Meeting the Locals

Arriving at the Moheshkhali ghat by speedboat.

Toys for sale, Adinath Temple fair.

A stranger in a tea shop says I have a Bengali face. “How so,” I ask. “Foreigners usually have a fat face,” he says. “So, do I look sick then?” It didn’t take long for the Moheshkhali locals to prove they’re not shy.

A trip to the island readily accessible by speedboat from Cox’s Bazar won’t leave the visitor feeling they’re not a part of it.

It’s advisable to walk in from the jetty to the start of the road before taking a rickshaw, for a better fare.  Anywhere in Gorakghata town will be about twenty taka. I’m lucky. I find an honest driver. But as he rides in others are excitedly calling out, “hoto!” meaning “How much?” in their local Bangla. They’re wondering how much overcharging has gone on, but when the driver calls back “one hundred taka!” they know he’s criticising them.

“Ah, Bengalis!” says the honest driver, shrugging his shoulders. But of course, he’s Bengali too.

No visitor to Moheshkhali is likely to feel left out.

For anybody without any Bangla accommodations are made. “Good night!” one man calls out, remembering whatever English he can. It hardly matters that it’s early afternoon.

Selling sitolpati mats.

Another man is busy buying roadside fish. He seems engrossed in the sale, but the sight of an outsider is too tempting. “How is your country?” he asks. Should I take him literally and start explaining how Australia is? Well, most of it is quite dry, desert in fact… It’s expensive compared to Bangladesh but it’s also quite materially developed… Large parts are flat but in other areas there are mountains… Or should I just say “Australia”, answering the “Which country are you from?” that he actually means?

At the Adinath Temple there’s a fair going on and one college professor has been tasked with making loudspeaker announcements. He stops me for a chat. As I walk away I hear a new announcement, “Thanks to our Australian friend who says he just ate jelabis!” It’s difficult to feel more welcomed than that!

The jetty and ghat in Moheshkhali.

In a local eatery I’m stunned. “Do you speak Bangla?” someone asked, a simple question but I’m lucky I caught it since it’s uttered in what sounds like one long syllable! I’m not used to Chittagonian Bangla. “I speak a little Bangla,” I’m thinking, “But do you?”

New shoes, anyone?

To the outsider, Bangla in Moheshkhali sounds a bit like an electric saw unsure if it wants to cut a tree. It sounds choppy like the speedboat getting there that banged, wave to wave, across the channel. It sounds like chewing on gum. It sounds a bit Burmese.

“Chittagong dialect,” reads the District Gazetteer, “is almost unintelligible even to the people of neighbouring districts like Noakhali and Comilla… The most noticeable feature that strikes the stranger is the tendency of the people to slur over consonants, to clip syllables and to substitute aspirates for sibilants.” I think that’s a more sophisticated way of saying the same as above.

By evening I find myself in Chandan’s tea shop. He’s smoking a respectable Gold Leaf, so I start to joke about how rich he must be, how he must have a car. Everybody’s laughing; while Chandan says he has two cars! “But I smoke cheaper brands too,” he says.

He says he’ll soon be married which is my cue to question him like a relative. “Is the girl from a good family? What’s her qualification? What does her father do?” He returns from the counter with an invitation card in shiny gold. “This is the very first invitation I’m giving,” he says, and he’s hoping for two hundred guests.

Passengers from Cox's Bazar town.

Meanwhile Jamal the betel seller over the road is concerned for my wellbeing. He gives his mobile number. “If you have any problem at all, you just call me!”

Evening at the temple fair.

I ask if that also applies if I’m in Cox’s Bazar and he says it does. “But what if I’m further away, like maybe in London or Tokyo? Should I call you then?” Bless him! He offers to shut up his betel shop and come to rescue me anywhere, worldwide, anytime!

In Moheshkhali, everybody’s watching the foreigner, but I’m told I’m lucky. “A few years ago two foreign women came here,” I hear, “and a crowd of at least a hundred followed them as they walked along the road.”

About the jetty are mudskippers basking, lounging and fighting for ground. Larger specimens are charging; forcing smaller ones to flee back into the tide. As I’m boarding a speedboat to follow the tide to Cox’s Bazar myself, I can only smile at the memories of friendliness and curiosity that the people of Moheshkhali have given me.

Transport.

This article is published in The Daily Star, here: Moheshkhali through a Foreigner's Eyes

Selling sweets at the Adinath Temple fair.

At the ghat, as I prepared to board the speedboat back to Cox’s Bazar there was a guy in a bright yellow t-shirt. In bold letters on his t-shirt was written “Three Lines, Up the Nose!” which is clearly a reference to cocaine snorting. In Bangladesh people often wear second hand clothes from the west. His made me chuckle to myself and I thought about explaining to him that he was advocating drug use, but then I thought if I said anything out of shame he might never wear that t-shirt again… and maybe he doesn’t have hundreds to choose from. So I let him be.

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.

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.

Banglafornia

California started as an idea. Photo: Ron Eagle.

California. The first known mention was in the 1510 romance novel “Las Sergas de Esplandián” by Spaniard Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. In the novel, California was an imagined island populated by black Amazon women, without any men. West of the Indies, California was the closest thing on Earth to paradise. California started as an idea.

A street in Dinajpur.

Moulvibazar. I’d taken the opportunity to wander the Kulaura back blocks – my last evening. The dark, dog-legged roads wound through fields interspersed with Londoni mansions. What percentage of rooms in those homes was unoccupied at any given moment? I’d taken the opportunity to be alone: not an easy feat.

It was a usual highway-side shop in one of those under-construction buildings. It could’ve been a mechanic workshop or a hardware store. But TV was showing cricket and cans of Danish condensed milk lined shelves along the far wall. There were maybe five customers.

A Californian rickshaw wallah, San Diego. Photo: Ron Eagle.

I ordered tea, sitting on the bench by the door – and the finale to my solitude lasted approximately thirty seconds: inevitable Bangladesh! The man covered in sawdust started the usual run of questions – where I was from, what I was doing – that deshi curiosity that sparkles with genuineness, as common as water.

After a minute of talking he said with a big smile, “Please let me pay for your tea. It would make me happy.” I gently refused several times to no avail. An invitation to visit the furniture workshop across the road followed. Ah, the hospitality – I know, I know, it’s everywhere...

Meanwhile there was genuine regret when the tea wallah didn’t have my cigarette brand. He felt the need to explain his stocking arrangements – why it couldn’t be available.

Meanwhile at the bus stand the ticket seller thought to say, “If any stranger gives you food along the way, don’t take it!”

Moulvibazar. In days we’d made a tiny shard of history, her and me. The way things go.

A street in Dinajpur Town.

They spoke in Sylheti and I’m going to miss it. With the scraping over the ‘kh’ it felt delectably Arabesque – I couldn’t speak it of course but the simple sentences mostly found their meaning, if I couldn’t always identify every word.

Sylheti language seems to carry urgency – perhaps languages do when you can’t understand them clearly. A basic ‘hello, hi’ sounds terribly important. It’s so important that there’s no time to open mouths much or bother pronouncing every syllable. I was thinking it would be an ideal language for farewells at train stations, you know, that movie scene when the train starts moving and the friend on the platform starts running to keep up with the window where the passenger is. In Sylheti it seems they could say so much more in those final seconds.

And any Sylheti aboard the Titanic probably narrated the entirety of their life story in the last moments before jumping onto the lifeboat. Well, ahem – first impressions...

On the several occasions I was asked about Sylheti I’d taken to responding, “Eta haglami bhai! Noakhaillar Bangla sobche shondor!” “It’s foolishness! Noakhali has the most beautiful Bangla!” The first part got them laughing, particularly the haglami which should be paglami. The second part got them started... but... “jaitanno, khaitanno,” it always sounded more like a Sylheti trying to imitate a Noakhali accent than the genuine article.

Dinajpur. Maybe it’s better to look forward? It’s time to head west to a new idea. It’s time to find my Banglafornia.

Dinajpur sunrise.

I’ll be heading for the sunset across the great plain right to the end. There’ll be miles of road to cover, hours of tar disappearing under wheels. There’ll be rivers to cross and excitement. It might take a while to get there. It may be hotter – perhaps there’ll be palm trees.

A San Diego trolley car waits for rickshaws. Photo: Ron Eagle.

The idea of California has changed. It’s like, bikini roller-blading women on beachside strips rather than Amazons. There are surfer dudes, like, listening to groovy music. Everyone is attending, like, thrice-weekly therapy sessions and injecting botox. They “do” lunch and liposuction. People say “like” a lot according to the preconceived California cliché.

Dinajpur is a thought to explore. So what do we know? Well, there’s the distinct disadvantage of high expectations. You see, I’ve hardly met a person from Dinajpur I didn’t like. They seem so straightforward and thoughtful: I’m expecting sincerity on the whole. I’m thinking there’ll be a bit of Santali culture, a dollop of archaeology. Thinking there’ll be a tolerant blend of Hindu-Muslim and not expecting language troubles.

The Dinajpur idea is so strong that in Dhaka when a rickshaw wallah says they’re from Dinajpur I don’t bother pre-negotiating. You just expect fair price, said once, money in hand not looked at. Indeed on the handful occasions where it’s not proved true, I must confess I’ve been known to criticize, “But how can you make trouble? You’re from Dinajpur!”

But is it really like that?

And yeah, okay, so Dinajpur’s a bit more northwest than California would be. It’s really more of an Oregon. But hey, who knows anything about Oregon?

Lily More, Dinajpur.

Will a Californian rickshaw wallah take his money without looking at it?

This article is published in The Star magazine, here: Banglafornia.