by Holly Watt
Snug in the black Land Cruiser, Casey cracked open a bottle of ice-cold water, and leaned her head back against the plush headrest. ‘Would you arrange a car for us down to Cox’s Bazar tomorrow?’ Casey put on Emily’s confidence like a coat. ‘It would be so helpful.’
Raz would expect them to be driven. In Dhaka, the Bengali elite were driven everywhere by a chauffeur. With at least one bodyguard, and the horn blaring. Quite often they travelled in convoys, in a cloud of weed and coke.
‘If you want to go to Cox’s Bazar,’ said Raz, ‘it would be much easier for you to fly. The highways, they can be very dangerous.’
Casey stared out of the car window. Men sat on white plastic chairs in the shade of the motorway bridges, watching the world go by.
‘Oh, but I would so love to see some of the countryside,’ Casey protested. ‘You don’t see anything from the plane. You might as well be anywhere. In fact’ – she dipped her head like a princess – ‘could you arrange for us to take the train from Dhaka down to Chittagong, and then a car onwards? It’ll be an adventure.’
‘Of course,’ Raz smiled round at her. ‘It would be no problem.’
In the smart Dhanmondi district, they passed through airport sensors before checking into the hotel. Security in Dhaka had jumped after an attack on a restaurant just a few years earlier, when the militants stormed in, and sprayed the crowd with bullets, not champagne. So now a bored security guard ambled round the car, checking for bombs with a mirror.
‘He would never find a thing,’ Raz whispered back at them, so that Casey almost grinned.
A tired hotel receptionist stared at Emily’s passport for a long moment, and Casey felt her heart rate surge.
‘It’s so exciting to be here at last,’ Casey beamed at the receptionist, lighting up the room. ‘Have you worked here long?’
The receptionist smiled back, not understanding the patter of English.
‘You are most welcome to the Rose Petal Inn,’ she recited. ‘Here is your keycard.’
‘I will message you later,’ Raz said. ‘About the train journey.’
And he was gone.
Their room was generously sized, and could have been anywhere. There was one bed. Ed looked at it.
‘I can sleep on the floor again.’
They laughed, Casey meeting his eye for the first time since they got off the plane. You promised.
‘I can go downstairs and tell them that Mr Burton-Smith snores like a train if you want,’ offered Casey. ‘And that I must sleep alone.’
‘It’s fine,’ said Ed. ‘I don’t mind if you’re OK.’
‘I’m so shattered,’ Casey yawned. ‘I’ll just pass out.’
‘And we won’t be here very long anyway,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, thinking. ‘Raz said the baby would be brought to Dhaka. And that means the mother is somewhere else at the moment.’
It was odd, averting her eyes as he changed. When Ed went for a shower, Casey hurried to the mirror, peering at herself pensively.
‘Why didn’t Miranda come out to Dhaka?’ Ed came out of the bathroom, rubbing his hair dry. ‘I think some of that bloody dye is coming out, you know. I’m going patchy.’
‘She’s tied up in London,’ Casey said quickly. ‘And she thought Hessa could use the experience, anyway.’
‘Sure.’ He tugged off the silky bedspread. The air conditioning sighed.
Casey lay down beside him, careful not to touch.
‘Are you sleeping all right at the moment?’ she asked into the silence.
‘Are you?’
‘No,’ she said quietly.
‘Well then.’
They lay side by side in the dark. He was so close, solid in the dark. The room fell into silence. Casey listened to his breathing, and longed to reach out and touch him. The traffic roared outside, and she knew that he lay awake for hours.
33
They jumped awake when the telephone rang beside Ed’s head.
‘Mr Burton-Smith?’ It was Raz. ‘I am sorry to bother you, but the express train to Chittagong, it goes very early.’
‘That’s OK.’ Ed was rubbing his eyes. ‘We’ll be down in a minute.’
Even at this early hour, the traffic in Dhaka was solid.
‘There are fewer crashes than you’d think,’ Raz shrugged. ‘But still a lot of crashes.’
In the dawn, the station was packed.
‘How will we get on board?’ Ed said, as a train pulled into the station, and the huge crowd surged forward.
‘Not this train,’ said Raz. ‘This one is for Sylhet.’
That was where Hessa’s family was from originally, thought Casey, where the tea plantations rolled green for miles.
A wave of passengers flooded across the platform as the train stopped. They crammed through the carriage doors, pushing their way further and further into the train, squeezing into every inch. Packages, parcels, a baby, all were passed over the heads of the crowd. As the train pulled away, so slowly, men were still wedging themselves on board, hanging on to the doors with all their strength.
But the people fell away for Raz, Casey saw, when the next train arrived. The crowd edged back, as he paced through towards their carriage.
‘No problem, you see,’ he smiled, as they stepped into a first-class compartment. ‘And at the other end, our driver will meet you.’
‘You’ve been so kind,’ said Casey. ‘Thank you very much.’
It was beautiful, travelling slowly through the Bangladesh countryside. The rice was growing in the paddies now, impossibly green in the neatest of rows. Between the lines of emerald seedlings, water glittered in the sun. Here and there were small villages perched high up on embankments, peering out among mango trees and date palms. Between the villages, raised roads snaked through watery fields. Occasionally, the roads meandered all the way to solitary shacks built out on tiny islands, right in the middle of the paddies.
Low-lying Bangladesh, delta nation, half-needing, half-dreading the floods.
In the little villages, minarets poked out above stands of bamboo. Small boys raced the train, giggling to themselves. Casey pointed out the brick factories to Ed, with the high chimneys belching smoke into the air.
The station names were like charms. Srinidhi, men bent double in the rice fields. Gangasagar, detergent bubbling in a waterfall. Laksam Junction, a goat wandering down the platform. The train rolling on, waved forwards, solemnly, by a stationmaster in a black suit with a green flag. He kept his red flag firmly wrapped up. At lunchtime, a man came down the train, selling the sweet milky coffee that made Casey’s brain fizz. And finally, the buildings grew closer together, and, slowly, so slowly, the train rolled into the suburbs of Chittagong.
The man who met them off the train was a surprise.
‘Dylan.’ He shook Casey’s hand hard, audibly Australian.
He was dark-haired, very tanned, with shocking blue eyes. A Bangladeshi parent, Casey guessed.
‘How was the train?’ he asked curtly. ‘It’s a long way.’
‘We wanted to see the countryside.’ Casey smiled at him. ‘It was fascinating.’
‘I’ve organised a car to take you down to Cox’s right now.’ Dylan was brisk, tough, wasted few words. ‘It’s just outside the station.’
A Rolex gleamed on Dylan’s wrist, as he gestured towards the car. Another black Land Cruiser, again with no markings. A Bangladeshi man hopped out, and rushed towards them. The driver was very nervous around Dylan, Casey saw, quite subservient.
‘It’s about four hours to Cox’s from here.’ Dylan tapped on the roof of the car, as soon as their bags were stowed. ‘You’ve sorted a hotel?’
‘Yes,’ said Ed. ‘It’s all done.’
The car accelerated away.
In a drifting sea mist, Cox’s Bazar was apocalyptic. At some point, years ago, the property developers had rushed here, hoping to make their fortune from the old resort.
They began building high-rise hotel
s, dozens of them. But then some crisis erupted overnight, and the hotels were left abandoned, half-built.
They looked haunted, now. Some of the buildings had rows and rows of blank dead-eyed windows. Others had just a few concrete storeys completed, and an empty skeleton of steel sagging above. Rubbish piled up along the road.
One hotel, almost finished, had been squatted by dozens of families. Bright clothes fluttered on a balcony, where some architect had probably dreamed once of all-modern-comforts, a-magical-seaview. Children grinned down from the hotel roof as Casey and Ed passed. Hello mister, hello mister.
Here and there, a few labourers worked sporadically, their drills on concrete jagging the air. Further down the street, fishermen paced to and fro in what would have been an huge ornamental lake in the fantasy version of Cox’s Bazar. A curve of hotels, half-built, circled the lake. The fishermen smoked as they hunted. The catch was sold in the market just a few yards from the lakes. All along the road to their hotel, the fish were hung up to dry in long lines. The stink was overpowering.
The NGO signs were everywhere. Save the Children in one hotel, Oxfam in the next.
‘This,’ Ed looked around him, ‘is the country’s resort?’
The beach was beautiful though, golden sand rolling south towards the Burmese border. The fishing boats, sailing home through the dusk, were half-drowned crescent moons.
‘Watch out for the quicksand,’ grinned one of the hustlers. ‘We lose a few tourists every year at Cox’s.’
At the hotel, Casey rushed up to their room, switching on her laptop.
‘There.’ She pointed at the screen.
As the car was driving down towards Cox’s Bazar, Casey had edged a tiny tracker between the car seat and the floor.
‘Isn’t that risky?’ asked Ed now.
‘I think these men must have quite a big operation,’ Casey explained. ‘With different divisions running out of Dhaka and Chittagong. I thought that they might send a different car for us, if we got the train down to Chittagong. A car based down this end of the country, rather than up in Dhaka. And with any luck, that car will now head back up to Chittagong. And then it might be parked up overnight, somewhere near wherever those girls are.’
‘I suppose it might,’ Ed put the same emphasis on might. ‘But what if they find the tracker?’
‘Did you see how the driver reacted to Dylan?’ asked Casey. ‘Fear. I reckon that Dylan has plenty of enemies. Even if they find it, they won’t know the tracker came from us.’
Tapping her computer, Casey updated the tracker location again. It was 20 miles up the road, at Eidgaon, stuck in slow-moving traffic.
‘OK,’ Ed lay back on the bed, exhausted. ‘Let’s see where it goes.’
She nudged him awake five hours later.
‘It’s arrived,’ she whispered. ‘It’s parked in Sagorika.’
Sagorika was a sprawling industrial zone, just to the north of central Chittagong. Dozens of factories lined the dusty roads, and thousands of workers poured in and out of them every single day.
They aren’t as bad as they used to be, the factory bosses say defensively. But Casey had heard the stories about the Bangladesh garment factories for years.
Small children, splashing through so much bleach that their hands and feet turned white. Women coughing in the chemical air, until the blood spattered red.
And the Rana Plaza, of course, when eight storeys pancaked down into one. Over a thousand people died that day in Savar, when the vast factory collapsed.
All around the world, people wore clothes from the Rana Plaza. It had supplied so many shops, from Bonmarché to Benetton, Mango to Monsoon. They found so many pretty rags in the rubble.
The workers had tried to protest, that morning. They were ordered back to their machines, although you could see the cracks in the walls by then. A month’s salary gone, if you miss just one day, they were told. Get back to work. Get back to work. Get back to work, right now.
The overseers carried sticks too, just in case.
And down came the factory, with a mountain’s roar.
The rescue took days. One woman, afterwards, told how she was passed a hacksaw to cut off her own arm. It took hours, she said, trapped under a steel beam. She would saw a bit, pass out, come round.
Casey was back in Chittagong before dawn, driven through the night in an old taxi she found a few blocks from their hotel. On her screen she had watched the Land Cruiser manoeuvre round the north-west of the city, before coming to a halt in the industrial area. And the moment it parked, Casey was on her way.
Hessa was waiting in a faded business hotel, near the centre of Chittagong, her face lighting up as Casey arrived.
‘Welcome to Chittagong,’ Casey grinned. ‘We’ve got to hurry.’
34
It had been odd, flying into Dhaka on her own, Hessa thought. Odd not to have her whole family around her, bickering, squabbling, and being met at the airport by a dozen more relatives. Waiting for Casey’s call, she had drifted around and around Gulshan Park. Clockwise, the way they always had. Hessa stared at the pink flowers, and the red roses, and the steep, lush banks sliding down to the sludgy green lake, and wondered.
You have to choose.
She crossed back and forth over the bridges as the joggers ran past. All around the park, she noticed the old buildings replaced by the new. She felt a jolt of sadness at the loss, even though she barely remembered the old ones.
I never had this life, so why do I miss it?
It was easy to blend in, almost. She went to the shops, bought some clothes. A sari, orange and pink. A shawl, the chips of diamante glittering as she moved. Gold earrings, dangling nearly to her shoulders.
You have to choose.
Three girls were in the changing room, chatting about last Saturday and next Saturday and the Saturday after that. Hessa’s conversations, in London.
I never had those friends, so why do I miss them?
She wondered about her mother, a lifetime ago. Did she gossip with her friends, just like this? Hold up the shiny earrings, the long bright sari? I was never here, so why do I have these memories?
Hessa was relieved to hear from Casey. Fly to Chittagong, Hessa, as soon as possible. She had barely unpacked a thing. It took her only a moment to leave that dark hotel room.
In the Chittagong dawn, Hessa and Casey focused on the building where the black Land Cruiser had parked for the night. It was a big white structure that took up a whole block, five floors high. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling, to let in as much light as possible.
A wall of blue corrugated iron, 15 feet high, ran right the way round the factory. Casey tried to peer through, but couldn’t make out any of the factory’s features. The Land Cruiser was there though, parked up right next to the entrance.
‘What’s the factory called?’ Casey couldn’t read the Bengali alphabet.
‘Arakny . . .’ Hessa struggled with the word. ‘Incorporated. It doesn’t mean anything, I don’t think. It’s just a word.’
The company’s logo was a stylised oak leaf. Casey photographed it, just in case. ‘I wonder if this is where the red skirt and your grey velvet jacket were made.’
They were sitting in a rainbow-painted tuk-tuk. The grille that fitted around the passengers was closed up. The grilles were usually shut to deter bag-snatchers, who preyed on the traffic as it slowed, but it shielded them well here. Pink plastic flowers with big green leaves were twined through the steel mesh.
‘The women might be in there,’ said Casey.
‘They might,’ agreed Hessa.
The tuk-tuk’s driver was staring into space, exhausted by a night of driving across the city.
‘Do you think you can . . .’ Casey began.
You have to choose.
‘Of course,’ and Hessa’s eyes slanted into a smile.
35
Two hours later, Hessa was at the gate to the factory. The workers had crowded in by then, flooding throug
h the door in their hundreds. One woman sat close to the gate, hands out in the international gesture of desperation. Her face had been terribly burned, the skin pulled tight, her mouth a slit. She turned blank eyes at the sound of Hessa’s steps. Please, please, help me.
Hessa was wearing an old blue sari, bought in a dusty shop a few roads away. She had a pale orange shawl wrapped around her head, and fraying grey sandals on her feet.
‘What do you want?’ The door clanged open and a man stared her up and down.
‘A job,’ Hessa said quietly. Talk quietly, Casey had taught her. It’s harder to pin down an accent from a whisper.
‘This is not how we employ people here,’ the man said. ‘We have proper agents.’
Not the voice, Hessa thought. You are not the voice on the telephone.
The man moved to close the gate.
‘I beg you.’ Hessa put a choke into her voice.
The man paused. He made a show of staring at his watch, and gave a long sigh. ‘All right,’ he stood aside. ‘Maybe it is possible, this once. We may have some vacancies.’
They walked towards the factory. There were no other buildings in this compound. Rust stains ran down the white walls from cheap windows, like red tears. Rubbish blew in circles, chased by a hot wind.
‘You have skills?’
Hessa bowed her head.
‘Where are you from?’
‘A little village near Sylhet,’ whispered Hessa. ‘You wouldn’t know it.’
‘I thought I didn’t know your accent.’ He was pleased with himself. ‘You are not from Chittagong.’
‘No.’
They walked into the factory, and the noise hit Hessa like a slap. It was brutally hot, the air choked by desperate sweat and sour chemicals.
The women, packed together in row after row, sat crouched over their sewing machines. The girl closest to the door glanced up. She wore a small dust mask, her eyes above dark with exhaustion. She was very young, Hessa thought, probably lying about her age. No one would check if she was really eighteen: that much they all knew.
On the table to one side of the girl’s sewing machine, a pile of floral material lay in neat shapes. Pink hearts, blue arrows. The girl picked up two pieces, tucked them together and whirred them through the machine. Mummy’s little princess, read a tiny T-shirt.
