Sea Dreaming

Ramsagar is the largest man-made lake in Bangladesh

 I

They’re slightly odd, those human choices: we’ll survey the scene in front of us much more readily than we’ll cast our minds inwards; we’ll champion the future while neglecting the history which cooked it; we’ll focus on the upwards achievements more than those of the downwards variety. Yes, in the human sphere most often it’s the sky which rules the ground.

We know the first person on the moon for example – conspiracy theories aside – but not the one who reached the greatest ocean depth and resurfaced to tell of the ride. We know the planets – can name several of the stars and Everest, but hardly the trenches where the seafloor falls away just as remarkably. While we’ve barely discovered the fish and life forms of the great depths, is what I’m saying, we’re pondering if there’s bacterial life on Mars. We tend to look up.

Architects and engineers are hardly free from the fever: forever they conspire to construct taller towers to support longer spires. We celebrate that. We reproduce pencil-tall building images – now on Instagram, once on postcards. But which building has the deepest basement? Which tree has the deepest roots?

Yet in Dinajpur there’s a series of impressive constructions of the downwards type to challenge the human predilection for heights. The grandest of them all lies in village Tejpur.

The start of evening catches Ramsagar tank in Dinajpur, Bangladesh.

II

The rhesus macaque at Ramsagar.

It’s slightly odd, there’s a monkey in that tree and you’d hardly expect to see him here. Friend says, “Maybe he escaped from his cage?” I say, “Maybe he’s a rhesus macaque?” But the Assam macaque looks similar and come to think of it, maybe he’s a she? But for the picnickers to enjoy there’s a half-zoo over the long mound of grass-covered tailings to the right, so friend’s cage-escape theory holds some merit.

To the left is a large rectangle of water. Yes, you’ve guessed it: we’ve reached Ramsagar. It’s the most famous of Dinajpur’s seven historical tanks and the largest manmade lake in Bangladesh. It has a water surface area of 77.90 acres – not to be sneezed at. Certainly those who dug it out by hand couldn’t have taken it lightly. “Nobody knows its depth,” friend says.

As I understand it, convention is that a monkey on a branch doesn’t look inward in quite the contemplative way a human can. They may be better attuned than us to hunger, exhaustion or thirst. Convention is that a monkey, regardless of location, can’t be expected to think in any historical way – which is not to say he doesn’t know where he was on the day before yesterday.

Yet there’s one thing that monkey does: in equal measure he looks all around. You can watch him as he shifts attention from further up the branch to across the water, from the treetop to the ground.

Would the human perspective be altered if we spent greater hours climbing trees? Would the imagination of “progress” be aimed equally at downward feats?

The water of Ramsagar still lives up to its crystal-clear reputation.

  

III

There’s a sign which says the water body was excavated by the local king Raja Ramnath in the mid-eighteenth century; though I have doubts that monarchs personally spent much time with a shovel in hand. It’d be interesting to know how many hundreds or thousands of people were involved in Ramsagar’s excavation.

The sign says construction continued for five years – presumably at its peak during winter months and resting for the monsoon, if contemporary pond construction methods are anything to go by. And when it was finally done, the tank that by the mid-twentieth century was renowned for fishing, boating and picnics, it took the name Ramsagar – the Sea of Ram.

Of course this “Ram” refers to Raja Ramnath while the “sagar” is most commonly attributed to its impressive size. But couldn’t it be, just as easily, that the “sea” title reflects the sweat and effort of the workers having dug the entirety of seventy-seven plus acres… enough to make the tailing-hillock to hide the half-zoo from which the monkey escaped his cage?

Surely if you’d been involved in digging out even one acre by hand you’d be calling the result a “sea” too. Matasagar, Anandasagar, Suksagar… all seven tanks are “seas.”

And then, when it was finally complete, did Raja Ramnath say, “Okay, that’s one down and only another six to go?” I’m taking the liberty to assume Ramsagar came first – but being the largest it might rather have come last.

But what was it exactly that induced him to consider such a flurry of downwards construction? He had a palace. He completed Kantaji Temple. It’s not as if he had an aversion to buildings. The answer is simple: water. People needed clean, pure drinking water.

But of course I’m not suggesting that the escapee macaque appreciates any of that.

Ramsagar was constructed in the mid-eighteenth century by local king, Raja Ramnath of Dinajpur.

IV

Nowadays Ramsagar is a National Park, an oasis for Dinajpuris and people from beyond. The fresh air, with water yet clear enough to easily spot a hand-sized crab, Ramsagar is for family and friends; the snack stalls and tea stalls are straight ahead don’t worry, just up there by the tank’s far end. 

If you take the time to soak in the scene it’s quite the place to be inspiring – for while the parkland beauty must keep us looking out, the serenity is enduring enough to coax a looking-in. And while the future is, as always, ever beckoning, you’ll forget that, at last, to consider the magnificent achievement of the past. In that place the upwards focus of many-a-where holds no sway, not against the downwards accomplishment of Raja Ramnath’s day.

Yes, at Ramsagar it’s the ground that rules the sky, capturing indeed its very reflection. Over chotpoti and a cup of tea you’ll realise that they’re slightly odd, those usual choices of human perception.

And if you’ve travelled up from Dhaka in this day and age, you’re surely as delighted as that monkey who escaped his cage. So then: What’s the tallest building in Dinajpur town? The answer: “Who cares? Look not up, but down.”

Ramsagar: a wonder construction of the "downwards" variety.

The Hijol Tree

Do you see? Do you see the hijol tree? Note its cracked, thirsty bark and the determinedness of its stance. With majestic bird’s-nest-in-crown and orderly ant lines it brings connectedness. It stands alone... they stand in clumps and pairs across the plain. Scan the empty lowland horizon between depressed watery stretch and rice field to find those lasting symbols.

Birds-nest-in-crown, the hijol tree.

Lal Miah, 45.

In the vast open lands that have come to be, where there is not even a hijol close at hand, he’s pottering, inspecting the paddy. Shirtless and in lungee, he says his name is Lal Miah, 45. His skin is darkened by the sun. “Maybe thirty-five years ago there was jungle,” he says, “everywhere.” His hair is grey and largely gone.

It used to be a forest.

There used to be a great forest in Moulvibazar’s Hakaluki that stretched as far as the imagination, even a little further. It was so thick with unkempt growth – branch and trunk – that every hope of finding a way through seemed lost. It wasn’t only the hijols’ home. There were koros and boron trees too. They were the main arboreal forms.

Birds nest.

We can imagine the walking in circles not being sure of the forwards from the backwards or of knowing in which direction lay the way out and which the way home. The canopy, the vines, a wealth of green so abundant that even the harsh sun’s rays must’ve been a little shy to shine there, knowing, chances were, they’d never touch the ground.

The landscape is open and empty.

Of an afternoon it would’ve been stifling with humidity – it still is as we stand in the open with Lal Miah – and crawling with insects, then. Who could’ve heard their thoughts when the green hell was decked with the din of the jhi-jhi poka cicadas? For the darting crows, jumping bough to twig, it must’ve been a heavenly supermarket in that season, with those delectable insects in their millions to be snatched as easily as leaf litter by the bucket could be lifted from the forest floor.

The few hijol trees are symbols of what was.

Wild elephants passed by, stomping, crushing, playing with bamboo stalks as toothpicks in their trunks – Lal Miah remembers. Rhesus macaques, capped leaf monkeys and the choshma bandor – the phayre’s leaf monkeys which wear the ghostly imprint of spectacles – they called loudly. Guardians of their territories those primates must’ve held confidence in where the tastiest flower-fruit-bug morsels were.

Sunlight finds the hijol.

The full moon must’ve been the decorator then, sprinkling light panes down into the first of the leaves. And to the moon the jackals raised their voices, with hundreds howling as if to triumphantly summon the shadowy places to stalk with liberty and loiter through the forest night.

When the sun sets over Hakaluki there are still a few jackals to hear; of a day a few monkeys, if you can find them.

The hijols grow in pairs, here and there, or stand alone.

But that forest was special – not just any forest – because it delighted less in ages and lunar cycles and roving pachyderms, and more in drenching rains.

When the monsoon comes it will recreate that inland sea.

Hakaluki, waiting to be submerged entirely.

When monsoon reached Hakaluki the trees waded, they got used to that – soothed and soaked all the way up their lower trunks to the first of their boughs. In those months that forest swam: a great forest submerged in an even greater but temporary inland sea. Fancy that!

The Hakaluki water is clear and as a garden underneath.

Hakaluki dreaming.

Wind-called waves leapt up at tree snakes sheltering in the nautical treetops, then, with several snakes, if Lal Miah’s memory holds true, in each and every tree. “The forest protected our houses,” he says, “Where we stand will be under ten feet of water in the monsoon.”

Hakaluki's abundance.

And along the road, stationed in the dry fields we saw the yellow nouka boats looking absurd. Even now Hakaluki is still that type of wetland called a haor. Even now a clacking frog is at work making percussion in the reeds beside the deepest permanent water body; and somewhere spotted flapshell and hardshell turtles are wondering how long before the sea returns.

The 40,000 hectares of the Hakaluki Haor area forms one of the remnant wetland ecosystems that dot the up to 25,000 km² of the Sylhet Basin. To go back further, before the howling jackals, before the cicadas, before the serpents in trees... in ancient times the whole Basin was underwater. A true inland sea, the so-called Ratnag stretched from Meghalaya’s cliffs to Tripura’s uplands, then, and provided a maritime home for the mysterious Kirata people.

The vast Sylhet Basin used to be underwater.

Hakaluki Haor, towards the summer.

Long afterwards, probably when Hakaluki was already forested, there was a locality, some place somewhere, where the local Bengali people took to pronouncing the letter ‘s’ as ‘h’. It’s from such custom that the word morphed, so it is believed: when the Bengali sagor, meaning sea, became the large seasonal wetland, haor.

Freshwater mussel shells.

Oh, and see the freshwater mussel shells – someone has eaten those – scattered along the summer shoreline? Sometimes they held pearls.

Hingai.

Oh, and see the youths with the grape-sized, devil-faced hingai fruit in their basket? Sweet like the rose apple, it grows underwater in the shallows of the dry season only to disappear when the sea arises.

Fishermen. The local fish catch is not what it used to be.

Paddy at Hakaluki Haor.

There was a plentiful piscine society bustling among the roots of the trees underwater, then. With 107 identified species to some extent there still is, but 32 species are currently threatened and the fish catch has dwindled.

Some birds are migrants, others remain.

And the birds – locals and winter migrants: the egrets, the little greb, the pheasant-tailed jacana... Some fly in from as far as Siberia to be gone by the summer; all are attracted to Hakaluki’s possibilities: the purple swamphen, the Asian openbill, the little cormorant and the country’s smallest duck species, the cotton pygmy goose...

Egrets are still to be found in numbers.

“When the forest was here we couldn’t sleep for the sound of the birds,” says Lal Miah.

Egrets preparing to roost not far from the edge of the haor.

The mammals meanwhile, greater and lesser, retire to the fringes when the sea arrives. They can hardly live on boats. The porcupine, fishing cats and various civets, excluding the palm civet which may prefer to climb one of the remaining trees... Only when the water recedes will they rediscover their usual stamping ground.

Lal Miah remembers how it was.

And beyond the animals, the birds and fish, there were other things that dwelt in that forest, then. “In the jungle time nobody would dare to venture off alone at night,” says Lal Miah, “They would go in groups, if they had to, of at least five people. There were some forest places where bad things, maybe jinn spirits, killed people – time to time they’d find bodies.”

Some efforts are being made to restore Hakaluki. Since 1999 it’s been declared as an Ecologically Critical Area by the Department of Environment and projects are afoot. The Dutch are investing. This year three new bird species, the black headed ibis, the glossy ibis and the painted stork, found elsewhere in Bangladesh, were sighted for the first time. And beehives, absent since 2006, returned – three or four of them. These are signs of increasing biodiversity.

It would be a great dream to see, one day, that submerged forest rise again. Maybe it will never be. For now we can only imagine, knowing that secret past while inspecting the hijol tree.

Do you see? Do you see the hijol tree?

Another day dies.

Will the forest ever arise again?

Lastly, you know, a strange thing happened in Hakaluki which you won’t believe. It was when we’d walked a few hundred paces away from Lal Miah – still in the open vastness, not a single tree to hide behind, no rise to the land. But when we turned, looked back and scoured the scene, it was more than a little perplexing... that Lal Miah... he was gone; vanished as if into thin air.

Sunset at Hakaluki Haor, Barlekha, Moulvibazar, Bangladesh.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: The Hijol Tree

With thanks to Bashir Ahmed of the ECA Management Unit, Department of Environment, for introducing the haor ecosystem.