Teknaf Road

A journey is as calming as a palm tree?

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”  - Robert Louis Stevenson. Across continents and centuries great thinkers, philosophers and wordsmiths have set their minds to the meaning of journeys. But what if they’d boarded a Bangladeshi regional bus?

The nameless company's pineapple-toned non-stop special service from Cox's Bazar to Teknaf.

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck.

At the Cox’s Bazar bus station, it isn’t so much that I choose the bus to Teknaf… the bus chooses me. I’m hustled aboard by two youths, one with a gammy eye, who then demand cash for a ticket. In any other country it’d have to be a scam. But this is Bangladesh: it’s probably the system or a system or some invented variation of a system… it’s creative and poetic so I oblige.

Still, as they run away across the parking area with cash in hand I can’t help wondering if I’ll see their overworked faces and one gammy eye again…

The non-stop special service stopped, the road blocked.

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau.

The bus is small, the company seemingly nameless. There aren’t too many dents in the vehicle – a favourable omen – and it’s painted with a kind of soothing tropical motif in pineapple tones, somehow befitting a way-down-south journey. In the front is a sign: “Non-stop Special Service.” I can’t imagine how special it’s going to be.

The seats are cramped but as a concession to longer legs the guys who’ve just run off with my money thrust me to the seat by the door. They made a point of mentioning the legroom advantage.

As could probably only happen in Bangladesh they soon return with my ticket. At first I suspect they’ve stashed a little commission in a hiked fare but when others pay I realised that no, it’s whole-hearted honesty. When will you stop doubting this country?

A lovely spot with mud and traffic under a tree.

“I like this place, and willingly could waste my time in it.” – William Shakespeare.

The bus sits and sits. We bake and bake. The sun grows hot and hotter – as more people are invited, hustled or cajoled aboard. And finally, we move!

But not far. Just out of town on the Ramu Road is the Teknaf turn-off to the right. It’s a lovely spot under a large tree with mud to get semi-bogged in even on a dry day and enough traffic hovering to be irretrievably parked in within seconds.

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.” – St Augustine.

I learn that Teknaf is a town of readers. It must be. Why else would that annoying man be yelling negotiations for half an hour as three enormous sacks of books are loaded – two blocking the aisle by the door and one on the roof, heavy enough to feel the bus slightly squat in pain. They can barely lift the book bundles aboard. Do they ever read about journeys in Teknaf? Do they consult manuals on bus freight limits?

With horns blasting and snack sellers squeezing up the aisle between the tome-tonnes and the ever increasing number of seat-less passengers, it seems negotiations have finally come to a close. It’s time to leave, after several more minutes when the bus can honk its way out of the vehicle entanglement and find some version of open road. It’s hard to breathe now.

Perhaps the Non-stop Special Service becomes non-stop after this?

Readying the bus in front for an acrobatic feat. It's rear wheel fell down a road shoulder hole.

“The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The first one-and-a-half kilometres hold promise. True, the chassis is a bit close to the roadway on account of the books. True, the driver doesn’t feel the need to slow much for the bumps. It’s promise that ends with a bang! Far be it from me to criticise literature but an excess of literature just busted the engine somehow – irreparably.

Standing, standing, in the sun, on the roadside… they’re saying a replacement bus will come but does the pineapple themed no-name bus company have a replacement bus?

There’s a fight brewing, about literature. The regional businessman is yelling that he paid extra for the cargo so it’s not his fault – they should’ve taken fewer passengers. The passengers have a near book-burning expression on their faces. There are no fans of the written word among them now.

After a good part of an hour it turns out they do have a second bus – only they’ve filled it with other passengers before they left.

They could sell tickets to the daredevil bus show.

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu.

Hammer and tongs there’s a boarding of the new bus: elbow and shove, people are piling inside to claim a centimetre of space though the vehicle is started out full. My jostling skills aren’t up to the challenge and at school I played rugby.

Fortunately the guys who once ran off with my money are now with hand gesture telling me to wait patiently. They’ll find a seat where there are none.

“It’s so nice to know where you’re going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.” – Samuel Beckett.

With two book sacks loaded on the new bus roof and the third destined to stay behind, roadside, the conductor tries to convince two young lads in the front row – one of the seats with legroom – to give up their diamond of a prize on account of one foreigner. Thankfully they argue.

There’s yelling and manhandling and I say nothing since what they’re asking is unfair… not that I claim the strength of character to refuse the seat had those lads’ determination faltered. But there’s no greater chance of them moving it turns out than of the former bus.

Somehow the gammy-eyed conductor hustles up a seat further down the line. I don’t see that happen – but I’m ushered inside.

Coincidentally the man beside me is the same as on the first bus. “Ah! This is my sitting friend from before,” he says jovially.

The outskirts of sprawling Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp in Ukhia can be seen from the road.

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert.

We can hardly have reached Ukhia Upazila before the bus stops again. Ahead the road is blocked. There’s some roadwork going on and a bus in front is dangling precariously with one back tyre hovering over a gargantuan road shoulder gap. All its passengers managed to escape without the bus toppling and now there’s a crowd of local onlookers too, wondering what to do.

They’ve decided to use a plank to ford the hole; with the bus wheel hopefully balancing along it until it finds solid earth. The only hitch is nobody really has a sturdy plank so the locals improvise. They choose the best large stick they can find at short notice. It looks about as trustworthy as a Himalayan swing bridge built during Queen Victoria’s reign and never repaired.

If they did this in a stadium people would buy tickets, I think. It’s a daredevil stunt. It’s an action film. I’ve certainly taken up a roadside posit to see if the bus falls. The anticipation thrills.

Suddenly the driver puts his foot to the pedal and the bus bursts forwards with back wheel walking the plank. Just inches behind the wheel the plank is splitting, giving way; but in the nick of time the bus reaches the far side. The show is a success! Macgyver would be proud.

The road, closer to Teknaf.

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” – Anaїs Nin.

Being so close to Myanmar there are four Border Guard Bangladesh check posts along the way. It’s the first that’s the most interesting. While conductor is busy having paperwork checked at the office over the road, two young BGB guards are ordering boxes from the roof.

When conductor spies this activity he gallops back, frantically pleading for them to stop. But it’s late. They’ve already decided a large box of medicines will go no further. They wave the bus on and there’s nothing to do but proceed.

“It’s good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

– Ernest Hemmingway.

As we rumble through bazaars in fully-Ukhia-now, the conductor’s standing a few rows up the aisle. “If you are going to vomit use a polythene bag!” he’s saying urgently to a passenger. “If you are going to vomit use a polythene bag!” It’s said a third time it’s said and thrice said can’t be good – anticipating the pong of sick, it’s really a special service now.

The Teknaf Range as viewed from the Naf River. Things start to look spectacular as they get peninsular.

“Travelling – It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta.

Somewhere around Hnila passengers wish to get out – it’s a non-stop service but it’ll only take a moment… and if we don’t stop the people will only have to travel back again from Teknaf and that would be hardly fair. “Life is short, time of the essence,” is the unspoken rule. And everything in Bangladesh is flexible and personalised – it’s about being considerate really and that's nothing to consider.

Mangroves grow along the Naf.

“Not I – not anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.” – Walt Whitman.

Trouble brews as one passenger wants his cargo retrieved from the roof – I’m not sure if the bag broke on the way or as it’s hurriedly taken off – non-stop services may stop, but not for long. The clouds of anger have gathered over the journey once more.

The driver fears for his vehicle so pulls off too soon, leaving the gammy-eyed conductor to sort out the brouhaha.

Meanwhile – and I’m not sure if that passenger owned the sack of jam fruit – black plum – on the roof but a couple of other passengers have discovered it has a convenient hole in it. Journeys make us hungry; and they’re reaching out the window and unseen, up onto the roof feeling for jam which, handful by handful unexpectedly find their way to open mouths.

Boats beside the Naf waiting for the tide. On the far side are the hills of Myanmar.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus.

Some hundred metres on and the conductor at a run reboards. His belt buckle is broken. His shirt is torn. His face holds that post-punch-up relief, yet there’s no ill-will for the driver who left him to his fate.

The scenery is stunning now – the Naf River to the left and grainy Teknaf range to the right. The abode of wild elephants, it’s feeling delightfully peninsular.

Stop-start stop-start… people want to get out… it’ll only take a minute… life is short, time of the essence… but eventually we make it – not to the Teknaf bus stand quite; to the scrap of dusty yard in front of the Awami League office which serves as a terminus when… Who needs to go all the way to the terminus? I alight to stretch my legs, finally.

A market in Teknaf.

“Though the road’s been rocky it sure feels good to me.” – Bob Marley.

The most memorable part is the look on the conductor’s face. He’s so overwhelmed with thankfulness at getting there – the pineapple colours certainly didn’t sooth him. As much as anything he seems happy to have survived; and enthusiastically he shakes my hand as if to invite a sharing of that great congratulation. It’s a wonder he’ll go through it all again on the following day. Absolutely! A journey it was!

“It is better to travel well than to arrive.” – Gautama Buddha.

Selling shupari - areca nut, Teknaf's signature crop.

A shorter version is published in The Daily Star, here: The Philosophy of a Local Bus Trip to Teknaf

Shupari - areca nut grows well in Teknaf.

Where People Are Still People

Dinajpur District hosts many elaborate Durga Puja pandals every year.

Initial observation: it was deep night as the bus from Dhaka crossed the border of Dinajpur District. A few minutes later a woman needed to get down. It spurred discussion among the driver, the conductor and other passengers. Was she sure? Was it okay to leave a woman alone on a dark road?

She repeated the place name. It was right. She got out.

The bus moved forward. The bus stopped. The bus reversed. No, it couldn’t be done. She was delivered instead to the safety of a late night barber’s shop nearby. And I wondered…

I’m not alone in anticipating that assuredly considerate temperament from people of the country’s northwest. Simply mentioning a person is from Dinajpur is a kind of character reference.

This writer was determined to find out: what makes the Dinajpuri?

Goods for sale at a Hindu fair.

Observation: in Dinajpur town no rickshaw driver asked for more than the exact fare; one can’t say that of all regional centres. Indeed twice I was unexpectedly called back. “You paid too much,” rickshaw drivers said, referring to the little extra knowingly given. Now that has hardly happened elsewhere…

I asked our local The Daily Star correspondent Kongkon Karmaker his opinion; and he himself exhibits many of the admirable qualities one might associate with Dinajpur, albeit just between us there’s a bit of Barishailla in his blood.

He spoke of Hindu families preparing shemai, vermicelli, for Muslim Eid al-Fitr; of Muslims leading Durga Puja committees, with some taking the chance to perform aroti dance in front of Ma Durga’s pandal. The town’s prominent temples seem to confirm religious tolerance.

“Dinajpur has one of the highest percentages of Hindus in the country,” Karmaker says, “Disharmony is rare.” The district is also diverse with ethnic minorities, principally the Santhals. Meanwhile, according to Karmaker, local hijras are better accepted and less pushy than elsewhere.

Perhaps there was more to learn in the villages.

Locals at the Nurul Mudir tea shop in Taiabpur, Birol.

At Mahadeppur village in Birol Upazilla, at a nameless shop in the row called Bashudev Supermarket, proprietor Sanatan Chandra Roy agrees to the premise, “People are good here. There’s no conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Why I don’t know. It just is so.”

“What’s in Birol?” proposes a customer. “Everything is here: betel, cigarettes and tea.”

And history agrees. The Dinajpur District Census Report of 1961 as reported in the government Gazetteer observed that Dinajpuris are “nostalgic to a degree, and unless they are very hard pressed they do not leave their homes.”

Kali Puja, Dinajpur. 

“Few experience the pangs of hunger as our own countrymen do in times of distress,” wrote a Briton, Major Sherwill, about Dinajpur, much earlier in 1860, “They may wholly abstain from labour for weeks or even months and still manage to feed and clothe themselves and their families. Their wants are few.”

According to the Gazetteer land has traditionally been more plentiful and population density less than other regions. Have these factors influenced an easygoing attitude?

“There is no district in Bangladesh as thanda [cool] as Dinajpur,” says Md Fazlul Haque at the Nurul Mudir tea shop in Birol’s Taiabpur village. The Upazilla administrative officer spent years in Khulna, which he liked, but “Dinajpur’s people are best.”

Dinajpur's Kali Temple.

His hypothesis: “People are occupied with their own business. Nobody has intention to harm someone. We don’t like conflict.”

“At any Durga Puja pandal,” interjects shopkeeper Mozammel Haque, “for every four Hindus there must be eight Muslims. Everyone enjoys. We are one.”

“The land is good,” he reflects, “That’s why people are gentle.”

“People here are very simple,” suggests farmer Sri Manmohan Chandra Roy of village Andharmucha in Chirirbandar Upazilla. “People are not much desperate so we don’t quarrel.”

Observation: evening on a narrow road in town and I’m surprised by overpowering music blasting from a red-light flashing amplifier, street-side. “Inconsiderate,” is the first thought, but then I notice the other side of the street: the long concrete wall of Dinajpur gaol. Perhaps somewhere inside a prisoner was smiling from hearing the distant rhythms of their favourite Bollywood and Bangla dance numbers? Perhaps a prisoner was having a birthday, knowing they were not forgotten? It takes volume to conquer concrete.

Motorcycle parking area at a Hindu fair. 

And yet the Gazetteer mentions mass migration into Dinajpur, especially at the time of Partition’s upheaval. It lists periods of famine. And news out of the district over the past several months is peppered with instances of violence, some political, others not. Surely such facts remind us: every rule has exceptions.

Regardless, in Dinajpur you’ll find it in general: that helpful, sincere majority – a little more tolerant perhaps, a little more peaceful perhaps…  Exactly why, I’m still unsure.

Kali  Puja in Dinajpur. 

 A ride at a village fair. 

A Poet's Aside

The entangled branches of Tangail's tamal tree.

(Photos courtesy of Mohammed Shafiqul Islam).

Hurry! Hurry! Delay is waste, to tarry, distraction: so says the modern world. It’s probably why intercity buses stop only once, at some kind of wannabe-grand roadside eatery with a fluorescent name along the lines of “Food Village” or “Leisure Spot.” The conductor says we’ll be stopping for twenty minutes. It means half an hour.

Lord Krishna's tamal tree. Can you hear his flute song?

But the village flute doesn’t run like an intercity bus. For one thing, everybody knows a flute song never need cram extra passengers in. For another, flute songs don’t travel at death-defying speed. No – the meandering, the tugging of the soul along detours and improvised paths is what any flute song is about.

…which is why, though time is of the essence and we should be hurtling non-stop towards Dinajpur by now, it can happen that the flute leads us momentarily elsewhere, to a different kind of leisure spot. 

Like the flute, this place was favoured by Lord Krishna. It’s to be found in Tangail.

A journey by flute meanders, tugs the soul.

Moreover, well, let me be clear… It’s not a physical journey that I write of this time – I’ve never been there. It’s a journey heard about, a place that might be hoping to be known. Who am I to refuse the wishes of such a place? And instead of leisure – we are, after all, talking of Lord Krishna, we might say pleasure.

The hearing of the place came about when Shahjalal University of Science and Technology English lecturer and poet Mohammad Shafiqul Islam contacted me recently. Our conversation worked its way towards villages as conversations often do with me. The Tangail native was keen to speak of a village three kilometres east of Ghatail Upazila’s Sagardighi – the village called Gupta Brindaban in reference to Lord Krishna’s childhood home. Our poet wanted to tell about an old tamal tree.

The tamal tree collects the threads of people's prayers.

The last time he reached there, he says, with friends he sat beneath that tree and took comfort from its shade. It offered coolness and peace on a day of particularly scorching heat. “We were showered with the grace of life,” is how our poet described it.

Sridan, Sudan, Basudam, Subal, Madhumangal, Subahu, Arjun, Gandharba, Daam, Stokkrishna, Mahabal and Mahabahu: when Lord Krishna reached the place many moons earlier he brought with him twelve friends, according to our poet – others say there were sixteen. He came for leela, for secret pleasure.

It’s believed Krishna used to sit in the tree and play his flute. To its melody Radha would be entranced, Krishna absorbed in the duality of music and love. At other times his friends would be with him and Lord Krishna would take pleasure of a more platonic kind. Either way, Krishna is said to have stayed by that tamal tree for a long time.

As his forefathers did, Sree Prafulla Chandra Baishnaba cares for the tree.

 

“Sree Prafulla Chandra Baishnaba welcomed us with a smiling face when we arrived,” says our poet. Like his father and forefathers before him, he has taken on the duty of looking after the tree. There’s a temple nearby, the Bigraha Mandir, where people every day offer puja.

Krishna devotees fasten threads around the tamal tree’s branches, believing their ailments can be cured and wishes fulfilled by God’s grace. Muslims and Christians are also known to revere that place. 

Hundreds of years: the root of the tamal tree.

“The tree,” says our poet, “now hundreds of years old with its skin dried up, may seem weak with the weight of age but from the tranquillity of shade it grants devotees – with the nurturing of secret wishes and the drawing of feelings of sacredness from hearts, it surely measures great strength.” As Krishna once played his flute people now spend long hours absorbed in meditation.

“Their faces seem to glow with heavenly colours,” says our poet. “They begin to feel light, both physically and mentally as God is sure to grant life to their hopes.”

The tree itself is said to have died many years ago – but people did not stop their worship when it was lifeless – and then, after twelve years its branches mysteriously donned once more the decoration of new green leaves.

“Sree Prafulla showed us other aspects of the tree that are unusual,” says our poet. “It has an opening in the root and trees should not survive in a condition like that. And the shade it provides is extraordinary.” 

Through the twisted, turning years of this world...

Two branches of the tree are unusually entangled around one leafless, small branch – it is believed that was the branch upon which flute playing Lord Krishna sat.

In Chaitra month on occasion of Madhukrishna Troyodoshi a festival is held. Thousands of people congregate – of many faiths and from as far as India.

But of course one can’t anticipate taking comfort from the shade of a tamal tree forever. The devotees take their spiritual fill from the Radha-Krishna pleasure grove and eventually leave. Poets must understand too, of course, that once a poem is done there’s a need to move on. Even Lord Krishna, though he may have stayed for many days knew he had more to do elsewhere. 

Krishna the flautist, with Radha, at the nearby temple.

 

Our poet with his wife.

“As we left,” says our poet, “We carried with us a distinct celestial feeling of solemnity and sanctity.”

And so, like the devotees, like our poet and Lord Krishna, we are also bound to move forward. The village flute cannot give pause to the song for long. 

And so, like the intercity bus the mind with body must re-embark… One stop is sufficient, surely, for the trip to Dinajpur. Don’t worry it’ll only take twenty minutes, which really means half an hour. Don’t be late in getting, once more, on board.

With thanks to Mohammad Shafiqul Islam for sharing his experience.

The tamal tree from the south.