The women have three years to pay back the loan, and to prevent the whole scheme suffering the fate of well-intentioned causes in a cruelly commercial world, the interest is a hefty 20 per cent.
The results, as Naila explains to me, as we drive out to the countryside some 25 miles (40 km) from Dhaka, have been impressive. Grameen Phone has led to the empowerment of women and the empowerment of local village communities.
Not only are villagers able to talk with family members abroad, but villages themselves are able to talk to each other. They can compare prices of basic goods like seed and fertilizer and avoid being ripped off by unscrupulous suppliers.
‘They can’t be hoodwinked,’ as Naila puts it.
Watched by a small caravan of Grameen advisers and feeling rather like a royal visitor, I’m led by Naila, wearing a smart orange and yellow shalwar, black, medium-heeled, leather shoes and rolled umbrella, along a narrow mud path between the fields. Pumps chug away, irrigating the rice paddies, and families of ducks are scudding about among the young shoots. Naila finishes a call and snaps her mobile shut.
‘I love my work,’ she says, steadying herself to cross an unsympathetic patch of wet, sticky mud, ‘I love it so much.’
She apologizes for her executive outfit, but she has a big business meeting later. I ask her if the endemic corruption everyone talks about here hinders her work. She shakes her head. Bribes are a commonly accepted part of the system, if you want things to get done fast.
‘They call it speed money,’ she says. ‘It’s not always such a bad thing.’
Passing by a field of lentils, with fragrant blue flowers and clumps of bamboo with bee-eaters darting in and out of them, we reach Athalia village. In a month’s time, when the monsoon starts, we could not have walked here, for the surrounding fields become a lake and stay that way for half the year.
A reception committee is waiting to meet us as we scramble up the bank, and we’re led into the village, composed of around 30 huts of palm thatch and corrugated iron. The huts are built on hard, smoothed mud, freshly treated with liquefied cow dung, which seals the clay and keeps it waterproof. There is no electricity here. The village phone has been held for the last four years by Mrs Abida Sultan, a short, middle-aged woman with prominent, gold-rimmed glasses and matching gold watch. She is shy and rather quiet today, continually readjusting her pale pink sari modestly over her head, in a way that makes me think she wouldn’t wear it like this if we weren’t here. Her phone is in a plastic cover with a purple trim, and she grips it tight as she answers Naila’s questions.
Being the only phone-lady for miles around means Mrs Abida Sultan is in demand. She must be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. She is making between 7000 and 10,000 taka profit every month, about PS70 to PS100. A rural family needs about 5000 taka a month to survive, so, unlike most of those who live in Athalia, Mrs Abida Sultan can comfortably break out of the life of subsistence. Grameen Phone has enabled her to send her 19-year-old daughter to university, something she could previously never have dreamt of.
Naila says that, despite Grameen’s success, the potential has barely been tapped. Only one million of the 140 million in Bangladesh have been connected through the mobile system, and Grameen Phone, half owned by the Norwegians, is now the biggest single investor in the country. The concept has been exported to poorer rural communities in places like Malaysia, Thailand and Ukraine.
The pace at which Naila and her PR team work is very different from the leisurely diurnal rhythms of this soft, warm, inviting countryside and once away from the village her mobile starts up again and doesn’t stop until we’re back in Dhaka.
For those able to survive the sound and fury of the capital there is a reward. Ishraq puts it simply.
‘The best international cooking in Southeast Asia.’
And he’s determined to prove it. Last night we ate some fine Chinese, surpassed tonight by a wonderfully authentic Lebanese dinner. And tomorrow, yet another strike day has been called, so we can stay in bed and sleep it off.
Day One Hundred and Twenty Three : Dhaka to the Delta
Life down in the delta rarely makes the news. Goings on in Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet hog the headlines. But today is different. In between all the hartal horror stories, the New Nation has a mention of the Sundarban Islands, my final destination. Apparently, the decomposed remains of six villagers, killed by man-eating Royal Bengal tigers, have been discovered deep in the mangrove forest. I sort of wish I hadn’t read that.
On the way to the boat terminal, through lanes crowded with commerce and alleyways of go-downs where old men, still calculating by abacus, sit cross-legged beside sacks of rice or swat flies away from fruit stalls with feather dusters, we pass an incongruous set of cast-iron railings. Behind them rises the Ahsan Manzil, a wedding-cake pink building that was the palace of the Nawab Abdul Ghani, a Muslim and the largest landowner in East Bengal at the time of the Raj. By all accounts, this influential man was also a man of learning and culture, and his son Salimullah founded the Dhaka Medical School. The Pink Palace, as it’s known, has been restored to its former glories and is a reminder of the beauty that lurks beneath the surface of this scuffed and overworked city, and makes me wish I’d had more time to explore.
The Sadarghat boat terminal is Dhaka at its most exasperating and exhilarating. Everyone fights for everything: parking and unloading space, space at the ticket counter, space on the long pontoons, space on the boats that moor up against them. No-one is actively hostile, they’re just there. There where you want to be, and in huge numbers.
After many wrong directions, I eventually find our boat and can’t understand why I hadn’t seen it earlier. With an ochre-painted superstructure and massive paddle wheels, the PS Ostrich is an old-fashioned, pleasing shape, like a great nautical sausage. It is part of the Rocket Service, pride of the succinctly named Bangladesh Inland Waterway Transport Corporation. The identification plaque records that its Year of Built (sic) was 1929 and that it was ‘Renovated and Dieselized’ in Narayagonj (just outside Dhaka) in 1996. It accommodates a total of 700 people on two decks and has 24 places in First Class.
I step onto the gangplank. Below me, the water is thundercloud grey. An evil-smelling, viscous grease-slick covers the surface of the Buriganga like lacquer. Then I’m shown to a flight of steps with a banister rail in polished wood, which leads up to the first-class accommodation. Here, the world is transformed. The cabins, their numbers in polished brass, lead off a long and gracefully proportioned state room, down the centre of which runs an elegant mahogany table. The wood panelling on the walls is painted a subtle combination of light and dark grey, and interspersed at intervals with fluted bas-relief columns picked out in gold leaf. Outside, a covered deck set with tables and chairs offers the enticing prospect of cocktails at sunset. Sadly, this being a Muslim country, there is no bar on board, but Ishraq, ever ingenious, has access to supplies of his own.
Five minutes before our scheduled departure time the Ostrich emits two sonorous blasts from its horn, warning late-arriving passengers and waterborne tradesmen selling hard to the open decks below us that departure is imminent. We cast off and pull away from the seething Sadarghat dead on time, narrowly avoiding collision with one of the many ferries fighting for our place at the pontoon.
Ishraq has invited a friend of his along, a delightful lady called Mahjabeen Khan, but known to all as Moni. She is probably not far from my own age, but is blessed with a good head of glossy dark hair and intensely dark eyes. She was born in Guwahati, Assam, but at Partition in 1947, her family, being Muslim, moved from there to Sylhet in what had become East Pakistan. Looking back now, she can see that trying to turn East Bengal into a part of Pakistan was a terrible mistake.
‘They wanted us to behave differently, look differently, eat differently, dress differently. We were always a secular country.’
She and her seven siblings, six sisters and one brother, were sent to high school in Dhaka and encou
raged to study a musical instrument. Moni discovered a talent for singing as well as playing and turned professional, until she married an ambassador and spent 15 years in Washington and Bangkok. Her husband, Abu Zafir Obaidullah Khan, was not just a diplomat and scholar but one of Bangladesh’s leading poets. Her story seems to paint a portrait of a charmed life and it’s quite a shock when Moni reveals that before she met Abu Zafir she had spent 12 largely unhappy years in an arranged marriage.
But before all that, when she was 13 or 14, she and her family took the Rocket Service when they went on holidays down south. She remembers its formality: the crisp linen tablecloth and gloved waiters in white uniforms with braided epaulettes, brass buttons and matching white turbans.
Tonight, there’s less ceremony. People eat at different times. A tasty, fleshy local fish called bekti is served, but not with white gloves.
A thin, bespectacled man introduces himself after supper. He spent several years at the Botany Department at Sheffield University and, in one of those serendipitous moments that give travel a good name, I find myself on both the Ganges and the Brahmaputra swapping stories with a Bangladeshi botanist about the church I used to go to when I was nine.
The waterways of Bangladesh seem to operate on the same philosophy as the roads of Dhaka, an improbable synergy that, by the most dangerous means possible, successfully accommodates every kind of river user. None of them seem to have lights or horns. And as we don’t have radar, Captain Mohammed Rahman has to rely on instinctive judgement.
I’m in bed in my cabin reading Patrick O’Brian when we make our first stop at Chandpur. There is a lot of noise and light and the sound of shouts and the slap of sandals, and the loading and unloading is still going on when I put down my book about Napoleonic sea battles, feeling that, perhaps, past and present aren’t so far apart.
Day One Hundred and Twenty Four : Chandpur to Mongla
Up at six. It’s a soft, drowsy morning. The banks are shrouded in mist, from which fields and trees occasionally emerge, tinged with diffused morning sunlight. The mist and the water mingle, giving the impression that everything, on water and land, is floating.
From a map on the wall of the state room and a few enquiries of the waiters, I work out that we are west of the main river channel and south of Barisal, heading slowly through a maze of curling rivers in the rough direction of the Sundarbans National Park. Breakfast is a disappointingly routine affair, enlivened only by discovering that my bottle of ‘Mum’ mineral water is proudly labelled ‘Official Drink For the 10th Asian Conference on Diarrhoeal Diseases’.
At half-past seven we reach a place called Jahlokati. An archetypal scene of passengers waiting beneath a spreading neem tree, a few thatched buildings and a tin-roofed warehouse, its walls stuck with political posters and daubed with slogans. The signs are only in Bangla, reminding us that we are well away from the cosmopolitan world of Dhaka. Well away from the hustle and bustle too. Though a lot of people are getting on and off here, the noise is as muted as the morning light.
As the gangplank goes down, the line of disembarking passengers begins to move, most of them balancing their possessions in bundles or cardboard boxes on their heads. Then the porters come aboard and take off the big stuff: massive, tight-strapped, white bundles that are manoeuvred slowly up the gangplank to the accompaniment of a chant.
The river is low and the root systems of the mangrove trees run along the banks like exposed wiring. A slew of fresh-cut logs is floating up against the shore and a man, balancing on one of them, dips his hand in the water and cleans his teeth with his finger.
The timeless rural peace is shattered by the warning sound of the ship’s horn, which reverberates around this quiet little place like the roar of a bull elephant. After ten minutes or so, the gangplanks are raised, provoking the usual last-minute rush, as people leap out of the bushes and race aboard.
Our kitchen staff have secured a sackful of green coconuts, which they split open for us, and we drink the sweet but cool milk as we pull out onto the stream again.
A few minutes later, a modern concrete bridge materializes, silently, shockingly, out of the mist, then slips away behind us and we’re back into the past again. Spreading rain trees, rubber trees and date palms cluster tight along the bank. A white-robed figure strides dramatically among them. Deep-hulled, tall-prowed boats, like Chinese sampans, bob up and down in our wake. I watch an immensely distinguished-looking man with a bushy, grey beard carefully prepare his fishing net. He tosses it into the water and slowly pulls it in and examines it. There is nothing there but mud. With infinite patience, he gathers the line, tosses it out and draws it in again. Nothing.
There is something about the dignity both of the man and his slow work that leaves an impression. And the fact that he never once looks up as a yellow 1920s paddle steamer with 700 people on board goes by.
The morning wears on. The sun grows stronger, but I find it hard to tear myself away from the deck rail. The dancing silver patterns of light reflected on the water, the gradual release of the countryside from the mist, the sound of a flute drifting across, all create a feeling of the world slowed down, a seductive and fragile sense of peace.
Moni and I are talking about this, about how the world’s most crowded country can offer such a sense of calm, and she asks if I’ve read any of Tagore’s work. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t. Rabandranath Tagore was the Shakespeare of Bengal. A crude metaphor, perhaps, but it reflects his status here. He was a poet and playwright and, though he was a Hindu, he wrote of the universal preoccupations of Bengalis and particularly of the countryside, which, Moni thinks, has changed not at all since he died over 60 years ago. He had an international reputation, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and being awarded a knighthood by the British, which he returned in protest at the massacre in Amritsar in 1919. (Evidence of which I saw on Day 30.)
A lot of Moni’s favourite songs are Tagore’s poems set to music and she sings some to me as the countryside he celebrated slips past. As Moni points out, he was sympathetic but never sentimental about the rural life. We are in what they call ‘cyclone alley’, and in Tagore’s time, just like now, this golden panorama of huge skies and wide water, of rice paddies and thatched houses, bordered by the long, dark outline of the mangrove forest, could be transformed overnight into a killing field by the storms that brew up over the Bay of Bengal.
One of the songs Moni sings tells of the bruised Bengali people standing in a line, crying, and asking their god to ‘speak into our ears and into our hearts and tell us there is good news’.
We stop more frequently now and in the middle of the afternoon pull up at the jetty of a small settlement rejoicing in the name of Moralgunj. Big crows eye us from the bare branches of a dying man-grove tree.
I’ve worked out that the relative importance of our ports of call can be determined by the number of gangplanks the ship puts out. Chandpur was a four-plank stop, but Moralgunj is only a two-plank stop. Mongla, where we arrive after 13 hours, is Bangladesh’s second port after Chittagong. It’s also where we bid goodbye to the Ostrich, and disembark down five planks, with a security rail on either side.
Day One Hundred and Twenty Five : Mongla to the Bay of Bengal
There is one task we have to complete today and that is to cover the remaining 90 miles (144 km) between here and the Bay of Bengal, and rendezvous with a forestry department launch, which will take me out onto the ocean and off into the sunset for the final shot of the series.
I’m up before five. Shower, pack my things together, grab a basic breakfast at the Hotel Pashur, then walk out past the bus station and down to the jetty, where two of the three boats on which our day depends are bobbing up and down on the water. They don’t inspire confidence. Named Feni 1 and Feni 3, after a frontier town north of Chittagong, they’re ex-lifeboats with a Do-It-Yourself viewing platform built on top and furnished with plastic chairs. The boat is steered from the top deck by a Heath Robinson rudder ex
tension made from various pieces of scrap metal, into which is fitted a handle made from a tree branch. Well, not made from it exactly. It is a tree branch.
This whole unsteady collation is topped with a few lengths of domestic, wrought-iron railing and a sun canopy suspended from four sticks.
The crew is lively and enthusiastic. Unlike the engine.
We cast off at dawn and, as the light slowly improves, we can see our surroundings are as magical as yesterday. We chug through a clinging mist, past the temporarily exposed mudflats they call chars, islands that appear briefly after the flood waters recede and are instantly planted so that at least one crop can be harvested before the next monsoon washes the island away.
About an hour south of Mongla, the cultivated land comes to an abrupt end and we are hemmed in by the dark, impenetrable walls of the largest coastal mangrove belt in the world. There are few settlements down here, and the short, steep, slimy banks offer no landing opportunities. If one needed any further reason for staying away, the forest is also the habitat of the much feared Royal Bengal tiger, whom the people of the forest refer to as ‘uncle’. It’s considered bad luck to utter its real name.
Occasionally, we come across some fishing boats, at which, oblivious to our deadline, the cooks insist on stopping so they can investigate luncheon ingredients. They eventually settle on crab, sweet-water lobster and some of the largest prawns I’ve ever seen. Ishraq says these are of such quality that these small fishermen sell them on to bigger trawlers, which take them up to freezer plants at Mongla, from where they will be sent to the dining tables of the USA and Europe. It’s a business worth $100 million a year.
Himalaya (2004) Page 33