by George Black
The ramshackle building was a warren of tiny sweatshops making saris, lungis, and T-shirts for the local market. Girls of eleven or twelve sat on the floor, cutting up bolts of fabric or sewing on buttons. I asked one of them where she was from, and she said Barisal, in the coastal southwest. A boy of the same age was sitting at a sewing machine, stitching something red. His round head was shaved to the point of baldness. One of the men laughed, pointed to his own head, and said something to Jewel.
“He says they call the boy Watermelon,” Jewel said.
* * *
Later, we drove out beyond the city limits to the northeast. It was mango season, and we’d stopped to buy a bagful from one of the wharf-side fruit vendors at Saderghat. “The mangoes in Bangladesh are the best in the world,” Jewel said, patriotically but also accurately, and we feasted on them until the juice ran down our arms. The monsoon had finally broken. A fierce rain drummed on the roof of the car, and the windshield wipers beat time. The fields were already waterlogged. For mile upon mile, they had been staked out for drainage and development by real-estate speculators, whose signs were planted at intervals in the knee-deep water. This is where Dhaka would grow in the future to accommodate the twenty-five million that the experts feared would push the city to the tipping point.
Textile mills and dyeworks were strung out along the road leading to the town of Narsingdi, which sits on the left bank of the Meghna just short of its confluence with the Padma, where the Ganges begins its final slow lap to the ocean. We talked our way into one of the mills, where a twelve-year-old boy named Mainul Islam stood up from his labors in the packing room to show off his new cell phone, a pink Chinese-made Sunny model that he could never have afforded if he’d stayed in school. No one else in his family worked; he was their sole support. He posed for a photograph under a large red sign that said, in English and in Bangla,
WE DO NOT EMPLOY WORKERS LESS THAN 18 YEARS OF AGE
The highway back to the city was lined with lengths of dyed cloth, orange, yellow, red, purple, green, and blue, hung out on clotheslines to dry like some roadside version of Christo’s Central Park project, The Gates. In the labyrinth of narrow, muddy lanes, whole families were dedicated to the business of turning out low-quality fabric for the sweatshops on the Buriganga. Their rickety homes vibrated to the clatter of cast-iron looms that looked as if they dated back to the Industrial Revolution. In their earth yards, men and boys were sloshing cloth around in zinc bathtubs, up to their armpits in dye, hands and wrists stained permanently indigo and crimson. One man told me that he scrubbed his arms every night with scouring powder and bleach, but it didn’t make much difference. “Don’t worry,” he grinned. “This is good water. It doesn’t harm you.” He upended his tub and poured some of the liquid into a drain hole. From there it would run into a nearby sewer, which ran into a canal, which ran into a stream, which ran into the Meghna, which ran into the Bay of Bengal.
WOMEN OF THE DELTA
Down in the hole that had once been Rana Plaza, there were mountains of sodden, half-sewn clothing, spools and bobbins of thread, and bolts of brightly patterned cloth. The crushed remains of half a dozen cars were still waiting for removal, and next to them was a broken plaster mannequin. She was lying on her back in a puddle of early monsoon rain. She wore a pair of tight purple knee-length pants, but she was naked above the waist. Her torso had been severed in a neat diagonal below the right breast, but her head was intact. She had ivory skin, a pink rosebud mouth, ash-blond hair brushed straight back off her forehead, and piercing blue eyes. You wanted to read an expression into them, one that said, “What happened?” But there was no expression; they were just fixed on the sky.
What happened was that Rana Plaza, seven stories high, had pancaked in upon itself. It was worse than the fire at the Tazreen factory five months earlier. One hundred and twelve garment workers had died at Tazreen. In Rana Plaza, it was almost exactly ten times that number, this time not burned alive but flattened and dismembered by concrete pillars with unattended cracks and third-rate rebar. With the exception of the World Trade Center, it was the worst structural collapse of a building in human history, only this one was the result of negligence, greed, and corruption, not murderous intent.
The thing I found hardest to absorb about the shallow pit was how small it was. The site of the Twin Towers covered sixteen acres. The footprint of Rana Plaza was not much larger than a basketball court. The building next door was still under construction. It reminded me of the shoddy new office buildings I’d seen in Allahabad, its façade a thin veneer of blue reflective glass that seemed to have been slapped on like a Post-it note. The interior was just a raw skeleton of brick and mortar walls. This being Dhaka, there was every reason to assume that its building plans had involved the same unholy collusion between venal developers and corrupt politicians.
I hopped the security barrier. A couple of cops in neatly pressed blue shirts were sitting on plastic chairs a few yards away, and they yelled at me. But this seemed to be something they had been told to do in their training manual rather than something that actually called for further action, so I climbed over a heap of bricks and took the unfinished stairway to the top floor.
The upper levels of the building had suffered a good deal of collateral damage. Great sections of ceiling had bellied downward and were propped up in a tentative way with single stalks of bamboo. Whole walls had been blown out by the force of the collapse, and papers from the upper floors of Rana Plaza had floated in. Many were still strewn about in the wreckage. There were cards with samples of buttons and zippers, and pattern forms and order books and cutting instructions and packaging for shirts that said, “Blue Side: Quality Never Goes out of Style.”
The Tazreen fire had created a scandal for Walmart because one of its suppliers had been making nightgowns in the factory. The company was called International Intimates. This was known because of documents that workers had uncovered in the ruins. At Rana Plaza, many of the dusty papers I found in the rubble related to contracts with the United Colors of Benetton, headquartered in Treviso, Italy. They were shakily translated from the Italian. Regolare bene le tensione delle macchine. Adjuste better the tension machine. Outside Babar Kabir’s office at BRAC, I’d seen an elegantly dressed woman sitting in the waiting area. She was tall, blond, and somewhat resembled the mannequin. “She’s from Benetton,” he’d said.
The journalists who flocked to Rana Plaza in the days after the disaster poked at the raw nerve of our moral culpability, the hidden cost of our trips to the mall. For the most part, they hewed to the usual narrative conventions of the tragedy in a poor country: evil owner (which he was), innocent victims (which they were), the one miraculous survivor (there invariably is one in these stories; in this case, it was a woman who somehow made it out alive after being trapped in the wreckage for seventeen days). None of the reporters, as far as I could tell, ever asked where the women of Rana Plaza were from or what had brought them here in the first place.
* * *
Rana Plaza was a long way from the sweatshops on the Buriganga and the dyeworks on the road to Narsingdi, which served the humbler end of the domestic market. It was part of a globalized industry where the buyers cared about things like the precise angle at which their logos were sewn on, an industry that brought Bangladesh 80 percent of its export earnings and employed three and a half million people, most of them poor and uneducated women.
In Dhaka, the majority of the garment workers lived in two neighborhoods on the northwestern outskirts of the city: Savar, where Rana Plaza was located, and Mirpur, the most rapidly growing area of the city, where Jewel had taken me to see the rickshaw graveyard. Most of them were recent migrants from the countryside. In Mirpur, I met a longtime advocate for their rights named Shirin Akhter. “Work is the pull, and water is the push,” she said. “We are a country of rivers, but we have no water to drink.”
If the women work in Savar, they’re likely to be from the northwest. There, the en
emy is drought and the drying up of the Ganges watershed. If they work in Mirpur, they will more likely be from the southwest, from the Hundred Mouths of the Ganges, where the enemy is floods, and the rivers are turning to salt. In both areas, it was a tale of failing farms.
Akhter had a theory that explained the difference between Savar and Mirpur. She pulled out a map and pointed to two bus terminals on the west side of the city. If you were coming from the north, the bus dropped you near Savar; if you were coming from the delta, you got off at the terminal that was a little way to the south, closer to Mirpur.
In Savar, I went to a housing development called Jamgora. It was one of Dhaka’s biggest slums, home to more than a hundred thousand people. But they were not the poorest of the poor. The garment workers may start off in the bamboo, tin, and palm-frond huts of the bastis, but once they get a little money, they tend to graduate to places like Jamgora, where rents are two or three times higher.
Jamgora was a complex of grim, water-stained concrete tenements connected by underlit corridors. Each block was divided up into cheerless cement-walled rooms, with heavy metal doors and windows secured by padlocks against theft. In one room, two young women in their late teens were sprawled on the bed watching a soap opera. I asked one of them where she was from. She answered in a shy whisper that her home was a village in the northwest, just across the border from India’s Farakka dam, in the water-starved triangle of land between the Padma and the Brahmaputra rivers. It was her day off. Like many, she worked for ten hours a day, six days a week, but she was no longer on minimum wage, which at the time of the Rana Plaza disaster was less than forty dollars a month.
A young man wandered over to join us. He was from the same area. The family’s crops had failed once too often; now his mother, a brother, and three sisters were all working the sewing machines.
Bleak though it was, Jamgora was about a limited kind of upward mobility. The wages were low, there was no sick leave, you could be dismissed on a whim, the supervisors had advanced degrees in sexual harassment, you didn’t even have the right to ask for a toilet break. And there was the constant unspoken fear of another Tazreen fire, another Rana Plaza. But at least the women in Jamgora had also broken free of the suffocating taboos of village life. If they’d remained, they would have faced the prospect of an early and unwanted marriage, arranged by a father desperate to keep down the cost of his daughter’s dowry, which would only increase as she got older. But here they could chat with friends on their cell phones, go out at night for a soda or an ice cream if they weren’t too tired, perhaps dare to put on a little lipstick. If they were hard-pressed to pay the rent, some might even split the cost with a male roommate (usually platonic), hoping that rumors wouldn’t reach their parents.
* * *
The following evening, Shirin Akhter took me down a darkened back street in Mirpur to meet a group of about a dozen women. Confirming her bus-station theory, all but one were from the delta, nine of them from the division of Barisal. They gathered in a circle on the floor and recounted the stories of their migration. The causes were a mix of what the experts called “extreme” and “slow-onset” changes in their circumstances. The stories varied from one woman to the next, but water was their common thread.
Rokeya said she had come to Dhaka from her home on the edge of the Sundarbans, the great coastal mangrove forests, because a tiger, driven from its customary habitat and deprived of its usual prey as the land grew saltier, was menacing her village. Nasima got a call on her mobile from a neighbor, warning that the riverbank by her home was slipping into the water; by the time she got there, her house, garden, and trees were all on their way to the Bay of Bengal. Nargis, who was from a village near the mouth of the Meghna, had left after the great cyclone of 2007 with four siblings, all of whom now worked in the garment factories. But her parents had refused to leave, and the remittances that the kids sent home had helped them rebuild their small farm. Jesmin, who was also from southern Barisal, had come to the city as a teenager with her brother after their father died of leukemia. Another brother followed, and soon all three were sewing clothes. A decade later, after the cyclone struck, village life became so precarious that Jesmin’s mother and two remaining siblings concluded they could no longer survive in Barisal, and they headed for the city, too.
Jesmin was thirty now. She wore a graceful red sari with brocaded sleeves and a tiny gold nose stud. She had high, sculpted cheekbones and dark, deep-set eyes, and while some of the other women stared at the ground and told their stories in almost inaudible monosyllables, Jesmin had a calm and direct gaze, a poise, a natural charisma. She spoke about the hardships of life in the garment factories and the nostalgia she and her friends sometimes felt for their villages, their resentment of official indifference. But when the conversation turned to Rana Plaza, I told her that well-intentioned consumers in the West were asking whether it was right to buy clothes from a place that permitted such things to happen. I said I’d heard about a store in Canada that had posted a notice in the window that said, “We Sell Nothing from Bangladesh.” She looked at me in disbelief and then began to laugh, and soon most of the women in the room were chuckling and shaking their heads. It was as if they’d never met anyone with such a preposterous sense of humor.
When the laughter finally subsided, Jesmin looked me straight in the eye and said with a smile, “But if you stopped buying the clothes we make, what do you think we would do? We’d die.”
THE WILL OF ALLAH
The road south from Dhaka was lined for miles with tall, tapering smokestacks trailing black plumes from the brick kilns. Each of the chimneys was marked with letters identifying its owner: NGN, NBM, AG, KAS. Children squatted by long, low walls of mud, pressing it into rectangular molds and stamping it with the same initials. Workers with long beards and embroidered skullcaps carried heavy loads of freshly fired bricks yoked to their shoulders, a dozen in each basket, and arranged them in neat stacks. Others dozed in tarpaulin shelters. Wives tended to the surrounding rice fields or sorted lumps of coal for their cooking fires. The sun beat down through a gray-brown haze.
The brickworks extended all the way to the Mawa ferry point on the right bank of the Padma, the main stem of the Ganges, just above its junction with the Meghna. Dredgers were at work on the riverbed, and there were a handful of one-room corrugated metal stilt houses. One of them had collapsed onto the beach, but the structure remained intact, and a man had somehow contrived to rope the whole thing onto a bicycle cart, canted at a forty-five-degree angle. Otherwise, there was little in the way of facilities, just a short pier to accommodate the larger ferries. The foreshore was lined with smaller vessels and fiberglass speedboats that could hold a dozen people. You could reach them on narrow bamboo gangplanks or by wading. We chose the gangplank, and one of the speedboats zipped us across the river, which was quite narrow here, not much more than a mile or two wide. Sandy flats stretched away in both directions, fringed by a low wall of trees.
* * *
On the other side, we climbed aboard an aged blue Land Rover with no air-conditioning and not much in the way of suspension. We drove for a couple of hours until we reached the town of Bagerhat, where we stopped to take a look at the fifteenth-century Shait Gumbad Masjid. People call it the sixty-dome mosque, although in fact it has seventy-seven of them, and the interior had the chambered coolness of an equal number of pillars. The black-bearded imam bustled over toward me as I came out into the sunshine, and he shooed away a crowd of pilgrims, most of them women in burkas. “No talk for you,” he chided. “Only for people from America.” They retreated a few feet and formed a semicircle, straining to follow the conversation. “Where you are from?” a woman asked.
The imam introduced himself as Mohammed Helal Uddin. His English was fractured, my Bengali was nonexistent, and my translator had gone temporarily AWOL, so it wasn’t the most fluid of exchanges. I could get as far as the as-salaam o alaikum, but even that made me nervous, knowing that some Mus
lims believe that the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, had instructed them not to offer the walaikum as-salaam in return to an unbeliever. But the imam did so courteously and seemed anxious to allay any misgivings or prejudices I might have, even though I hadn’t expressed any. “Islam is very peaceful religion,” he said earnestly. “Holy Qu’ran says all people created equal, no difference. Ladies and gentlemen, different prayers, but also same, equal. Islam is always speaking truthful, no bad word.”
He told me about the last great cyclone—or, to give it its proper technical name, Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Sidr, 06B—which had struck in November 2007. It raged for five days, and the winds reached 160 miles an hour. The mosque had come through it unscathed, although huge palm trees had crashed down across the outer brick walls. “Is very difficult for us,” he said. “People come here to mosque to be shelter.”
We talked about the changes in the weather, the ferocity of the storms, the rising seas, the salt that came surging into the fields from the Bay of Bengal. I asked him what he thought accounted for them.
“We see the will of Allah,” he replied. “We see as da’wah”—a summons to piety.
* * *
The great cyclone had smashed directly into Sarankhola, a cluster of five villages on the broad and sluggish Baleshwari River, thirty miles or so south of Barisal and another thirty from the open ocean. The Baleshwari was typical of the rivers of the delta in its chaotic topography. Again, my maps weren’t of much help. The river appeared to emerge as a side channel of the Meghna. But which one? Did it begin life as the Naya Vangani? The Arial Khan? The Kalabadar? It meandered for many miles in a series of sloppy loops, braids, and oxbows, picking up tributaries, sliding around chars, changing its name to the Katcha, joining forces with the Kaliganga. Secondary streams seemed to leave one river only to empty into another a few miles away. Some curled back on themselves like a snake eating its tail. Some seemed to flow in two directions at once. By the time it reached the ocean, the Baleshwari had become one of the largest of the Hundred Mouths of the Ganges, a good five or six miles wide. Or perhaps by the time it got there it was the Bhola. It was impossible to tell.