Slow boat from Barisal

Since the Mughal period, Barisal, on the west bank of the Kirtankhola, a distributary of the Lower Meghna, has been an important port. The commercial gateway to the southwest delta, Barisal has been described as the “Venice of Bengal” or “Venice of the East,” although if you’re just counting waterways, almost any large town in southwestern Bangladesh is a Venice.

The Kirtankhola channel is not deep enough for the ocean-going cargo ships that steam up the Lower Meghna from the Bay of Bengal, but it can handle smaller freighters that ply between the towns of the delta region, carrying bricks, building materials and bulk agricultural produce. Motorized nouka deliver fruit, vegetables and fish to villages, and ferry passengers, bicycles and animals across the rivers; the catamaran version—two nouka with a wooden platform—is large enough to carry a couple of vehicles. There’s a new road bridge across the Kirtankhola at Barisal, but most rivers and channels are not bridged, and ferries are the only way to avoid a long journey on dirt roads. 

I had flown to Barisal from Dhaka but decided to take the boat back. After meetings at the local university and medical college, my UNICEF host, Sanjit Kumar Das, took me home to his apartment to meet his family. His wife had not only prepared desserts but made up snacks for my return trip to Dhaka. Sanjit had booked me on the 3:00 p.m. Green Line Waterways launch. “You’ll be on the launch for at least seven hours,” he said.  “You can buy food on board, but this will keep you going.”

In the Bangla transportation vocabulary, the English word “launch,” derived from the Spanish lancha (barge), is not what you’d expect—one of those sleek party boats that line marinas in Florida, or the kind of patrol boat the coastguard and police use to chase drug runners. The Bangladesh “launch,” often four decks high, carries several hundred passengers, and sometimes vehicles and cargo. One type looks like a modern ferry—the kind you’d take across the English Channel, but without the drunken football fans in the bar—while another looks like a Mississippi sternwheeler, all open decks and verandahs but without the stern wheel. From Dhaka’s Sadarghat ferry terminal, launches to southern destinations—Khulna, Barisal, Patuakhali and islands of the delta—leave in the early evening, and offer comfortable cabins with air conditioning. I haven’t done the trip this way, but travelers tell me it’s exhilarating to leave behind the noise and pollution of the capital and float off into the sunset.

At the Barisal ghat, Sanjit and his daughter guided me through the stalls selling street food, snacks, fruit and vegetables. Three launches were moored, and Sanjit wanted to make sure I boarded the right one. I stood on the top deck and waved goodbye. Below me, nouka glided in and out of the ghat, carrying passengers, bicycles, motorbikes, yellow water barrels and fruit and vegetables. Small boys jumped into the water, splashed around and climbed back up the wooden pillars supporting the quay.

A man emerged from the launch’s kitchen and laid a long blue rug on the open deck. Passengers would need to pray during the trip. I wondered if someone with a compass or a smart phone was appointed to adjust the arrow to Mecca to the meanders on the river.

After several blasts from the launch’s horn, we cast off.  For an hour or so, I stood on the open deck enjoying the breeze and watching life on the Kirtankhola—the shore line of coconut palms, bananas, mango trees and small settlements, fishermen casting their nets, cattle grazing on low, grassy islands. We passed small freighters heading downstream with loads of gravel, bricks and sand, and nouka crossing the river. After two hours, we joined the Lower Meghna and the shoreline disappeared into the late afternoon haze. There wasn’t much to look at except for larger cargo ships and swooping seagulls, so I retreated to the air-conditioned upper deck. It was a midweek departure, so I had my choice of seats. A steward brought me tea and I settled down to read a book and make some travel notes.

It was difficult to concentrate because of the constant chatter from the TV monitors, occasionally interrupted by gun shots and car crashes. Green TV was offering a steady stream of Bangla-language movies with routine plots and stock characters. The Dhallywood (Dhaka-based) movie industry is not as large or well renowned as its Indian big brother, Bollywood, but it has perfected the mass production process, churning out hundreds of movies a year for domestic audiences and the Bangladeshi diaspora in the Middle East, Malaysia and the UK. There were shoot-outs on city streets, car chases, and love scenes on beaches and green mountain pastures, the characters’ slow-motion passions enhanced by rain, mist and other artificial weather elements. Most characters appeared to change clothes every couple of minutes, the women dressed in bright colors, the men with slicked black hair usually dressed in smart suits and sporting sunglasses, even during night scenes.

It was night by the time we reached the Buriganga River, the channel of the Padma that flows through Dhaka. We passed overnight launches heading south, their deck lights illuminating them against the dark water. Many passengers were on deck, enjoying the cool night air. We docked at Sadarghat, and I emerged into the maze of Old Dhaka, the streets crowded with auto-rickshaws, trucks, buses and people. I was already missing the river.   

On the road in western Bangladesh

The city of Jessore in western Bangladesh, with its winding alleys and lively markets, has always been commercially and strategically important. It is a transportation hub, where the main north-south road from Rajshahi and Kushtia to Khulna crosses the east-west highway to India. The frontier at Benapole, an untidy cluster of hotels, restaurants, warehouses and transport facilities, is less than 30 miles west. In 1971, as Pakistan’s army battled Bangladeshi regular forces and mukhti bahini guerillas, millions of refugees fled west along this route to India—an exodus memorably described in Allen Ginsberg’s poem, September on Jessore Road.  In early December 1971, Bangladeshi and Indian forces recaptured the city, a victory that set the stage for a rapid advance and the surrender of Pakistan’s forces.

Today, the Jessore road remains the main overland commercial route between the two countries. Trucks rumble west, carrying textiles, jute products such as rope and sacks, scrap metal and agricultural produce. Bangladesh imports coal, petroleum, chemicals, rice and manufactured goods, including cars and trucks. On the road south from Jessore to Khulna, we passed rail junctions where laborers off-loaded coal from trucks into rail cars, part of a supply chain that begins in the mines of Bihar and West Bengal and ends at the power stations that supply Dhaka’s garment factories and residents.

In contrast to the northern section of the road from Kushtia to Jessore, which is bordered by rice paddies, corn fields and mango plantations, the southern section is more industrial. The region has deposits of mica and bauxite and produces building materials; we passed the tall chimneys of brick kilns, cement plants and factories with rows of bicycles parked outside. The dull grey concrete buildings were interrupted by unexpected splashes of color—apartment blocks and commercial buildings painted from basement to roof in bright red or green, advertising cement, chips, tea and mobile phone services. Perhaps only in South Asia can you buy not only a roadside billboard, but a whole building to push your product. On some, an uplifting slogan was added to the product name and logo, a small dash of corporate social responsibility to atone for dunking yet another block in company colors. It was nice to know that the company that sold you chips also believed that “The Learned are Judicious.”

Beyond the kilns and plants, the rice paddies stretched into the distance, irrigated by diesel-powered pumps drawing water from the aquifer. Along the road, lined with eucalyptus trees, peanuts were laid out on tarpaulins to dry. The most important cash crop in this region is shrimp, raised in fresh and saltwater ponds; we saw blue nets stretched across the ponds and small fields of red—harvested shrimp drying in the sun. Logs were piled on the roadside, ready to be fashioned into furniture. South of Khulna is the Sundarbans, the delta area with the largest continuous mangrove forest in the world. It is home to deer, wild boar, otter, saltwater crocodiles, river dolphins and the last surviving Bengal tigers. Officially, it’s a protected area, but its vastness and lack of roads make it difficult to police. Illegal logging has become a lucrative industry.

Khulna, where we stayed overnight after a visit to the university, is an old river port on a distributary of the Padma. It used to be a center of the jute industry, but today shrimp is its major export. With a population of just over one million, it’s the third largest city in Bangladesh, but a distant third; Dhaka has a population of 8.5 million and Chittagong 4.5 million. It’s still a bustling place, crowded with trucks, buses, auto rickshaws and cars. We stayed at the City Inn, a three-star establishment with a temperamental elevator that promoted itself as the “symbol of elegance.”

From UNICEF’s perspective, there’s a lot to do in western Bangladesh. Poverty rates are high, and many children suffer from poor nutrition. Overall, the country has improved its maternal and childhood mortality rates, but some western districts are lagging. Many children work in agriculture and small industry, so child labor is an issue. On the other hand, why would parents send their children to school when the quality of primary education is low, and poorly-paid teachers sometimes don’t show up for class? The government’s failure to provide education, health and social services has created needs that are partly filled by development agencies and by the mosques which operate madrassas.

I was told there were Islamic State-affiliated training camps in this region where young Muslim men are radicalized and sent to Iraq or Syria. At the Islamic University of Kushtia, which has a large department of religious studies, I trod carefully in my discussions with faculty members. I need not have worried because they were typical academics, contemptuous of all authority.

I would have likely faced more hostility from the motorcycle gang we passed on the road near Jessore, waving red flags. The region, like its Indian neighbor West Bengal, is a stronghold of the Communist Party. I thought the bikers all looked rather revolutionary chic—sooooo Che Guevara with their red bandanas embossed with the hammer and sickle. But I was not about to stop and commend them on their sense of fashion.

Vote the pineapple

In Bangladesh, a country with more than 700 rivers, it’s hardly surprising that the symbol of the dominant political party, the Awami League, is a boat—in this case, a traditional river craft with a high prow, the nouka. As in other developing countries, political symbols are important, especially in rural areas where literacy levels are lower than in the cities. Although urban areas are growing, two thirds of the population still live in rural areas. Voters may not be able to read a newspaper or a political poster, but they will recognize the party symbol. Vote the boat.

The ruling Awami League (AL) was already in full campaign mode when I visited in September 2018, three months before parliamentary elections,. All over Dhaka, banners and posters featuring the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, were plastered on billboards, building walls, telephone poles, and almost anything else that could support them. The grandmotherly, bespectacled and always smiling Hasina promised to maintain the country’s impressive pace of economic development.

The symbol of the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), a sheaf of rice stalks, is also designed to appeal to rural voters. In 2018, no one was giving the BNP much chance. Its ailing leader, Khaleda Zia, was in prison on what her supporters claimed were politically motivated, trumped-up corruption charges; her son was trying to run the party from exile in London.  Although the BNP eventually allied with other opposition groups to contest the election, Sheikh Hasina and the AL, with the help of a little voter intimidation and ballot rigging, emerged victorious.   

There is no accurate count of the number of political parties in Bangladesh. The last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was quoted as saying: “When you have two Bengalis, you have two political parties. When you have three, you have two parties, each with three wings.”

Mountbatten’s words rang true to me on my visit to Khulna, the third largest city in the country. Municipal elections were coming up and at key points around the city--major roads and intersections, the bus station, the markets--large banners of candidates competed for attention. They were all (or mostly) men, and they struck serious, unsmiling, I’m-all-about-business poses in their photos.

Their parties use a variety of images. The symbol of the local BNP is the pineapple, a metaphor for agriculture or fruitfulness or I don’t know what. As my UNICEF car returned from the university one day, we were halted by a march of BNP loyalists, shouting slogans and holding wooden signs with the candidate’s photo and a pineapple underneath.

Two parties use images of animals found in the Sundarbans--the large delta region of mangrove forest to the south--so there’s the crocodile party and the dolphin party. This is an agricultural area, so there were rice stalks and a farm cart. One candidate, presumably running on a law and order platform, looked tough and urged voters to cast their ballot for the padlock. Then there was the guy with the wrench, presumably running on an “I’ll fix the problem” platform.

At one intersection, a poster showed horses galloping in a field. I hadn’t seen a horse since I arrived. I asked my UNICEF companion Umme Halima what it meant. She shrugged. “I think it’s supposed to suggest that these guys are energetic,” she said.