Every year, somewhere between the azan calling the city to
Fajr prayer and the first rickshaw bell of the morning, Dhaka quietly adds
another year to its age. This year the number is 416, a figure historians trace
back to around 1610, when the city was raised from a river town into the
provincial capital of the Bengal Subah under the Mughal Empire. It is a number
too large to hold in the mind all at once. Four centuries and more of monsoons,
conquerors, traders, poets, rickshaw pullers and...
