The Empty Footpaths of Mirpur 10: A City's Silent Play-by-Play

Standing at the edge of the Mirpur 10 roundabout, the first thing you notice is not a crowd — it is the absence of one. In the morning light the footpath looks so immaculate that it seems someone swept it all night and then packed up their own shadow and left. On match days I have walked this very junction toward the Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium — bag on my shoulder, notebook in hand. Back then this footpath held jerseys, flags, peanuts, tea, ten-taka plastic whistles. Today it holds bare concrete and the corner of a torn banner flapping without a sound. I keep a notebook of silences, because that is where the crowd lives after the lights go down. Today this footpath is another page in that notebook. At sixty-three, I stopped calling the score and started calling the meaning between the scores; and what plays here is not a score — it is a tone, the tone a city makes when it erases part of itself. Walking back that evening I saw a broken wooden stool abandoned in a corner. Someone had sat on it to sell tea, someone had stood there all day. 'Footpath cleared' reads well in print. But if that stool could turn its head, it would ask: where did I go? A hawker's tools are silent, yet their silence is no lighter than a stadium's. That question pulls me back toward the ground. Mirpur 10 is not merely a junction; it is a crossroads where many of Dhaka's inner roads converge. On match days cars stop here, rickshaws jam, and thousands pour out on foot toward the stadium gates. Inside that crowd the hawkers leave no gap — they know a crowd means a market, and a match means a crowd. Under the floodlights I have watched a teenager thread through the crush carrying three flags, earning more in a day than the price of a ticket. So I cannot read the eviction drive at Mirpur 10 as municipal news alone. It is also the news of an economy built around a venue, and the news of an erasure — where the word 'clean' means liberation to one person and removal to another. One road, one stretch of concrete, two entirely different stories. Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC), the civic body for the northern part of the city, carried out a drive to free the footpaths of the Mirpur 10 area, and illegal structures were demolished as part of it. In the administration's vocabulary this is removing encroachment; in the vocabulary of those whose livelihood sits on the pavement, it is the risk of losing bread. One act, two dictionaries — and the city's civic politics lives in the space between them. The drive was not peaceful. Hawkers attacked police and city corporation staff. Resistance of this kind cannot be dismissed. People who refuse to surrender their spot have usually understood that survival is no longer a cost-benefit calculation but an existential one. I have watched this city's lanes for years; the face-off between hawkers and authority is not new, yet each time it carries the same note — who may stand in this city, and who may only pass through. After the drive the picture is clear: the scene at the Mirpur 10 roundabout and surrounding footpaths has changed. Walking space has returned. An elderly man, a schoolgirl, a mother carrying a child — none of them must step into traffic now. I will not belittle that gain; in a city without walking space, reclaiming walking space is no small thing. But the map is not even. The footpaths of Mirpur 1 and Tolarbagh have not yet been cleared. Here lies the most important fact of all — only Mirpur 10's footpaths were cleared, while elsewhere the occupation stands. In administrative language this is a phased drive; in analytical language it is uneven enforcement. And uneven enforcement is never just a story about administration; it is a story about the map — who lives where, who is heard, and who stays quiet. If I imagine the city as a live server, the footpath is its oldest map. Every day thousands of people look for a position on that map — some sit, some walk, some trade standing up. When the administration arrives with a broom, it is really rewriting part of the map. Every patch note is a small elegy for the player someone used to be — and this drive is no exception. Mirpur 10's footpath has been rewritten; whether those who were part of the old text get a place in the new page, nobody is asking. What the administration calls 'illegal occupation' is really the name of a system that did not appear in a day. Over two decades, as buildings rose, shops multiplied and roads narrowed, the footpath turned from empty space into a business address. Nobody decides to become a hawker; circumstance lowers them onto the pavement. Of the thousands who migrate to Dhaka from the villages each year, many find their first address not in an office but on a footpath, in a rickshaw garage, or in a small room beside the stadium. Why do hawkers sit precisely on footpaths? Because they have no alternative to rent-free space. Beyond a shop's rent, a warehouse's cost, the hassle of a trade licence, the footpath is the cheapest retail market available. And near a stadium its value rises, because here people arrive in fixed numbers at fixed times — two hours before a match, and one hour after it ends. Within those few hours lies many a day's earnings. I know this rhythm of match day. Before a match the footpath almost becomes a small fair — jerseys, caps, bags, flags, peanuts, tea, fuchka. Someone sells Dhaka's lost memory, someone else only earns the price of rice. When the match ends the crowd flows back from the stadium gates toward Mirpur 10, and the hawkers begin to fold up. This emptying footpath is like the final score of an evening — sound falls away, light falls away, and the road recovers its own face. Now there is an effort to hold that face permanently. The space freed at Mirpur 10 will stay free every day, the administration promises. But a promise is not permanence. A hawker never truly vanishes; he relocates. The footpath cleared today may see the same crowd return next month in the lane beside it. Eviction often does not erase occupation; it moves it — from one place to another. Here I run into an old argument. The numbers we love most in sport — distance covered, sprint counts, measures of effort — often show labour that meant nothing. Someone runs a great deal and does little; someone runs little and does everything. Urban drives carry the same trap. One junction can be cleaned for a photograph, a headline, a declaration of success. But the number of footpaths still occupied across the city never enters that photograph. Visible effort and real outcome are not the same thing — an argument that holds on the field and on the street alike. And if we look at the true cause, another uncomfortable truth surfaces. Why do players break down again and again? Often the biggest culprit is not the medical team but the fixture calendar — two games a week, no gaps, no rest. Likewise, why is there encroachment on footpaths? Because the biggest cause is not the hawker's stubbornness but the absence of alternative livelihoods — where there is no work, no licence, no social protection, the footpath is the only support. A problem whose root is structural cannot be solved with a broom; a broom only changes the view. This structural cause explains why Mirpur 10's success cannot simply be copied onto Mirpur 1 or Tolarbagh. Where occupation is denser, where some hawkers have traded in the same spot for years, a drive means many livelihoods stopping at once. No one photographs that number, but it is the real arithmetic. Still, I will not dismiss the drive as pure theatre. When a state decides that footpaths are for walking, that too is a policy — and behind that policy may stand the vulnerable, such as people with limited mobility who fear stepping into traffic. I am old; I know how fundamental the right to move through a city is. So in Mirpur 10's empty footpath I also see a possibility — of a city where the daily commute is not a struggle. But possibility is not achievement. The reality is that the administration could clear one junction and could not — or would not — clear the other two. That unevenness tells us the matter is less about policy than about power. The broom falls first where clearing costs least, where resistance is least, where political risk is least. Mirpur 10 was the easy site; Mirpur 1 and Tolarbagh are not. The hawkers' resistance is no small matter either. When police and corporation staff are attacked, it is not merely a law-and-order problem but a message — people at the edge of survival can no longer bear the fear of loss. If the administration reads that message only as suppression, the same scene returns at the next drive. If it reads it as a question of rehabilitation, perhaps some path opens. One thing I notice about urban governance again and again: we decide where people may not live, but almost never decide where they may. There is an accounting for eviction, none for resettlement. So eviction becomes an event — photographs, headlines, praise; and the life that follows stays in the dark. Where the hawker who lost his spot went, what he ate, whether he could keep his child in school — none of that gets a photograph. Here the lesson of the silent arena serves me. On the field the most important things never reach the scoreboard — the creak of a chair, a player's breath, someone leaving a Discord channel without a word. Likewise the most important fact of this city is missing from the report — the addresses of those who moved away. Absence has its own play-by-play, and learning to read it is the real work of analysis. I know many readers want a simple story here — either the administration as hero or the hawker as victim. But simple stories are more comfortable than true, and comfortable stories are usually incomplete. The truth is that two kinds of people shared this footpath, both claims were legitimate, and both were hard to satisfy at once. One wants space to walk, the other space to live. In that collision the decision comes from political priority — who first, who later. So a caution is needed. It would be wrong to be over-romantic about this. I will not turn hawkers into symbols of poverty; many are shrewd traders whose arithmetic is sharper than mine. Nor will I call the administration a merciless machine; keeping civic order is a legitimate duty, and discharging it often forces hard choices. Painting either side in glowing colours makes the analysis false. There is another trap I felt myself as I read the report. At the word 'Mirpur', the mind of a cricket journalist like mine runs to the stadium. But the truth is that this report contains no cricket at all — no match, no player, no team, no rule. There is only a place-name with a stadium standing beside it. Building a cricket story out of the word 'Mirpur' is easy, but then it stops being news and becomes fiction. A city's footpath story relates to the stadium only as a distant neighbourhood does — familiar, but not the same. From this another question rises: is Mirpur 10's clearing part of a larger promise, or merely the result of one successful day? If there is a plan to make the stadium precinct 'ready' for a future major event, this drive might be seen as a first step. But I keep that link as inference, because the report names neither the stadium nor any tournament. Mixing inference with fact weakens analysis, and weak analysis ultimately fails to understand the city. Yet what can be understood is enough. This drive teaches us that a city's change is measured not by its cleared footpaths but by its remaining ones. Mirpur 10 is clear; Mirpur 1 and Tolarbagh are not. In that single line lies the whole story — unevenness. And unevenness is never an accident; it is usually a decision. The biggest fact here is not that a footpath was emptied; it is why only one junction was emptied. If the power to clear were equal for all, all three would be empty today. Since it was not equal, the decision must be read as strategy more than discipline. And strategy means priority — who first, who later, who not at all. Within that priority I see the silent stadium of Mirpur 10. An empty stadium is only a building; with people it becomes a venue, a history, a memory. Likewise an empty footpath is only concrete; with people it becomes a market, a livelihood, a story. At Mirpur 10 the concrete has returned today; the question is where the livelihood went. In the end, if I read this as a match, I must look beyond the scoreboard. The scoreboard will say the footpath was cleared. But the scoreboard never says who was displaced, who lost the evening meal, who could not pay a child's school fee. That silent accounting is the real result to me, because at sixty-three I have learned that what lives between the scores is what builds or breaks a city. In my notebook this event will be filed as a photograph of an empty footpath, and beneath it one line: a market was here, now there is only a walking path. In that one line sits a city's whole contradiction — progress and eviction, in the same sentence. Looking ahead, two questions remain. First, will the Mirpur 10 model reach Mirpur 1 and Tolarbagh, or will it stay an honest intention written on blank paper? Second, if it does reach them, will those who lose their spots be given alternatives, or will only bare concrete be left behind? The answers will decide whether this drive is a new beginning or merely another change of scene. Until an answer comes, one page in my notebook will stay blank — just like the footpath at Mirpur 10. And I will wait for the day when a hawker stands on that pavement again, this time with no shadow over his head — only an honest accounting of a city.