A Carpenter's Journey

Carpenter Gobindra Chandra Halder can't sit or walk unaided, but he pursues his livelihood with enthusiasm.

It begins with an idea. There’s planning to be done: a sketch in pencil completes the start. It requires concentration. There’s never been a journey of substance when it’s been relentlessly easy to plot the best course. There are always obstacles. Always.

Some travellers rely on maps. Others chart their distances with compass or strategy; or alternatively follow an intuition-based path. Gobindra Chandra Halder, 55, has found in flowers, birds, trees and people the key to his way forward. He has enlisted into his service the curves, repetition and symmetry of regal design. For his is the journey of a carpenter – a carpenter with more than thirty years of experience.

 Gobindra  has made a name for himself as a carpenter.

“The throat is four fingers,” Gobindra says, explaining how he measures each body part to give his carved figures proportional accuracy. Everything is measured.

The sawing and sanding are his setting out. It’s after that he proceeds further, commencing the painstaking carving phase that will bring to each design its life, its third dimension. He inches onward, slowly, slowly – towards the destination of the finished piece. “With delicate work,” he says, “there is no time limit.”

From his two-room, mud floor home-and-studio in College Road of Rajapur in Jhalokati he’s made his name in handmade furniture manufacture. The medium he found for his each successive journey is wood and Gobindra is a respected artisan in it.

Things are never that easy. There’s never been a journey of substance that’s been free of challenges. Sometimes such roadblocks are relatively minor and easy to negotiate; at other times difficulties of the seemingly insurmountable type appear – enough to tempt any weary traveller into hanging up his hiking boots for good. It’s in the nature of a journey: problems can arise at any time, well into a long ago established voyage or, as in Gobindra’s case, right from the start. He had little choice but to face his situation. There was nothing for it but to persevere.

“He was good at school,” says his brother, high school teacher Kitish Chandra Halder, “but fate did not reward him.”

There came a night when Gobindra was about ten years old, when he dreamt that robbers were looting their household. Driven by fear the sleeping child climbed out of the window and fell from the first floor.

At work in his garden.

At first it seemed as though he had overcome his injuries – that his nightmare would be recorded as no more than an amusing anecdote among various childhood mishaps. But from age fifteen Gobindra started to lose power in his legs. The movement in his neck, back, arms and legs started to decrease: the delayed result of a possible spinal cord trauma he had sustained.

His family took him to Dhaka. But after visiting many hospitals not only were the doctors unable to offer much more than the hope his injury would right itself over time, they were unable even to name his affliction.

His parents took him to the pond for swimming, which a doctor had suggested. They even tried treatment by a local healer, a kabiraj. All that was forty years ago.

“Our family has suffered for a lifetime from concern over his injuries,” says Kitish Halder.

Gobindra proved courageous. In pain and with difficulty he completed his SSC examinations. But after that he found it impossible to continue his studies. Nor when the time arrived was he able to marry.

There’s been a gradual deterioration. Our carpenter requires a walking stick to move about. He cannot turn his head. He cannot bend. Mostly he lives in pain. He dines at either his sister’s or his brother’s house as he cannot cook a meal. But Gobindra has never stopped trying – his furniture is evidence of his determination.

From a young age he had demonstrated a talent for carpentry. It allowed him to develop his small business and manage a meagre livelihood, in the company of flowers, birds, trees and people, in the medium of wood. He can earn around 5,000 taka per month, but his work gives much more than that: a sense of purpose.

“I never had lessons in carpentry,” Gobindra says, proud of his achievements, “The designs come quite naturally as I start to draw.”

Gobindra with a bed head he has made.

He makes all kinds of furniture including sofas, showcases, wardrobes, beds, alna clothes racks and chairs. But for his condition it would be no problem to work in building construction as well, he says.

“Big items like almirahs and larger beds are difficult for me now,” he says.

Each piece takes time to complete. Gobindra is unable to sit in a chair and needs to take regular rest, lying down for greater hours than he is able to work. Nonetheless his customers are usually pleased with the results. “They often pay more than the agreed amount when they see a piece completed.”

He should really go to Dhaka. Due to the difficulties in finding suitable transport and more so the cost, it’s unlikely that he will. But it would be interesting to know what forty years of progress in medicine could do for him. He might find there are treatment options now. His affliction might at the very least find its name.

But this is not his complaint. “People don’t order the most intricate items anymore. They are too expensive.” He wishes there were more flowers, birds, trees and people for him to measure and bring to life.

Yet, when asked what sort of design he enjoys most, he says “It’s like football. The best enjoyment is not for the players but for those who are watching.”

And all around Rajapur people are watching. Many houses in the area feature his work. In each sofa, showcase, wardrobe and bed is an arduous journey of his, most often seen in an everyday and taken-for-granted way – a journey hoping to reach the twin destinations of functionality and beauty. Yet it’s never been easy for our carpenter who cannot bend.

Carpenter Gobindra Chandra Halder in his two room, mud floor studio and home.

Questions for a Lone Bird Called Das

"Perhaps I shall be a duck, some young lass's."

This article mainly relates to the poem "I Shall Return Once More" and its well-known Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899 - 1954).

To maternal Dhansiri’s banks did you return, as according to your plan? Are you there now in the guise of a wild bird, a white hawk or shalik or dawn crow? Or were you driven to move on by the bitter realisation that found you when you saw that river later? Your heart must’ve been struck! It’s not the river you knew, Jibanananda. Change does not stop, even for you.

Trees reflected in the Dhansiri.

As the locals tell it quite assertively, it wasn’t far from the broad Dhansiri’s riverbank, your maternal uncle’s house. Is that how you came to know her, as some say, to be stirred into noting her name? Did you feel her watery breezes as you once sat beside the pond in your uncle’s yard?

Did he feel river breezes while sitting beside his uncle's pond?

On the other hand locals attest to many things and there’s no authoritative information that you really made childhood visits to the village called Bamankathi in Jhalokati – your mother was indeed from Gaila in Barisal. There would seem to be no proof that a now empty Bamankathi yard once belonged to an uncle. It’s a history unverified.

You would understand that people like to make claim to a name like yours. You of all people would appreciate that poets sometimes like to record names like Dhansiri in representing greater things. Where is the truth, Jibanananda? Did you leave it somewhere for us to find?

The Dhansiri reflecting plants and reflecting Das.

Yet it’s nice for a moment to assume you knew at least Dhansiri. It’s no great distance from Barisal Town and maybe there really was a relative’s house in Bamankathi. There are surely details that from your life’s record got lost along the way – just as the memory of the haystack doesn’t stretch much beyond the harvest. It is interesting to ponder that you might’ve held Dhansiri close as a childhood memento...

And as for the river – old people speak of a twenty-or-fifty-times larger Dhansiri, if you want to know. They can still recall, if you ask, the setting off by ship from her banks for Barisal or Dhaka – ships which must’ve reached even Kolkata once. Did you ever see those steamers passing: how each ploughed deep rippling furrows into the river’s skin? Did it seem as if those tracks would last eternally, with all the strength in the engines that made them?

Das portrait by Narayan Chandra Biswas of Itna, Narail.

But of course a boat’s trail vanishes after minor moments and perhaps you wondered as the majestic Dhansiri and her cohort wind regained the upper hand. It would’ve seemed that nothing could stop her: certainly not any manmade contraption – and you had little affection for manmade contraptions.

Yet time happened.

Some say deltas are unfaithful creatures, Jibanananda, devoid of loyalty as to where rivers lie and in what measure of bounty their waters flow. From Dhansiri’s bank that uncle’s house is a way off now. Some call the name of Farakka to explain your Dhansiri reduced to an exaggerated stream, with barely the width between its banks for a steamer to pass. It’s not a suitable transport route anymore. Others may wonder at the longer effects of British river-tinkling, turn of the last century, at the not-so-distant Gabkhan Channel.

Equally it might be that dear Dhansiri simply mourned the loss of her poet friend after you fell beneath that Kolkata tram and left that earthly life. It can be the river in protest simply refused to carry on with the vigour that had been.

"I shall return to the banks of the Dhansiri, to this Bengal / Perhaps not as a man but in the guise of a white hawk or a shalik."

Or was it your entanglement with nature that became quite unmanageable? As the currents of your own, now large, River Jibanananda grew after your death so the Dhansiri might have rather instinctively regressed towards modesty as a means of maintaining a kind of balance. Perhaps we witness in its reduction a form of love, a self-sacrifice returned to you by one of Bengal’s rivers? Could it not be so?

Some say you were a loner. But the rivers were always with you, Jibanananda.

Some say Das was a loner, but the rivers were with him.

Yet if it was your thoughts of rediscovering her beauteous strength that drove you as a bird back to Dhansiri it must have hurt to comprehend that like your own bodily vitality Dhansiri’s would eventually wane.

And when you knew Dhansiri reduced, did you break down? Were you overwhelmed – afflicted by the pain of that Dhansiri destiny you witnessed? No, more likely you took your anguish into yourself and waited for introspection to take its course and push it out again eventually, in a new and vast language of bird flight, a secret carnival of altered syntax cartwheels in the air and altitude rising and dipping lines seemingly without connection. Did the other birds understand your aerial acrobatics then? One day they will.

The plot in Bamankathi they call the 'Das house.'

And if you stayed at Dhansiri, were you circling overhead as we crossed the farm fields, directed by farm hands to the empty yard they call the Das house? They had excitement in their voices – they wanted that place to be special. Did you feel nostalgia or were you laughing – they got it all wrong!

Have you seen the new plantation and the fence of sticks that marks the nearby property they call the Sen house; was it there and not actually in Natore that a young lady once caught your eye, the one you reframed and named for the world as Banalata? On the other hand Sen is a common name. Nobody can ultimately know the source of your inspiration.

Beyond the fence is the 'Sen house' in Bamankathi.

That whole Bamankathi neighbourhood is gone now – just empty plots. I suppose they might have followed you to Kolkata at the time of Partition. I suppose you would have known it before your death. Was it with a sense of sadness then, for what you knew to be gone, that you wrote of Dhansiri? Or was it but a name?

Whichever was the case, wherever you put the truth, the destiny of the river you noted, you cannot have known that.

Yet don’t dismay, still there is nature’s beauty in her. A lesser Dhansiri is given to reflection and village fishing frames. Crops grow along her banks and small dinghies are yet moored there. The newer Dhansiri would be a most welcome home for a duck belonging to some young lass, her crimson feet adorned with bells. You wouldn’t be the only duck to float amidst Dhansiri’s calmed memories, though the company of other ducks might not have impressed you. Are you a duck – one of them? Which one?

Some say deltas are unfaithful creatures. The Dhansiri is not as Das would've known it.

A final question, Jibanananda, a personal question: when that tram bell rang on Kolkata’s street in 1954 did you fall or was it an attempt at suicide, a desire for an early exit from a then barely appreciative world? There is speculation, you know. Of course it’s not decent to speak much of suicide – there’s too much culture in it – and you don’t need to answer. I just wanted to say, I wanted you to know that if it was suicide, I for one can understand it.

Fishing frame in the Dhansiri.

You broke all the rules of poetry in your life and you should’ve been rewarded for that – but the reward came late and perhaps it was, in the end, the rules that broke you? Perhaps that’s how it always ends when the world is not ready. You must know that by now.

Perhaps the Dhansiri reduced its flow from missing its poet friend?

The Dhansiri, Jhalokati.

The Dhansiri today is quiet.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Questions for a Lone Bird Called Das

A Tale in Three Parts

A new Goni Miah gumchha is on the weave.

It’s a tale in three parts: one part warp, another part weft and the third part selvage. The first part is stationary, under tension, held tight by the frame. The warp yarn doesn’t change. The second part is the filling yarn which is movement, adding texture, closing gaps. As the shuttle slides from side to side, the twine unwinds to settle as the weft. Where they meet, the two – the structure and the movement – comes the final part. The selvage forms as firmer edge to bind, to hold it all together and prevent unwanted ravelling. Yes – it’s a woven story – a story of cloth.

Abdul Goni Miah has 60 years of experience working the loom.

It’s the tale of Abdul Goni Miah. White bearded and ninety by the calendar, he lives in a modest tin roof house in Basanda village of Jhalokati. He’s still gets about alright, relying on his one good eye. It’s solely at night when there’s a problem, when not only the sky but his whole world goes dark these days. Still, it’s only ever hours until by the light of morning he can see again.

It’s a tale of a grocer’s son whose father later had a clothing shop. It’s the story of a weaver with the experience of sixty years at the loom. He came to make his living from the old wooden pedal machine that resides on the side veranda of his home. It’s a machine with mother’s memory in it given by a brother-in-law after her death. It was a thoughtful act that set him on the course of a livelihood in three parts – through summer, winter and rain.

“You’ll not find any better gumchha in the country than mine,” Goni Miah says with pride.

There are stories in the weaving of each gumchha.

But look at it like this: the warp yarn is the farmer’s field, the plot passed down through generations. It’s the earth that holds the paddy. The warp yarn is those unnoticed rain tree branches, under which the van puller goes. He’s taking baskets of fish, his cargo, to the market. In the warp is the jamai’s paish, the son-in-law’s rice porridge – and just as much the dish in which it sits. The warp yarn is the pond, not less, where the village lads take their dip. Even in the winter sky of an evening you’ll find the warp. It’s above the roadside bench where that old man has stopped to rest. He’s waiting for his chest to settle, glad to catch his breath.

And the filling yarn meanwhile must be the aches in the farmer’s bones. It’s the glisten of the sweat beads that to attention have aligned themselves across his brow. The weft you’ll see is in the paddy as it grows ever so slowly. It’s in the song of the van puller when he and his fish baskets are on their way, and equally in his angry curses when he’s underpaid. There’s weft in the jamai’s burp of satisfaction and in his grin. It’s in the lads’ splashing action and in the chattering of the old man's remaining teeth as the fog closes in.

The gumchha: that most Bangladeshi of cloths.     

Of course the selvage is the gumchha: that most essential, humble cloth. It binds structure and movement, making each moment enmesh. Yes – Abdul Goni Miah’s is a woven story at the heart of Bangladesh.

It’s quite a contribution to be weaving stories like these; and the Goni Miah gumchha, local icon, is oft presented as a gift – to Jhalokati-visiting VVIPs.

Goni Miah worked on nilambari saris for his first forty years at the loom and was recognised as the best weaver in Bangladesh. His saris found new homes as far as the Middle East and the United States.

For the following two years at lungee he tried his hand – it’s for the past eighteen years that Goni Miah gumchha has been his brand.

He’s still active at the loom, helped by his wife and eldest son. There’s only so much that can be done with eyes reduced to one. Yet from each day from Goni’s house three new gumchhas emerge – with double thread and the finest finishing, 350 taka per piece.

“Other gumchha are just for business,” Goni says, “The threads are less. But I like to give to people a product that’s the best.”

Oldest son Motiur Nasiruddin Miah hopes to continue the family's gumchha weaving tradition.

It’s a tale of three sons born in the decades of the loom – with the click and clack veranda weaving going on, his family gradually grew. One son became a carpenter and another drives a CNG in Narayanganj. It’s his oldest son, Motiur Nasiruddin Miah, who’s set as his mission carrying on the family tradition.

“If I get capital I can spread this industry all over the world,” Nasiruddin says, “Dad has the name. All I need is two electric machines. Demand is there but NGO interest rates are high.” But from pride of his father’s achievements, he plans to continue, if you wonder why.

A story in three parts: warp, weft and selvage.

It’s a story of three gentlemen who’ve passed by at various times through the years – one district judge and one DC and one Faridpur ex-MP. They came to Goni Miah’s house and chatted, bought gumchhas without saying who they were. It was only when Nasiruddin saw them off, only when he saw the car – then he realised who they are. “Baba is that well known!” he says.

“Everything is from Allah,” Goni adds of his gumchha’s design, “and one type came from Narsingdi.”

“It’s instead of a towel. Enjoy it! Pure cotton dries you really well,” Nasiruddin explains. But there’s more to it than that...

Look at it this way: Goni Miah’s there when the farmer wipes his brow. He’s there when the lads dry off on the bank of the pond. He’s there as the spots of paish are dabbed away from the corners of jamai’s mouth – and when the old man wraps his head to keep the winter cold out. He’s the van puller’s belt, the drier of dishes at times; and he’s there to help when the lid of the water bottle simply won’t budge or to lift the kettle when it’s too hot to hold. These are the stories in the weaving of every gumchha sold.

The Goni Miah gumchha is renowned in Jhalokati.

Goni’s mother is in them too, and his wife and three sons. There’s the story of Goni Miah in the gumchha too, in each and every one.

It’s a story of three leaders, from the sari-weaving days. Goni Miah’s saris to Sheikh Hasina, Khaleda Zia and Ershad’s wife found their ways. And the interesting part is when Goni tells that two of those leaders paid generously for what they bought, while the third he quietly confesses paid a little short. But to say more than that – which one – I will not do, it would not be nice. In any case it surely would’ve been the party officials who negotiated the price.

Motiur Nasiruddin Miah dreams of expanding the gumchha business.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: A Tale in Three Parts

Meet the Patikars

The skilled fingers of Krishna Rani Patikar.

It’s a risk to harvest the paitra reeds. The matted, dark landscape within is an appealing habitat for cobras. But then, the sun doesn’t fail to try to shine for risk of clouds. And the rain can hardly refuse to fall for risk of making the ground slippery. Things go on as they should when living close to nature and the Patikars gather cylindrical paitra stems in the harvest months from Ogrohayon to Magh. Making circles into lines into rectangles – they’ve been doing that for centuries.

No, it’s not the shapes of ancestral tradition that make a Patikar laugh. It’s colour that amuses them.

Paitra field in Hailakathi.

To plant paitra is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Like the cobras, the reeds return after harvest, without fertilizer or pesticide and with just a little weeding to secure their space. In the damp soil the reeds will rise again into the sunlight, year after year. It’s a cycle of little difference from the way the moon rolls across the night sky. It’s the light of hope.

“The shitolpati looks beautiful,” a villager says, “and you don’t need a fan for sleeping.”

Shaker Chandra Patikar in the paitra field.

In the village of Hailakathi, in Rajapur of Jhalokati, there are old women and young men, children, grandfathers, cousins. They’re all of them Patikars – 250 weavers of 82 families sharing that shitolpati mat tradition – because the day can never arise when a breeze wants not to be a breeze. Anyway, there’s the pride of craftsmanship in being a Patikar.

Haridas Patikar at work.

Haridas Patikar sits on the mud veranda of a small house. He has a knife to get through difficulties but for the most part uses that most ingenious tool – fingers. With the help of fingernails he shaves the outermost sheaths of paitra stem into long fibrous lines.

Sometimes fingers get cut, says a young boy nearby. Sometimes there’s blood in that Patikar tradition.

Harvested paitra stems.

After rolling back the reed skin, once circle has become line, there is occasion for pause – for seven days the strands are bathed in the luxury of rice water before being boiled and dried for a day in the sunshine. Like a Patikar bride on her wedding day there are age-old processes to follow – getting ready, making sure all is just right – and the demand for shitolpatis is greatest when there’s a wedding on the cards. Lastly the paitra lines are sunk into the pond for an hour: then it’s time to weave.

“We have the paitra gardens and good weavers,” says Haridas proudly. “Many other villages take paitra from here – but the finest quality shitolpatis come from this village – the best in Bangladesh!” It’s a bold statement that holds no controversy in Hailakathi.

A few houses further along sits Krishna Rani Patikar, 35, who’s been known to weave since she was a young girl. She learnt that business from her parents. She knows that with five days of weaving she can produce a 6 x 7 foot shitolpati of the first class and earn around 1500 taka from the association.

Guran Chandra Patikar & Krishna Rani Patikar with sons and neighbours

She lives with husband Guran Chandra Patikar, 45, and their two sons. All four in the family assist in shitolpati production – while son Shaker Chandra Patikar, 19, is reading in class 10 he may also be found braving cobras harvesting paitra or weaving. The family can earn up to 6,000 taka per month which isn’t a fortune but certainly goes further than it might in Dhaka.

“In winter shitolpatis are cheaper,” Shaker says, “in summer more expensive.” 

“Gorom kale thanda, shit kale gorom,” adds a woman nearby, “In the summer it is cool and in the winter, warm.” You know, the first part of her saying is particularly true and the shiny coolness of a shitolpati beneath on a stuffy summer evening is sure to bring to life the sweetest dreams. We’ve all of us experienced that, surely.

In the smoothness is a centuries-old tradition

And to run one’s hand across a shitolpati where there is no disjunction to the smoothness to be discovered is to feel the Patikar tradition: balanced and beautiful.

They’ve brought out a curio, onto the veranda where Krishna Rani weaves – it’s the synthetic nemesis, the pipe-shitolpati from Comilla. Environmentally interesting in being made from recycled soft drink bottles, the plastic mat can only meet with disdain in Hailakathi.

“This mat will become smelly after use. This mat doesn’t have the coolness of a shitolpati.” Certainly there’s no natural cycle in drink bottle to line to rectangle. It’s not an ancestral life pattern for the sun or the paitra to acknowledge. And it has colour – not to be taken seriously by any self-respecting Patikar.

Krishna Rani Patikar, left, and a neighbour at work, weaving a shitolpati.

Shaker Chandra Patikar weaving at home.

“The superior shitalpati,” it is recorded in the 1981 Government Gazetteer for Bakerganj District of which Jhalokati was a part, “is made out of a reed ‘parita’ grown in damp ground near homesteads... The workmen are called ‘paitiyas.’ These manufactures are carried on by the local people in their own houses and on their own account and the employment of any hired labour for such purposes is scarce.”

Good for sleeping, the shitolpati is cool in summer. There's no need for a fan.

Doubling as a tea shop proprietor in Rajapur town, Shopon Patikar is Secretary of Aashar Alo – The Light of Hope, the organisation charged with shitolpati marketing. Every month he travels to Chittagong, sometimes to Cox’s Bazar, Sylhet or Dhaka.

Aashar Alo has 105 members and in Hailakathi after Cyclone Sidr the Bangladesh Army constructed a workspace for the organisation where weavers sometimes congregate.

It’s not easy to transport shitolpatis. On the Chittagong-bound steamer and in the Laldighir Par Mela, a fair held on 12 Boishakh that attracts shitolpati traders from across the country, there is the ever present risk of theft. A stall at the fair costs up to 20,000 taka – a significant investment; and shitolpatis break easily – they must be transported like glass.

Shitolpatis must be transported like glass.

Shopon knows too that one Patikar is not another Patikar. Among the families some are very poor and have to sell each shitolpati immediately. They take loans for capital and sell early to pay the interest; if they have no paitra garden they must buy supplies. Other, wealthier Patikar families may buy from neighbours to re-sell later, perhaps in summer when prices are high. “A 2,000 taka mat in summer costs 1,000 taka in winter,” Shopon Patikar says.

At the Mela, Shopon has the chance to inspect shitolpatis of other districts. “Good quality shitolpatis come from Jhalokati and Bakerganj,” he says – undoubtedly a generous concession to the latter, and Bakerganj Thana is likewise singled out as a shitolpati centre in the Government Gazetteer. “There are also shitolpatis from Sirajganj, Sylhet and Chittagong,” Shopon says, “but those are not as fine in the weaving.”

The Patikars dream of an export market.

Back in Hailakathi meanwhile the ancestral day-and-night cycle does not preclude dreams of course, and with on-shitolpati sleeping big dreams must arrive easily. These days the light of hope shines on exports – they think of higher prices, better livelihoods, inspired by the success of the garments sector and firmly committed to their craft.

It’s easy to imagine that with a little computer training, with the potential of internet-based sales, Hailakathi’s Patikars are closer to the world than the sun or the paitra might realise.

But for now, the generation-after-generation work continues, the shitolpati knowledge passed down the line. For instance, the finished shitolpati can be washed without soap but must be dried in the shade of a tree. For instance, the outermost reed skin that gives the shitolpati its smoothness and shine cannot be dyed.

No, it’s the rougher inside part of the stem that is coloured with dye powder and woven into patterns – and there’s unavoidably a reduced quality in that. Yes, in the village where circle becomes line becomes rectangle, it’s colour that makes a Patikar laugh.

Harvested paitra. The Patikars take circle, make line, make rectangle.

Shitolpatis from Hailakathi.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Meet the Patikars