Bangladesh's East End

“Don’t take the piss, luv. I’m bleedin’ knackered.” I caught the last part of the mobile phone conversation in the lobby of the Valley Garden Hotel in Sylhet, a bustling city in northeastern Bangladesh. By his dress and skin color, the speaker, a man in his 30s, looked Bangladeshi, but the accent and word choice were purely London. The man picked up his bag and went to the elevator.  He looked as if he’d just arrived after a long flight.

Which he probably had. There are flights from Heathrow via Dhaka to Sylhet on Biman Bangladesh, the national airline, and other connections via Dubai and Delhi. They serve a community of Bangladeshis—or Sylhetis as they prefer to be called—who have settled in East London since the 19th century. The first came as merchant seamen, hired on in the southern port of Chittagong by British trading ships. When World War One broke out and young British men were conscripted to fight in the trenches, the demand for seamen increased and more Sylhetis took to the seas. Leaving their families was difficult, but they earned more money than they could working in the tea plantations. Between voyages, they lived in cramped quarters in London’s docklands. Some left the ships to take factory jobs and sent money home.

As Muslims, they maintained their culinary practices. In the 1920s, a Sylheti opened a curry shop that became the foundation for a thriving Bengali restaurant industry, centered on Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets. Bengalis of Sylheti origin comprise only 10 per cent of the South Asian population of Britain, but 90 per cent of all South Asian restaurants are Sylheti or Bangla-owned. Of course, the Brick Lane entrepreneurs adapted to British taste and climate, cutting down on the heat and spices. But they have been remarkably successful. Today, the Bangladeshi restaurant industry is estimated to be worth $6 billion a year.

Brick Lane, Tower Hamlets, London

Some of that money comes home to Sylhet in the form of remittances to support family members. It goes towards medical and educational expenses, and daily living needs. British Bangladeshis have built mansions outside the city to use when they visit. Most of the time, a colleague told me, they stand empty, with a guard, a maid and a gardener on staff. In a society where, despite its Muslim principles, material possessions are valued, the mansions represent a family’s social standing—a concrete (or usually brick) status symbol in a region where many people remain desperately poor.

According to economic statistics, Sylhet Division is the wealthiest region of Bangladesh outside Dhaka. But the wealth is unevenly distributed and the region lags behind others on indicators for health, nutrition and education. On the tea plantations, many workers are from the Indian states of Orissa and Bihar. They are the descendants of workers brought in by the British during the colonial era; they have struggled to preserve their Hindu religion and native languages and have never fully integrated into Sylheti society. 

The tea plantations—or tea gardens, as they are somewhat romantically termed in Bangladesh—stretch across the low hills along the road from the airport to the city.  Compared with the rest of the country, the region’s climate is cooler and wetter, making it (like its northern Indian neighbor, the state of Assam), ideal for growing tea, most of it for export.

Bordered on the north by the Indian state of Meghalaya and on the east by the state of Manipur, the Sylhet region is among the most ethnically diverse in the country, with villages of Manipuri, Khasis and Tripura people in the hills, practicing Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. The region has its own language, Sylhoti, with ties to both Bangla and Assamese. My travel guide claims Sylhoti has over 10 million speakers worldwide, some of them in East London.

The day my UNICEF colleague Yasmin Khan and I arrived, there was a hartal—a strike by transport workers protesting at an increase in the price of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), which fuels all the auto rickshaws and many buses, trucks and cars. UNICEF’s security people had warned us to be careful because some roads had been blocked by strikers, but the main road was clear and mercifully free of traffic, so we reached the hotel in what our driver assured us was record time. Still, there was trouble elsewhere; the Sunday newspaper carried a picture of a government official’s SUV that was damaged by strikers. By early evening, the strike was over and Sylhet returned to its normal traffic congestion, its narrow streets clogged with auto rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, vans and trucks.  Sylhet is a major shopping destination, with some of the best discount clothing outlets in the country.  Many British Bangladeshis (perhaps including the man in the hotel) come here on shopping trips; after paying for the flight and excess baggage, they’ll still come out ahead compared with shopping in the UK.

All at sea in Chittagong

“Can you give me a window seat on the left side of the plane?” I asked the Novoair agent at Chittagong airport as I checked in for the return flight to Dhaka. I usually request an aisle seat to get a few extra inches of legroom, but it was going to be a short, 50-minute flight and I hoped for a good view of the Bay of Bengal as the plane headed northwest. I had read newspaper reports of major back-ups at Chittagong’s container terminals and expected to see a few ships anchored, waiting to enter the estuary of the Karnaphuli River. I wasn’t disappointed. Through the patchy clouds I could see dozens of container ships at anchor over a wide area. Between them, like smalls insects, were the black dots of fishing boats.

There’s a vigorous and usually good-natured debate between residents of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and its second-largest city, Chittagong, about which has the worst traffic jams. I’m not going to take a position on this one, but I’m pretty confident in saying that Chittagong’s largely unseen jam--the shipping back-up--may have the greater effect on the economy. I’m no maritime expert, but it’s evident that if a large container ship has to park in the Bay of Bengal and wait up to a week to get into port, then someone (and probably more than one person) is losing money. The scene from the plane window is a tranquil one, but the economic effects are real.

Chittagong’s natural harbor, noted as early as the 1st century AD by the Roman geographer Ptolemy as one of the major seaports in the East, was the ancient gateway to Bengal. From the 9th century, Arab traders became prominent in the city’s commercial life, and introduced Islam to the region. They were later joined by Portuguese traders. In the colonial era, the British built railroads to link Chittagong to Calcutta (Kolkata) and other cities in India. Today, it is a major industrial and commercial center, with the Bangladesh Navy’s largest base. It’s estimated that roughly 90 percent of the country’s seaborne trade passes through Chittagong. With China now Bangladesh’s largest trading partner, efforts are underway, under the so-called Belt and Road Initiative, to build rail and road links from southern Yunnan province to the port. With direct access to the Indian Ocean, China will no longer be dependent on shipping through the Straits of Malacca, between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a narrow seaway that can easily be blockaded in time of war.

Chittagong, with a population of about seven million, is still a city of heavy industry--think of Cleveland or Sheffield before the steel mills closed, and the cities rebranded themselves as commercial centers and scuzzied up the downtown areas with boutiques and tapas bars. It is a major steel producer, importing iron ore and coal and recycling scrap from shipbreaking yards along the coast. It has textile and cement factories, and others processing agricultural produce. Truck traffic is heavy. In Dhaka, trucks are banned from the metropolitan area during daytime hours, but in Chittagong the major port roads are clogged at all hours with yellow Tata and Leyland trucks carrying containers, fuel and other cargoes. Fortunately, most of them run on compressed natural gas (CNG); otherwise, the city’s pollution problems would be a lot worse.

Slow going in Chittagong, April 2017 (photograph courtesy of Daily Star). As is the traffic wasn’t already bad enough, the city also regularly suffers from flooding.

You don’t even need to leave the airport to get a sense of Chittagong self-image. At many airports around the world, the display ads and video screens pitch high-priced luxury goods and financial services. Not at Chittagong. In the check-in area, the major visual competition is between two cement companies. You are invited to “Trust in Confidence Cement, an A grade clinker” (whatever that means) or in Ruby Cement, part of the Heidelberg Cement Group. Both feature images of projects that stand tall because of the cement used--hotels, commercial buildings, bridges, tunnels, power plants, overpasses (flyovers). Between them is a screen displaying what holds all this concrete together. The KSRM steel company, “Your Steel Partner,” claims to build “Future Bangladesh on a firm foundation.” You can even upgrade to KSRM Premium “for colossal construction. The video screen features computer animations of bridges, overpasses, and cloverleafs with high-speed trains speeding over almost empty highways. KSRM has a claim to fame because its steel is being used for construction of the major bridge across the Padma (Ganges) which will at last provide a direct road and rail link between the east and west of the country, but it is also a utopian, animated dream of a future Bangladesh without traffic congestion.   

 My hotel was close to GEC Circle in the city center, where several main roads meet, and the traffic backs up at most hours of the day. GEC is the name given to the newer part of Chittagong, north of the old city and the river. I wondered why this major commercial area had such a prosaic name, rather than the name of a major figure in the city’s history. A university colleague explained: “General Electric once had its corporate headquarters here. It was a landmark, so the everyone called the area GEC.”  General Electric is long gone. There’s also a CDA Avenue  but that’s more easily explained--it stands for Chittagong Development Authority. One night, I wandered around the circle. It’s lined with stalls selling cheap clothes, fruits and vegetables, fresh fish, tea stands, and booths selling mobile phone recharges. Behind the circle are arcades of small shops selling bakery goods and sweet desserts, jewelry, lighting fixtures, saris, electronics, and pharmacy products. At 11:00 p.m., the streets were full of people, walking, shopping and getting on and off the bicycle rickshaws.

GEC Circle

The two universities where I met with faculty and administrators and made presentations to students on communication and development offered a contrast in location, facilities and style. Port City International University, a six-year-old private university a mile or so from GEC Circle, is in the Khulshi Hills, a leafy upscale residential area with high walls, guard houses and security systems. Compared with Dhaka, which is flat as a pancake, Chittagong has some gentle rises but to call them “hills” is an overstatement. Khulshi Hills is about as elevated as those Cleveland suburbs a couple of miles from Lake Erie that call themselves “Heights” because they’re a couple of hundred feet above lake level.

 The university has 6,000 students and a new campus under construction, At the entrance, two sentries snapped to attention and saluted. I was greeted by an entourage of faculty and students and walked slowly so that the photographer could keep in front of me, taking shots of me chatting with the welcome committee. At the opening ceremony, I sat on a dais, partly obscured from the audience by the large flower display on the table. Later, I was presented with a bouquet and a fancy plaque with my name on it.

Chittagong University, a public institution with about 25,000 students, is in a semi-rural setting about an hour’s drive, depending on traffic, from the city center. “There are monkeys and snakes in the forest,” my UNICEF companion Hasan warned me. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, economist and civil society leader, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microfinance and microcredit, studied and taught at the university. Hasan told me that he piloted his development projects in villages surrounding the university. The Faculty of Social Science building, where I met with faculty in communication and taught a class of 4th year and masters students, is named for him.

The facilities are similar to those at other public universities in Bangladesh--aging, concrete academic buildings, with the paint peeling from the heat and monsoon rains, large classrooms where three students squeezed together on each wooden desk, and faculty offices with padlocks on the doors. Yet it has attracted talented faculty who are dedicated to their work, and I enjoyed my conversations with them.

The university has long been a center of student political activism. While I was meeting with the Vice Chancellor, a group of students was staging a noisy protest outside the administration building. I asked one faculty member about the graffiti on the walls of the academic buildings.  She said the names and symbols represented student groups or clubs. Because the university is so far outside the city, most students commute by train to a special station on the campus. “The students travel together, and they give their group a name,” she explained. I asked if the so-called clubs had a political as well as a social side. She smiled but did not answer directly. “There have been a number of research studies done on their activities,” she added guardedly. I think I know what she was trying to tell me.

Bangladesh's friendly skies

Fly Your Own Airline. That was the slogan of United Airways (not to be confused with the larger US-based carrier, United Airlines), a private airline in Bangladesh. It was emblazoned across the aircraft and at the check-in counter of the domestic terminal of Dhaka’s Hazrat Shahjalal airport. I’d like to think it meant the crew would invite you to take over the controls once the plane has reached a safe cruising altitude and take a selfie in the cockpit against a background of flashing instrument lights, but it was probably just the product of a brainstorming session with a marketing team to make passengers feel part of the airline family.

I didn’t have the opportunity to test the slogan because United Airways, notorious for delays, flight suspensions and poor in-flight amenities, ceased operations in mid-2016, but I’ve flown with three other private airlines—Regent Airlines, Novo Air and US Bangla. All connect to domestic destinations and offer a few international flights, mostly to India and Southeast Asia. After the government airline, Biman Bangladesh (Air Bangladesh), lost its monopoly of the skies in 1996, the airline industry literally took off and competition is cutthroat. My total bill for three round-trip domestic flights came to under $250, and all airlines offer special discounted fares.  If you plan ahead, you can fly almost anywhere in the country for under $60 round trip.

Bangladesh is a small country, so the flights are short. My first flight to Jessore in the west on Novo Air took just 30 minutes; it was 45 minutes to Chittagong on Regent and a seemingly interminable 50 minutes to Sylhet in the north on US Bangla. With short flight times, everything in the cabin happens at breakneck speed. The attendants race through the routine announcements and safety demonstration (in both Bangla and English) in a couple of minutes, including the requisite quotation from the Koran, roughly translated as “God (Allah) is almighty, without him we would not be safe.” Immediately after the seat belt sign is turned off, and almost before you have time to lower your tray table, the cabin attendants are running up and down the aisle, doling out boxes with sandwiches, cookies or cake and a bottle of water. There’s more glitz to the packaging than the food inside the box. “Celebrate Spring with the bite of true delight,” promises US Bangla on its bright yellow boxes with a floral design. “True delight” consists of a soggy bun wrapped around processed chicken, a slice of sponge cake and a mint wrapped in teeth-challenging plastic. But there’s no time to debate truth in advertising because it’s a mad rush to collect the trash before the seat belt sign goes on again and the plane begins its descent. The standard request to “sit back, relax and enjoy your flight” seems irrelevant because it’s non-stop action most of the way.

For those of us accustomed to long lines at check-in, surly gate agents and tiresome security checks, taking a domestic flight in Bangladesh is remarkably hassle-free, the security measures relaxed and the staff helpful and friendly. At the terminal entrance, your luggage goes through a scanner while you walk through the security gate. No one tells you to remove your belt or empty your pockets, so you invariably set off the alarm. The security agent points a scanner in your general direction, then waves you through. No ID is required at check-in. There’s one more scanner for carry-on, but you don’t have to remove your laptop, or take off your jacket, belt or shoes. There’s a list of prohibited carry-on items—the usual ones (handguns, knives and other sharp objects) and a few oddball items such as tape measures, tennis rackets, cricket bats, pool cues and catapults. Your one-liter water bottle?  Carry it on board. The value-sized shampoo bottle? No problem.

I got to know the departure lounge at Dhaka’s domestic terminal pretty well. I usually headed for a corner area where there’s a sofa and two easy chairs—a standard living room suite that would not look out of place in a low-rent apartment. The fake leather is showing its age, but it’s the most comfortable place in the lounge. The thrift store ambience is enhanced by a couple of other upholstered bench chairs across the room. There’s a small tea and coffee stall and a place to buy sweets and pastries. It all feels rather homely.

You have no problem finding your gate because there are only two. Although the domestic terminal handles 50-60 flights a day, the system works well. There are a couple of monitors for departures, but the standard announcement to board is made by airline agents strolling around barking, “Regent—Chittagong” or “US Bangla—Sylhet.” If you’re dozing, they’ll wake you up to check where you’re going. The slightly surreal atmosphere continues on the bus, where the soothing pre-flight muzak track is distinctively but confusingly Celtic—soft acoustic melodies on piano, flute and, harp.

Or perhaps you will travel by car. For no clear reason, every airline provides a couple of cars to shuttle passengers to the plane. I assumed this service was for VIPs, government officials and disabled passengers who found it difficult to board a bus. But it seemed entirely random. For the first flight to Jessore, my UNICEF colleague Yasmin and I had chauffeur service to the plane with the driver stashing our carry-on in the trunk.

After a short flight and fast onboard service, you expect your checked baggage to arrive promptly and intact. Unfortunately, although Biman Bangladesh surrendered its monopoly of domestic routes, it still handles—or rather mishandles—baggage at every airport. Delays are longest for international flights because of lack of equipment and baggage handling staff.  It’s a 45-minute flight from Kolkata to Dhaka, but one passenger told the Dhaka Tribune that it took five hours for the luggage to reach the carousel. According to a report by the airport authority, an average or more than 100 passengers a day file claims at the lost and found office; either their luggage went missing, or items were stolen. According to the Tribune, “ground handlers routinely pick out suitcases from flights they know are bound to be filled with valuable goods, such as flights from the Middle East or India.” Closed-circuit TV has failed to stop the pilfering by Biman Bangladesh staff.  Private airlines and consumer advocates are pressing for an open tender to allow a private company to take over baggage handling.