dhaka has become and start to plan his future.