by George Black
Most of the people of Sarankhola were Muslim; maybe 10 percent were Hindus. Despite the bitter conflicts of the past, the two communities appeared to coexist in striking harmony. The Muslim homes were simpler, with neat, muffin-shaped haystacks in their yards. The homes of the Hindus were sturdier and more ornate, painted in vivid primary colors. Some were decorated with patterns that looked like henna stencils on a woman’s hand. They had fenced vegetable gardens and flattened yarels to winnow their rice and scrupulously tended shrines in adjacent huts. Every house, regardless of religion, brought offers of biscuits, fruit, and small cups of sweet black tea.
A group of villagers walked with me along a narrow, elevated path, a shoelace of doughy, yielding gray mud raised six or eight feet above parallel rows of fishponds that were coated with emerald-green algae. They grew two rice crops a year and a few vegetables. They ventured into the forest to cut timber and firewood, though the tigers made them anxious. A fifteen-year-old boy from the neighboring village of Khuriakhali had been eaten a few weeks earlier while he was out fishing.
One man was old enough to remember the catastrophic cyclones of 1970 and 1991. The early-warning systems were much better these days, he said. From the radio, people knew that Sidr was on its way two full days in advance. A three-tier system of red flags in the main population centers predicted its likely strength. Government officials and village volunteers spread the word via handheld bullhorns and loudspeakers mounted on bicycles. Right up to the last minute, however, no one knew exactly where the storm would hit. In the end, it made landfall around 10:30 at night. Most people in Sarankhola made it to the shelters, which were raised ten feet above the ground on concrete pillars. But in Khuriakhali, fourteen were trapped in their homes, reluctant to abandon their meager possessions, or swept away and drowned. “The water came up to here,” the man said, indicating his collarbone. “But only four thousand died.”
The winter that followed had felt like a long, slow-motion aftershock. For months, the fields were tainted by salt. The rice and vegetable crops failed. The wells stayed brackish. The fishing boats were reduced to kindling. The weather continued strange throughout the dry season, which lasted a month longer than usual, punctuated by sudden freakish downpours. At ten in the morning, people were still shivering in sweaters. They were plagued by familiar ailments—headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, the raging fevers and bone-numbing chills of malaria—but they came at unaccustomed times.
As we walked back through the village, a young woman named Mukhti, which means “salvation,” sang me a Bengali folksong in a clear, sweet soprano. A farmer asked if I would be interested in buying his daughter, who was of marriageable age. A wizened old man greeted me outside his home, leaning on a stick. I asked how old he was, and he said one hundred.
FIELDS OF SALT
Bangladesh’s third-largest city, Khulna, lay on the sluggish Rupsha River, which ends up in the Bay of Bengal as another of the Hundred Mouths of the Ganges, one of the largest. It was a ramshackle place, but mercifully decongested, at least in relative terms, after the bedlam of Dhaka.
Finding a decent bed for the night proved to be every bit as challenging in Khulna as it usually was in India. We chose a mid-price establishment with murals on the walls of the dining room that depicted teddy bears and cartoon characters larking around in a snowstorm. Next to them was a VW Beetle with holiday suitcases lashed to the roof, and the words “Go Baby.”
There was a large framed painting of flowers on the wall of my dark, cavernous room, and something was moving behind it, which turned out to be a splay-footed lizard fully eighteen inches long. I called the front desk to ask if they could send someone up to remove it, and a few minutes later two men arrived with cricket bats, a large, rusty, pump-operated spray can of insecticide, and an English vocabulary that consisted entirely of the words “no problem.” I tried to convey through frantic sign language that there was no need for all the weaponry. If they could just remove the creature gently and put it back in the garden? “No problem,” they said, yanking the picture from the wall, spraying the lizard in the face at point-blank range with insecticide until it tumbled to the floor, and then commencing to beat it with their bats. When it finally stopped twitching, they carried it out by the tail.
* * *
Even in Uttar Pradesh, with its two hundred million people, there had been some respite from the press of population. A small patch of forest, a stretch of empty road. But driving deeper into the delta toward the Sundarbans induced a strange kind of open-air claustrophobia, with no break either from people or from land under one form of cultivation or another. Every mile was a white-knuckled battle between overburdened trucks adorned with wooden folk art carvings and buses with their headlights on full beam despite the bright sunshine and with passengers clinging to the roof. Rickshaws, bicycles, and motorbikes engaged in their own adventures and misadventures as if they were auditioning for NASCAR. Flatbed cycle carts were heaped high with firewood, twenty-foot culms of bamboo, sacks of rice, cooking pots, hay bales, teetering pyramids of cooking oil tins, and people. The imbalance of weight was too much for one small cart, which abruptly tipped over, catapulting the driver backward like a circus performer shot from a cannon and sending his ten passengers, including a frail elderly woman, sprawling onto the highway and into the path of the oncoming traffic. The old lady picked herself up, dusted herself off, and started all over again, reattaching herself to the crush of humanity and livestock wandering randomly along and across the blacktop: scrawny goats, undernourished cattle, chicken, geese, dogs, children, old men with white beards hobbling along on canes, women in saris and burkas, day laborers in their checkered lungis. Life on the road was a crude Darwinian contest that the trucks and buses would always win.
* * *
We drove on, cutting due west across the endless rice fields before looping back to the south until we reached the busy little town of Shyamnagar at the edge of the Sundarbans, just a few miles from the Indian border. Shyamnagar merited a line or two in the histories of Hindu-Muslim conflict because of Pratapaditya, a sixteenth-century zamindar and maharaja who resisted the navy, the artillery, and the formidable war elephants of the Mughal emperor Jahangir until he finally surrendered and was transported to Varanasi, where he died in captivity. The redbrick ruin of one of his palaces was still standing, just barely, in Shyamnagar, at the edge of a field where some boys were playing cricket. Trees grew out of the windows, and squatters had hung their laundry to dry in the derelict rooms that they shared with a healthy population of cobras.
Another bicycle cart meandered past. Behind the driver, on the wooden flatbed, a bearded man was shouting into a deafening pair of loudspeakers.
“What was that all about?” I asked Benedict, a young man who worked for an NGO called Uttaran, which busied itself with the concerns of the poorest communities in this part of Bangladesh, giving them advice on everything from drinking water to domestic violence.
“He says if you give money to the madrassa, you will go straight to heaven.”
A few hundred yards on, another loudspeaker was blasting invitations to an Islamic gathering. A crowd of teenage boys blocked the roadway, collecting funds.
“They’re also from the madrassa,” Benedict complained. “It’s only for boys, of course. There are many more of these schools than before, more all the time. The main thing they do is read and memorize the Qu’ran. In Arabic. The government encourages them to teach modern and general education, too. But…” He threw his hands up; what could you do?
In the past, rural Bangladesh had never been ruled by the dictates of the imam, whose role were generally restricted to the rituals of birth, marriage, death, and burial. The cultural lines between Hindu and Muslim were blurred. Communities had gathered without regard to religion to hear the epic tales of the Sufi master Gazi Kalu, who had enjoyed the favor of both Allah and the goddess Ganga, or to debate local issues to the accompaniment of songs and poetry and stylized perf
ormances by traveling troupes of actors. Now those things were slipping away in favor of the Wa’azi, prayer gatherings that sometimes edged toward militancy. Saudi money was pouring into the country.
* * *
At dawn, vague figures moved in and out of the mist on mud paths dotted with date palms and windowless thatched huts, as if Monet had set up his studio in Bengal. The sun was a pale tangerine ball over the horizon, a glittering reflection between the half-submerged stalks of rice, and the landscape was cut up into sharp rectangles. The rice fields were broken up here and there by shrimp farms, and then the shrimp farms took over, interrupted only by the occasional square of emerald paddy. English words began to appear next to the florid Bengali script on the roadside signboards. Prawn Hatchery; Gold Coin Aquaculture. The water in the ponds was mildly salty to the taste. In this part of Bangladesh, the salinity of the soil was eighty times higher than it had been forty years ago. Much of the land was no longer fit for grazing, and the competition between rice and shrimp was as unequal as the contest between a bus and a bicycle cart.
Benedict told me how the big shrimp companies had come by all this farmland. They started by leasing it: maybe twenty thousand takas, $250, for a two-year lease on half an acre of land. Then they renewed it. Shrimp farming was not a labor-intensive industry. You lost your land, you lost your job. If a farmer had a problem with that, the companies would bring in their musclemen, the mastaans. The shrimp were on their way to Japan, the United States, and Europe with lucrative price tags attached, so there was never much doubt which side the government would be on.
Benedict’s boss, Shahidul Islam, whom I’d met earlier in Dhaka, had found this out the hard way by asking awkward questions. One day two soldiers dragged him from his office and took him to a nearby army base, where he was blindfolded and beaten. He had the impression that they used a field hockey stick. They broke his foot, and he still walked with a slight limp. He spent seven months in jail under Bangladesh’s Special Powers Act, charged with “organizing landless people against the state.”
* * *
Burigoalini, Tatinakhali, Kolbari. We had run out of road, and the last villages on the edge of the Sundarbans were at the end of earthen embankments and bicycle paths. Burigoalini was an old name. It paid homage to a local woman who once had pastures here for milk cows, a paddy for rice, and thriving freshwater fishponds. The economy she embodied was a thing of the past. The checkerboard of shrimp ponds extended to the horizon, and eels, bound for China and Japan, were hung up to dry on ropes along the muddy banks of the Kholpetua, a tributary of the Arpangasia, yet another of the Hundred Mouths of the Ganges. Sluice gates flushed the brackish water from the river into the shrimp ponds. On the other side, a hundred yards away, was a solid wall of forest, the beginning of the Sundarbans, a place where no one lived.
In Tatinakhali, the villagers were trying to raise crops on the dikes, above the salt line. They were experimenting with floating vegetable gardens and raising crabs in small ponds fenced off with reed matting. Researchers were at work on saline-tolerant rice. The experts in Dhaka called this the economy of resilience, and resilience was a word that might have been invented with Bangladesh in mind.
“Ninety percent of the people would leave if they could,” a man said. But it was hard. The young ones dreamed of city life, but they had no money and no connections to make it happen. The older you got, the more powerful the ties that bound you to the village. Building a home and a fishpond, taking care of a patch of cultivable field, clearing a yard to dry and winnow your rice—that was a twenty-year investment of time, labor, and emotions.
The groundwater in Tatinakhali had become so salty that it was undrinkable, and the mud paths were crowded with women and girls in plastic flip-flops on their way to the sand-filter well in Kolbari, the next village, which purified water from the muddy fishponds. It was a mile and a half in each direction, three times a day, carrying home enough in your battered aluminum pot to supply your family’s daily needs. Nine miles altogether, under a stupefying sun. A round-faced woman named Shajida said that sometimes, if you were hot or tired or got a late start, you were late putting dinner on the table, so your husband took the back of his hand to you. A neighbor’s three small children were wide-eyed in the doorway behind her. Shajida told me that their father had been eaten by a tiger three weeks earlier.
“What happens when your husband does that?” I asked Shajida. “Is there a remedy?”
She gave me a tiny smile. “Crying,” she said.
THE TIGER OF CHANDPAI
Mongla was a scruffy river port with a harborful of rusted freighters, and there were murals on the main road to the jetty that told you what to do in the event of a cyclone. A cow was floating away in the flood. A man was clinging onto a wooden bed frame. Another was halfway up a palm tree, strapping his naked baby to the trunk. I boarded a small riverboat, the MV Bonbibi, and set off southward into the Sundarbans, looking for tigers.
One of the garment workers in Dhaka had left her village at the edge of the great mangrove forest because it was being menaced by a tiger. The teenage fisherman in Khuriakhali had been eaten by one. The three children in Tatinakhali had just lost their father. Now there was a problem tiger in the village of Chandpai. It had begun by killing goats, dogs, and cattle, sixty animals in the course of a few months. Then it had killed an old woman, breaking into her hut through the thatch roof and dragging her from her bed in the middle of the night. The most recent victim was a man gathering fodder for his livestock at the edge of the forest.
Long before dawn, I was awakened in my narrow bunk by the grating clank of the anchor chain being raised. I rolled over, lifted the flap of the mosquito net, and squinted at the illuminated dial of my watch. Four fifteen. On the shore half a mile away, Chandpai was beginning to stir. The first lights were flickering on, accompanied by the soft putt putt of a generator. Then the Bonbibi’s engine kicked into life, coughing once or twice before it settled into a loud, steady throb.
Chandpai occupied the tip of a narrow promontory only a couple of feet above the mean tide level, encircled by the dense green wall of the Sundarbans. The name is a matter of dispute. Some say it means “beautiful forest,” but most people say it’s the forest of the sundari trees, which yield a reddish timber that is greatly prized for making the hulls of fishing boats. Two-thirds of the Sundarbans are in Bangladesh, and a third in India. Together they cover more than 2,300 square miles, the largest contiguous expanse of mangroves in the world. Three and a half million people live on the fringes of the Sundarbans, in villages like Chandpai, but the forest itself is free of human habitation except for a few scattered outposts where government guards stand watch for illegal loggers, fishermen without permits, river pirates, and tigers.
A sea-level rise of twenty-six inches—now almost certain to occur within the next few decades—will obliterate the Sundarbans, destroying the buffer that shields the Ganges delta from the fury of future cyclones. It will also wipe out one of the richest natural gene pools in the world: 334 plant species; 186 birds; 53 reptiles; 222 finfish; 100 shellfish. The rarest creatures of all are the gigantic, endangered estuarine crocodile, of which fewer than two hundred survive, and the Bengal tiger, which numbers around four hundred.
The tiger has always been an object of terror. The male can weigh up to five hundred pounds and reach ten feet in length. During the spring tides, it is capable of picking a fight with a crocodile, a favorite scene on Dhaka’s painted rickshaws. It can swim as far as five miles in search of prey, and it can climb into fishing boats. And one of them was now frightening the wits out of the people of Chandpai.
* * *
The Bonbibi chugged slowly down the broad Passur River as the sun rose above the treetops. There were two other passengers, friends of mine, two forest guards in brown uniforms, and a crew of nine. The cook laid out our breakfast at a long table, an aromatic selection of curries, rice, and steaming flatbreads.
“What kind of cu
rry is this?” I asked him.
“Green wegetable, sir.”
At 10:30, he returned and loaded up the table again.
“Snack, sir?”
The second round of “green wegetable” gave me a furious thirst, but there was only bottled water. Bangladesh was officially alcohol-free. In Dhaka, rumor had it that you could find it if you knew where to look and whom to ask. Supposedly it was smuggled in across the border from Myanmar. But I’d never figured out the right code words. One day when I was eating lunch in a white-tablecloth restaurant, an obsequious waiter had delivered a bottle dripping with condensation to a smartly dressed middle-aged man at the next table.
Next time the waiter passed, I told him I’d like one, too.
“Sir,” he said, “we are having no beer.”
“But you just gave him one.” I pointed.
He considered how to break the news of social niceties in Dhaka. “Sir, he is VIP.”
The Bonbibi had turned off into a narrow channel, fifty or sixty feet wide, and I went up on deck and picked up my book. I was rereading Heart of Darkness. Chugging along through the mud-brown water and the thick tangle of forest, we might have been in Conrad’s Congo. A troop of rhesus macaque monkeys cavorted on a narrow strip of beach. Spotted deer and wild boar browsed in the shadows. Several species of kingfisher—blue-eared, black-capped, brown-winged, white-collared—made sudden flashes of movement and color. Endangered adjutant storks prowled the shoreline on their spindly legs, and Brahmini kites and sea eagles glided overhead. At the junction of two larger rivers, a pod of rare Gangetic dolphins broke surface. Nearby, fishermen were setting sky-blue nets to capture fry for the shrimp farms.