Some years ago, a friend invited me along on a weekend bird-watching trip. I wasn’t converted, but for two days I was totally captivated. A whole new world had opened up before me at the end of a pair of binoculars and I have never looked at a bird again in quite the same light. In many ways, seeing Bangladesh’s towering chimneys and its brick-breaking workforce had a similar effect. A two-dimensional country with no stones was a revelation to me. For about a day, I even forgave it for not raining.
But then I got to wondering. Using mud to make bricks that could be broken down to produce stones was a cunning way out of a serious deficit in the country’s natural resource base, right enough, but why had no one thought of making smaller bricks in the first place? I consulted Runa on the matter. Her eyebrows became knitted for a moment, and then she said, ‘breaking bricks employs a lot of people.’ That wasn’t the answer and we both knew it, but it would have to do until a better one came along.
Another thing that surprised me about the Bangladeshi landscape was the number of haystacks on view. Rounded, yellow and bulging, they sat in significant numbers beside every village. There wasn’t any mysterious two-dimensional reason for them. The haystacks served the same purpose as they do in Europe; as a food store for livestock when grazing becomes scarce. What perplexed me initially was the implication that grazing would ever become scarce in such lusciously green terrain. Surely with so much water, Bangladesh was green all the time, I reasoned. And then it clicked. When the monsoon comes, most of Bangladesh disappears under water.
But the amount of water in Bangladesh is all relative. To me, it looked as if most of the country was submerged already. Everywhere I went I was confronted with swirling brown rivers and ankle-deep paddy fields, but everywhere I went was with Runa, and she never stopped expressing surprise at how dry the country looked.
‘It looks wet to me,’ I told her.
‘No, no. This is very dry.’
‘How can you say that when everything’s covered in water?’
‘But this is July. There should be much more water.’
I simply hadn’t yet become properly attuned to the two-dimensional mindset. What looked wet to me was actually dry.
And all over the country, villagers were gearing up for when it became wet. Men, women and children were out in the fields, busy ploughing with their oxen and planting tiny fluorescent rice seedlings ready for the monsoon crop. In the village of Harialgoup they were still waiting to harvest their jute because the crop was always best after it had been standing in water for a month.
Runa and I arrived there via a series of ferries that took us along the riverine highways and byways of rural Bangladesh. Every stretch of water carried an endless procession of water hyacinth clumps floating downriver in the murky waters as we passed fishing boats with huge nets, small ships laden with goods, and passenger craft of every size, transferring people back and forth. We caught fleeting glimpses of Ganges River dolphins leaping smoothly out of the water to disappear just as instantly without a splash. Virtually blind, because there’s not much point in being able to see when you live in a muddy river all your life, the dolphins find their way using echolocation, building up sound pictures rather like bats who fly in the dark. Brahminy kites, flaked with golden orange like a Brahmin’s robes, hovered in the skies above.
The people of Harialgoup were excited by the presence of a foreigner in their midst. The children were bashful, but responded to my smiles, while some of the men and boys got straight down to cases. They were intensely interested in my way of life.
‘Do you eat rice?’ asked a man with a headscarf tied around his forehead.
‘Yes, but probably not as much as you. We also eat bread in my country,’ I told him.
The next question came from a youth who was trying to grow a moustache. ‘Do you eat fish in Japan?’ he asked.
This threw me. I looked enquiringly at Runa who just shrugged. ‘I do eat fish,’ I told the assembled crowd, ‘but I’m not from Japan, I’m English.’
This time it was the villagers’ turn to be confused. They went into a huddle. A disagreement developed. Voices became raised. Some of the children were looking at me with renewed uncertainty. I began to think that a hasty retreat might become necessary. Either that or apply for a Japanese passport.
As Runa listened to the squabble a knowing smile appeared on her face. ‘Some Japanese tourists came here two years ago,’ she said. ‘They were the first foreigners to visit the village, so they assume you must be from Japan as well.’ With a flurry of hands and several shakes of her head, Runa put the record straight. Some of the men nodded knowingly; the boy with the nascent moustache just looked baffled.
With the question of my nationality settled, some of the villagers led me into the fields. They were alive with red dragonflies and tiny fire ants that administered surprisingly painful bites when I stood still for more than a few seconds. We walked in single file through the sumptuous green landscape, which the man with the headscarf tied around his forehead told me produced three rice crops a year. Keeping to the tiny raised paths between the paddies meant we all kept our feet dry, but when the rains came, everything I saw would be submerged beneath a metre or so of water.
‘When do you think the rains will arrive?’ I asked hopefully.
‘He says, “The rain is nearly dressed,”’ Runa translated. ‘It is a Bengali phrase meaning it is almost ready to come out.’ Perhaps there was some hope then, I thought to myself.
We had arrived at a spot where the paddy fields had stopped. We stood facing what might have been another field, with what looked like reeds growing in it. But here the water was obviously deeper because in the distance I could see people in low wooden boats punting their way through the reeds with long poles. It looked to me more like an inland lake, but I wasn’t going to say as much.
The headscarf man said that the area was unusually dry for this time of year. I’d suspected that might be the case.
I asked what the people in boats were doing and the guy with the headscarf suggested we go and look. He pulled off his flip-flops and plunged into the knee-deep water.
Now I hadn’t seriously been expecting to spend a month in the monsoon and not have to go wading through some fairly significant water bodies, and in preparation for just such an event I’d drawn up a short mental checklist of possible dangers I might encounter. High on the list were leeches, wriggly worm-like creatures that hang about in places like this waiting for some poor unsuspecting victim to appear and give them dinner. A leech latches on to any part of your anatomy and sucks blood. I’d been advised on the procedures for dealing with these unpleasant creatures by my sister’s friend Alan. ‘Don’t pull them off,’ he had said, ‘because you’ll probably only get the head, leaving the jaws in the bite, which could turn septic.’ You have to rub them with salt or burn them off with a cigarette, he told me.
I wasn’t looking forward to meeting a leech for the first time, but I had accepted it as inevitable. So while I removed my plastic sandals, I checked my shirt pocket for cigarettes and matches, and plunged in. Runa followed close behind, which impressed me. Given my initial assessment of her as a bit of a society girl, I’d thought that perhaps she would stay on dry terrain until I returned. She was obviously made of sterner stuff.
The water was delightfully cool and the mud oozed pleasantly between my toes, allowing me momentarily to forget the one particularly distressing aspect of the leech issue, as far as I was concerned, which was the fact that wading through water probably meant that I wouldn’t be able to see any of the little bastards as they bore down on me for a free blood dinner.
Until, that is, the water got deeper. It was up to my crotch and we were still some way off from the boats when Alan’s final piece of leech advice came back to me. ‘Don’t forget that they can get anywhere. You’ll have to become intimate with someone to check each other’s private parts.’
I stopped. ‘Runa, are there leeches here?’ I enquire
d, trying my best to make the question sound as nonchalant as possible. I held my breath as she relayed my query to the man in the headscarf.
‘No’.
I enjoyed my wade much more after that. The boats turned out to be hollowed palm tree logs from which an assortment of boys and girls were busy gathering all sorts of edibles from the waters. Some of the small girls were collecting perfect white waterlillies called shapla, Bangladesh’s national flower as Runa pointed out. Their long stalks were usually made into a marsala curry, but could also be eaten raw. They tasted a bit like celery. Others were collecting large snails or using short jute-stem rods to catch small fish the size of the children’s hands. An older man, dressed in a thick pullover and wielding a rusty sickle, was cutting reeds. He was going to feed them to his cow, he told me.
Life in rural Bangladesh is well tuned to the monsoon, and, as I’d seen, the villagers were gearing up for the annual inundation. When the fields become submerged, many farmers turn their hand to fishing, either in the waterlogged fields or in the rivers. Others, however, fish full time and some of the fishermen of Harialgoup had a rather unusual way of doing it. I first became aware of their modus operandi when I heard a curious noise down on the riverbank. It was a cacophony of high-pitched screeching that sounded as if someone was frantically squeezing half a dozen of those annoying squeaky children’s toys.
I followed the sound to a long wooden boat with a box-like cage at one end. The extraordinary sounds seemed to be emanating from the cage as a man in a white vest shoved small fish in through the bamboo slats. He opened the top of the cage and out jumped six otters. They scrambled over each other to slide eel-like into the water. Two of the otters wore harnesses attached to long ropes that were held by the man in the white vest. The others were apparently free, but none swam far from the boat. They all bobbed up and down by the shore, now with a lot less squeaking, looking enquiringly up at the man who held the ropes.
‘They are fishing.’ I turned to see Runa behind me and got her to ask the man in the white vest if I could watch. He invited me on board.
The man in the white vest, whose name was Ratan Hajra, used the otters to drive the fish into his net in a way similar to sheep farmers using dogs to herd sheep in Britain. He showed me how it was done. Once the otters were in the water, he and one of his crew unfurled a voluminous net over the full length of one side of the boat. The net was attached to a long pole at either end, which Ratan Hajra and his mate used to jig the net up and down in the water. At the same time, each man controlled the otters by manoeuvring another pole, to which the otters’ leashes were now tied, with his foot. The co-ordination needed looked a bit like that old conundrum of rubbing your tummy with one hand while patting your head with the other. I tried it. It was more difficult.
Ratan Hajra trained the otters from an early age. It was only necessary to harness the two adults, he said, since the younger ones would just follow them in whatever they did, effectively being trained on the job. He and his crew of three, made up of a brother, a brother-in-law and a second cousin, had just returned from a lengthy fishing trip down in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest area of mangrove swamps towards the coast on the deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers. They made reasonable money catching fish and selling it locally on a month-long trip like that, he told me, but he missed his family and it was sometimes dangerous work. There were tigers down there, he said, as well as crocodiles, snakes and pirates. Friends of his had been captured by pirates whose usual tactic was to hold one fisherman captive while the others were sent home to raise a ransom.
‘I’d like to get out of otter fishing,’ Ratan Hajra told me as he swept back a shock of slick black hair with his hand. His fingernails were painted red. ‘Other jobs in the village are less well paid, but they are not so dangerous. One of my brothers runs a small shop. I could do that, or become a retail fish seller.’
With my inexpert help, our fishing trip had not been very successful. Ratan Hajra removed the lid from the cage and the otters leapt out of the water and streamed into it without any encouragement, curling up and nesting quite happily. We carried the cage ashore and fed the few fish we had caught to the otters through the bars.
Having seen the otter fishermen at work, I then got to see them at play. Ratan Hajra and his crew were off to play a game of hadudu. They led me away from the river, back towards the fields where a man had just finished marking out a small rectangular pitch in the mud with his hoe. It was about the size of a badminton court with a central dividing line and two other lines, rather like the tramlines on a tennis court, at either end. Two teams of men and youths were limbering up by the pitch, tying their lungis tightly up between their legs. A small crowd had gathered to watch the match. It was farmers vs. fishermen. Almost inevitably, I suppose, Ratan Hajra asked if I wanted to play on the fishermen’s side.
Hadudu is the national game of Bangladesh. Its origins are obscure, but it has been traced back at least 4,000 years and some say it was originally meant to develop skills of self-defence, attack and counter-attack. Essentially the same game, with minor variations and under different names, is also played in India, Pakistan and much of the rest of Asia. Today it is a regular feature of the Asian Games. I’d never even heard of it.
It was like a cross between playground tag and rugby, with a bit of wrestling thrown in for good measure. Points were scored by touching or capturing the opposition players, and to add to the excitement, the person trying to score has to do it without drawing breath. The fishermen won the toss and one of our team stood at the halfway line where he drew a deep breath. As soon as he crossed into the farmers’ half, he started to breathe out, chanting ‘Hadudu, du, du, du …’ so that it was clear he wasn’t taking a second breath. Slowly he neared the farmers, all stood behind their rear tramline. They weren’t allowed to break ranks until our man had touched one of them. Once touched, the farmers’ job was to prevent our man from scrambling back over the halfway line. If they did, the farmers got a point. If our man made it back, we scored. It was a game of tension until the touch was made, and then all hell broke loose as bodies were flung through the mud.
Hadudu played to Bangladesh’s strengths. It didn’t require any expensive equipment or large playing areas. All you needed was two teams and a lot of mud. The mud was glorious; gooey and sticky like black clotted cream. In no time at all, both teams had been reduced to unrecognizable swamp creatures. I hadn’t enjoyed myself as much in years. As we made our way back into the village to wash, I was even rewarded with a light drizzle.
T H R E E
But the fact remained that it still hadn’t started seriously raining yet. Runa and I caught a paddle steamer from near Harialgoup that took us all the way to Dhaka. The Mahsud was one of five original vessels, built in the 1920s by Garden Reach Workshop in Calcutta, that were known as rocket ships. Its first-class accommodation was done out in sturdy wooden panelling with thick jute carpets on the floors.
I visited the captain, a stocky little man with an engaging smile, on the bridge. He had virtually no hair on the top of his head but a noble set of grey whiskers flared almost horizontally out from his sturdy jaw. He gave me the, by now familiar, story of how dry the soggy paddies looked.
‘When rains come, all these fields we are passing will be flooded,’ he told me.
I asked him whether the Mahsud plied its route between Khulna and Dhaka throughout the monsoon. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘we suspend the service for severe cyclones and tidal waves only.’
He had worked on the paddle steamers for more than 30 years, and I wondered which was the worst monsoon he had encountered. ‘Nineteen ninety-six,’ the captain answered without hesitation. He remembered it well, he told me, because there had been some tourists on board. ‘They were visiting me here on the bridge, just like you are doing as we speak, and they are all taking their leave to procure some photography on the catwalk.’ He pointed in front of him to the iron gangway that tapered away from t
he bridge along the roof of the ship towards the bow.
‘But severe storm was brewing and strong wind was blowing already and I ordered them all below quick sharp.’
He had just had time to put down the anchors before the storm hit. It had blown the catwalk clean away.
The journey to Dhaka took 36 hours. When I stepped on to the quayside, the captain, accompanied by his chief purser, came ashore to say farewell.
‘Which country are you coming from, please sir?’ The purser asked me.
‘England,’ I told him.
‘Oh England, yes sir, very fine country. And how have you found our country?’ I said I had enjoyed myself very much and thought Bangladesh was a very beautiful place.
‘I believe so, yes sir. It is very poor country, but very fine.’
Bangladesh was a fine country. It was green and lush and wet, but for me the only problem was that all the water was on the ground already. Just the occasional shower had disturbed the otherwise clear and bright weather on the paddle-steamer journey and we’d arrived in Dhaka in brilliant sunshine. The captain of the Mahsud had worried me the previous day on the bridge when I’d asked how long he thought I’d have to wait for some proper monsoonal rain. He had reckoned it would be another ten days before I’d see any.
Having not read any newspapers for nearly a week, I eagerly scanned the pages of the Bangladeshi press for reports of rain. My search was futile. There were regular stories about Dhaka’s appalling air pollution, the worst in the world they said, and daily reports of attacks by armed thugs referred to as dacoits. One morning, the Bangladesh Independent carried a sad story on its front page about the murder of a rickshaw puller who had been stabbed to death by a fruit seller while haggling for a pineapple. The story ended with the declaration that, ‘the name of the vendor could not be known.’ But the closest I got to a water-related story was a cautionary piece about the sewer lines in the old city that had come under renewed threat of bursting because one of the pump stations had been inoperative for the past six months. The station, built with a loan from the World Bank, had developed problems soon after completion four years before. It desperately needed spare parts, but the Water and Sewage Authority couldn’t afford them. The article pointed out that it was probably a disaster waiting to happen just as soon as the rains came, but it gave no indication as to when that might be.
Going to Extremes Page 21
