Batturia
The main road running through Gowair extends westward towards the railway and airport, building in busyness and messiness as it passes tight communities in unfinished concrete homes and collections of dirty teashops set up in rotting wood shacks at the side of the road. To the east, the road heads away from the worst of the mess, lined with wood workshops and metal mongers, blinding us with the lighting flashes of their spot welders. On the other side of the road, dusty windows glimpse through into clean showrooms of metalwork: curled bedframes and shining wire shoe-racks stacked against each other, with no care for originality between items.
The industrious shops thinned out further, separated by stone walls half-concealing trees and palms if a courtyard or field beyond. Soon these barriers fell away, revealing an expanse of patchy rice paddies laid in the dry riverbed. The remnants of the monsoon-season torrent wound through the fields in small streams, dotted with one-man boats paddling or punting their way around. On our left, shielded by a dirt embankment on three sides, a bog bloomed with lilac-pink flowers amidst the lush green broad-leaved plants.
Civilization rose around us again as we entered Canchkura. The pavements overflowed with a jostling bazaar; piles of apples and watermelons tumbling at the feet of passer-bys as they hurried, instead, to steaming iron woks deep-frying samosas, pakan pitas, and daal-balls, serving them into cups of newspaper with a sprinkling of shredded lettuce. The road forked: to the left, the bazaar overtook traffic with wandering street-vendors and awnings draped with scarves, lungis and sarees; to the right, twisting past the usual general stores, teashops and pharmacies before heading out of town again, immersed once more amidst fields of rice and views down a steaming river bed.
On our raised road, it felt like we were floating over the land, gliding past a line of palms and trees on both sides, and sweeping around turns as the road continued away from Dhaka. We passed a collection of fenced houses blaring pumping pop music and decorated generously with hot pink and fluorescent yellow banners. Nazrul told me that this was a Hindu wedding; extravagant and loud. Down the entrance way of dangling ribbons I caught a sparkle of sequins lining the hem of a dress. We now drove alongside the river, a dense jungle building up on our right, broken only by small shacks marking dirt paths leading to a distant settlement or house within.
We rounded a corner onto a group of empty easy-bikes lined along one side of the road, their drivers scattered under nearby shelters, sitting in the shade with small glasses of faun-coloured chai in their fingers. This was Batturia, end of the line for us. The road crumbled at the corner, falling into a stone and dirt path that dwindled into trodden walkways threading through the fields below. Jewel lead us down, taking us past the dark brown dirt of empty plots, the forlorn wilting of harvested crops and the young sprouts of a fresh rice paddy. Spread amongst this latest planting, like seeds sown on the land, men and women in dirty lungis and sarees hunched over the ground, sickle in one hand, weeding their livelihood.
A bamboo bridge straddles the stream, lashed together with multicolour rope and rages. It threatened collapse as the six of us tiptoed over the shaky structure. Built on a series of bamboo stiles with more of the same laid lengthways for the footpath, it allowed little room for leeway—when other farmers approached from the other side, heads balancing baskets of their produce, we were forced to the sides, leaning against the handrail with our feet planted on the supports rather than the path. In the water below, a small wooden boat glided past, a frail old man at the helm. Listening to the gentle swish of his paddle in the water, I realised the lack of other sounds here. Only the electric buzz of distant crickets and the occasional bird calling to its mate disturbed the sleeping riverbed. There were no sounds of rumbling cars, no motorbikes or trucks, no horns—squeaks, whistles and jingles—from tuk-tuks and rickshaws, no shouts of market sellers or calling to friends across roads, no blaring music from the ice cream vendor, no clang of hammers on metal or spark of welders, not even the cries of children playing nearby.
It was as if my ears had become muffled by nature, unable to hear the harsh, man-made sounds of Gowair. The open space suddenly felt closed, like a protective wall. Here, the world was subdued. By empty nature and the heat of the sun.
From bank to bank, the river stretched at least three kilometres. I imagined the river swelling madly in the monsoon season like the ribs of an angry dragon, engulfing the fields and crops, snapping the bamboo bridge like a toothpick, ruining paths and softening the ridges between fields with silt. The farmers forced to start again in six months’ time.
All that remains and reminds you of the seasonal farms below the water are a few billboards stranded in the river, denoting ownership. Now, with the river as two thin streams, we were free to amble across the bed. A ferry took us across the second stream. The old man sculled us along the water, bumping up on to the bank and requesting pittance for his efforts. We were now on the far bank of the empty river, looking back to the curved road we driven along before. It became difficult to make out the shacks and shops I knew were there. Constructed of wood and with palm-leaf thatching on their roofs, they blended easily with the wall of trees and thick jungle lining the river.
We moved through a cluster of houses and stores, their occupants occupied elsewhere at a small chai shop. A path led out of the settlement and passed small growths of cucumbers and gourds, hung from bamboo trellises. To our left, four boats appeared abandoned on the sand. Next to them, a fresh construction was underway, the hull coated now with black tar, the wood banisters at the rim with white paint. The workers stopped to watch us walk past.
We approached a wrought-iron bridge, protruding out of the bank like a metal splinter to nature. The bulky construction clanged in deep booms as we stepped onto it. Twenty metres out towards the middle of the river and the bridge stopped, subsiding into a dirt pile and becoming little more than the muddy tracks we had walked across before. Here, we stopped, needing to turn back before the sun disappeared into the haze that hangs like a veil at the horizon.
The air began to cool, and with a breeze rushing in on the easy-bike journey home, the sweat on my face quickly dried, replaced with a film of dirt and dust.
We returned to Batturia a week later, this time taking four new guests with us. It was our one chance of showing the locals something new in their own area. We went with Pinky and Rahima from the singing class, bringing Pinky’s sister, Pritty, and Solomon along as well. The drive took us again through Canchkura, where a bus caused a commotion as it tried to manoeuvre its lumbering body around a tight corner, the roads thinned further by bazaar stalls and wandering pedestrians.
I let out a sigh when we reached Batturia; beautiful Batturia; peaceful Batturia. Once again, the distant birds and happy crickets replaced the dusty bus horns and the bells of swerving rickshaws. We walked across the riverbed, taking our guests along paths through the field that now seemed so familiar. Beyond the iron bridge, we followed the dirt path through a dry, busty area. The plots of land bordering the path had deep crevasses tearing the parched earth apart. In another, the ghosts of trees—cut branches bleached white in the sun—lay on dark dirt, like wispy chalk drawings on a blackboard.
A green field of ripe rice grew up to the dead plot, separated and stopped by a raised ridge, like a damn holding back life, holding back nature. We sat a while, enjoying the dimming sun and noiseless symphony around us: hushed bird song, swishing blades of rice-grass, and the one-fingered applause of crickets. A family of cattle wandered by, herded by a dark, wrinkled old man, bare-chested with a brown lungi at his waist. His whip-stick rested on his shoulder. He walked slowly, but with ease—his back straight. Silhouetted by the yellowing sky behind, he looked like a wandering hunter on the plains of Africa, or a nomadic traveller, walking for days to find a new camp.
From behind him, three adolescent boys bicycled past. The tinny sound of Bangla pop swelled from the breast pocket of the leading boy. They bicycled lazily, the bikes wobbling from side to side with the swaying of their bodies, as if they, too, had been calmed by nature.
As we walked back, we passed the trellises of cucumber, set up in a wide ditch bordering the path. From beneath the mat of tangled vines filtered the sounds of conversation. There was a gap in the foliage and I saw three men sat around a board game of sorts—maybe chess—with tiny glasses of tea in their fingers. I couldn’t think of a better way to end a day.
The last time we came to Batturia was on our final day at the Dhaka Project. We would be leaving for the airport early the next morning. After finishing lessons at school, some of the children had asked us what we wanted to do. I could think of only one place, the place I had fallen in love with. An escape from bustle. From noise and incessant dust. Once there, we took a different route, boated along the river, the seven of us sat on a small wooden dinghy. This time we floated under the bamboo bridge, seeing its frailty for what it really was, stretched taught across the stream and poles bouncing in their binging with each step of a crosser.
From our low vantage point, much of the expanse was invisible to us, hidden beyond a wall of rice-grass growing at the bank. It made the trip feel very secluded, as if we had the river to ourselves. We were taken around to the ferry on the opposite bank, where we had crossed five days before. From here, the river stretched south past the iron thorn, curving to the left and disappearing behind thick jungle.
A path veered away from the river, threading through empty buildings in the settlement and a derelict market place; low tables laid out under rotting corrugated iron, as if waiting for produce to be piled upon them. The track led into the jungle where buildings sat amidst the trees, some deserted and decaying, others curtained neatly or fronted by a veranda with family members sat in chairs watching us walk past. A school building and field cleared a hot, dusty space, unprotected by the shade of the mango and fig trees around us. The single storey building had sand-yellow walls and empty windows. Five children played cricket on the field. We turned back; there was nothing more to see.
In the cluster of buildings on the riverside, two men cajoled their shy friend into saying hello. He was teased more until he used the rest of his limited English: “How are you” and “Where are you from.” Once of his friends in a dirty red top said the shy man was thirty-two, and blind. Nazrul urged us on, wary of the strangers. As we walked back to the ferry crossing I could hear the blind man’s friends trying to a few more words out of him, asking us for money, for baksheesh.
To the north of the ferry, upriver, the bed split at a pinnacle of land. The right hand river, part of the main trunk, maintained the thickness and faded into the hazy horizon of dirty green six kilometres away. To the left, the river thinned, no longer a patchwork of fields threaded with streams. Here the water reached from bank to bank, though the level was low, with a steep beach of mud and small plants reaching down from the trees above. A dirt footpath worked along one side, passing through the fringes of a sparse forest. The trees stood in bare ground with and equal several metres between each trunk, as if they had been part of an organised orchard. The trees disintegrated into a dip of green that filled the bed of a small, dry river, like a coating of moss on a gutter.
The track crept down to the water’s edge, where a hooded wooden vessel ferried bundles of villagers to a similar path leading up to a lone hut, marking the presence of more beyond like the border-shack of a close-knit community. Jewel called out to another small boat as it trundled closer from upriver. He asked for a lift back to Batturia, back to the starting point. The man would not take us. We hiked back along the river, singing a traditional Bangla song Fiona and I had picked up during the music classes.
The song’s first verse brought discussion amongst us as we decided on the order of lines. The chorus had us all together, smiling and singing strong.
“Ek din Bangali chilam re-e-e-e-ey,” a passionate crescendo and rising note for the last syllable.
“Ek din Bangali chilam rey!”
Translating roughly to “I was once a Bangladeshi,” I sang the tune with the English translation, bringing laughs from the boys, who joined in for the encore.
