The Grass Catcher

by Ian Wedde

  As luck would have it, Lina was the niece of one of my father’s team between 1954 and 1958. She worked as a liaison officer at the British High Commission and was an activist with a special interest in women’s rights and the issues of forced marriages and child prostitution. Much of her work, I learned, involved disabusing journalists bent on exposing the exploitation of young women in the garment-industry sweats. She’d take the journalists downriver to the floating brothels at Barisal on the Kirtankhola River, and let them see for themselves how the child prostitutes fared there: might it not be better to support the sweats, where young women could earn social value as well as money for their families, where they could avoid being married and having children at fifteen and sixteen, while people like Lina lobbied for good insurance schemes and safe working conditions?

  She got in touch with me because she’d heard on the grapevine that a journalist from New Zealand wanted to go up the Karnaphuli to the paper mill at Chandraghona where his father had worked when the mill first went into production in the early 1950s. The Rangamati area around the mill was pretty much closed off to foreigners. There had been ‘trouble’ there as a result of ongoing armed conflict between indigenous tribes and Bengali settlers in the Hill Tracts to the east; and gun-running between Bandarban in the hills and Kaptai where the dam had flooded vast areas of tribal land. But the ‘trouble’ also related to the mill itself. It had become a sensitive site after it was included in the WHO list of ‘catastrophic’ pollution zones – and, as I was to discover, because of skimming, stand-over and payroll-padding by dacoit, as they were usually called in the Bangladesh press: gangsters of various persuasions, some political, some religious and some (as at Chandraghona) associated with unions. Access to the mill was forbidden, especially to those on journalist visas.

  As she told me later, Lina was in a quandary. While not wishing to whitewash the problems of Bangladesh, and least of all the sweats, she was sick of dealing with journalists arriving with fixed agendas to expose corruption, labour exploitation, the endemic bombings, assassinations and violent political hartal, and especially the country’s spectacular urban poverty. But she was also the devoted niece and intellectual companion of the elderly Mr R.D. Qureshi who, as a young man of twenty-six, had joined my father’s team and was trained by him to be the Accounts Manager for marketing and shipping paper from the port at Chittagong.

  The mill had a long history of ‘trouble’ – it was rumoured to have been built so far upriver from Chittagong in order to have access to non-union labour. As Mr Qureshi put it in a letter he wrote me after we’d made contact, ‘Common laws of the country did not apply in the Hill Tracts, governed by special laws, so that formation of labour unions could be kept at bay.’ This may or may not have been true – it’s also possible the mill was sited to be upriver of tidal salination, which would have wrecked the pulping machinery ingesting rafts of bamboo. But soon after Mr Qureshi and the Wedde family from New Zealand arrived at the mill, there was a violent uprising of workers, in the course of which a number of managers were killed; the unrest wasn’t just a labour matter, but was also due to conflict between Urdu-speaking Pakistani bosses and foremen, and Bangla locals. The tension that would lead to the War of Liberation in 1971 was already building from its inciting incident on 21 February 1952, when students were killed by police during a pro-Bangla-language demonstration in Dhaka – the Ekushey moment I’d never heard about as a kid. All we knew about the riots at the mill back in 1954 was that for a few days some of ‘the Brigadier’s men’ were posted about the place with .303 rifles, and we had to stay inside.

  Nor had I ever heard of or bothered to find out about the huge popular impact of the Language Movement’s rallying text, the poem Kadte Ashini Fashir Dabi Niye Ashechi (‘I have come not to mourn but to appeal for hanging’), by the Chittagong writer and activist Mahbub Ul Alam Choudhury, whose funeral on 10 November 2007 was a national event; or the song ‘Amar Bhaier Rokte Rangano’ (‘My brothers’ blood splattered’) by Abdul Gaffar Choudhury, which is still sung every year at the probhat feri, or barefoot march, by hundreds of thousands to the Shaheed Minar martyrs’ memorial in Dhaka on Ekushey; or the great Bengali rebel poet and Tagore disciple Kazi Nazrul Islam, whose 1922 poem Bidrohi (‘Rebellion’) became the anthem of the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971.

  On 21 February 2005, I had Ekushey lunch with Mr Qureshi and his extended family. Qureshi was now retired, a seventy-seven-year-old haji, long-bearded, moustache-less, exquisitely courteous and very funny. As well as writing regular newspaper columns on popular music and film, he’d written a travel guide to the holy Muslim sites of Turkey. His name revealed that he was descended from the Arab Islamic missionaries who came to the Sylet region from Mecca 700 years ago. He remembered my father with affection and gave me back a letter Chick had written to him, congratulating him on his marriage in 1959. In return, I gave him a black-and-white photograph from my father’s vast collection: it showed the youthful, goateed R.D. Qureshi with my father and a number of the other trainees. We sat in Mr. Qureshi’s living room after exchanging these gifts, and shared the same box of tissues. Qureshi claimed it was his pipe-smoking that made his eyes water; we both knew better.

  Later in the day, I walked from my guest house along to a nearby traffic island to get a rickshaw across to the Shaheed Minar demonstrations, and passed a guy with a little bicycle-tyre repair shop. He’d made a papier-mâché model of the Shaheed Minar memorial, using what Mr Qureshi had earlier told me was a copy of a Bangla newspaper with Kazi Nazrul Islam’s famous poem in it. This was partly out of respect for the language martyrs, but also as insurance against the Awami League enforcers who were policing the general strike during the holiday. As the Bangladeshi historian Rafiuddin Ahmed put it, Bangladesh never believes anything until there is a poet to articulate it. And the authorities know this: Mahbub Ul Alam Choudhury’s poem, which had been printed clandestinely, was banned by the government, which issued a warrant for Choudhury’s arrest; he fled disguised in a woman’s burqa and remained in hiding for several months. It’s difficult for a poet accustomed to a low-key poetry culture such as New Zealand’s to comprehend the public scale and historical significance of poetry in Bengal. The nearest I’d come to it was in 1969–70, in the Middle East, where the poems of the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish were broadcast to attentive audiences on breakfast radio, fed the rhetoric of popular political protest and at the same time underwrote the cultural credibility of high-level diplomacy.

  Over the next month, as I began to learn about these things, it was as if I stepped a little way beyond the wall of privilege and ignorance that had surrounded me as a kid, and which I’d been content to live in up to the moment when I surrendered my passport and bag to the crowd at the Biman Bangladesh check-in counter – a moment denoting privilege articulated from below by hospitality, rather than from above by power. I was in a culture where private, introspective expression seemed like an oxymoron; where it was absurd to imagine any writer being unaware of 21 February as International Mother Language Day, and only slightly less absurd to imagine a writer with a history in Bangladesh being ignorant of the origins of International Mother Language Day in the Bangla Language Movement. Fifty years after beginning to become a writer, I re-encountered the perfect diagram of my childhood introspection: another kind of privileged compound; a home I had to leave again in order to understand what it had shut out.

  Lina wanted to discourage me from going up to the Rangamati region and the mill. But she knew that her uncle and I had to meet, and that Mr Qureshi would conspire to help me. I didn’t tell her I intended to go to the Hill Tracts as well. There were reports of foreigners being abducted there, and of armed confrontations between the army and tribal rebels. But behind these were blithe Parjatan promotions targeting Bengali holidaymakers, with excursions to the cool hills and to water sports on Kaptai Lake.

  It was late at night when I arrived in Dhaka, and outside the airport an enthusiastic demon
stration was underway behind a high security fence. Various competing loudspeakers were haranguing the mob, which was shouting at armed security forces, some of whose uniforms I would later recognise as belonging to the notorious RAB, or Rapid Action Brigade, most often involved in what the Bangladeshi press daintily called ‘crossfire’. What sounded like old-fashioned cherry-bomb firecrackers went off; some red smoke bombs blurred the lighting along the security fence; paper bags of flour were biffed over the fence and burst harmlessly near the security guys, who looked bored and sullen. The crowd resembled those you see at cricket matches in the subcontinent.

  When I got to the guest house I was staying in, I asked its manager, Parveen Prodhan, what the demonstration was about. Over the next few weeks I came to be in awe of her, and of her sidekick Justina Biswas. Their supply of information was phenomenal, as was their combination of entrepreneurialism and charm.

  ‘Was nothing,’ said Parveen airily, adding, ‘but hartal going to happen on fourteen and fifteen, better to stay here. Very good lunch. Cheap.’

  I soon began to find out what ‘was nothing’ meant. Like the language of Bangla poetry, Bangla political activism and the demonstrations that express it are at once dramatic and commonplace.

  On 9 February 2005, the day after I arrived, 30,000 male workers from eight jute mills in the Kulna-Jessore industrial belt formed a human chain in bare feet and sleeveless undershirts. All were carrying empty earthenware plates. A similar human chain had been formed the day before at Rajghat, in Jessore’s Abhoynagar upazila, or administrative district. In Dhaka, the opposition party Awami League’s supporters, unofficially led by Asma Kibria, widow of the assassinated former Awami League finance minister Shah A.M.S. Kibria, repeatedly formed human chains, holding kilometres-long banners inscribed with poems. So did those silently protesting at the ongoing killings of journalists, especially after the death from bombing of the Khulna journalist Sheikh Belalludin on 11 February.

  Such peaceful demonstrations don’t rule out rioting. The ordinariness of violent unrest was captured in a Dhaka Daily Star newspaper headline following the first day of the two-day hartal on 14 and 15 February – the days Parveen had suggested I spend having affordable lunch at her place: ‘Street show-off ends without confrontation’.

  In fact, fifteen people were injured in Tangail; BNP activists ransacked the Awami League’s Bogra office where they set fire to papers and burned the portraits of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (the Father of the Nation) and the woman leader of the Awami League opposition, the phenomenally energetic Sheikh Hasina. The ‘without confrontation’ included ten people injured in Moulvibazar; 10,000 extra security forces mobilised in the capital; bombs thrown at a railway crossing, a bus stop, and near Golap Shah Mazar in Gulistan. Numerous police baton-charges were reported off-handedly in the press. Baton-wielding police tried to arrest women picketers at Russell Square in Dhaka but were beaten back by Awami League leaders, and Awami League women activists were forced by police to parade blindfolded and tied together with rope through the streets at Meer Hazirbagh. On the second day of this hartal non-event, a Valentine’s Day crowd at Dhaka University was hit by four bombs, with sixteen people injured and a subsequent student strike. The bombs were left in potato-chip packets and went off when trampled.

  I kept my head down during hartals and once took lunchtime refuge in a kebab shop after an explosion nearby. It was probably a large firework intended to frighten, but people cleared out quickly into adjoining side streets. The kebab shop was pretending to be closed by keeping its lights turned off, but its owner served me delicious fiery chicken with bhaji and gave me a box of rose-scented tissues. A couple of loud fireworks also went off the day I attended the Ekushey rally at the Shaheed Minar; an estimated million people were there, and the explosions hardly registered. They weren’t reported in the press.

  During all this, I went through various processes of getting (or not getting) official bits of paper giving me access to the Rangamati region, to the mill itself and to the insurgent Chittagong Hill Tracts. Later, I forked out extra cash for obscurely sourced documents from the local upazila official in Chandraghona allowing me to be there after I’d already spent the day with members of the paper mill’s management. Like the disturbances, these arrangements seemed both crazy and organised.

  I kept count of the rising number of ‘cross-fire’ killings in shoot-outs between political cadres, dacoit gangsters and the RAB (in the region of 350 killed in my first couple of weeks there). I talked to different kinds of people, including aid workers and corporate textile consultants, retired state bureaucrats from the days of the Language Martyrs in 1952 and the Freedom Fighters in 1971, and I collected accounts of extraordinary probity and patriotism, and of massive corruption.

  I planned to write an article about all this, and I talked myself into believing I was doing research for my ‘home’ book – filling in the world beyond the compound of my childhood home. But what I began to notice on a daily basis was something different; something I remembered. The vivid memory of sweeping and sorting was what opened the door to my childhood home at Chandraghona.

  In Bangladesh, sweeping is an art form every bit as ubiquitous as demonstrating or poetry. Even in slums built on and out of the refuse of the cities, among the bushti shelters along the railway, on the road to Narayanganj, in the garbage heaps on the road to Comilla – in fact, surviving on the resources of the dumps – there are clear margins where the swept human space ends.

  Everywhere things are sorted, stacked, piled and arranged: bamboo bundled and graded by diameters, new-season bricks (brickmaking in Bangladesh is seasonal because of the rains), stooks of thatch, cowpats. Chaotic in motion, the rickshaws somehow always end up with front wheels aligned when waiting in rows. Things are bundled, basketed and bagged; the baskets are themselves patterned and stacked, or arranged in rows. The bags are recycled and endlessly rewashed: from trains, you see jute gunny-sacks and their more contemporary synthetic-fibre cousins drying in rows by village ponds and city canals.

  The kids selling freshly scraped and sliced carrots and cucumbers along the roadsides and by city parks and traffic roundabouts have arranged them in circular patterns on wide bamboo trays; when a customer buys some, the carrot wheel is rearranged. Elaborately symmetrical, giant flower arrangements being taken home in rickshaws on Valentine’s Day, despite the hartal; marigolds and zinnias on the Saraswati puja which combines rites for the Hindu goddess of knowledge with the traditional Bangladeshi spring festival; the immense arrangements of flowers at the Shaheed Minar memorial for Ekushey Language Martyrs Day. The beautifully patterned spatial and communal orderliness of the rice paddies; the frugal symmetry and serial construction of my airy, creaking, all-bamboo house-on-stilts high above the Sangu River in the smoky Chittagong Hill Tracts.

  ‘We must clean the path,’ wrote Rubana Huq, a forceful businesswoman and social entrepreneur. Huq’s industry was textiles and clothing, and she was writing in the Daily Star about the need to identify Bangladesh’s economic niche in the face of the giant sweats of China, India’s cooption of the high fashion market and the advance of automation. ‘Clean the path’ is a brilliantly apt exhortation to a culture whose genius is to do that every day in a million small ways. It is a clever, patriotic but not nationalist appeal to Bengal’s history as ‘Shonar’ – golden, once the richest country in the world (Marco Polo said so), where whole new principalities of absurdly fertile silt, the char islands of the great delta, will materialise after the monsoon floods and are likely to disappear along with their transient populations without ever being captured in a census. Bengal, once the world’s leader in textiles and weaving, always the world’s only supplier of jute, was consigned to the ranks of ‘Least Developed Nations’ by nineteenth-century British textile tariffs and the colonial administration’s political and religious divisiveness.

  ‘We must clean the path’ is also a brilliant way of eliding everyday sweeping and ordering with the m
illion-times-repeated 2-thaka (8 NZ cents) transactions that constitute the exact and frugal social logic of Bangladesh’s survivalist culture.

  My father, an optimist by nature and an instinctive collectivist in his economic practice, always spoke affectionately of the social warmth and enterprise of the small-business cultures he worked with, while pouring angry scorn on their inevitable nepotisms, back-handers and grifting. In noticing all this, it was as though I finally stepped out of the circumscribed compound home of my childhood in that place, where the sound of sweeping had always begun early, along with the smell of water sprinkled on dust. I was able to look at it not just through the emotional lens of memory, but with a sense of liberation and understanding.

  Parveen Prodhan, the manager of my little guest house in Dhaka, was a good paradigm of the world beyond my cloistered childhood home. Shrewd, efficient and constantly inventing commercial opportunities, her dazzling smile usually signalled a bright, value-adding idea.

  ‘Not to worry, no need to pack, pay half rate, nobody is going in only me,’ was her suggestion when I left with a small shoulder-bag to catch the train to Chittagong, and wanted to store the rest of my stuff and save on the room. To read that smile as an outrageous invitation to bargain would have been a big mistake. ‘Is your home away from home, isn’t it, Mr Ian?’

  Yes, it was, and when I came back a couple of weeks later with a grubby, recycled synthetic-fibre poultry-food bag full of overflow stuff from Chandraghona and Bandarban, there was a fresh packet of tissues in my little room, my laundered socks were tied together with pink thread and labelled ‘Mr. Ian’, and there was a fresh micro-cake of rose-extract soap next to the thundering cold-water shower. It was a good deal; what’s more she knew I could afford it, since, though I travelled and lived ridiculously cheaply, I was a millionaire in the real terms of on-the-street benchmark Tk2 transactions.