Among the Garjan Giants

Shilkhali's age-old garjan trees are unique in Cox's Bazar's coastal belt.

Transport through the forest.

In Shilkhali the setting Bay of Bengal sun sends golden light from beyond the beach and through the first fields to meet the towering trunks of the garjan trees. Hundreds are lit as candles by the orange glow. It’s quite a show.

The air is cooler, the day is done and locals haven’t passed up the chance to stroll among the leafy giants that tower over the scattering of nearby tin and thatch homes. Unique in the coastal belt for having stood the test of time, this age-old forest in Cox’s Bazar beneath Teknaf’s range holds a beauty that cannot be denied.

Fishermen with fry in the back of a jeep.

Trees rise before and after the Marine Drive; and what’s more interesting right in the middle of the road, as though the forest barely tolerates the line of pitch passing through its enchanted territory. In the several places where roadway is divided into narrow lanes squeezing either side of a resolute garjan trunk the shared CNGs and small trucks must weave courteous s-curves to get through. It’s as though the traffic tips its hat in honour of the trees.

Nearby a few tea shops are coming to life. Customers are ready to reacquaint themselves with neighbours after a day of labour. Nearby, on a shady field a football match is underway.

A CNG three-wheeler weaves, where the trees own the road.

Football under the garjan trees.

Such activities could characterise the life of many a village but in Shilkhali the forest grants an added degree of calmness to proceedings. In the tea shops it seems impossible to retain tension. Over the football ground the garjan canopy presides as silent, ever present referee.

Fading eastward into the shadow before the mountains, the garjan forest is a site that any passing tourist will want to see.

Tea shops come to life in the late afternoon.

To the north in Shilkhali Bazar proper there’s talk of a wild elephant group that sometimes arrives by 8 p.m., wandering down from the hills to trample paddy in search of food. The villagers are yet brave and ready to chase them off.

And besides, if the group doesn’t arrive there’s a lone individual, a regular elephant who can be relied upon to grace the hillside farmlands from 9 pm until dawn.

Shilkhali: looking inland from the beach.

A fishing trawler on wheels: a kind of hovercraft?

Local Abdul Karim, 18, who studies in class 9, leads the way with his friends along a country lane, a short walk to the east, to show a trampled fence and a large, recently broken jackfruit tree.

“Elephants eat coconut, banana and jackfruit,” he says, adding that the betel and areca palm gardens are spared. “You should see how an elephant headbutts a coconut palm to make the coconuts fall; how they open green coconuts with their feet.”

It's as though the garjan forest isn't quite comfortable to let the road go through.

Crab patterns on the beach.

Crab art.

Asked if the elephants worry him he shakes his head. “I wasn’t scared of them when I was little. Why would I be scared now?”

A short walk to the west meanwhile brings us to the beach with a minor lagoon to wade through before reaching the empty, stunning sand stretch. The red crabs by their hundreds scurrying into burrows were clearly not expecting visitors.

Trawlers by the shore.

Alone on the foreshore further down, fisherman Hasan is hoping for shrimp, busy with nets.

The Teknaf Range.

The jeep on the way there.

To the Bay of Bengal.

To the south of the forest meanwhile new plots are well-marked between road and beach, with signboard names of hotel this and hotel that. Accommodation has made a long term booking it would seem to stay in the area along Teknaf’s northern coast; and what will the garjan forest make of it should sun seeking crowds arrive in coming years?

Yet for the moment, the area is quiet.

The garjan forest: see it before the tourists get there.

Fisherman.

The crabs aren't expecting visitors.

This article is published in The Daily Star, here: Among Shilkhali's Garjan Giants

Me with Abdul Karim and his friends.

Harnessing the Strength of the Octopus

The view from Amtoli Para of Himchhari Beach and the Bay of Bengal.

Amtoli Para, Himchhari.

In the hilltop community of Amtoli Para in Himchhari of Cox’s Bazar, 20 women from the 70 households are gathered on a mat. With sweeping views down to the beach and across the Bay of Bengal the scene is idyllic, suitable for a picnic if it wasn’t quite as hot. Below, along the coast were once their permanent addresses, their homes, shops and gardens. Cows grazed foreshore grasses; goats roamed.

The 1991 cyclone changed all that, proving that a permanent address isn’t always permanent. In one respect the villagers were lucky. Although the nearest cyclone shelter was 1.5 kilometres away nobody died; and the worst of the cyclone was destined to be met elsewhere. But crops were ruined; cattle and houses were swept away. With villages destroyed and land no longer inhabitable they turned from the sea.

There was no choice but to move into the sand-rock hills.

The track to Amtoli Para.

Nurul Haque, 23, outside his home.

Needing new livelihoods the villagers took advantage of the only available resource: the trees of Himchhari National Park. Still today they are primarily wood-cutter families and Nurul Haque, 23, originally of Croalia village, is typical. The father-of-two ventures into the forest four to five days per week, leaving at 9 a.m. to return by mid-afternoon. He walks four kilometres to find trees, hauling fuel wood back to sell in Himchhari that evening or on the following day. He earns a meagre 200 – 400 taka for one day’s efforts.

“Wood cutting is painful,” says Ismat Ara Sultana, 20, who, like most of the area’s women, pursues the same task as her husband for about half his income, given the smaller loads she can carry and her competing home duties.

It’s a livelihood that degrades the national park and has caused the forest to shy away from the coast over the years, exposing the area to even greater erosion risk.

But more recently the village women of Amtoli Para have turned attention back towards an oceanic theme, in the form of crocheting toy octopuses.

The women of Amtoli Para learning to crochet.

It is hoped the women won't need to sell firewood anymore.

From March 2015 the social enterprise Hathay Bunano and the Chittagong-based NGO Community Development Centre, in liaison with relevant government departments and under the auspices of the Climate Resilience Ecosystems and Livelihood project, have begun implementing a new project in the hope of finding sustainable livelihoods for the villagers while better protecting the forest.

Crochet training in Amtoli Para, Himchhari.

The project will teach 28 local women to crochet, with guaranteed buyers of their toy octopuses and other items arranged abroad. Their products will likely find homes in babies’ cots in the UK, USA, Australia and South Korea.

“There will be 28 fewer pairs of hands cutting wood,” says Livelihood Facilitator Ruma Majumder, “and that’s good news for the forest.” With two months’ training, it’s hoped each woman may earn up to 4,000 taka per month if she works full-time.

“I like it,” says Sultana, “Yes, there’ll be some difficulties in learning the new skill but it will be okay.”

Amtoli Para. After the 1991 cyclone there was no choice but to move into the hills of the Himchhari National Park.

The road from Amtoli Para to the beach.

Unfortunately nearby Rohingya households cannot be included for lack of residency rights. They will have no chance to move out of forest harvesting.

With only a non-formal NGO school to rely on, that currently teaches to class 5; in a place where few children study beyond that due to the 25-taka transport cost to the nearest government primary school proving prohibitive, basic entrepreneurial activities come with the hope of improved opportunities, even where the household income rise is modest.

Amtoli Para scenery.

Through crocheting, through harnessing the strength of the toy octopus, Amtoli Para’s women are set to better contribute to finally overcoming the multigenerational consequences of the cyclone, to the benefit of their families and the forest.

A house in Amtoli Para.

New construction in Amtoli Para, Himchhari, Cox's Bazar.

This article is published in The Daily Star, here: Harnessing the Strength of the Octopus in Himchhari

A lone tea shop in Amtoli Para.

Money in the Ground

Salt production in Moheshkhali Island accounts for more than half of domestic consumption.

In the fields at Tajiakata of Moheshkhali’s Kutubjom Union they’re lifting water, bucket by bucket. The criss-cross channels are hand dug to entice a little of the sea inland. Seawater is being lifted, litre by litre, to the first of four shallow tanks carved in the ground.

Salt is one of the main industries of Moheshkhali Island.

Even in the morning the sun is fire, but then they’re counting on evaporation. When labourers sweat, sweat is salty.

It’s a semi-lunar landscape, yellow and brown, treeless and arid. It’s a shallow water-trough landscape of salt heaps. Leaving his nearby home at some minutes before 7 a.m., Abdus Salam, 34, will soon be there. For eighteen years he’s been harvesting salt.

“Water collection is the most difficult task,” he says.

For Salam, salt is a livelihood; but salt is also much more.

Salinity in the human, salinity in the sea: for centuries poets and evolutionists have contemplated a distant ancestral link to the earliest life forms that from the primordial soup clambered ashore.

Labourers Mahamadul Karim and Shefatul Islam lift seawater by bucket to begin the salt making process.

More than food seasoning, more than food preserver, sodium chloride is life’s essence: where we came from and where we are. There can be no life without salt. Should we cry, we shed salty tears.

Evaporation ponds. Salt is simple brilliance.

In South Asia there’s independence too in the white sea-spice. On 12 March 1930 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began his famous Salt Satyagraha, a march from near Ahmedabad to the Gujarati seaside village of Dandi. At 6:30 a.m. on 6 April Gandhi collected salt by the shore.

Protesting the British salt monopoly brought worldwide attention to the non-violent independence movement and many in India took confidence from Gandhi’s symbolic act. Many followed his example and were arrested. Salt is a harbinger of coming freedom.

The afternoon sun illuminates the salt fields.

Salt taxes also encouraged the French Revolution and paid for Columbus to sail to the New World. At a time when half of China’s revenue came from salt, a Great Wall was made. At the centre of human civilisation you’ll find salt.

Aztec mythology meanwhile includes Huixtocihuatl, goddess of fertility who presided over salt and saltwater. In Hinduism auspicious salt is used in housewarmings and weddings. Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in a hadith recorded in Sunan Ibn Majah reportedly said, “Salt is the master of your food. God sent down four blessings from the sky: fire, water, iron and salt.”

Religion, civilisation, human life: salt has shaped history.

But Salam’s talk is not of this. He explains that older water will drain through adjoining, ever shallower troughs. He knows evaporation will take to its task. In the final polythene-lined tank after about a week, salt crystals awaiting collection shall sparkle, says he. Salt is brilliance in its simplicity.

The lunar landscape of the salt fields.

He predicts merchants will buy direct from his field. He understands that if he needs to store salt when the monsoon arrives he can bury it, wrapped in polythene, underground. “There’s money in the ground,” say the people of Moheshkhali.

More than half of Moheshkhali's population participates in salt.

When labourers sweat, their sweat is salty.

Salt is also a budget. From 5 kanies of land leased for upwards of 40,000 taka Salam calculates that with two labourers employed he can produce 300 maunds of salt per kanie during the January to April season. He’ll need 100 pounds of polythene for one kanie at 75 taka per pound.

There are contingencies to account for: a falling price caused by transport disruption and late winter fogs that bringing moisture to undo the sun’s work in salt’s disheartening dissolution.

Moheshkhali produces the largest portion of salt to meet domestic demand. Salt farming of about 19,000 acres enlists some degree of participation from most of the island’s 3-lac population.

Abdus Salam, 34, has been working in the salt fields for 18 years.

Yet ironically the Bay of Bengal is best suited for salt. While averaging 3.5% salinity, the world’s seas are not equally saline.

Salt crystals ready for collection.

Of open seas, the Red Sea is considered the saltiest at 4%, due to a lack of rain and river inflow, and because of its narrow connection to the less saline Indian Ocean. Enclosed water bodies can be much saltier still, like the Dead Sea with 34.2% salinity. 

The Yellow, Baltic and Black seas by contrast, like the Bay of Bengal, hold below-average salt content.

Afternoon at Tajiakata salt fields.

Salam can’t consider seawater but he does consider land. Sandy soils are not much good, where absorption is high. Suitable land produces salt more quickly, of higher quality.

As the word ‘salary’ shares its Latin root with salt: either money to buy salt or payment in salt, it’s easy to conclude that Salam has it right… Salt means food on a table and a family fed.

Should we cry, tears are salty.

The alien landscape of Shaplapur in northern Moheshkhali.

This article is published in The Daily Star, here: Moheshkhali's Money in the Ground

Salt. The stuff of life.

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.