The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  The Ostrich was scheduled to leave at 5:45 the next evening, so I gave myself two hours to get to Sadar Ghat, but a block from the river the taxi stopped, totally surrounded by cars and rickshaws and pedestrians and horses and donkeys and motorcycles. “I can’t get any closer, boss,” the driver said. I pulled my bags out, and was set upon as if I were a fumbled football by a dozen crazed porters wanting to carry my bags. I grabbed one, handed him my bag—two other guys pounced on him, trying to rip them off his shoulders, but we fought them off and plunged into the crowd. Down a set of muddy, trash-strewn concrete stairs, fires burning on the banks, and onto a floating steel pier, the ferries docked bow-in, a line of them stretching for two hundred yards. And across a wooden gangplank onto the Ostrich, which was now a teeming city herself, gorged with people. I picked my way over them and through them, up a narrow wooden stairway, to four wooden doors near the stern—my second-class cabin. I’m not sure why, but I’d decided to take a bed. It was a moment of weakness; I’d slept on a lot of floors, had been squished and elbowed for months and I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. Or so I convinced myself. Looking at that steel floor, I’d forked over the cash for a bed. The man who’d showed me around the day before appeared; now he was wearing a red double-breasted jacket and black slacks. “I’m Ashisha,” he said, “and I am the first-class steward. You are welcome to eat in first class if you’d like. And if you need anything, anything at all, then you just tell me.”

  Under a moon full and round and almost gauzy in the tropical night, the Ostrich shuddered and thumped, and we pulled out into the current. Boats were everywhere in the river, lit with flickering oil lamps. I leaned on the rail, and young men crowded around me, thousands of insects buzzing around the bare lightbulb on deck.

  “Do you have an agent here?” asked a young man who introduced himself as Nipu Hossain.

  “An agent? For what?”

  “For tours, hotels, tickets. I can get those things for you instantly. And if you see something interesting, something you like, a sample of cloth, say, I can ship it. You and me. We can have a good business. You need a business partner.”

  “No thanks,” I said, explaining that I was just traveling.

  “Business can be good!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not interested in any business.”

  “This is very easy, and the profits can be large.”

  I looked him in the eye. “I’m not going into any business with you.”

  “Yes, I see,” he said. “But the profits can be very good. All you have to do is to take my card and if you, say, have a friend who likes things and if you connect us, I will give you a percentage. As a gift!”

  We slid past a mile of shipyards, steel hull after steel hull appearing as dark shadows on the beach, sparks flying from welders’ torches, flashes of heat lightning in the blue-black sky. Nipu and Sunam Roy, twenty-five, taught me Bangla. Ami cha chai: I would like some tea. Dhonno baad: thank you. Dam koto: how much?

  “We are so poor,” said Roy, who lived in Chandpur with three families in a single room. “Culture is all we have.”

  I suggested we have some tea, and we walked into the center of the ship, jammed with huddled masses on the floor. At one end stood a counter piled with packs of cookies and chips and nuts, sodas, a kettle of boiling water on one side and a man sitting cross-legged on the top, in front of a wooden cash box. I asked for a cup of tea, and men moved over, making room for us on the single bench reserved for tea drinkers in front of the stand. “Foreigner,” I heard, rippling through the crowd. We were tight, hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder on the bench, touching, always touching, in every passageway and in front of the snack bar. I asked about so many sinking ferries, and mentioned the statistic that a thousand a year drowned.

  “It’s not so many,” said Roy. “And most get afraid and lose their senses. Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Where is your family?”

  I tried to explain that I was traveling for work, but even that left them puzzled. I was feeling a little testy; it was hard to keep open to the crowds and the same questions all the time.

  “Aren’t you cold?” they asked. The night was balmy and warm, but they shivered. “It is winter!” they said.

  The hours ticked by and the men pressed in. I was surrounded all the time, the questions thrown over and over again: Where was I from? Was I alone? Why? What did I think of Obama? Finally I escaped to bed.

  At midnight I awoke to cocks crowing. At 5:00 a.m. my roommate’s cell phone rang. At six I went out on deck, to a pink horizon, thick clumps of green water hyacinths floating in the khaki river. We turned up another river at eight, hard against wide expanses of swamped land in which water buffalo waded, past rice fields and thatched shacks, from which men, women, and children emerged to stare at the old steamer throbbing by.

  The snack-bar cashier never moved, sitting cross-legged on the bar in front of his box all day and night, and he gave me a discount. In a corner a man stood talking into a microphone, his voice booming and distorted, the deck so crowded it was hard to move. A pair of teenage girls covered in black, only their brown eyes showing, sat on the tea bench, their eyes swooping over everything, and me, staring at me, elbowing each other, taking it all in. “That man is selling medicine,” said a man with a long beard and skullcap. “Take it and you will feel better! I don’t believe it, though.”

  His name was Hasan, and he’d just retired after fourteen years as a bellman at the Intercontinental Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “I will now go into the stock business,” he said. “I will buy, hold, and then sell. In Saudi, it is a Muslim country. A woman can’t go out without a head covering, but my country is a little bit more free.”

  “Which do you like better?” I asked.

  “Well, we are a Muslim country so that is our way, but a little bit more free is good.”

  Around lunchtime, Ashisha appeared, inviting me into the first-class salon. I felt guilty, but I went anyway, cutting through the massed humanity, the jumbles, opened a door, and passed into another world full of Western children playing Monopoly and men and women who looked just like me, playing guitars and munching on cheese and crackers under the veranda on the bow. The women’s hair flew in the wind, free, bare arms outlined in tight, short-sleeved T-shirts. Barefoot. Suddenly I saw them through the eyes of the men and women in their flowing robes and head coverings—so free, so cavalier with their bodies, no wonder men equated that with “easy.” The children shouted at the waiters imperiously and climbed on the rails like they owned the ship. Everyone had space to lounge and spread on the sofas and big, comfortable chairs. It was a different world entirely, and it shocked me. I had barely spoken to another westerner in a month. They were so easy, so relaxed, so unhindered; they were like candy, like a drug, like an unbelievable luxury; five minutes in their presence and I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to sprawl on the wicker sofa, sip a glass of wine, nibble on familiar crackers and cheddar, watch the children, who reminded me so much of my own. I wanted to hug them and tousle their hair. I wanted to talk and talk and talk, about whatever came to mind, without carefully picking my words. But I had to leave. It was like when I was reading and suddenly looked up in the Indian train, and couldn’t believe where I was. But this was worse. It felt heartbreaking. Instead of that wild feeling I got bursting into the Amazon, I felt weary and homesick. I wanted my own children laughing and playing Monopoly and my own friends drinking wine. I had to run away; if I didn’t I would have been swallowed up. And this was the worst part: hanging out with them threatened my ability to tolerate the tea stand amid the multitudes and the crushing solitude of the crowd and the unremitting poverty, which I didn’t even notice when that was all I saw. Up in first class the contrast was too great.

  I asked Ashisha if I might see the captain, and he took me up a flight of stairs to the roof and a small wooden pilot house, and introduced me to Captain Lutfas Rahman, wearing blue denim jeans and
jacket, buttoned up tight despite the ninety-degree heat, sitting cross-legged on the wooden chart shelf. The pilot house was simple: a big old wooden wheel and brass throttle, replaced by two stainless steel levers when the Ostrich had been converted from coal to diesel in 1995; a GPS and a compass. It had no radar. I asked him if the Ostrich was a good ship.

  “No!” he said. “An old ship! A paddle-wheel ship is useless now; where in the world is a paddle ship used? Nowhere but Bangladesh!” He almost spat the words out. Shook his head. The Ostrich was owned by the government, which had no money. At least, he said, it was safe; it was the private launches that sank.

  “I would like a new, modern ship. With a screw instead of paddles.” He’d been on the water a long time, starting as a deckhand in 1976, and he saw his wife and children in Dhaka every Sunday evening and Monday morning, before returning to Khulna again. It was a good job, but the pay was bad. “In Dubai I could make 150,000 taka [about $2,000], but here the government gives me just 20,000 taka [$290] a month. And there are no instruments on this ship so we rely only on my experience, and the rivers change all the time. I have seen many cyclones in my life. I have seen man, cow, horses, floating in the river going to the sea. I look and think, but I cannot help. I can only cry my eyes.”

  . . .

  I WANDERED out of the pilot house and sat on the wooden walkway across the Ostrich’s roof, my feet hanging off the side, watching the river flow past. It was late afternoon. Quiet. The river silvery blue, the banks green and lush. The sun strong, beating down; beads of sweat rolled down my back and my forehead. I wasn’t alone long, though. A young man climbed the stairs, saw me, and came over. He wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, and had a satchel strung over his shoulder. I braced myself for another wheeler-dealer, but Rokibal Islam was different. He was just nineteen, on his way from home to university. He was smart. Bright-eyed. And he told such a sad story, a story so common in places like Bangladesh. His father was the principal of the local high school. “But he was very, very honest. He believed in honesty, always. He told us that money wasn’t everything, that you should not be greedy.” But his honesty was challenged all the time. “Always people wanted money for his promotion. But he would not pay. They couldn’t fire him, but they could transfer him. So they transferred him all the time and he rode his bicycle to many different schools. Once he was offered a job as a forest supervisor, but it was a corrupt job and he didn’t take it and gave the job to a friend who is very rich now. He has four houses in Dhaka City.” Instead, his father died of cancer when Rokibal was fourteen. “We were so poor,” he said. “We had no money for tutors and then we had no money for school, even.” Rokibal read on his own, studied on his own, at home. He missed a year of school. But he muscled his way back, graduating third in his class. And now he was at university and thinking of a master’s degree.

  At first I’d been worried, when he told me how poor he was, that he’d ask me for money, for help with a visa; so many did and I could do nothing for them. I felt guilty that those requests annoyed me. But he never mentioned it, and as the day turned to dusk and the river became a world of shadows for a few minutes, Rokibal told me about dating and dreaming and struggling, opening a crack into his world. He had a girlfriend, sort of, that he called on his cell phone, but it was no more than a little bit of talking back and forth. He would eventually marry someone arranged by his mother. “Yes, of course,” he said, frowning slightly. “There is no other way.”

  IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT when we docked at Khulna. We squeezed and jostled through the Ostrich, out over bouncing wooden planks, and onto dirt streets, dark and rutted. I spent three days in Khulna and it felt like the end of the world. I didn’t know what day it was, what day of the week even; I had lost track of them. I was feeling just more and more out there, somewhere, alone on the planet. Tourists didn’t come to Khulna, or not many of them, anyway. My plan had been to take the Rocket to Khulna, then find a local ferry farther south toward the ocean, deeper in. I asked my hotel the name of the port and climbed in a bicycle rickshaw and off he pedaled. There were few cars, which made it quiet. Hazy. Cool, dust in the air, on the streets, the rickshaw, the storefronts, everything. Toward the river, we bumped slowly—the pedaler straining, sweating, slower than walking—over potholed dirt streets lined with trucks in swirling red and blue and yellow, and handcarts piled twenty feet high with barrels and PVC pipes. Cows and goats wandered and munched on garbage and piles of pineapple stalks and sugar cane. We passed open shops stacked with metal sheeting, and factories welding steel cabinets and bed frames, men in salwar kameezes and lunghis, and women in black burqas. Rubble and chickens and people, people everywhere, thick and pungent. Once off the rickshaw, though, I couldn’t find any ticket office, anybody who spoke English and could help me. Launches lined the wharf, but no one knew anything—just stares and shaking heads from old wrinkled men with few teeth and brown, weathered faces stained with betel nut and paan. It was like I was in a dream, a nightmare in which I couldn’t communicate, couldn’t cut through the lines of human interaction.

  Finally, giving up, I returned to the hotel and persuaded the bellboy, whose name was Milton, to go with me, riding in the rickshaw in his black pants, white shirt, and tie, riding hip to hip, 300 pounds now, the driver drenched and straining. When I suggested it might be faster to walk, Milton shook his head, said no. And at the river, Milton found three men sitting at a desk in a wall-less room, in front of a weatherbeaten log book. They talked back and forth in Bangla, their heads shaking. “They don’t understand you,” Milton said. “They are ill-educated. Ignorant. They don’t know why someone wants to travel; why you’re here.” But finally it was revealed. There were no boats heading farther south, only a few short-haul launches going back the way I came; to get to Dhaka the Ostrich was the only answer, and it wouldn’t be back for another three days, leaving at nearly 3:00 a.m. “How about the train?” said Milton. The train station was next door, and we found a hulking man sitting at an old oak desk surrounded by ancient-looking equipment and huge bound ledgers three feet long. A train left nightly at 8:00 p.m.

  I spent two more days in Khulna and I walked through the streets a celebrity. I couldn’t make it more than half a block without getting stopped, engaged in conversation. What country was I from? Why was I in Khulna? Was Barack Obama a Muslim? What was my profession? Bangladesh was the friendliest, most curious country I’d ever strolled through. I drank tea on a shelf carved into a tree on a streetcorner, got taken into the offices of a frozen shrimp importer, was given a tour of the local university by a boy accompanied by two young women covered except for their eyes. Workshops lined the streets, industry was personal and everywhere. Anvils rang and showered sparks. Shops made tin pails. Welders, all barefoot, squatted on dirt floors in shops the size of one-car garages. “Please, just if by some chance you meet someone interested in doing business in Bangladesh,” said Hossain Lukman, who stopped me on the street. “I know, I know, but you never know and you give them my name and contact information. We are a family and business is our business. We are honest and we can make a good business. Bangladesh is very poor but we work very hard.” I could barely get a word in; my protestations that I had no interest in business went unheard. Bangladesh was a place of worker ants, filled with tens of millions of them, curious, willing to do almost anything, eager for just about anything. Lukman was twenty-seven. “This is the honor of my family to be successful; it is very important right now.” The second I said the word American, people touched their hearts, nodded their heads to the side in reverence.

  . . .

  THE TRAIN BACK to Dhaka was uneventful, but awful. I sat upright all night as doors opened and cold, damp air blasted in through the open windows and the train shook and rattled and distorted music roared, and we slid and bumped into Dhaka at dawn.

  I STILL HADN’T TAKEN one of the thousands of private launches, though, and they were the real death traps of Bangladesh. So early the next morning I made my w
ay back to Suder Ghat and bought a ticket to Chandpur, where hundreds had died in numerous sinkings and capsizings over the years.

  Nose-in at a floating steel dock floated hundreds of battered, bent, rusting white steel ships, the waterborne equivalent of the matatus in Nairobi, the commuter trains of Mumbai. “Chandpur, Chandpur, Chandpur,” touts called, and I slipped aboard. The launches were all the same: one large, open deck lined with benches facing the bow and, above, an open, flat deck with tables and chairs welded to the deck. Sometimes these took 3,000 passengers; today there were only a couple of hundred. I counted thirteen life rings, and no rafts or lifeboats of any kind. A bronze bell on the bow rang and we pushed away, into the current and crowds of the river itself, under a hazy blue sky and a burning sun. Freighters and small wooden nowks, as the little pinnaces were called, hundreds, thousands of them filled with people and bricks and stacks of wood, some so overloaded that their topside rails were literally underwater. We passed miles of brick factories, barren expanses of sand around a tall cylindrical smokestack, each one an almost pharaonic scene of hundreds of bare-chested men and sari-clad women carrying buckets of sand and piles of bricks on their heads. It was the world unfiltered, raw, the water flat and greenish, perhaps half a mile wide.

  As I was eyeing paper plates of some chickpea food that a boy was delivering from the deck below, a tall, boyish-faced man plunked himself down in the chair in front of me and introduced himself. Mohammed Amir Hosain, to be called Fardus. He wore green khaki slacks and a pink checked shirt, and he had a face as round as a ball. “Would you like some?” he asked, and whistled, calling the boy over and imperiously ordering.

  “I am a soldier,” he said. “I am strong! Where are you from?”

  “America.” The golden word.

  “America is my hobby!” he said. “Would you like to have lunch with me when we get to Chandpur?” There was something about him. Kind. Open. I trusted him. I said I would.