This morning, as my driver Aziz and I pulled up to the Gulshan 2 Circle, I noticed more than ever that changes are afoot.

“Everyone is in their own lane, Aziz bhai,” I commented. “The traffic looks so… tidy.” And indeed, the sloppy mess of rickshaw-between-car-between-baby taxi-between-bicycle-between-car that normally clutters each breathable inch of space (betwixt which beggars manage to knock on car windows one at a time and ask for change) was today evenly divided into four lanes, structured by men in orange vests with handouts telling drivers to mind the red and green lights and to obey the signs. Indeed, the government has recently issued a law requiring vehicles to “stay in the middle of your lane unless indicated by your turn signal, and obey all traffic lights and appropriate street signs.”

This, my friends, is a revolutionary new requirement, unprecedented in potential reach. If Bangladeshis could manage this superhuman feat, the earth might cease its revolutions and cause the sun to bow in honour of this great achievement. However, citizens hold out little hope for such a result, as the scheme, which currently has traffic controllers at maybe 6 or 7 prominent intersections throughout the city, is masterminded and managed by some Japanese firm, anxious to bring their civilized ways to Southeast Asia. The colonial style of such a “modernizing” endeavour is not lost on the people.

So as I sat with Aziz bhai waiting in our proper queue, I asked him what he did over the weekend. “I look for a wife for my youngest son,” he said. I asked him how he went about finding a suitable mate for his son, and where he was looking. “Outside Dhaka I go, into the villages. My son not marry someone from Dhaka City. These girls not so good. So far, I find some girl with pretty face, but very thin, and not healthy. Then they have little dowry.” I asked if he knew the families of these girls ahead of time, but he insisted they were strangers. I asked if his son had any voice in choosing his mate. “My son 28, but as he not very good looking, and I not very rich, is hard to find for him good wife. He accept whoever I find, so my choice is his choice.” The more questions I asked, the stranger it all became: the curious sense of cultural familiarity that allowed this man to knock on the doors of village strangers and ask if they had a daughter of marrying age; the trust a son placed in his father’s choice for him; the superficial qualities of a woman required to merit his blessing; and finally, the despicable exchange of money required, called a dowry, that bought and sold a woman’s life away.

In the afternoon, I left the office with Aziz bhai and Sumi, the only other female at work, to make a shopping trip to New Market, a crowded shopping plaza in central Dhaka. As we braved the incredible traffic in what turned out to be an hour of driving, I asked Sumi, eight months pregnant, about her husband. I knew they had been married for over a year, and although I have been here for almost a month, it finally occurred to me to ask what he does for a living. “He is a singer,” Sumi told me, “and a creative teacher.” “Where does he teach?” I asked. She gave me the name of someplace I had never heard of, which I learned, upon further inquiry, was several hours from Dhaka. “He lives there,” said Sumi, “and he comes to Dhaka once a month, for two or three days, to see me. But when we were married, then he stayed for two weeks.”

She explained that her parents had tried to find him work in Dhaka, but nothing was opening up, so he couldn’t leave his job. As for her part, Sumi said, “I can never leave Dhaka City.” But I imagine it also has something to do with the couple needing both of their incomes.

“What will you do once the baby comes?” I asked. “I stay with my parents,” Sumi told me, “and they will take care. And maybe in another year, my husband can find work here.” Sumi’s resolute strength and indefatigable sense of humour immediately deepened my sense of respect for her: this woman, modest and unassuming as she is, was suddenly a hero in my eyes.

After what seemed like ages of walking through endless stalls of colourful saris and salwar kameezes with bright patterns of thin cotton, endlessly flowing fabrics and young salesboys shouting out “Madam! Madam!” while customers jockeyed for position and bargained over prices (which Sumi, by the way, turned out to be very good at), we emerged with dishtowels, ornas, trinkets and china. We found Aziz bhai in the car and took off… only to sit at the same traffic light for 8 continuous revolutions, watching it turn from red to green to red again, without moving an inch. Besides for the ever-present honking of horns, it was actually the most patient I had ever seen an entire road of traffic behave. As the cross-traffic refused to stop, our unruly cluster waited, an waited, and waited some more.

It was torture.

When we finally made it through that intersection 20 minutes later, things didn’t get much better. Traffic continued to ebb much more than it flowed. After crawling ever so slightly for what seemed like ages, we would roll once again to a dead and indefinite stop. “This is traffic situation in Bangladesh,” said Aziz bhai. After an hour, we had made it about halfway – back to Sumi’s home – and after another 10 minutes of stop-and-nearly-stop rickshaw backups, we made it onto some sort of a major road, from which rickshaws were blessedly banned. Suddenly the sporadic lane-markers returned, and with them the traffic directors instructing drivers to “stay in your lane and follow traffic lights,” and with it some temporary sense of order.

It all seemed so maddeningly clear. To avoid appearing racist, bigoted, or imperial, we westerners refuse to pass judgment on the cultures we don’t understand. We feel ashamed, somehow, to admit anything that we feel might be absolute. “An imposition,” our politically correct minds tell us, “of western values on a non-western society.” But sometimes it’s impossible not to do, not just when you think of a marriage arranged without love, but when you think of a society with little value for women beyond what they look like and how much money comes with them. It’s also quite hard not to pass judgment on a society whose people can’t figure out that cramming into the small space next to you at a perpendicular angle to the rest of the traffic is not going to cause you to reach your destination any faster.

Of course the danger here is making criticism absolute, and condemning everything in a society based on both the things you can’t understand and the things that drive you crazy because of their inherent “wrong-ness.” But then there is always a Sumi. Amidst the madness, somehow there is room for someone like Sumi: an independent woman, living in a man’s world, and refusing to seek the protection she has rightfully earned from her husband in the village. For this woman, something greater is her strength. She, somehow, makes it seem possible for all of these other things to change, and for the true beauty of such an upside-down society to shine through and all of its horrors to melt away.

“Do you think people will ever learn to follow these traffic rules?” I asked Aziz. “No,” he replied resolutely. “I think this is Bangladesh. This never change.”