Unusual or not, it was frustrating. My mission that first morning was deliberately lightweight given the long flight from England. I had to get some passport photographs for my Bangladeshi visa application form. My plan was to travel overland from Calcutta to Mawsynram through the length of Bangladesh, a country virtually defined by its annual monsoonal floods. The aim was to pick up a few tips on how life is lived in a country as much known for its water as its land, before hitting the world’s wettest place just north of Bangladesh in the Indian state of Meghalaya.
It wasn’t far to the nearest photographer, the helpful man on the hotel reception desk told me, but I should go by taxi.
‘Is it too far to walk?’
‘Taxi is better sir,’ he told me.
I jumped into a taxi and asked the driver if he knew the place.
‘Most certainly sir,’ he replied, but he answered before I’d finished the question, which made me think otherwise, so I got the doorman to give the driver directions. We set off at a stately pace for precisely ten seconds, the time it took to enter the traffic. Then we stopped and the driver switched off his engine. Twenty minutes later, he gunned the Ambassador into action again and we drove another few yards. After an hour, I could still see my hotel through the rear window, but we had managed to turn a corner. We were once more sitting in the gridlock. My driver turned to me. ‘I am seeking further directions,’ he said.
‘But we haven’t gone anywhere yet,’ I started to say, although he had already jumped out of the cab. Reappearing from the mêlée a few minutes later, he announced that we had been going the wrong way for the last hour.
After another 30 minutes, we sat outside my hotel once more, now pointing in the opposite direction. I decided to pay off the driver and walk, despite his assurance that it was not long now. He was right in that respect. It took me two minutes to find the photographers on foot.
The Hindustan Ambassador is an Indian institution, nothing less than an early 1950s British Morris Oxford that has defied the passage of time and continues to be the most common motor vehicle on the streets of Calcutta. Since it was designed half a century ago, it is not surprising that the Ambassador is big, heavy and slow by contemporary standards. It is like driving a whale. Sometimes these cars would simply stop in the middle of the road, seemingly for a rest. Hence many of the traffic jams.
The following day, I decided that an auto-rickshaw would be a better way of negotiating Calcutta’s insane traffic. Although its two-stoke engine sounds like a demented sewing machine, the three-wheeler is smaller and nimbler than the Ambassador and thus has a better chance of weaving a path through the frequent jams.
I made my way with Runa, my rather glamorous and highly efficient Bengali translator, through the streets of early morning Calcutta. People were still sleeping on the broken pavements beneath the awnings as horses and rooks nosed through the previous day’s rubbish swept into neat piles in the gutters. We were off in search of fish for a dinner party to be thrown that evening by one of Runa’s friends. The fish in question was known as hilsa, a monsoon speciality. Like salmon, the hilsa spends much of its life at sea but chooses to spawn in freshwater. During the monsoon, it swims up river estuaries to lay its eggs, and that’s when the Bengalis catch it.
‘Bengalis just love fish, but it has to be from a river,’ Runa told me as we zipped along past a group of men washing at a gushing water pipe by the roadside. ‘They look down on sea fish and anyone who eats them.’ Our auto-rickshaw swerved overdramatically to avoid a gaping pothole in the road and abruptly veered back in the opposite direction to avoid a head-on collision with an on-coming tram. Runa carried on regardless, supremely unperturbed by our near-death experience. ‘Hilsa is one of the absolute best. We are just crazy about hilsa. People eat it at lunch and dinner, and for those who can’t afford to eat it twice in one day, they will leave the leftovers from dinner so that they can savour the smell at lunchtime.’
Our auto-rickshaw driver made an emergency stop outside the Kole fish market. Men tottered along the fetid pavement balancing world-record amounts of fish in baskets on their heads. Mini glaciers of ice wrapped in jute sacking were being manoeuvred off bicycles and onto ancient wooden trolleys. Ladies on the backs of lorries shovelled piles of sawdust, the bright yellow colour of building sand, into sacks, which were being carried into the cavernous market building. We followed one of the sawdust sacks inside.
The fish market was small but bursting with people. Runa led me up and down the aisles lined with men squatting beside baskets and bowls full of fish of every description. Every description, that is, except hilsa.
‘The monsoon is late here, so there are not many hilsa yet,’ Runa explained as she deftly elbowed her way through the crowd. ‘We must try elsewhere.’
Half an hour later we found some in a nearby street market. It didn’t look particularly spectacular to me – silvery coloured like a salmon, only slightly shorter – but it certainly went down well at the dinner party. Runa and I reverted to a faithful Ambassador for the short drive from my hotel that evening, passing, as we went, the income-tax office of the finance ministry marked by a bright neon sign that read, ‘Pay your tax – hold your head high’.
I wore my best shirt for the occasion, though I was beginning to worry that I hadn’t brought enough. I’d got through three on the first day alone, peeling them off as they became too soggy for comfort and hanging them up in my room to dry. But drying they weren’t; they just hung there festering in the heavy atmosphere.
Runa was resplendent in a sparkling aquamarine sari, set off by silver ankle chains and toe rings. ‘I wear these in honour of my father’s evolution,’ she said. ‘He never let us wear silver, never. This was because the servants wore silver, you know. So we could wear gold only. It was gold or nothing. He was quite unyielding on the matter. Then one day he went to Delhi and came back with these anklets and toe rings. It was a sign of his evolution.’
A long sweeping staircase took us up to an apartment where you could play hopscotch on the Persian rugs adorning the white marble floors. High ceilings sported wooden beams painted white to go with the marble. The living room was slightly smaller than an aircraft hangar, its walls hung with an eclectic and unpleasant collection of paintings. Plush settees were arranged around a large glass-topped coffee table casually littered with enough silver ornaments to start a museum. Solid candlesticks stood on the mantelpiece above an ornate fireplace. Over in the far corner, a less formal zone judging by its population of wicker furniture, sat a black upright piano. Framed family portraits aligned along its top continued on across an assortment of classy looking sideboards that hung around the edges of the scene trying to be inconspicuous. Bearers in crisp white uniforms wafted in and out carrying drinks and the murmur of polite conversation could be heard above the buzz of the air-conditioning.
The hostess spotted Runa and me from across the room and started out towards us crying, ‘Darling, how good of you to come!’ Some minutes later we met, just south of the glass coffee table, and the woman smothered us both in kisses.
A drink was thrust into my hand and I was introduced to an interior decorator as ‘a man interested in rain’, while Runa was whisked off to the other side of the room. I told the interior decorator the reason for my visit and where I was heading.
‘I don’t know Meghalaya,’ he told me, ‘but I was at school in the north-east, at St Paul’s in Darjeeling. It rains a lot up there too, you know. Used to rain for weeks on end; miserable place in the monsoon season.’ He paused to sip his drink. He was well turned-out, with flowers on his blue corduroy shirt.
‘And what about the clouds?’ I asked. ‘I understand Meghalaya literally means “Abode of the Clouds”. Was it very cloudy in Darjeeling during the monsoon?’
‘Funny you should ask that,’ the decorator replied. ‘I was unhappy at St Paul’s to begin with, until I met a chum. I’ll never forget what he said on our first meeting, it will always stick in my mind. He
came up to me in the dormitory and said, “this is a place where the clouds come in through the windows.”’
He smiled as he remembered the moment. ‘And they did, by Jove. Floated right in through the windows and took up residence in the dorm. We wouldn’t see the sun for weeks. But when it did appear, the school announced a sunshine holiday. Everyone got the day off to enjoy it.’
We had been joined by a bald and rather earnest arts correspondent for the Calcutta-based Telegraph newspaper who told me that the monsoon had been a great source of inspiration for poets and artists over the years. I sensed that this was a prelude to his instructing me at some length on the qualities of some of the poems concerned, but he continued in such a disinterested tone of voice, punctuated by that annoying cocktail-party trick of constantly looking over my shoulder to see whether there were more stimulating conversations to be had elsewhere, that I was not sorry when our hostess appeared across the horizon to give me her take on the monsoon season.
‘Once the rains start, there’s nothing for it but to stay in bed. It’s the most delightful season if you like sleeping. I can stay in bed for days.’
When I turned round again, both the interior decorator and the bald arts correspondent had disappeared. A bearer had materialized in their place at my elbow to ask if he could get me another whisky. He said please, which made it sound as if I’d be doing him a favour by accepting. He also said that dinner was ready if I’d like to make my way to the buffet in the servery.
The hilsa had been steamed in a coating of Coleman’s mustard and wrapped in small banana-leaf parcels. It was spectacularly good. I ate it listening to a police inspector as he gave me a synopsis of the conditions that could be expected in his city when the rains arrived. The drainage system often couldn’t cope, he told me, and the water was knee-deep.
‘Calcutta would grind to a halt in these circumstances if it weren’t for rickshaw wallahs,’ he went on. ‘These fellows carry on working when none of the taxis or buses can get through. In actual fact, monsoon is their most profitable time of year. They can charge what they like because they are the only vehicles that can muddle through.’ He was talking about the man-powered rickshaws, formerly found all over India, but now only in Calcutta. ‘But this is dangerous work,’ the inspector continued gravely, ‘visual contact with the ground is impossible due to presence of water, and if municipal council has been deficient in replacing manhole covers, rickshaw wallah may suddenly disappear in unexpected manner.’
I asked the inspector whether there were any particularly seasonal crimes during the monsoon, a query that prompted what was likely to be a lengthy discourse about hilsa smuggling across the border from Bangladesh. But my companion was interrupted by a sudden shout of ‘Oh my God!’ from the other side of the room, an exclamation that briefly sounded as if it might warrant his professional attention. We both turned towards the incident, which had now dissolved into semi-hysterical laughter. Two labradors had entered the room, expressing their excitement with wagging tails that had sent several drinks flying from the glass coffee table. One of the dogs had then promptly peed on a rug. A bug-eyed fat man, who looked uncannily like a frog and had not moved from his position on one of the settees all evening, suggested that canine urine was probably very good for Persian rugs. It was at that point that the police inspector excused himself, judging the moment an appropriate one to leave.
The dinner-party talk of things monsoonal had certainly put me in the right frame of mind for my journey through Bangladesh to the world’s wettest town, but the fact remained that the rains had yet to arrive in Calcutta and this was a disappointment. My daily perusal of the newspapers indicated that the monsoon was causing havoc just about everywhere else. Orissa, the state immediately to the south, was almost completely under water by this time. The papers carried photographs of sodden people pushing a few sorry possessions before them on makeshift rafts, up to their necks in water. But the best that Calcutta could offer was a ‘few spells of light to moderate rain’.
It hardly even managed that. I got some gentle drizzle and on one occasion a minor shower, but it was all a far cry from the Biblical deluge I had mentally prepared myself for. The minor shower came when I was choosing an umbrella from Mohendra Dutt Grandsons Company, renowned umbrella makers, on Mahatma Ghandi Road. It had passed by the time I emerged to test my new umbrella beneath the elements. Nevertheless, after another day’s shopping, I was fully equipped. I had a smart black umbrella, a blue plastic mac and a particularly unfashionable pair of moulded plastic sandals that Runa insisted were the best footwear for the monsoon. All I needed now was some serious rain.
T W O
We caught the train to Bangladesh. There were iron bars across the windows in my carriage and a public notice forbidding passengers from carrying explosive articles. It was just a local commuter service but Indian Railways were obviously taking no chances. The train didn’t quite go all the way to the border since rail services between the two countries hadn’t been running for 36 years. They were due to be resumed the following year, but while they were still laying the track, the end of the line for me was Bongaon Junction, a few kilometres from the border.
We took a taxi after leaving the train. The highway was straight and lined by huge trees with lime-green ferns clinging to their lower branches. Their thick trunks were dotted with dung pats drying in the sun, later to be prised off and burnt as fuel. Goats ran across the road between the bicycles pulling carts. Ducks and geese waddled through paddy fields that were an impossibly vibrant green; the sort of day-glow colour that I’d thought could only be achieved by scientists using synthetic chemicals with very long names.
Mixed in with the paddies were fields of jute plants. Their long thin stems, which grow to twice the height of a person, have no branches, a bit like bamboo but bushier at the top. Fibres from the stems’ bark were draped across bridges and on makeshift frames prior to being turned into sisal string, ropes, cloth and sacking. On crossing the border, it became clear that the bicycle rickshaws in Bangladesh were more brightly painted than their Indian counterparts and that most Bangladeshi women wore headscarves. The full abruptness of the transition was brought home to me when I saw a cow being slaughtered by the roadside. I had left a Hindu world and entered an Islamic one. Other than that, paddy and jute fields looked much the same in Bangladesh as they had in India, although in Bangladesh they did seem to have more ducks in them. Bangladesh also had one other thing in common with its neighbour: it wasn’t raining.
For the most part, Bangladesh is a country in just two dimensions. While other countries have mountains and hills and valleys and all sorts of sloping bits in between, Bangladesh is just flat. Not pancake flat, but river floodplain flat. It is made up of the ends of several of the world’s major rivers, and a multitude of others besides, all flowing into the Bay of Bengal. The country does actually have a few hills, but they are tucked away down in the south-eastern corner, where no one really notices them. So the overwhelming impression of the place throughout my stay was one of flatness. Smooth, level, even, horizontal flatness. I suppose you could count the sky as a third dimension, but I wasn’t going to do that until it did the decent thing by producing some rain.
It was lucky that there were some trees to break up the skyline; a task jointly shouldered by a quite phenomenal number of towering brick chimneys. I tend to associate chimneys as tall as a two- or three-storey house with industry, and therefore with cities, but these chimneys were in the countryside. And they weren’t all gathered together in tall chimney zones either. They were spread out, dotted along roads and rivers wherever I went. Each one marked the site of a brick kiln, usually surrounded by neat walls of their produce. This multitude of rural kilns puzzled me for some time. I had seen a few brick houses, but nowhere near enough to absorb the output of so many manufacturers. Then I noticed that the forecourt of a petrol station we had pulled into was paved with red bricks. A little further on, the tarmac road from the border ga
ve way to a brick surface.
Later still, I began to notice piles of bricks by the roadside. Squatting beside these piles were huddles of men and women, each usually hunched beneath the shade of an umbrella, busy demolishing bricks individually with the aid of a hammer. On one side of these brick slayers were perfectly good whole bricks, and on the other were fresh piles of small brick pieces. I’d never seen anything like it. The temptation was to ask Runa about it straight away, but I stopped and tried to work it out for myself. Try as I might, I just couldn’t figure it. ‘Runa …’ I began.
‘There are no stones in Bangladesh,’ she explained with devastating simplicity, ‘so these people are making stones. They use them in construction and for filling potholes in the roads you know.’
And then it all became clear. The career of a brick breaker is intimately related to Bangladesh’s status as a two-dimensional country. You might not consider it every day, but stones are actually pretty important raw materials. As Runa had said, they make up the foundations of solid buildings and underlay high streets and motorways the world over. Most countries have a ready supply of stones either quarried from rock faces or dredged from riverbeds. Rock faces presuppose hills of some description, so this is not an option in Bangladesh. But one thing it does have in abundance, not to say excess, I hear you say, is rivers. Right, but unfortunately from the stone point of view, all the stretches of river that flow through Bangladesh are at their wrong ends.
It is a well-known fact that rivers move lots of stuff from the land and dump it on to other bits of land and out to sea. It is also a fundamental principal of physical geography that as you move down a river from its source the average size of the material it carries gets smaller. This is partly because smaller bits can be carried further and partly because bigger bits – the boulders, rocks and stones – get ground down as they go. Either way, by the time you get to the end of a river all that tends to be left is fine-grained clay and silt. Hence, Bangladesh has a surfeit of mud, but no stones.
Going to Extremes Page 20