Paris diary: The fire back home in Bangladesh

Kabir Ahmed, 41 years old, sells Paris and Olympics trinkets at a little store opposite the Notre Dame, across the Seine, but his heart lies in Bangladesh. His passion is ignited by the fire of the “students’ revolution” back home. He seems to have bought into the French idea of Laïcité — the very strict separation of the citizen’s personal life and his/her role in the public sphere.

Kabir is not for Sheikh Hasina, he’s not for Khalida Zia. “Muhammad Yunus! He’s one of the five most intelligent people in the world,” says Kabir, eyes sparkling with pride. “He was the chief guest at the Olympic Games opening ceremony! He and the students should run the country.” All politicians are corrupt, he declares, and asks: “How is it that the secretary of Sheikh Hasina has 400 crore takas? If he’s got so much money, how much money would she have?”

Kabir laments the attacks on temples and Hindus across Bangladesh and insists they’re the handiwork of politicians. “They are not students,” he says. “University students don’t attack minorities! They are BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party) workers, or they are poor people who have been paid by BNP.”

If you walk around the Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower, and if you enter the shops selling Paris and Olympics souvenirs, you would hear a lot of Bangla from news and analysis on YouTube channels. Many of these stores are run by immigrants from Bangladesh, and they excitedly talk about the violent events back home. Most of the men support the students, and one flashes out his phone to show you a video of a student being shot. “See, he’s unarmed!” says Habibur. “He was very poor, he was studying English Honours. Why was he killed?”

Chandigarh connection

When Notre Dame burnt, Parisians stood there in groups, silently crying. Gopal Sharma, a Chandigarh man who runs an Indian restaurant at the very edge of the Seine, a stone’s throw away from the great cathedral constructed between the 12th and 14th centuries, remembers that April 2019 night very well. “People were just standing there, crying,” says Sharma, who moved to France two decades ago and has been in the hospitality business since. “For the believers in France, it’s the holiest site, like the Golden Temple is in Punjab.”

In a nation with aggressive secularism, with religious symbols banned from public life, the 850-year-old Notre Dame is not about religion — it’s much more than that. It’s the very symbol of France, immortalised in the novel Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo; the book’s deformed, hideous protagonist, Quasimodo, was immortalised by Charles Laughton in the 1939 movie. Over the last few days, Olympics tourists from across the world have been thronging the Notre Dame, less in piety than admiration for the restoration work. As for Sharma, he’s willing to offer a glass of wine to visitors from Chandigarh. — Rohit Mahajan