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.

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.

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.

Swimming to Bangladesh

Midway through the first afternoon of the August 2017 UNICEF workshop for university faculty on communication for development, one participant rubbed his head and glanced towards the ceiling. Sure enough, a steady drip of water was coming through the acoustic tile. He shifted his chair. Soon, drips appeared in other places. People started moving tables and chairs, and a janitor placed a bucket below the leakiest spot. Then someone noticed water dripping onto the lectern and rescued the laptop. I looked up at the acoustic tiles, many of which were stained brown and black. This was evidently not the first time rain had come through the roof of the University Grants Commission building in Dhaka. No one complained or even commented. In monsoon season, you expect to get wet.  

There is flooding in Bangladesh every year, but the floods of 2017 were the worst in a decade. The first rains came in April, fully three months ahead of the normal monsoon season, inundating paddies before farmers could harvest the first of the three annual rice crops. After several weeks of rain in July and August, rivers and streams in the north burst their banks, inundating thousands of acres of farmland and washing away homes, schools, shops, vehicles and livestock. According to the government’s Meteorological Department, on a single day, August 11, almost a week's worth of average monsoon rainfall was dumped across parts of the country in the space of a few hours. By the time the rains eased, and the floodwaters began to recede, almost 150 people had lost their lives, 700,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed and up to a third of agricultural land submerged. The waters destroyed rice crops and washed out the fish ponds that provide the main source of protein for the rural population. More than eight million people sought shelter on higher ground or on narrow levees, erecting flimsy shelters of bamboo poles and tarpaulins, without food, clothes, clean water or sanitation facilities. 

"People are used to seasonal flooding but nothing to this degree,” Corinne Ambler of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) told CNN. “This is a different level—for miles around all you can see is water, the flooding has transformed the countryside. People were fearful they would soon begin to starve." By the third week in August, most vegetable prices had shot up by at least 50 per cent, with the price of onions and chili—essential ingredients in many dishes—doubling. The flooding was the most serious since 2007 when more than half the country was affected and more than 1,000 people, most of them children, died. In August 2017, across India, Nepal and Bangladesh, more than 1,200 people died from flooding and landslides and 40 million were affected.

For the Bangladesh government, NGOs and international relief organizations, providing clean water and sanitation were the major priorities. Floodwaters provide breeding grounds for water-borne diseases such as diarrhea, malaria, dengue and Japanese encephalitis. Reaching stranded communities was challenging because the floods washed away roads, bridges and railroads. A newspaper front page photo showed a woman walking along the buckled tracks of a railroad in a badly-hit region of the northwest. The force of the waters had washed away the track bed, and submerged the tracks for three days, leaving them looking “like those of a roller-coaster.”

The Dhaka-Dinajpur line at Kauguan in August 2017 after flood waters washed away the track bed. Courtesy The Daily Star.

Dhaka escaped the worst of the flooding, although rising water in streams and lakes washed away banks and inundated the rough shacks and market stalls where poor families, many of them migrants from rural areas, eke out a living as bicycle rickshaw drivers and roadside vendors. Roads in low-lying areas were under knee-to-waist high water. Urban planners blamed the waterlogging on inadequate drainage and pumping systems and accused government officials and contractors of corruption, shoddy construction and poor maintenance. Over the years, private developers have filled in sections of the canals and rivers that serve as the city’s main drainage channels. Culverts that feed into the waterways are often clogged with garbage and building materials.

The morning after the laptop rescue the rains came again, heavier than the day before. In the lobby of the Ascott Palace Hotel, my colleagues and I waited for the hotel van, wondering how we would reach it without being soaked to the skin. For the staff, it was a familiar challenge. At the entrance, a canopy extended several feet into the street. The van drew up and a guard held up a brightly colored umbrella, almost four feet in diameter, to cover the three steps from the canopy to the door, while still remembering to give us the customary salute. 

Three days of monsoon rains in July 2017 left many roads in Dhaka under water. Courtesy The Daily Star.

Most travelers were not so lucky. Bicycle and bicycle rickshaw drivers pedaled unsteadily through the torrent, one hand on the handlebars and the other clutching an umbrella. Cars sped by, their tires splashing them; one poor cyclist got a double whammy when cars passed him simultaneously on both sides. Auto-rickshaws—the so-called CNGs, powered by compressed natural gas—stalled out, forcing their drivers to push them to the roadside. Street cleaners and construction workers, carrying bricks in baskets on their heads, had no protection from the downpour.

Rickshaws and vans push through the water in Chittagong after six hours of heavy rain in April 2017 left many areas of the port city flooded. Courtesy The Daily Star.

Most workshop participants showed up late that morning. One said it had taken him 2 ½ hours to make a five-mile trip across the city, but he was nonplussed; he was from Chittagong, where flooding is usually much worse than in Dhaka. On a previous visit in April my UNICEF colleague Yasmin Khan had translated a newspaper cartoon. It depicted the portly, bespectacled mayor of Chittagong, happily floating on an inner tube, while his constituents struggled through the flood waters. The caption read: “Mayors come and go but citizens continue to suffer.”