Sreemangal Sevens

Seven-colour tea served at Lawachara National Park outside Sreemangal.

Ten-colour tea.

Beyond town is the Sathrong – the Seven Colours – Restaurant. According to the signboard it’s “fully air-condition,” and it will be, at some time after you arrive when they switch the air-conditioner on. Or you can sit street side. Those tables have air all the time, occasionally mixed with a hint of traffic exhaust. It’s hardly a secret that Moulvibazar’s Sreemangal harbours a tea secret. It has to be tried.

A warning to fussy diners – don’t expect details from the waiter. In the case of the signature seven-colour or the newer ten-colour tea it’s not worth asking. “I don’t know what’s in it,” twenty-six-year old waiter Joshim Uddin will say, “It’s made behind a curtain.” Indeed it is. It’s a secret.

Tea. Bangladesh runs on tea. There’s no corner of the country to escape it. Community bonds are built, tested, destroyed and re-imagined in tea shacks in every local market. Who’s stealing whose land, who bought the expensive fish and who’s facing the false case because their uncle doesn’t like them much – all local life details can be imbibed over a cup.

Sreemangal's Sathrong Restaurant. The layered tea is made in secret, behind a curtain.

Sathrong Restaurant, Sreemangal.

Villagers argue politics while sipping, with election posters hanging expectantly, longingly or ridiculously, depending on the candidate pictured – waiting to be referenced or discussed – and hopefully not mocked – by tea drinkers. Plans are made and negotiations settled as water boils in Bangladesh. Exactly whose goat was eating which tree – it almost requires a cup or two to sort that out.

Meanwhile in the city, it is tea that a Baridharan lady will turn to, what she will offer even to a not-entirely-welcome guest, possibly with a biscuit. There’s civility in it. Tea is a nod to decent society. And being so quintessential, when tea comes in unusual colourful bands like at the Sathrong, it’s really something to consider.

It’s unsurprising the innovation should belong to Sreemangal. With its renowned row-patterned hillsides of tea bush the town leaves no guess work that it’s a national tea growing hub. Take a few solid strides up the road from the Sathrong and you’ll be staring at a tea garden.

Count the colours. Make sure it tallies with the order.

After the magic behind the curtain is completed, Joshim Uddin returns with the very attractive coloured tea. There really are distinctive colour bands. You’ll need to count them... to be sure the number correctly tallies with the order. You might be tempted to pump for further information...

“I think there’s coffee in it,” Joshim Uddin guesses, “Milk, green tea, black tea, ginger and sugar. Each layer has its flavour.”

Despite the kitchen’s curtain the secret hasn’t been entirely safe. A handful of places around Sreemangal now serve layered tea. Some establishments have a prohibition on anyone else being inside the kitchen while it’s made. All still zealously guard the precise methodology.

Brown, buff, orange and white; then fawn, auburn and raw umber: those are the seven layered colours in the earliest version, top to bottom, impressive, down the glass. Take your colour chart if you will. Test it. Taste it.

But is it possible there’s a secret within the secret? That the colours of those Sreemangal-sevens conceal inner meaning?

Take brown for instance. It starts with brown. Brown is the colour of raw earth. It’s rustic and agricultural. In that is the farmer’s cycle surely, the hope in the seed-sowing that follows the plough? Brown is the struggle of the Bangladeshi delta, the source of growth and vitality. Brown is where we’ve come from. It’s where we all end up. It’s a place to stand.

We could say that brown is the thud of the base drum in the orchestra called Earthly life. It’s quite understandable it’s the first of the layers to reach the tastebuds.

But what do the colours mean?

Now buff is altogether different. It’s a more recent colour: an innovation. Its first recorded use as a colour name in English only dates from 1686. Buff is the colour of undyed leather.

From brown it must signify refinement. The harvest might have grown in the field but it’s stored in say, mud brick homes – consider the buff-coloured farmhouses traditional to North Bengal. Sacks of hessian are also roughly buff, aren’t they? In them food heads to the cities. Even leather – that primary stuff of buff – is the start of shoes – fit for walking. It’s easy to sense that the buff layer is about movement and progress.

Ten colour tea from Sreemangal.

Buff is archaeology, civilisation begun. It recalls the rushing rivers of the monsoon. It’s the colour of that line across the water to be seen from the Chittagong to Barisal ship, where the water of the Bay finally encounters the buff-coloured Meghna’s outflow. A quickening in the tempo of the human song is the buff.

The colour orange comes in at number three. That colour was once referred to as yellow-red. It didn’t find an English name until the first oranges, the fruit, arrived from the east in the late fifteenth century. It was first fruit, then colour.

Orange brings excitement: amusement, elation and joy. Orange stands for the excesses of jackfruit, the exquisiteness of mangoes and the frivolous indulgence of jelabis. Happy Krishna wears yellowish-orange as often as not.

With the brown of the land and the buff of progress taken care of, it certainly seems like the time for orange – there can be no mistake here. It’s the step toward literature and poetry and emotion. It’s the colour of human expression. It befits that the orange layer tastes intoxicatingly sweet.

The fourth of seven is white. In a western sense it could denote purity. In China it might signify death. But Sreemangal being a South Asian town it’s as likely to represent cow’s milk – perhaps exactly what it is. White is that fertility symbol that leads to family and society. It makes sense because it’s hardly worthwhile to be elated with orange if there’s no white to bring about those to share it with.

From the Renaissance European artists started to dabble in white, adding it to other colours to bring new brightness, and it’s not a solitary brightness, but of society, of the many...

Next comes fawn. It’s an interesting shade of brown, mostly used to describe furnishing or fashion or the lighter pelts of some dog breeds. At the Sathrong it will take some thinking – perhaps it’s as simple as luxury. By the time we’ve reached fawn the cities are built, society is there. It’s time to decorate: a nice sofa, a pure-bred, shiny pet dog?

Each layer has a distinctive flavour.

The penultimate colour is auburn – reddish brown – and it’s even more cryptic than the fawn. Auburn usually refers to hair colour – especially women’s hair. Ann Boleyn is said to have had auburn hair, and just because King Henry VIII beheaded her in the finish is not to say she wasn’t attractive. Her fate wasn’t driven by her looks. It’s just a guess – only the tea maker behind the curtain could ever be sure, but could auburn signify lasting beauty, or love? It’s beyond the fashion of fawn – something higher, something more valuable...

Raw umber, last – it’s a teaser, it must be. It’s ironic in being prehistoric. It was with iron oxide and manganese oxide, the powder called raw umber, that over 40,000 years ago mankind painted horses on the walls of European caves. Now that’s humour, isn’t it? To remind us that no matter how far we might think we’ve come we are never far from our primitive roots. Read the horrors in any newspaper and it’s clear. That final colour in the seven-coloured tea is actually the most ancient. Our end is our beginning.

Seven and ten-coloured tea is a little adventure. Analyse the colours, sample the flavours and wonder at the secret... because, ultimately, it’s tea. And tea, as much as anything, is what keeps Bangladesh running.

It's still tea... what keeps Bangladesh running.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Sreemangal Sevens

Test it. Taste it.

Manu

The advantage of the Manu station ticket counter is it's very unlikely you'll have to queue.

I

The trucks are loaded and overloaded these days, heaped high, rice grain, cement sacks, bananas or livestock. It’s a lily. It’s a lotus painted pink on the yellow cabin door – or a serene mosque in ghostly green with attendant crescent moon. There’s an eagle landed on a branch. There’s a magpie robin. Every truck is a canvas.

Non-specific flowers trail along the metal panels above the wheels. There’s the driver. There’s the attendant shouting out things. Every truck is an optimist ready to tempt its fate and ours. These are spiritual, personalised, grumpy machines. There are deadlines. There’s no time to lose. In the diesel stench they rumble, shoot like bullets along the highway kicking up dust and nerves all across the country.

Those trucks carry more than goods of course. They’ve loaded up that history and carted it away. Who will think of Manu now?

The Manu station timetable.

II

Shanti Lal Robidas, Manu platform.

There’s lethargy to the heat by the Manu River in rural Moulvibazar. The shiny singular line of railway tracks from Sreemangal to the south reaches Manu station on a long curve through fields, with a little box bridge over a culvert up the line. Beside the larger bridge in red-brown iron that crosses the Manu grand trees line the rustic platform. The trees are the best hope for conversation.

It’s not that the Manu platform is entirely empty. The stationmaster has gone home for lunch but Shanti Lal Robidas, 60 plus, is there. He doesn’t much wish to speak though. He’s brought his shoe shining kit from home – over the tracks among the collection of tin shed stores they call Manu Bazar. He’s waiting for any passing shoes that might need polishing or cobbling. It’s an effort that seems futile. The Mail, the Jalalabad and the local Kushiara... three trains per day deign to stop. Perhaps his is more a psychological business, something to get him out of the house. It’s a ritual.

Robidas lacks that engaging effervescence it’s so easy to take for granted. He’s really not a conversationalist – shy and reluctant. It stands out. He’s not Bengali for sure. “Five to six years ago all the trains stopped here,” he says, coaxed out of him, “Business was good.”

It's not certain he knows where his family come from.

Perhaps his heritage came via the tea plantations. Those workers’ families were lured and tricked from all over India by the British – many are no longer sure where their roots lie. They brought cultures and now half-forgotten languages; from his demeanour one can sense that anachronistic binding sense of caste, most often out of place in Bangladesh. It seems as if he doesn’t wish to speak because he’s ‘only’ a cobbler and cobblers can’t have anything useful to say. Perhaps that’s not it – nothing is sure. If he said a little more we’d know. But it feels oh so rural India.

Later, two of his friends arrive. They’ve noticed the sight of strangers on the platform. Cautiously Robidas confesses he’s been the Manu platform cobbler since the East Pakistan days but otherwise his friends take over, verbally encroaching to speak for him.

“Manu was more developed than Kulaura Junction,” one says, “All sorts of goods passed through – rice grain, timber, fish.”

“There’s no excitement like there once was – no business, no people,” says the other.

There's talk of a flood maybe fifteen years ago when the rail line was closed for seven days. “Sometimes passengers slept and ate at the station.”

The guy in the orange shirt was very keen to be in the photos.

Suddenly there’s the long bellow of a horn. A train is approaching from the Sreemangal side, acknowledging Manu station with the sound as if sending a little “hello, hi” to a friend from a bygone era. Or perhaps it’s a greeting for the cobbler? For the few on the platform there’s some interest in it: the strangeness of change!

I watch the train close in; the others watch me watching. But there’s no slowing down for Manu, no pairs of shoes to comfortably alight to be polished or cobbled. With a rush of wind; with passengers sticking heads out train windows, waving, watching rural Bangladesh rush by; with platform tree branches momentarily waving back; with kids train surfing on the roof... change is as suddenly gone – over the river, across the bridge, into the future. That change is bound for the bustling bazaar of Kulaura Junction and the modernised skyline of Sylhet City – express.

Stillness easily returns to Manu. Stillness has made itself comfortable there.

Express train passing by Manu station.

III

Manu was once a busy, commercial station.

In Kulaura there’s talk of a Manu River lined with godowns. Especially it was a port for fish and chingri shrimp sent by rail from Chandpur, Chittagong and Noakhali. Those goods got down at Manu to board barges on their way to market. In its heyday Manu was a commercial station with three rail lines, five station buildings and twelve staff working eight-hour shifts such that always a minimum of three were on duty.

Upstream is India, the Tripuran town of Kailashahar and beyond, oddly enough, another little train station called Manu. Indian Manu is on the Lumding – Agartala rail line opened in 2008.

Downstream is Moulvibazar town. But while these days there are river barrages on both sides, not to mention the border, in all likelihood it’s primarily the trucks that did the damage. With the ease of highway transport they packed up that history and carted it away.

Manu platform and the Manu River.

IV

Md Badal Rana, stationmaster.

In the evening Manu is deserted. Only stationmaster Md Badal Rana, 35, sits in his office, several ledgers in front of him. There are six columns he needs to complete each day with the amount of whatever meagre takings he’s collected. There’s no need for signalling work.

“I’m alone,” he says, “The station is only here for the bridge. The river is here. I have twenty-four hour duty.” His manner is gregarious, clearly pleased for the company. It’s the sort of thing to take for granted – there’s no doubt he’s Bengali.

“The trains, including the expresses, are many,” he says, “but the line is only one. Often trains have to wait at Sreemangal or Kulaura Junction. Today the 6 a.m. train came at 11 a.m. and the 11 a.m. train came at 2 p.m.” It’s his personal phone he uses to find out where a train is when passengers come. “The worst thing is when people have to wait a long time.”

“It’s a poor area,” he says, “People work as rickshaw drivers and such. They don’t buy tickets much; and the Kushiara comes first – it’s a local service where you buy the ticket onboard.” It costs ten taka to travel 24 kilometres, 12 taka for 31 km and 15 taka for 41 km.*

The tracks towards Kulaura Junction.

Rana likes the locals. “Hindu or Muslim, they are good, simple people. We have nice adda, chatting, together. Everybody knows me. I’m invited to all the pujas and weddings. They all have my mobile number and I spend too much money returning calls to sell tickets. Sometimes I sell long-distance tickets to Chandpur or Dhaka.”

It took Rana some adjustment to get used to his Manu posting, which he took up in 2011. “There is no food system here. No rice. And I don’t like coming at night. After 10 p.m. there aren’t people around but if a train is arriving at 1 or 2 a.m. I am here. What will I do if people come?” At the least, with the help of a local councillor he managed to have the tube well fixed. It was broken for thirty years but now he has drinking water.

He points to the broken ceiling above us. “What if a woman was sitting there and it falls?”

*US$1=80 Bangladeshi taka.

Manu station, Moulvibazar District, Bangladesh.

Manu was once a station of 5 buildings and 12 staff.

The station. Manu. Moulvibazar.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Manu

Stillness makes itself comfortable in Manu.

The trucks have carted away the history.