THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512080066
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT SHELTON TRAVEL, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 279 lines
AFTER GIVING ME directions to a particular stretch of Bangladesh coastline, the young Bengali cheerfully tossed in that the spot had a ``very, very nice beach. . . not too many rats.''
He was only trying to be helpful. And, I suppose, in Bangladesh it was considered a glowing recommendation.
But it wasn't exactly the sort of catchy travel slogan that would make me want to go there. I discreetly crumpled up the directions and thanked the Bengali for his time.
I already knew that Bangladesh can weave an element of cultural shock into even the most mundane of activities. I laughed at myself for thinking the beach would be an exception.
With a population of 120 million - about half that of the United States - crammed into a space a little smaller than Georgia, Bangladesh is so unspeakably poor that it gives true meaning to the term ``Third World.'' One travel book describes it as being ``more like a Fourth- or Fifth-World state.''
At intersections in Dhaka, the capital, vehicles are often surrounded by a deluge of beggars desperately pleading for money as they press grotesquely deformed limbs against the windows.
In this country so impoverished that an airmail stamp costs half the average daily wage, sending letters is largely rendered useless as stamps are frequently steamed off after they're mailed.
Bangladesh being nearly synonymous with images of famine and floods of biblical proportions - a cyclone in 1970 killed 225,000; another in 1991 killed 140,000 - and it's hardly surprising that this land of the Bay of Bengal is not high on most tourists' wish list.
I ventured to Bangladesh earlier this year because I'd never been there before, and I was curious to see what the country was like.
What I found in this off-the-beaten-path land was well worth the journey.
Despite the Third World inconveniences, recurrent disasters and things like rats on the beach, Bangladesh possesses an almost intoxicating capacity to fascinate.
It is the daily life of the country and its teeming, bustling humanity that make it such a surprisingly intriguing destination.
Scenes seemingly from a thousand years ago virtually inhabit the countryside.
Off a rural road, suspended like a mirage on the horizon between a brown, desiccated field and a vibrant blue sky, Muslim women wearing flowing cotton saris separate wheat from chaff by tossing the grain into a flickering airborne mosaic that drifts down on wide wicker mats.
Farther along the road, oxen walk a sunken circle of compacted dirt around a dust shrouded well as they rhythmically draw up sloshing buckets on a squeaking wooden waterwheel, used to irrigate crops.
A few miles on, sinewy armed laborers in a factory consisting of little more than a smoky kiln perched in the middle of a field carry heavy hods of red bricks on their head and stack them on waiting donkey-drawn carts.
One day such antiquated sights will vanish from the world altogether. For now, they're alive in Bangladesh.
Travel in Bangladesh, though by no means easy, is not too difficult as long as you're flexible about your schedule.
While the country offers a fairly extensive road network, most of the byways are too narrow for the number of overloaded vehicles rambling over their course. Traffic snarls, even in rural areas, are not unusual.
Aside from the continual delays presented by the poor roads and many rivers of the country, you're also sure to be slowed by such unexpected scenes as huge crowds attempting to right an overturned truck, or villagers having a frenzied discussion in the middle of the road to determine who ran over someone's goat.
But delays often present opportunities to discover.
As a hired Bengali driver and I looked on in expressionless wonderment at the ruckus raised over a collision between a water buffalo and a blue pickup truck, I noticed a faint metallic pinging in the distance.
After leaving our jeep and sidestepping the anarchic throng surrounding the stiffening buffalo carcass, we walked a half kilometer over a hill toward the sounds.
There, working in the muggy haze of a stone quarry resembling a scene straight out of a Cecil B. De Mille movie, were perhaps a thousand men, women and children, some as young as 5 or 6, breaking large rocks into gravel with hammers.
Using the driver as an interpreter, I talked with the quarry supervisor, a diminutive, barefooted Bengali wearing a dirty red T-shirt and baggy corduroys. Despite an initially dour countenance, he gradually became willing to talk about life in his rocky realm.
Shaking a cigarette out of a pack and lighting-up, the supervisor told us that the gravel produced in the quarry was for road construction.
Wages for the grown-ups were the equivalent of 50 cents a day, with workdays running from 10 to 12 hours, depending on how hot the weather was. Children were paid according to their output and ability.
While the supervisor, the driver and I walked around the vast open quarry, the stonebreakers continued their monotonous tasks.
Occasionally, a few of the younger laborers would look up and smile. The older ones, their eyes bloodshot with age, all maintained a trancelike, thousand-yard stare through the boredom and grittiness as we walked by.
At the edge of the quarry, I came upon a girl of maybe 6 years of age. As she steadied a cantaloupe-sized stone with her heels for the strike, I noticed that her chin had several stitches, the recent result of making too much of a backwing with her hammer.
As she split the rock, I thought of how poverty had robbed so many of the children of Bangladesh of their childhood. Looking back at the glassy-eyed elderly workers, I also thought of how easily this often brutal country can deprive Bengalis of their very lives.
For the people in the quarry, breaking stone was the only way they had to keep the roosting prospect of starvation at bay. For others, it might be working long hours in the sweatshops of a textile mill or scavenging for bits of food in open dumps.
Most seemed to have their own way of staying ahead of hunger. Once, after finishing a meal in a cafe, I watched two wiry looking kids quickly scamper in off the street to snatch away the uneaten leftovers from my vacant table.
With much of the population of Bangladesh leading an equally precarious existence, the Bengalis have become a people quite used to extreme hardship. It has been so since long before the country's creation.
Born in 1972, Bangladesh (``land of the Bangla or Bengali speakers'') is a nation conceived out of extreme violence. The country's green flag with a red circle in the middle symbolizes a bloody past.
The seeds of Bengali conflict were planted by the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in August of 1947.
Seeing no other way to remedy the unending struggles between the Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent, the British divided the vast lands there into India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan.
Although the partition, overseen by the British viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten, had largely separated the Hindu and Muslim factions into their own lands, it virtually ignored a wide-ranging host of social and political realities that would ultimately continue the instability in the region.
One of the most glaring failures of the arrangement was that East and West Pakistan were looked upon as being one entity - one to be administered from West Pakistan.
Since the Muslims of West Pakistan were broken up into several language groups, the most dominant of which was Urdu, and the people of East Pakistan spoke Bengali, serious conflicts were sure to arise. Further fuel was thrown on the smoldering tensions by the marked social differences between the two Muslim sides of the subcontinent.
In the early 1950s, the government of West Pakistan declared that Urdu would be the national language. This resulted in a Bangali language movement in East Pakistan that gradually transformed into a Bengali nationalist party.
Years of intermittent fighting and riots followed. Finally in 1971, the Awami Party of East Pakistan won a majority of seats in the National Assembly of all Pakistan. Rather than accept the startling returns, the president of Pakistan simply refused to open the assembly.
The Bengalis of East Pakistan responded with strikes and rioting in the spring of 1971. Pakistani troops trying to suppress the Bengali automony movement reacted by burning hundreds of villages throughout the country and indiscriminately shooting thousands of Bengali citizens.
This ghastly state of affairs continued through December 1971 when ongoing border tensions between Indian and Pakistan erupted into open warfare. Between the combined forces of the Indian army and the Bengali freedom fighters, the Pakistanis lasted only two weeks.
After the surrender of the Pakistani forces, the nation of Bangladesh was formally recognized by most countries the following spring.
In the years since 1972, Bangladesh has withstood a series of famines, most notably in 1973-74, which have kept the economy continually off balance.
Today nearly 100 international aid organizations operate in the country. Outside assistance accounts for three-quarters of the country's annual revenue.
In this land confronted by military coups, government corruption, widespread disease and lethal hailstorms, nothing affects the people more than the cyclones and resulting floods, which hit nearly every year. In 1970 more than 200,000 people died in the aftermath of a single storm.
Considering the way fingers of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the two major rivers of the subcontinent, weave through Bangladash, you can see how the floods can be so devastating.
The country is now so sparcely forested that I would often see women patiently arranging cakes of cow dung and straw to dry in the sun. Later the dried patties would be served as cooking fuel.
With torrential rains this summer combining with snowmelt flowing from the Himalayas, the worst flooding since 1988 destroyed 70,000 homes and ruined over a half million acres of crops.
A Reuters report stated that, ``Families, cattle, and even snakes shared the same roof in their desperate need for shelter.''
Unable to stem the waters, Bangladesh has no choice other than to simply endure.
While the sinuous waterways of Bangladesh can be a curse, they are also a blessing, as so much of Bengali life and commerce is centered on and around them.
After hiring an old, stubble-faced boatman to take me a short way up the Brahmaputra River, I saw vessels of nearly every description loaded from stem to stern with anything from bleating goats to bales of jute to truck tires.
Whether done by engine or hand power, trafficking on the rivers is the easiest way to get goods from here to there in Bangladesh.
As a slight breeze stirred small ripples across the muddy sweep of the river's surface, I wiped the afternoon sweat from my forehead and motioned for the waterman to let me off on the shoreline.
Knowing that the charge for the three-hour river journey would be embarrassingly cheap, I paid the boatman 200 takas (about $6). He smiled broadly, deepening the wrinkles sprayed across his face, and expressed his obvious approval of the rate in Bengali.
Then, folded the money in his callused hands, he bowed slightly and softly said, ``Asalaam Allyikhum,'' - (``Peace be unto you'').
As I left the boat and walked beside the river, taking photographs and being followed by a contingent of about 20 curious Bengali youngsters, I saw a beauty and peacefulness in the everyday life carried on beside the water.
Bengalis bathed in the river, washed clothes in it, cooked along its banks, frolicked in it, and in their flimsy ramshackle dwellings often built on stilts, lived along its shores.
Working with a sheen of sweat on his back, a father wearing an Islamic skullcap repaired a wooden-hulled boat in the harsh sun.
Nearby, a mother marshalled giggling, naked children into a home after a cooling swim while other family members shared a meal in the shade of a cloth tarp.
In this most crowded country in the world, the people here had truly learned to simply enjoy the moment, obviously taught through their apocalyptic experiences the fragility of their lives.
In contrast to traveling in neighboring India, where touts and hustlers angling for a sale can drive you to distraction, the people along the river not used to seeing tourists were content to carry on with their routines.
After making a big hit by letting the 20 or so children look through my telephoto lens, I made my way several miles farther down the shoreline to a bazaar.
I looked on as turbaned merchants furiously bargained with their customers over mottle swaths of fiery red, brilliant orange and saffron colored muslins and silks.
Other merchants, content to take a more aloof marketing approach, fanned themselves, as they lounged above the stalls in hammocks.
In a country as poor as Bangladesh, the offerings in the bazaar were of a more basic than manufactured nature.
Finding your way around was easy, as the location of desire items could quickly be found through the senses.
The buzzing of flies swarming about in the balmy air announced that you were nearing the fish section on one row, while on another a wafting sweet smell let you know where delicate flower garlands were to be had.
Amid the cacophonous chatter of the crowds, the bazaar appeared to be as much a place to socialize as to buy goods.
With no one paying much mind to the small lizards skittering about underfoot, clusters of strolling Bengalis carried on conversations as they looked over stalls exhibiting colorful but modest piles of papayas, mangoes, jackfruit, pineapple, watermelon and bananas.
One stall featuring coconuts with an end sliced off and a straw placed into the milky center provided me with a welcome refreshment.
Nearing the edge of the bazaar, I saw that the tents were now bathed in the soft pink luminescence of a setting sun. With coconut in hand, I hailed a pedicab to take me back to my hotel.
As the shadowed silhouettes of people and buildings grew taller with the warning light, the driver pedaled and I rode on the rear seat of the large tri-cycle through the narrow back streets of Dhaka.
Dogs barked as merchants swept the dimly lit thresholds of their stores. In the distance, a call to evening prayers faintly echoed from a minaret.
Another long, colorful, fascinating day in this far-off land was coming to a close, as was my visit.
During my time there Bangladesh had lived up to its almost metaphorical reputation for poverty and hardship.
Amid its many difficulties it had also revealed another side though; that of the Bengali people, always quick with a smile, living their lives as best they could under often desperate circumstances.
Bumping along in the pedicab, it occurred to me that while I would oddly miss this strange land, I was looking quite forward to getting back home.
I realized that in my short time there, Bangladesh had given me an even deeper thankfulness and appreciation for my own country.
Aside from all the unforgettable sights I had seen during my visit, that alone made the trip worthwhile. MEMO: Scott Shelton, a Portsmouth native, deals in real estate in the
Washington, D.C., area until another exotic destination attracts him. He
has previously written about and photographed Vietnam, Myanmar (formerly
Burma), Patagonia and the trans-Siberia train.
ILLUSTRATION: COLOR PHOTOS BY SCOTT SHELTON
Top: A Bengali woman wears a traditional flowing cotton sari.
Above: Bengali children as young as 5 and 6 in a quarry break large
rocks into gravel with hammers for road construction.
Above right: Trafficking on the river is the easiest way to get
goods from here to there in Bangladesh.
Photos
SCOTT SHELTON
A Bengali woman makes cow dung and straw cakes for cooking fuel.
The red and green flag of Bangladesh flies above a small cargo boat.
The red circle in the center symbolizes the country's bloody past.
by CNB