<i>In the shadows of violence</i>

It was mid-afternoon. Gulshan-1 roundabout was still strewn with debris from the rioting a couple of hours back.
Nearby, a 39-year-old man was talking animatedly to a small crowd.
“Now who will compensate for my losses?” the man, Sheikh Sadi, was actually asking himself, not those who had gathered in front of his spectacles shop vandalised by the marauding garment workers.
“I'm paying for someone else's problem,” he said, as one of his employees was sweeping shards of glass off the floor.
Pointing at the trashed exterior of his shop on the ground floor at Navana Tower, Sadi claimed he had suffered a loss of around Tk 12 lakh.
“I have no insurance on the shop, which is the result of my labour and savings for years,” he added.
Like him, many shop owners watched helplessly as the workers demonstrating against the government-announced minimum wage rampaged through roadside malls in Tejgaon, Mohakhali, Gulshan-1 and 2.
“We would have been spared the brunt, if no garment factories had been allowed in the city,” observed Sadi.
Gulshan Avenue, which is usually teeming with shoppers on Friday, was a deserted-looking site for most of the day. Shopkeepers kept their shutters rolled down till late in the afternoon.
It was a different Friday for sales staff. Instead of serving customers, they were busy cleaning shops left littered with broken glass.
“If things were normal, we would not have time to talk to you,” a salesman at a Bata store told this correspondent.
Some shop operators were venting their anger at the role police played. They said the law enforcers could easily have stopped the demonstrators entering Gulshan, the posh quarter which rarely sees such vandalism.
“The chaos could have been averted, had the government been alert,” said Kazi Akhtaruzzaman, in-charge of Athena's, a furniture and home décor shop.
It was a sentiment shared by many.
“Police had wireless. What did they do when the protesters were marching down to Gulshan from Mohakhali?”asked Sadi.
Doing business in a diplomatic zone, they never thought they would have a day like this, he added.
Shibly Nomani of Lighting Palace at Habib Supermarket in Gulshan said police tried little to disperse the demonstrators.