In the Courtyard, Smelling of Wine

Walking towards the gate, we passed an underground vat of molasses, the staple ingredient for almost all of the distillery’s produce. A thick, tar-like substance stained the ground around the access building, tainting the air with sweet molasses mixed with petrol fumes. We had a troupe of eight: five teachers from the nearby college—Monju being one of them—Fiona, Solomon and I. The guards stopped us, inquiring about our purpose. Rashed handed his phone to the guard, who talked briefly before letting us through. It was a red metal gate with a sub-door for pedestrians. We went through into a courtyard walled by brick buildings.

A green rectangle stretched out in front of us, lined with small shrubs and flowers, and with trees speckled across the grounds providing shade and half-obscuring the main distillery building—a large dirty-red brick building with small grotty windows dotted across its side. The air changed, filling with the smell of sweet wine and cider, fermenting sugar and squashed grapes. I wanted to follow my nose and find the source of this syrupy scent.

Our first stop was the laboratory. We entered a single room at the top of stone steps running up the side of a building. Directly to our left stood a row of compressors, fridges and cabinets. On our right, a bench extended two thirds into the room, lined with glass vials and test tubes. Pipettes and drips suspended from retort stands dunked into a few of the tubes. A shelf on the far wall held boxes of unnamed items on the right and darkened bottles of chemicals on the left, the labels faded and coffee-stained. The lab tech stood on the other side of the middle bench, watching us and answering questions abrupt and short.

We moved back out to courtyard, passing a godown—storehouse—with small doorways in the brick. Through the darkness within, I could make out large metal cylinders, but it enveloped all before I could make out the far wall. Rashed said these stores were for spirits. The smell of alcohol was increasing, pervading everything, and filtering through scarves covering mouths and noses.

Vats of Unrefined Spirit

We came to the packing section of the factory, a warehouse filled mostly with empty cardboard boxes stacked together in heaps. Just inside the door, two men sat at the labelling desk with a third security guard resting on his feet nearby. The desk had reams of labels on one side and a metal labelling machine on the other. The labels said “Carew’s Brandy.” They were blue with pale yellow borders and writing. Under the name, it said proudly, Product of Bangladesh.

On the floor in front of us, close to two-thousand five-hundred plastic bottles lay in a neat grid, filled with a clear liquid, and labelled with similar stickers. These were bottles of Carew’s Tsarina Vodka. The smell confirmed it. My nose began to run from the stinging fumes. Too much of a good thing turned bad.

To the left, on a raised platform along the far wall, five vats sat with tubes running down to a conveyor belt. Rashed translated the words of a man demonstrating the filling process. At my feet, near the start of the conveyor belt, were boxes of empty bottles, ready to be filled from the vats above, capped and labelled. Rashed led us back out to the sweet wine air, passing a few blue barrels containing unrefined alcohol.

“This is the local alcohol. Unrefined. They will mix it with water and drink it. It is very popular in Bangladesh and especially Darsana.”

We entered a godown, a tall hall filled with six vats stretching floor to ceiling, thirty feet high. Each one held spirit, fifty-thousand litres of it, unrefined fermented molasses waiting to be turned into vodka or brandy, or sold as-is for varnishing or mixing with water. Three of the vats were two-thirds height, with a steep set of wooden steps stretching up the side of one. We ventured up the rocking construction, peering down into the vats and seeing our own reflection: a ring of light in the silky black liquid. From our vantage point, the other larger vats seemed small, dwarfed slightly by our own height.

From the godown we passed a powerhouse, off now, but helping to provide constant electricity in an otherwise unstable grid. It sat in a small brick building and filled almost the whole space within, leaving a walkway around one side. The giant generator was a cylinder of steel rested on its side. Pipes ran out of the building, splitting to other areas of the complex.

Rashed told me that this distillery provided the alcohol for all of Bangladesh. It is the only distillery in Bangladesh and one of the biggest in Southeast Asia. He talked about the old industry of the sugar mill, still running but at a loss, with the distillery bringing in all the money these days. With increasing demand within the country, they had ceased exporting, though they used to have customers in nearby Sri Lanka and India, as well as Japan and other parts of Asia.

He led us to the main building, the fermentation building. As we neared, the sweet wine transfused into thick malt sugar and at the large door of the building hot air flowed past us, like the open door of an oven cooking viscous syrup. To the right of the entrance two pipes spewed a frothy orange liquid into the drain below.

Pipes like a Windows Screensaver

Inside the building, a piercing metallic shriek echoed off pipes and canisters dotted in the large space. Heading up some stairs, we escaped the worst of the smell and came to a desk covered in piles of paper and backed by three chairs.

“This is the molasses house.” Rashed gave a running commentary of the places and buildings we passed.

We passed the desk, heading through a small opening into another room of a similar size. This one held eight circular tanks, each bubbling with brown-yellow molasses mixed with fermenting yeast, and giving of a stench of burnt sugar and biting alcohol. The froth in each vat oozed across the surface, churned slowly by steam bubbled up from below, brimming to the surface in a tumult at the edges. Pipes hung from the ceiling close above us, some dumping more sickly-brown liquid into the vats.

We were walking on a rickety wooden walkway, threaded around the edge of the room between the wall and the vats. Through numerous gaps in the wood panels, I could see through to the floor below, eighteen feet down, and the vats stretched all the way. We were skimming around the tops of these massive containers, seeing only the top few feet. There was an empty vat and here we could see the true size of these goliaths. They were perhaps eight feet in diameter giving them five-hundred cubic feet of volume.

On the walkway, two men sat in wooden chairs, watching the vats but otherwise lethargic. Rashed introduced us to one whilst the other moved away to another part of the room to inspect the other vats.

“This is my brother, Munsafa.” He smiled and tilted his head. His messy beard wrangled away from his chin. He had on a white Muslim cap and a white Fifa World Cup t-shirt from 2002. In photographs, like many Bangladeshis, he assumed a stoic posture and expression, staring into the lens as if bored. Only once was he with his grin out, his lower lip peeled down to reveal white teeth—though his eyes were still void of emotion.

The walkway led us around the side of the vats and towards another small opening, beyond which a further nine vats frothed away. We returned to the noisy main tower. The building had a large hole running up the middle, allowing us to peer over the edge and see the other six floors stretching above. Two large, segmented pipes ran up one side of the space, disappearing into the ground below and twisting onto the top floor overhead.

Fermenting, Bubbling, Stinking Froth

On the first floor, in one corner, two benches with ten glass bell jars sat against the wall. In each, a clear, shiny liquid spurted up from a glass pipe running halfway up the middle and splashed back into the jar. Here they tested the unrefined spirit to ensure quality before sending the bulk of it off to the storage vats of the godown.

“Third floor,” announced Rashed.

The concrete floor was littered with gaps and holes, some filled partly by tubes and pipework running throughout the building in a messy network of steaming hot steel, others were empty, portals to the floor below and making me giddy seeing the thickness of the floor.

We ascended more stairs, the railing on either side hot to touch. The air stuffed down our throats and stung our noses, the alcohol biting at our eyes. From the top floor, we had a wide view of Darsana. Close by, at the foot of the building, the sugar side of the factory spread out in a long warehouse. A few more square vats sat on the top floor, again filled with molasses—they seemed keen to fill every room with the stuff.

Rashed led me into a metal workshop, empty of people. The floor was scattered with scraps of bent and rusted metal. Parts of machines lay on top of each other and along shelves. To the right, a small wooden school desk sat under a single ceiling fan. There was a small desk light and a few papers lay across it. Beyond, four metal cabinets walled the room.

There was a second powerhouse. This one was running and the brick building holding it was scorching hot within. Through a small window at the front of the generator, a fierce, electric blue fire swirled around as if fighting to break free of its metal confines.

Over the din of the screaming flames, the operator shouted a proud number. “Twenty-four hour. Twenty-four hour.” This generator ran throughout day and night to keep the distillery alive. Rashed later told me that when demand and supply were high, the plant would run twenty-four hours a day, churning our boxes and boxes of alcohol along with tens of barrels full of spirit.

We exited the distillery compound, heading around to another gate, smaller and barred, through which was the sugar mill itself. Here, for a few months each year, during the jute season, the factory would work to crush, refine and bag the sugar, ready to be sent off to shops and sold.

Now it was deserted and silent. A huddle of three men shaded themselves in the midst of a few large silos just inside the entrance. They peered our way, moving their heads slowly in the midday heat. They were drinking from bottles similar to those of the Tsarina Vodka and chewed tobacco.

To our left stood the main factory warehouse, a huge brick construction with a corrugated iron roof, stretching from the gate’s fence at one end to the other side of the sugar mill compound, perhaps two-hundred metres away. There was a small alcove with an entranceway cut into the side of the building and we stepped through into an echo-filled space. Light from a nearby warehouse door made the spindly machinery within glow, sending shadows and shafts of light through the room like lost ghosts.

The building had a few different sections and Rashed lead me off to the left of the building, into a vast hall. It held all the equipment and machinery, piled along one side, to transform the crushed jute into bagged sugar. We walked its length within a minute, passing tubes and pipes, cylinders and vast vats. Conveyor belts ran alongside us at head height and the rest of the construction stood on stilts, lifting it to the roof.

“All this side to make sugar,” Rashed led his arm along the line of jumbled metal, “make sugar, and then storehouse.” At the far end of the hall, a sign above a door read Godown.

We passed a row of dusty windows cut into the wall on our right. “This is the laboratory. Here, they are test the sugar.”

The laboratory looked much like a college lab: rows of wooden desks filled the room with gas and electricity points at the aisles. Towards the front of the room, a long desk spread along the wall, covered in stacks of papers and books and a gathering of glass vials, test tubes and bulb beakers. Two steel cabinets sat at the far wall, steel grey and dented. The room was empty of people and the light was off.

“The sugar is made and packaging here.” We had reached the end of the room where the jumble of components petered out to a single chute dumping its contents into a hopper, which snuck through the wall to the godown beyond where the packing took place. I looked back down the line of manufacturing. The metal plates and vats, pipes, chutes and conveyors, together looked like a mad scientists dream.

A group of workmen sat at a bench. A wobbling fan hung tenderly from the roof far above and a lonely lamp buzzed on the wall. They had watched our approach and now asked Rashed about me. From what I could gather, they asked my country and how I knew Rashed. At the mention of Monju’s name, one man said he knew David Ghosh—her brother—and that he had been David’s classmate at the college here.

Rashed took me back through to another large space filled with several wide conveyor belts undulating over various blocks of machinery. Our visit was brief; we skirted round one corner before ducking away to another room.

It was a corridor running alongside the ‘dusting’ room and had an old railway running along it and twisting away around a corner. On the other side, the brick wall held twelve black steel doors, thick, heavy and small. Each one was a boiler and the stones around each entrance had black char stains running out in streaks.

Similar to the distillery, the sugar mill made and mended all its own machinery. We entered a third open hall, the sugar mill workshop. The space looked empty, filled only with six metal lathes down one side and a few large benches stacked with metal plates or wood planks. Nothing filled the space above our heads. In the far corner, a machine whirred away with a huddle of workers overlooking its operators. On the other side, four men sat on a workbench whilst two others nearby manoeuvred a large planer along a plank of wood. The floor was littered with metal filings and coils of steel, like cuttings of curly metal hair.

The lathes stood proud in a line, frosty green and blue-silver. They were chunky machines. Rashed lead us on a beeline between low stacks of metal rods and broken parts and through a doorway beyond the workbench. This adjoining room had a low ceiling letting the only light in through broken holes, casting fuzzy dots on the dirt ground below. It was a smoky room cluttered with wrought iron chunks; parts for machinery elsewhere in the mill: thick-toothed gears, large shafts, anvils, and rollers.

Six or seven fires lay dormant down the middle of the room, the dusty grey ash in piles around black coals. One of them, further down the room, still smouldered, a trickle of smoke escaping through one of the starry holes in the roof.

In the right wing of the room, at the far wall, the space was dominated by three smelting ovens, their soot-black chimneys solid and tall, stretching beyond the roof. Their mouths gaped open and dead, the fires out for the moment. Around them piles of rough-cast parts with jagged angles and burs lay ready to be polished, refined and given life within one of the machines of the sugar mill.

Back in the workshop, we passed back through to a large door leading outside. To the left of the door, I stopped to watch the whirring machine in the corner. It had a metal tooth on a rocking shaft, slowly moving back and forth, nudged slowly by two metal wheels. It cut into a clamped, toothed rack, scratching away a thin string of metal dust before being adjusted by half a millimetre to a new position, lower or closer, to cut another string away.

So the process continued, during my three-minute wait and for many hours after, shaping and grinding the rack into perfect shape for use in the sugar mill. The gentle scrape created a melodic rhythm, coupled with the pendulum swing of the cutting tooth. I could’ve sat for a lot longer, watching the precision and patience.

Rashed ushered me outside to a bright sun. Tens of trucks sat waiting in broken lines like a sleeping army, ready at a moment’s notice to charge off and gather jute. We passed a metal cloister, stretched out fifty metres from the factory building beyond. In a ditch cut in the ground, a conveyor lead to a chute that transported dumped jute into the factory to be churned, boiled, ground and bagged within.

We left through an open, unmanned gate under the sweating sun. By rickshaw, we headed away to the Bazar. Rashed treated us to ice-creams, stood in a shaded shop. We ate in silence. Towards the back of the shop, a young man melted closed packets of soft cake, using the heat of a flickering wick.

For the rest of the day, I continued to smell glimpses and memories of the sweet stench. As I moved, the sickly scent and strong alcohol dislodged from my clothes, filling my nose and making my eyes water once again. The smell I remembered as delicious from before—the malt at the entrance to the distillery—now seemed nauseating.