by George Black
EASY LIKE WATER
In the Mirpur neighborhood of Dhaka, Mostafizur Rahman Jewel, a bright and personable young man who was eager to show a visitor all possible points of interest in the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, took me to see the rickshaw graveyard.
“How many are there?” I asked, trying to take in the scale of the place.
Jewel said that the common estimate was fifteen thousand.
They were jammed into a field that covered a couple of acres, flanked by palm trees and utilitarian five-story apartment buildings stained with damp. The frames and handlebars were pitted with rust, the bamboo-frame canopies were tattered, the chains were lost or scavenged. There were also a few deceased trucks and buses, half strangled by weeds.
The rickshaws were lined up in rows, stacked in pyramids, strewn randomly upside down with their wheels silhouetted against the sky like a conceptual art exhibit. There was a towering scrap heap of orphaned plastic seat cushions in a riot of primary colors. The rear panels of the rickshaws were a vivid gallery of painted scenes, with the artists favoring a range of stock motifs. Heartthrobs from Dhallywood, Bangladesh’s junior cousin to Bollywood, with fearsome mustaches and impressive guns, rescuing sloe-eyed damsels in distress. Technicolor renderings of the Taj Mahal. Roosters, spotted deer, crocodiles, and Bengal tigers locked in mortal combat. More oddly, there were rhinos (which disappeared from Bangladesh more than a hundred years ago) and zebras (which were never there in the first place). Many of the rickshaws were ornamented with bright, wistful fantasies of the rural homeland the pullers had left behind, a world of limpid lakes, brightly painted cottages, tropical flowers, swans and peacocks. One bold spirit had broken from chaste local convention and depicted a man pressing himself between the thighs of a half-naked woman with a sari pulled up around her hips.
But the fifteen thousand wrecks in the rickshaw graveyard were only a retired fraction of the fleet. Dhaka is the rickshaw capital of the world. The common estimate is that there are at least six hundred thousand and maybe as many as eight hundred thousand—and that includes only the pedal-powered variety, not the motorized three-wheelers. Someone told me later that when Google Earth came to map Dhaka with their Streetview cameras, they found the gridlock so atrocious that they could only get any work done before dawn or late at night. It can take an hour to drive a mile, yet the rickshaws somehow shimmy their way through the chaos like shoaling fish, in a racket of bells and car horns, avoiding oncoming buses by inches. Dhaka traffic calls for the same reflexes that passengers are taught in a plane that’s about to crash. Brace for impact.
On the way back into the city center, after one near collision, Jewel raised an eyebrow in amusement as I relaxed my death grip on the dashboard of our vehicle and exhaled.
“No problem,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant. “Piece of cake.”
“Piece of cake?” Jewel’s English was good, but not that good.
“Slang expression. Something really easy, no sweat. Like not killing that rickshaw walla. How do you say that in Bengali?”
“Panir moto shohoj,” he answered. “Means ‘easy like water.’”
Easy like water. That seemed like a strange choice of words, because water is Bangladesh’s existential curse.
* * *
The Ganges presents its passport at the Bangladesh border and changes its name and identity. It becomes the Padma, and except to the country’s small minority of Hindus, it is no longer considered to be a goddess. A short way south of Dhaka, the Padma meets the Meghna. This is a smaller river, but from the confluence to the ocean, Meghna is the name that sticks. The country it flows through is as flat as a pool table. Almost 160 million people are crammed into an area the size of Iowa, or, if you prefer, a fraction more than England.
The flow of the Padma and the Meghna is sluggish in the extreme. The massive load of silt and mud it transports from the Himalayas and the North Indian plains forms islands that come and go, form, disperse, re-form somewhere else. Some of these chars are solid enough that people take up residence there, farm rice, and hope their new home survives longer than the previous one. From June to November, Bangladesh reels under the force of the monsoon. The rivers bully their way into the fields, the banks erode, and farms, sometimes whole villages, are swallowed up in the current. Rivers can break through the lowlands and change their course entirely. In a fortunate year, a third of Bangladesh is flooded. In a bad year it’s half; in the worst, it can be two-thirds.
However, try asking the millions who live in the delta of the Ganges if they have enough water, at least of a kind that is of any use to them. Over the past few centuries, the natural course of the river has shifted eastward, redirecting the surge of freshwater that used to dilute the inflow of salt from the Bay of Bengal. Major rivers that once helped to channel the Ganges to the Indian Ocean have dried up or been blocked by silt. The Mathabhanga, the Bhairab, the Sialmari are now little more than names in a history book.
Bangladesh is also synonymous with man-made calamities. In 1970, a year before it fought its war of independence from Pakistan at the cost of three million dead, Indian engineers built a barrage across the Ganges at Farakka, a few miles short of the border, to divert the flow to the thirsty megacity of Calcutta and flush out the silt that threatened to clog up its harbor. So for much of the year, parts of Bangladesh have too little water, not too much.
Those who live in the delta are further tormented by the cyclones and tidal surges that sweep in from the Bay of Bengal. One cyclone in 1970 killed 300,000 people; in 1991, another 138,000 died. The early-warning systems are better now, keeping the body count down, but disaster still feeds on disaster. Bangladesh built a huge web of dikes and embankments to shield themselves from future floods. Dutch experts came to help, having long experience of such things. But the solid walls of earth had a perverse effect. They held the rivers back, but at the same time they blocked drainage on the land side. The fields remained waterlogged for months. Already cursed by topography, the delta now has to cope with a warming and rising ocean, which will make the storm surges fiercer, the fields saltier, the monsoons more unpredictable.
How bad will it be? From the rickshaw graveyard, Jewel took me to see one of the legion of experts in Dhaka who are trying to answer that question. Mohazarul Alam—Babu to his friends—is one of Bangladesh’s leading climate scientists. A dapper, good-natured man with a neatly trimmed mustache, he chose his words with care.
“We will permanently lose between 12 and 15 percent of our surface area,” he said.
He registered my shocked expression and smiled.
“Oh, you have to understand, this is under the most benign scenario.”
THE IMPOSSIBLE CITY
Even in the upscale neighborhoods of Gulshan and Banani, where diplomats and garment buyers and earnest foreign humanitarians congregate, a misstep in the dark can drop you through a pothole into an open sewer. I went to a guesthouse in Gulshan the next morning to meet another of Dhaka’s legion of outgunned experts over a cup of nasty instant coffee.
Professor Haroon ur Rashid was a professor at Dhaka’s North South University, a specialist in urban planning. He was a small, owlish man, inclined toward gallows humor. His English was impeccable.
“Amartya Sen grew up in Dhaka,” he said. “You know, the economist who won the Nobel Prize. He once told an interviewer from the BBC that his children saw him as a man without taste, because he had said he liked every place he had ever visited and could happily live anywhere. There was only one exception: Dhaka. That was unlivable.”
Rashid grinned. The city was his home. He lived the unlivable.
In 1953, he said, the population of Dhaka was half a million—not much more than it had been in the days of Bishop Heber. The big leap came in 1971, after the War of Liberation, when people could choose between living in Pakistan, now reduced to its western portion, or in newly independent Bangladesh. People in the east spoke Bengali, not Urdu. Bengali Muslims practiced a
form of Islam that was quiet and conciliatory. They had lost three million of their citizens to the Pakistani Army and Air Force. So most opted to stay put in Bangladesh.
“Now the population of Dhaka is growing at 6 percent a year,” Rashid said. “Most of the newcomers are from the countryside. These are people with no skills. They work in low-wage, marginal occupations. The city has grown by accretion, not by planning. In terms of infrastructure, water, services, sanitation, Dhaka is a total disaster. God only knows what it will be like in the future.”
It was fifteen million now, maybe sixteen. No one knew exactly. I did the 6 percent math in my head. Four hundred thousand rural migrants a year. The population would reach twenty million by 2020. Maybe twenty-five million by 2030. And Babu Alam’s best-case scenario meant another seven million or more being driven from their homes by the ocean.
“What is the government doing about it?” I asked.
Rashid just looked at me with an eyebrow raised as if I’d asked a particularly stupid question.
* * *
The migrants come to Dhaka, a thousand or more of them every day, from flooded coastal divisions like Barisal and Khulna, or from the drought-stricken northwest border areas that have lost out to the Farakka barrage and the demands of Calcutta. Their flight has a powerful cascade effect on the city. Once they arrive, they face a new version of the very thing they were trying to escape, trading one water emergency for another, and making matters worse by the simple fact of their own presence.
Generally, it’s the main breadwinner who comes first. As likely as not, he’ll start off as a pavement dweller. Then, tracking opportunities by word of mouth, he may find work as a day laborer or a garbage picker, a seller of scraps from the tanneries of Hazaribagh, a place every bit as dismal as Kanpur, or as a brick breaker or a security guard, sitting all night on a plastic chair in the dark outside a parking garage or an ATM booth. Many will join the ranks of the rickshaw pullers, earning two hundred taka a day, two dollars and fifty cents.
The migrant will eventually find a place to live in a basti, one of Dhaka’s hundreds of slum areas. Some of these are no more than a straggle of stilt houses along a polluted canal. Others are virtual townships of a hundred thousand or more, each with its own complex internal economy and social hierarchy. He’ll sleep in a room that measures six feet by eight, perhaps sharing his bed with other men working rotating shifts, paying his monthly seven hundred taka to the local slumlord. “It’s like the Godfather or Al Capone,” said Babar Kabir, another of the city’s experts and an especially overburdened one, since his portfolio at BRAC, a giant nongovernmental organization that occupies a twenty-one-story building and has a half-billion-dollar budget, includes disasters, the environment, and climate change. “There’s a whole invisible pyramid of lieutenants and sublieutenants and rent collectors. And if you fall behind on payments, you’ll get a visit from the mastaan, the muscleman.” As for potable water, unless some kindly NGO has installed a tap, the migrant may have nowhere to turn but to the “gray business” that controls its sale in the slums. Often he’ll pay fifty times more for a liter of drinking water than people in a middle-class neighborhood like Kabir’s, who simply need to turn on the faucet.
As the new migrant puts down tenuous roots, his family will join him. Sometimes they come one at a time, sometimes all at once. The sons will follow his pursuit of menial jobs; the wives and daughters will gravitate toward domestic service, manual labor, or a sewing machine. More and more these days, women were also leaving their families behind to find work in the apparel industry. Sometimes they came alone or with a friend from the same village. “These are often adventurous young women,” Kabir said, “and they need to find an honest middleman, because there are plenty of others out there who will take them for a ride, sell them into brothels, or traffic them across the border into commercial sex work in India.” Sometimes they will even be drawn into the booming black market in human organs, cajoled into selling a kidney for the equivalent of a year of minimum wages. Once a young woman finds a job, the engine of kinship kicks in: she does well, she recommends her sister, who calls a cousin, and so on until a half dozen members of the family may be working in the garment factories.
The next expert on my list was Iftekhar Mahmud, a reporter for The Daily Prothom Alo (First Light), the leading Bangla-language newspaper, who spent most of his time writing and fretting about the havoc that climate change would wreak on a city that was already unlivable. We met in a fashionable teashop-cum-art-gallery that would not have been out of place in New York or London or Berlin. “The rains are now more concentrated in the peak months of the monsoon season,” he said. “They have more than doubled in volume in August alone over the past twenty years. The city’s drainage system is equipped to deal with ten millimeters of rain, but we often get ten or twenty times that much in a single day.” Much of the city is only a couple of meters above sea level, and it didn’t surprise me to learn that the poorest bastis occupy the lowest and most flood-prone sections, which are inundated constantly with sewage-tainted water that brings disease in its wake. To make matters worse, the natural drainage areas that buffer the floods have been steadily encroached upon by land grabbers who pump them dry to throw up new housing, much of it illegal. One new development I had seen on drained land next to the Buriganga covered nearly four hundred acres, more than half a square mile. Bangladeshis, ever a poetic people, call it sandfill.
WHERE YOU ARE FROM?
There were times, walking or driving around Dhaka, when it seemed that the city was dissolving into its constituent elements. If it was made of iron, it was rusting; if it was vegetable, it was rotting; if it was brick, it was reverting to mud, to river sediment.
Jewel and I made our way through the clog of rickshaws to the old city. At every stop—and there were many more stops than starts—street children, bird-thin old women, blind men, people with deformities out of a horror movie tapped their nails on the windows of our car and put their fingers to their mouths. Vendors offered pirated copies of The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, and the Lonely Planet guide to Bangladesh.
The waterways along the road were lined with stilt shacks made of tin, tar paper, and dead palm fronds. The residents clustered on the banks, washing their clothes and cooking utensils, soaping themselves up, and brushing their teeth with twigs. Naked children splashed around in scummy ponds choked by water hyacinths. The city had a single sewage treatment plant; located on the southern outskirts of Dhaka, it could cope with less than 10 percent of what the city produced. The rest, more than a thousand tons of untreated human waste each day, went straight into the rivers, ponds, canals, and gutters.
We stopped near a fish market to chat with some brick breakers in lungis, the sarong-like garment that many Bangladeshi men wear in preference to trousers. They were using hammers to reduce the bricks to pebble-sized fragments. On the left side of the canal twenty feet below us was a precarious outhouse, propped above the black water on culms of bamboo. On the right, raw sewage was pouring in through a concrete pipe. I lost my footing on the muddy slope and careened down it like a kid on a playground slide. A mat of weeds and garbage broke my fall, just short of the water. A small crowd of men had assembled for the spectacle. There was great hilarity among the brick breakers. One of them asked, “Where you are from?” Bangladesh was off the beaten tourist track.
In the narrow streets of the old city, there were signs for the Oxford International Academy; the Pathway English Club—Results Guaranteed—Expert Teachers; and the Benchmark Academy—O/A Levels All Subjects. On one building there was a faded notice referring to a property dispute that quite likely dated back to the days of Partition, when countless homes were abandoned, squatted, and mired in decades of litigation. The English-language portion of it said,
IN THE MEAN TIME DEFENDANTS ARE RESTRAINED BY AN ORDER OF AD INTERIM-INJUNCTION FROM DISPOSSING THE PLAITEFF FROM THE SUET PROPERTY DESCRIBED IN THE SCHE DULE OF THE PLAENT
T
here were alleys that sold only bicycles, others that sold only musical instruments, others that sold only burkas. The exposed eyes of the mannequins followed you down the street. Overhead was a tangle of power lines, a cat’s cradle of black spaghetti. Buildings seemed to remain vertical by sheer force of will. Muezzins called from minarets. Bloodstained butchers with henna-dyed beards hacked away at carcasses for the upcoming feast of the Shab-e-Barat, the “night of deliverance.” Heavily rouged groups of hijra—whether they were transgender or eunuchs was impossible to tell—lounged on the street corners, pouting and flirting with their eyes.
Finally, we reached the Buriganga, the Old Ganga, which curls around the western edge of the city. The reason it has this name is that many centuries ago, before the Ganges changed its course, silting up old channels and carving out new ones, the Buriganga had been connected to the big river. Now it was forty miles away.
The Buriganga was the color of a moonless night, coated with a sheen of oil and floating debris. At the boat terminal known as Saderghat, the wharf was lined with decrepit triple-decker ferries. I saw one of those headlines that appear from time to time on the inside pages of the newspaper. OVERCROWDED FERRY CAPSIZES IN BANGLADESH: 300 FEARED DEAD, SEARCH CONTINUES FOR SURVIVORS.
We climbed aboard one rusted hulk and watched small, sharp-prowed boats laden with baskets, jute sacks, and piles of green coconuts weave in and out among the larger vessels. After a few minutes, there was the sound of footsteps on the deck behind us. It was a group of young men. My camera seemed to be of interest to their leader. My stomach muscles clenched. Camera, cell phone, passport, wallet, cash freshly withdrawn from an ATM. He advanced on us slowly, staring. Then he gave a timid, sweet smile and said, “Where you are from?”
The next time we went to Saderghat, a boatman rowed us across to the other side for a few takas, and we climbed a staircase to a fifth-floor rooftop to take in the view. We held on to the corner of a colossal billboard that said, “BE AN INVESTMENT PHILOSOPHER.”