DELTA FORCE

nder the shade of the mango trees, a group of students is sketching a staircase. Probably the most celebrated stairway in Dhaka, it is both graceful and complex, and connects two floors of the Faculty of Fine Arts, a venerated building created by the late architect Muzharul Islam. Since his death in 2012, Islam has been dubbed the founding father of Bangladeshi modernism, and the faculty, completed in 1955, was his first building. Impromptu sketching classes in this building are common; more than an act of homage, they also provide refuge from the sirens and relentless traffic that make up