What was Bangladesh like?
People often ask me what Bangladesh was like, and I guess, as a country with little presence in anyone’s mind except Boxing Day 2004, not many people have an idea of the people, the place, the cities or the landscape. From what I’ve heard of India, I’d say it’s a little like that. Being almost surrounded by India, and with the land it occupies switching in the past between India, Pakistani and British rule, it is rightly similar. Without going into any more detail though, I’d also say that’s where the similarities end…
The first thing that comes to mind for me every time I get asked that question is this: Bangladesh is hot. For the five weeks we were there, four and a half of them were hot and the other few days started hot and stormy before calming down in the aftermath of a torrential downpour. Travelling there in late March to early April meant catching the height of summer. The country is in a tropical climate and has little rain for half the year. The air thickens throughout these dryer months until May when the humidity reaches a tipping point and the deluges begin. We had some fantastic electrical storms during our stay too, with the lightning going off like a faulty fluorescent tube light in the sky.
Bangladesh is also very varied in what it’s like, not only in climate—the hill tracts in the North East are reportedly much cooler—but also in culture and smell. Having visited the busiest place in the country as well as one of the quietest makes labelling Bangladesh as one or the other that much harder. The only thing that seems constant is poverty and a national love affair with mangoes, no matter how ripe or not.
In the city, everything is dirty and all the buildings are either half constructed or half crumbling, except for a handful of government buildings and a westernised mall. The sewers offer little promise of hygiene, with many running open alongside the roads. The streets become one enormous rubbish bin, scattered with wrappers, bottles, fruit skins, rags and shoes. A smell of dusty sewage seeps up from the floor and is only abated when passing an occasional roti stand or curry shop, where the deep fat fryers exterminate the smell and leave you salivating for a samosa or two. Along the thick and thin streets, buses, trucks, vans, lorries, tuc tucs, easybikes, and rickshaws compete for the loudest noise, all honking and jingling in a cacophony of sound invading your mind wherever you are. Even behind closed doors and windows in our Gowair guesthouse, the dissonant symphony continued late into the night. It is like an imitation of jungle sounds—the calls, cries, squawks, cheeps, scratches and hoots—gone horribly wrong, distorted into the metallic screeches and bells, the awful parp of horns.
In the village it is another world; where in the city half-finished concrete carcasses stood next to the rubble of a home-no-more, the village houses are of mud and bamboo. Their creamy walls are rough to the touch and fringed at the top by a line of straw and palm leaf thatching. Every home in the village was built by its occupier or their fore-fathers. They are open plan to keep cool, and have no more than three or four rooms, even for families of eight or more. Along the streets of Ratanpur lies only litter from organic waste. With less access to western treats and plastic wrapped items, the streets are left a lot cleaner. The cobbles and small width of paths fend off the worst of the traffic too, leaving only a few rattling motor-rickshaws and the locals wobbling past on rusted old bicycles. If even this is too much for you, it is only ever a five minute walk to the river, or endless fields of swaying fresh rice just beginning to show signs of ripeness. When out in the open, hundreds of metres from the nearest road or settlement, the silence becomes a hum, a buzz of insects. It sounds like they too are concentrating. The sun dampens all other noise and if you shut your eyes, the crickets and grasshoppers close in, swarming into a ringing in your ears as the soft chirps come from all around you.
With a lack of fast transport, all life grinds to a thick sludge. Men dawdle in tea shops or stand alongside grazing cattle. Even the cows lift their heads from the ground to meet your gaze with a slow certainty. Mothers do their rounds of the neighbourhood, picking up the latest gossip. They wander between the fenced plots, calling out to friends inside and stopping for a chat and a glass of water. I followed behind, sitting in these stranger’s homes sipping water and smiling while they talked in Bangla. I could pick up a few words here and there, but nothing to construct sentences from. After ten minutes of nibbling my way through three biscuits we would leave, Monju—Fiona’s auntie—turning down offers of more biscuits, tea, water, fruit or rotis.
The town, Darsana , is a stepping stone between the two extremes. It held pockets of busy roads along the main thoroughfare and a peaceful escape in the distillery grounds or a large school field. We continued the daily gossip rounds and went home to the noise of a few rickshaws and trucks tumbling along the main road. There were areas where rubbish piled in dunes down the banks of a river or road, and others where the paths were only littered with branches and leaves from nearby trees. Motorbikes allowed people to rush around the wider, metalled roads, but left pedestrians in the side streets free to amble their lazy way among a mixture of wattle and daub houses and concrete or brick buildings.
On the surface and from first sight, Bangladesh is a country of mayhem. From the moment we emerged, bleary eyed from the airport at four in the morning, we were bustled into a shaking tuc tuc and sprung into the network of smelly alleys and dusty streets spreading out from the airport like capillaries from an artery. The next day Touhid, volunteer organiser for the Dhaka Project, led us through the streets of stinking, choking traffic and down even narrower pathways past open sewers and open courtyards housing four families, ten chickens and a goat.
But delve deeper, stay longer, and explore, and the hidden side of this wonderful country is found.
First you taste the food: plentiful plates of rice with bowls of chicken or beef curry and a dish of thick daal waiting to be ladled onto your meal. At other times it is a simple breakfast of roti and fried egg, made succulent with a dollop of chickpea daal. In the evening you stop at a chai stall and order a tea for everyone. They are tiny glasses of steaming tea, sweetened with an oozing of condensed milk, but at 5Tk. each (about 4p) they are worth every penny. The hot, thick, sweet tea is soothing and refreshing, despite the humid heat still hanging around after dark.
Then you talk with the people, the Bengalis. For us it was the children at the Dhaka Project school. In our first lesson, a craft lesson with year 3, they crowded around us, eager to find out about us. At the end of class, during their fifteen minute break, prefects from higher up in the school stuck their head in the door too, curious about their new visitors. We were celebrities for a few days, but once the novelty wore off, they were no less kind.
We spent more time with a few of them, letting them take us to Batturia, fields of rice laid across the dry bed of a wide river, where we talked for two hours as we walked across the river along thin paths raised between the rice paddies. We also made good friends with some of the girls from the choir club, where they helped us learn a few Bangla songs. They were gracious enough to invite us to their homes, a huge privilege for us and, as we later found out from them, a huge privilege for their families too. Their hospitality was unrivalled. Here are people living in the slums of Dhaka, choosing to send their child to school where many other families send theirs to work, earning barely enough to support their children and parents, yet in the blink of an eye, they had before us a plate of biscuits and glasses of lemonade. When we had finished at one girl’s house, others in our little troupe would ask us to their home too.
During the music lessons themselves, we had spent the first two quietly appreciating their singing from the side of the classroom. The harmonium player was a soft faced man with a shy but kind smile. The other teacher present appeared at first to be very stern. She never smiled in those first two lessons and as much as I wanted to try and join in with the singing, I was intimidated by her glare. In the third lesson, she was busy, so Fiona and I took the opportunity to join in, humming the tune of the chorus of one of the songs. The harmonium player loved it and the kids were upon us, eager to teach us a few more words before we had learnt the last. By the next lesson, music club transformed. Once the lady heard us sing—or attempt to sing—she was all smiles and helped us learn while we sat amongst the kids rather than separate at the side. The harmonium player was keen to show off our ‘talent’ in the staffroom and the children had us singing their song as they walked us home.
After getting to know people, they begin to show you places. Beautiful places like Batturia, peaceful and so removed from the havoc of Dhaka. In Ratanpur, we were shown the fields surrounding, fields that stretch to the next village some twenty kilometres away.
Bangladesh is a hard country to appreciate for many. I had a foot in the door with Fiona’s family, allowing me to extend my experience beyond Dhaka and delve into town and village life. Without the comfort and safety of a local to guide you, Bangladesh would seem a scary and unyielding place. Maria Concecaou, who set up the Dhaka Project, said in an interview that other flight attendants with Emirates had been scared to leave the hotel. They would stay only as long as they had to and rush away on the next flight out, sticking to pre-booked taxis in comfortable, AC cars.
Now that the Dhaka Project exists, it is much easier for travellers to visit the country. It is close to the airport and they offer an airport to guest house transfer to help you out. Their staff speak good English and the children will be eager to get to know you too. Travel outside of Dhaka would almost certainly need a guide. Even something as simple as catching a train is made impossible in the disorganisation of a Bangladeshi train station, not to mention that the trains are not marked or announced in English, and are invariably four or five hours off their scheduled time.
It is a fascinating country, but one that must be approached with a mind-set of improvisation and an ability to be flexible. Batturia, the children at the Dhaka Project, Ratanpur and Darsana are but some of the treasures held on the flood plain of the Ganges-Brahmaputra river system. It is, more than anything, a country waiting to be discovered.