Freedom

Sunset makes the Dhepa River in Dinajpur, shine.

Tell the river not to flow? I don’t think so. In Majadanga beyond Dinajpur Town evening is on its way. The sunset sky makes the river sparkle. She’s dazzling! Shall we be blinded by nature’s collaboration and call it improper? Shall we tell the river not to shine?

Or does it make sense to simply cross the bridge?

Through fields on the far bank tin houses with shared walls are lined up like soldiers. Trees are planted to beautify the all-too-logically arranged housing. Vegetables are growing, and guava. Something new is being tried.

“We lived as transients,” says 44-year-old Bokul, a Hindu. “Three years ago the government gave this land.” Together with Laili, 30, and Miss Maya, 24, she’s joined us in the shared yard. A small crowd has gathered.

The project is Manab Palli – the Human Village. It has 125 houses, 60 of which are home to hijras – members of the third gender – the remainder house formerly landless families.

“We’d stay randomly in somebody’s house for a few days,” says outspoken Miss Maya, a Muslim. “Before moving on…”

“Or on the street,” adds Laili.

Bokul, Laili and Miss Maya, at home in Majadanga.

In recent years the Social Welfare Department has been coordinating job skills training for hijras. Individuals can choose what they’d like to do: some hope to work in garments; others are learning to drive CNGs.

“We have no worries here,” says Bokul. “We have good relations. Everybody is nice to us.”

 “But it’s loud when the rain hits the tin roof,” says Miss Maya. “I can’t sleep!”

I mention that I like that sound. Everybody laughs. I don’t think people often disagree with Miss Maya. “Then what about when water comes inside?” she says adamantly, “Do you enjoy that too?”

I ask their full names but they’ve already been given. “It says Laili – just Laili – on my national identity card. You want to see it?” It was just a question but her answer says she’s had to defend her name. It must be strange to defend one’s name.

Oranges and reds, the radiant whites of their saris, the jewellery and painstakingly arranged hairdos – they take pride in their appearance – and they’re certainly not sparing with make-up. I imagine all the lipsticks and rouges packed carefully on shelves in sixty of those one-room homes. I wonder how they managed before.

“Things are okay,” says Miss Maya, “but we worry what happens when we grow old.” She applied unsuccessfully for a job at the medical college. “Sewing or office work,” she says, “I don’t mind.” Ambition they have. She’s completed agriculture training.

Houses at Manab Palli, the Human Village.

But for now they’re reduced to begging. Local administrators have asked them not to harass the public, and when they speak of it, it’s clear they’d like to follow the instruction. It’s not yet possible. “If there’s no food in our stomachs?” says Bokul.

Nonetheless Dinajpur locals say hijras in their district are less pushy. I’m beginning to understand: Dinajpur is a little tolerant. More than elsewhere, that society seems to be willing to try crossing the bridge.

The sky darkens; the river’s shine has left her. I ask if I can ask personal questions. I feel guilty. It’d be much better to live in a world where hijras were so accepted that there was nothing to learn from it. Personal lives are nobody’s business.

“You want us to talk in front of this crowd?” says Bokul. She has a point. After asking the onlookers to leave they open up. I’m impressed by their candidness.

“While growing up,” says Miss Maya, “I found that I liked to wear women’s clothes. I enjoyed male company. I wasn’t attracted to women.”

“At first I felt really badly about it. Then, as I started to express my feelings my mother started misbehaving.” Miss Maya’s home life deteriorated. There was anger. There was torture. It became intolerable and she left.

Life at Manab Palli, shared by formerly landless families and hijras.

It’s a common history. Bokul has no connection with her parents. They told her to get out – they never wanted to see her face again. “Nobody asks about us,” she says.

Only Miss Maya still visits her mother. She’s never invited to stay. I imagine the torturous thoughts that must plague her as she travels home. How could she not relive the rejection, not notice neighbours staring? There must be all the “what ifs” to haunt her. Visiting home… how much courage it must take!

“Parents spend too much on their children,” says Miss Maya, “For weddings they spend lacs. We don’t want that. We’re happy with a little, but we can’t even stay. They drive us away.”

Not knowing how to respond I feebly suggest their hijra community is a family. They’re absolutely unconvinced.

“We’re always surrounded by people,” Miss Maya continues, “but we’re alone. In this world we have nobody.”

“You’re never alone!” I want to say. But the words are cheap. So I say nothing and her statement just hangs there.

Nor is being alone a temporary state: “Suppose I had a good friend,” Miss Maya explains, “who loved me more than his parents. What would I do? People would tease him. People would say he was a hijra’s husband. If I really loved him I’d have to withdraw.”

Miss Maya has been to India. She stayed for two months, singing and dancing to collect money. “Nobody stops us at the border,” she says. She especially liked how Indians called her mashi, aunty, rather than hijra. “But Bangladesh is my homeland.”

Bokul, Laili and Miss Maya!

Thinking of the traditions of hijras attending weddings and the blessings they are thought to bring to the birth of a child, especially a son, I ask if they have any special culture. The answer is a resounding “No.” 

Miss Maya says young hijras need no advice. “One day they’ll see us and join us.”

I ask what’s best about being a hijra. “Freedom,” Miss Maya says. “We can talk to anybody, eat anywhere. What others think, I don’t care.”

Let's cross the bridge!

Family expectations, society’s expectations – as I leave I think how everybody faces such dilemmas, albeit less starkly. The freedom to be true to oneself, they have that, at enormous cost.

I wonder about another type of freedom: acceptance. They should have that too because hijras are a beacon. They’re frontrunners, canaries in the coalmine – their experience is an indicator of how free society really is. Life is hard at the top of freedom. But ultimately, their freedom is ours too.

The regimented housing: it fits. From somewhere hijras need to summon a soldier’s bravery. Night time on the river: it’s telling. Nature is a promise to keep. It’s never an improper collaboration. 



This article published in Star Magazine, here: Freedom

That Forest Feeling

Bark.

A troop of Phayre's leaf monkeys in the distance, moves through the deciduous and semi-evergreen forests of Lawachara National Park in Moulvibazar.

Why do forests inspire?

How is it that a bunch of trees and living things can lift spirits and free souls? What magnificent ingredient or elixir does the forest bring to enchant, inspire and release? Does anybody know?

I’d say it’s a lack of lines – in the sway of the giant bamboo stalks, in the leafy patterns of mulch we tread. Birth is the delicate curl of a new fern frond. Survival is the arch of a leech reaching out. Death is the decay of the forest floor – various stages – a mosaic free of squares, boxes and categories. Even the in-betweens – life’s joy in the sounds of bird and insect are hardly arranged as sheet music. They follow no tested, approved of chord progression. In the forest life is unrestrained. In randomness it finds the perfect circle.

A gorjon tree, Lawachara.

I’d say it’s a lack of lines but it can’t be. It isn’t true. The staunch, towering trunks of the ironbarks and gorjon trees in Moulvibazar’s Lawachara – they’ve thickened but otherwise not moved a millimetre in decades... they beat off the breeze, stretch up to hold the rain clouds. They put paid to that.

The forest has always been one of our best remedies. As the heart pumps to circulate blood to the toes it’s the forest that sends life-giving oxygen to the soul’s extremities. It’s as valuable as water, as soothing as the sea. The forest is in us. The forest is us.

There’s a troop of Phayre’s leaf monkeys, the chosmapora banar, in the distance – one of Lawachara’s four monkey species. The trees are deciduous, there’s a spindly network of branches outlined across an afternoon’s grey sky. The troop’s moving, one by one in bulky silhouette, taking turns out to the last branches. Then, jump! It’s suspenseful. It’s cinema. Into the clutches of a far tree’s green they land. Crash! They’re on the other side. How do they dare rely on those outermost, thin twigs? How do they know those barely-branches will not snap?

A Phayre's leaf monkey, taking a break...

Hours have passed. The monkeys are close. Their spectacled faces – slaty grey with white around the eyes – are looking down. They’re headed for distant flowers at the canopy’s top and this time as they jump it’s easier to observe the systems. The balance of the tail, the planning, the grab of arms and fingers...

The baby monkeys are trailing, frolicking as much as seriously knowing where they go... they trust their mothers will wait for them to safely negotiate the gaps. They’ll climb aboard her stomach, cling on as she jumps. It’s too far for them. Then, when secure, as she looks behind from concern for the next monkey crossing or to see what’s been achieved, the baby hops off to scamper along a new branch free of parental oversight.

Mid-air monkey!

The squirrels are fussing too, flicking their tails – short, sharp flicks – and calling with a chuk-chuk-chuk. They’re looking black from a distance – it’s confusing. They’re too small and the wrong shape for black giant squirrels – and this might be the wrong forest for those. They’re supposed to be orange-bellied Himalayan squirrels. They should be greyish – although their Bangla name, kalo kathbiral, refers to black... But where are their brilliantly bright bellies?

In the night when tranquillity makes impossible any tension – when the forested darkness curls around, threatens to make everyone a novelist, poet or painter, there’s a yellow frog – motionless, a statue, on the brickwork by the bungalow. It’s got those alien fingers with bulbous circular pads. It should be climbing a tree? There’s a mosquito biting its nose – drinking frog’s blood. How does a frog with padded fingers scratch? Why doesn’t the frog eat it? It would have to be the gecho bang, the Asian brown tree frog – nocturnal and crepuscular – common to all Bangladesh. They lay eggs on cream-coloured foam nests just above a water body.

An Asian brown tree frog.

How does a frog scratch?

By morning it’s time for humans. Buses stop, groups move about making too much noise. Md Ahad Miah has arrived. He’s 22, a little late, apologetic... a local guide – we’d arranged to set out at dawn. But he’s a forest resident too. He has fever. I like his attitude. Mahogany, chapalish, dumor – he knows the trees. “The forest is deciduous,” he says, “But after rain, say twenty days, the leaves return; the forest becomes dark.” He’s taken us deep, along leaf-covered deer trails. He dreams of opening a guest house, of knowing more about his wild patch of the Earth. He’s inspired – like me, like the city folk. Even more so – for him, his forest is some heavenly drug. He has a forest addiction.

Md. Ahad Miah, 22, tries the village flute. He has a forest addiction!

A bamboo stand. Lawachara.

There’s a rhesus macaque, incredibly bulky, at the highest heights of a tree. He’s sitting like a gentleman and it looks ridiculous – not at all agile or sleek like yesterday’s monkeys. I’m extremely concerned he’ll fall. Should he really be doing that? He may as well be a dolphin in that tree. It looks that natural.

And the leeches – ten, twenty on my shoes! They’ve made round blood circles on my ankles. There’s a price for wandering the animal domain. I would have spent the next two hours trying to remove them but Ahad is expert – he’s in sandals and not a single leech has caught him – with a stick he’s de-leeched my shoes in short minutes. He does this several times. “Do the leeches only bite foreigners?” I ask him. “Your blood is sweeter,” he says. But I don’t take sugar in my coffee?

Bamboo brings lines.

A forest oasis in a crowded country.

Lawachara: oxygen for the soul.

Butterfly on a railway sleeper.

A teak (shegun) tree.

But wait. Listen? “You’ll never see it,” says Ahad, “They’re extremely shy. Listen!” It was the dog-like bark of the barking deer. And high above – we’re looking for hoolock gibbons – it’s a squirrel of the type that doesn’t seem inclined to fit its taxonomy. And then, by chance, it jumps across a patch of sky. For a very tiny second there’s a flash – yes, a bright orange belly – you can’t see it twice. Ahad is likewise excited. “You know,” he says, “that’s the first time I saw that colour.”

We’re returning – no gibbons – but they’re not hard to find. Gibbons, you see, are incredibly loud and indiscrete. “Kuragao, kuragao” I type into my phone, trying to capture what they’re shouting with high pitched, sing-song voices beside the road. It’s just one of many sounds they make. They’re calling to warn other families not to encroach on their forest patch – in one direction others call back, in the other still more. Ahad explains the colours – males and children are dark while females are blondes. “There are about seventy gibbons in Lawachara,” says Ahad – he’s interested in everything, “from 16 families. And it’s crowded. The park isn’t suited to hosting many more.”

Ahad chooses the less-trodden paths.

Deep Lawachara.

Lawachara treetops.

Hoolock gibbons are endangered. From more than 100,000 individuals across their range from Assam to parts of Myanmar several decades ago there are no more than 5,000 now – in all Bangladesh there are 200. The hoolock gibbon is South Asia’s only ape. Lawachara is the best place to find them.

We move closer – through the trees we see – some are resting on branches, some jumping about, swinging effortlessly tree to tree. It’s true – they have no tails but when they dive into the air, catching a tree with those trusted long arms they own the forest, as though even phayre’s leaf monkeys barely know how to climb. They’re evening and morning watchmen. They’re boisterous and agile. They’re having fun.

Birth is an unfolding fern frond.

The forest excites. The soul is brimming with inspiration. Everyone’s a novelist, an artist, a poet... at least temporarily. Lawachara breathes life and space into this crowded land. We all need a little of that. “I am a part of nature,” says Ahad, “And nature is a part of me.” He’s right of course.

An ironbark tree.

The main entry to Lawachara.

After rain the leaves regrow.

Into the woods...

Lawachara's bounty.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: That Forest Feeling

Me and a forest train.