Bangladesh & India
Dateline: Dhaka
Jack (February-March 2001)
Mike & I rendezvoused in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. I arrived early and stayed with friends from my Peace Corps, Togo days. Catherine Nash was in my training group in Togo and was later, as fate would have it, at UMass with me. That's where she met her husband Reid. She now works of the U.N.'s World Food Program in Bangladesh while Reid does appropriate technology ceramics work at a materials research center there. They were not able to take any time off during our visit, so we basically connected at the beginning and end of our sojourn. We also managed to see one of my best friends from Shanghai, Shameem, who was a Bangladeshi graduate student in Chemical Engineering at our East China university. We traveled together quite a bit during the first part of my summer there, to Guillin and to Yunnan Province, near Tibet overland. He very much enjoyed meeting Mike as well as Catherine & Reid and will likely be seeing more of Reid because of their overlapping work.
Mike & I spent the first portion of our 'tour' in the southwest of the country, near the Sunderbans National Park, where the Royal Bengal Tigers reside. After flying to Jessore (across the border from Calcutta), we bussed to Khulna, third largest city, from where we took a two day river steamer, eastward and northward partly on the Ganges, back towards Dhaka. Our ship, oddly named the ""Ostrich," was a rig right out of Humphrey Bogart's African Queen, similarly dating back to the first quarter of the last century. Bangladesh is practically the same size as Wisconsin, but because of the monsoon season, has up to one-third of its land under water during certain seasons. So river steamer is definitely the best way to see the low-lying agrarian countryside. It was an incredible journey with a number of seemingly other-worldly ports of call, some stops in genuine towns but others in equally rural villages. It presented a dizzying cross section of Bangladeshi society, though mostly impoverished, to be sure, especially in comparison to our own country's position at the top of the economic food chain.
Once we reached small Chaudpur, we disembarked, to the consternation of no small number of passengers on board. Since a national labor strike was called for in the capital that day, we concluded it inauspicious to take the Ostrich for another 10-12 hours back, only to find no running trains. In Chaudpur, which turns out to be Shameem's mother's home region, we visited a local public primary school. Even in comparison with African schools I have known, it was an eye-opening experience. Aside from the school building itself, they have precious few resources to actually educate their students. I can only begin to imagine how tough it is for the kids themselves when monsoon season temps and humidity soar and drafts are hard to come by in cramped structures like that.
From Chaudpur we took a train south to Chittagong, the second largest city. To put things in perspective, those that can afford it in Chittagong, would spend their holidays in Calcutta. Chittagong is a place where people who, largely out of provincial thinking and ignorance, argue the world has no population problem, should be required to visit as a homework assignment. We spent an evening and part of the next morning, enough to see that there are enough people who have fallen through the cracks to challenge the social fabric of the world's richest nations, let alone the world's poorest. I'm still haunted by the vision of a feebly thin woman extending a coin-spotted bowl, her daughter in tattered rags on one side of her, and her own shrunken mother on her other side.
From Chittagong we took a bus up into the Chittagong Hill Tracts of eastern Bangladesh, not far from the borders with both eastern India and Burma. This is where Bangladesh's many non-Bengali ethnic groups reside. 40% of their land was flooded in the 60s, however, with the introduction of an American-built dam. This forced 100,000 of them to seek refuge in India's Assam state. From Rangamatti, Mike & I took a fishing boat out to the island of Peda Ting-Ting and a bungalow operation started by a retired Army commander of the local ethnic group, the Chaikma. Before sunset, they arranged for us to visit a traditional Chaikma village at the north end of the lake. In some respects, these indigenous people have as many ties to the Vietnamese and their life styles as they do to the Bengalis. Thatch huts are their normal living abodes. We were struck by the huge percentage of the village that were children. I happened to have a sack full of chewing gum with me, but would have had to do a loaves & fishes number to have covered everyone. As the sun began to sink below the horizon, it was quite a sight to see over a dozen gum-chewing Chaikma children waving goodbye as our boat departed for Peda Ting-Ting, across a lake dotted with the lanterns of small-scale fishermen trying to catch their last fish for the day, or first for the night.
From Dhaka we flew to Bombay by way of Calcutta, with just enough time to refresh our memories of what chaos Calcutta traffic is as we made a quick tour of the university and a well-known coffee shop just outside its gates, with a large painting of Bengali Writer and Nobel prize winner for literature, Tagore, staring down on all its patrons.
Our visit to Bombay was in many respects a return to the modern world, despite the fact that Bombay is a paradoxical mix of rich and poor, abjectly poor. The highlights of our week there were, curiously enough, quite possibly the time we spent outside of the town, seeing the ancient Hindu carvings in the caves of Elephanta Island out in the large port/bay area, taking a train 2 hours east to Nerul and then a toy train up to the old British hill station of Matherans where we stayed at a converted British summer home, and the Karla Caves (largest in India), with another ancient Hindu temple well-preserved within. These last two brought us back memories from E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India," though the temperatures were not hardly as intolerable as they were then or in that season of the year, nor did we hallucinate upon reaching the higher altitude caves! We did witness a killer post sunset glow, however, on the horizon looking back in the direction of Bombay and the Indian Ocean.
Before Mike & I parted ways, he back to Bangkok, and I to Singapore, we spent an evening with the mother of one of my Indian-born friends, Raj, now based in St. Paul. I call his mother "Auntie" Paramvesvaran. We first met when Raj's parents were visiting him here in St. Paul last fall. She sadly lost her husband to jauntice shortly after their return home. As a result, she now lives in their flat with one of Raj's cousins and a university student renter. We spend a pleasant evening with the three of them. "Auntie" is a chutney and dos queen and prepared some incredible chutney's for dinner. In return, I brought back an extra bag of kitchen ware and dresses for Raj's new Minnesotan wife, Valerie. Yes, we likely got the better end of the deal. (We joked that she's surely going to become a millionaire here in the States upon opening a chain of "Chutney Palaces". ;--) Following an after-midnight commuter train ride back to Bombay's "Victoria Terminus," we spent our last day seeing the odd shop and museum in our Colaba district, near India's famous "Gateway," then saw an Indian-made blockbuster movie, and rounded out the evening with a trip to locally famous Chowpatty Beach. Thus ended Mike & Jack's last big South Asian hurrah.