The Secret of Prionkor's Tea

Prionkor in Saha Kaka's shop, 1999

The constellations rearranged themselves at a faster rate; with us, the four friends, the nocturnal hours managed far less.  A slight altering, from one sitting position to another, the lifting of a leg, the turn of an arm: a marginally larger movement achieved only in those gaps given to napping when we’d fully recline on the long wooden benches of the tea shop, avoiding any random protruding nails, and close our eyes.

After some minutes we’d stir and ask my Saha Kaka’s son Prionkor to re-ignite the fire and re-make the tea.  He’d start over, many times.  There were nights in their entireties that watched these simple rituals, the life of that shack on the corner by the main road at the place called By-the-Big-Bridge.

Saha Kaka or Saha Uncle, yes the name has a failing: being Hindu he should be Saha Dada to follow the usual nomenclature, but ultimately the universe is not easily arranged into neat categories; and in Noakhali things that really aren’t, often are.  His ‘Kaka’ has no less respect to it than his ‘Dada’ would.

My Saha Kaka, thin as a stick, is an immeasurably kind man.  I’ll never forget in his house, which was small even by Hatiyan standards, when he’d lifted the worn-out pillow on the bed in the front room to reveal underneath two tiny, almost newborn, kittens.  ‘I let them sleep there,’ he’d said, ‘so the rats don’t get them.’ 

If that’s where Prionkor picked up his generosity I don’t know, but he never bothered to close the shop, didn’t tell us to go even though it was ridiculous to spend the whole night there.  Usually around ten or eleven he’d start closing some of the windows so that if the police passed on one of their hardly-ever patrols our loitering would remain undetected. 

It made no economic sense: tea was just one taka per cup then and nothing to lose sleep over.  And for us it was nothing to do with the tea: that’s for sure.  Of all the variations of the brown liquid available in By-the-Big-Bridge, Prionkor’s wishy-washy concoction was indisputably the worst.  We never told him.  Sometimes we’d privately laugh to see each other drink it, to witness the grimaces it gave rise to.

It was the adda, or chatting, not less, that would enchant us to stay until the eastern sky grew pale.

Things change: Alauddin took that job in Noakhali and went missing for a few years; Alamgir left in search of a plot of free land on the north side of the river and Prionkor after his marriage moved to India.  Nobody knew where he was for sure; even his family were sketchy on detail.  But we missed him.

It was Saiful who told me that the big bridge at By-the-Big-Bridge has a large, invisible magnet under it with the power to pull people back.  It was the magnet, he said, that returned him at regular intervals from his Chittagong job.  He said it pulled me too, almost annually, from Sydney.  It can be, because Alauddin gave up his mainland jobs; and Alamgir didn’t bother with the north side land in the end.  He left the river’s new creation to others.  It can be, because in Noakhali things that really aren’t, often are.  Perhaps only Prionkor was resistant to that magnet’s powers.

After several years I met his brother in Chittagong and he said he had Prionkor’s phone number.  So I rang.

Like so many Bangladeshi Hindus, Prionkor had settled on the outskirts of Kolkata.  There are whole communities around the City of Joy populated almost exclusively by Bangladeshi migrants.  I once heard it said that one in three West Bengalis had Bangladeshi origins, which, with a population of about ninety million for the state would put around thirty million in the previously-Bangladeshi community.  Even if such figures aren’t accurate, there are many millions who made the westward migration over the decades; just as others came east.

Last year I went to Kolkata for a few days.  It was a bit ad hoc: I was just at Benapole and my mobile phone range about to end.  ‘Today I’ll come,’ I sent as a text message, in Bangla but using western script.  I wasn’t convinced he could decipher it.

I took the train to his station, a bustling neighbourhood of colour and noise, and found one of those quaint phone shops that are the mobile-refill-shop equivalent on the other side.  Prionkor said he was on his way.  I was expected after all.  He sounded excited, or was that me?

He had arrived on his cycle-van, the way he’d found to make a living over there.  Thank goodness he wasn’t making tea!  He was unchanged.  I sat on the back of his van as he pedalled off towards his house; our catching up interrupted by people trying to get a lift.  Modes of transport are more often shared in India, on the basis of that West Bengali ‘why rent a whole one?’ logic that contrasts so pleasantly with the ‘why not rent a whole one?’ on this side of the line.  Prionkor told them today his van was a private service.

We stopped for tea and Indian sweets which to my unrefined palate are the same as those in Dhaka except smaller.  Prionkor said he’d been eight years in India and really liked it.  His children attended school.  His wife was happy.  And the Indian authorities never made problems; if they wished they could take to task that entire town for not really having, technically, the right papers, exactly.  They demonstrate tolerance.

I was impressed: the Australian authorities are in the habit of imprisoning even small children who arrive by boat without the right papers, often for years, though the numbers are a trickle.  The number of Bangladeshis in West Bengal could be greater than the entire population of Australia.  Somehow India makes room; somehow Australia requires a solid amount of human suffering before most of those asylum seekers, ninety-five percent, are allowed to stay. 

Prionkor’s house was one of those informal West Bengali structures, two rooms of brick separated by a thin makeshift wall, and in place of the tin to be found this side it had a neatly tiled roof, the norm on that side.  Despite its small size his place was pleasant.  It’s at the end of a circular road, an enclosed neighbourhood gathered amongst a few farm fields.  We sat in his small garden, featuring a mango tree and views across patches of still-open land.  We remembered things while his wife made lunch.  I confess I finally told him the secret of his tea.

‘In eight years,’ he said, ‘you are the first Hatiyan I’ve seen.’ 

The Indians were doing a census that day; the census collectors moved about, house to house.  Years ago, before the caretaker government’s efforts, a voter list was being made in Bangladesh.  I remember the guy entered the tea shop and for a joke I asked why I wasn’t on the list yet.  Everyone in the tea shop agreed with me.  The list-writer apologised and was on the verge of handing me his pen when his companion came in and set things right.

This time the Indians: I admired the way they skipped over the non-citizen households, politely chatting and moving on without fuss to find countable people.  Those towns must have very small populations if you only count the countables.  And of course the ones that have become countable often didn’t start out that way.




Also countable: one hundred pigeons, twenty glasses of papaya juice, six hideous jumpers, two big wheels and one international border, accidentally crossed.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Secret of Prionkor's Tea

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Bangladesh Waiting

Photo: Star Magazine

Before leaving Sydney we had the kind of bold plans only youth can muster. We wanted to see everything in India, preferably twice, before our three-month university holidays expired. I would be travelling with my old school friend Lachlan, who had proposed the India trip. It was our first foray to the Subcontinent, in the winter of 1995-6 (summer in Australia), and we were young and ambitious.

I remember the farewell at Sydney Airport: my parents and his. His mother was just saying how important it would be for us to look after each other while on the road, when I accidentally dropped my passport on the terminal floor and nearly walked off without it!

There was, of course, too much to see and experience in India to make definitive plans, but ultimately, pre-arrival, we’d settled on a direction: ours would be a clockwise tour from Rajasthan and Delhi to Kolkata, then somewhere South India and back to Delhi.

Bangladesh, embarrassingly, was something of an add-on, although I’m pleased the suggestion was mine. I was studying the map one day in Sydney, dreaming of all we would experience and where we could go, when I noticed just how close to Kolkata the Bangladeshi border was. ‘Now there’s a country I know nothing about,’ I thought, ‘might be a chance to find out.’

Lachlan was a worthwhile travelling companion for he would agree to any reasonable idea. He was also more practical, which did me good. He agreed to Bangladesh dependent upon whether or not we needed a visa and how much it was going to cost. We asked our travel agent who had a ‘where’s that?’ expression on her face. She’d never sent anybody to Bangladesh before, but had enough curiosity of her own to like the idea. She was insistent we tell how it was on our return. After a few days and a little research, she got back to us with the answer: we did need a visa but it was free! As there could be no harm in having a free visa stamped into our passport, of course we did it; we could decide later whether or not to use it, but at that moment both my dreaming and Lachlan’s budgetary concerns were satisfied.

After that I started reading about Bangladesh and my excitement grew.

It’s funny because, even to this day, all these years later, when people still routinely ask why Bangladesh?, the first thought to come to my mind is ‘well, the visa was free so what could I do?’

India had much to teach: there were sounds never before heard, sights unseen, smells un-smelled and a feast of novel tastes to make us feel like Rajasthan kings. More than that, it taught us to let go. Western societies have a small obsession with logic and systems: it has its advantages but feeds the human trait of control – over environment, experiences, everything; and in somewhere as exotic for us as India, it simply couldn’t work. If you’ve ever tried to buy a train ticket there, you’ll understand: it could take hours, lining up in several queues before a special trip to the office building out the back to see if we would be allowed to travel on the VIP quota. And it could happen that, setting out to take a train we would find ourselves on a bus; if we set out to see a historic site, we could easily find ourselves chatting over tea in a side street with the locals instead. India didn’t allow our western desire for micro-management, and when things didn’t go as we’d planned, we learnt with time to shrug and say ‘India will decide’. And decide she did.

Long before we came close to Bangladesh, I would say, I’d changed as a person. Once we’d relaxed in the face of poverty unimaginable to us; once we’d realized that the poverty didn’t mean every single person was out to rob or cheat us, that in fact the level of honesty was staggeringly high; once we’d begun to understand that the world, as bad as it can be, was indeed populated, by and large, with essentially good people, we could properly enjoy the trip. It was a question of faith: use your best judgment but leave a space for the rhythm of the Subcontinent to be your compass.

Now that I’ve thought about it more, I might put it this way: logic itself is cultural. That was the lesson.

I mention the change because it let me open, upon finally reaching Bangladesh, to the soft flurry of a Bengali breeze and the brute force of Bangladeshi hospitality; we were ready for the living poetry of Bangladesh. We had hired bicycles and ridden uncharted to Rajasthan villages, we had discussed culture and life at length with many Indian locals, we’d enjoyed impromptu home visits and unexpected movie shows in small towns. In Varanasi I learnt the theories of kite flying. In Sawai Madhopur we saw tigers and talked Indian recipes with the cook and at a Jain temple in Ranakhpur I turned twenty-one. We wanted to know the Subcontinent, that was the point, and it seemed, by letting go, we might have gained the opportunity to know most of its people personally. That was the surprise.

Bangladesh slipped from our minds for the first two months of our trip, around Rajasthan and roughly following the Ganges towards Bengal. It was really only in Bihar that Bangladesh re-emerged, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

We were on one of those timeless Indian train journeys: ‘timeless’ here meaning ‘duration of uncountable hours’, which is not to say we didn’t enjoy the Indian railways. However, on this occasion, sitting opposite us was a Bangladeshi family, the first Bangladeshis I had ever seen, and their children were running riot through the carriage, jumping on the seats, screaming full-lunged and howling like wolves. Their parents were entirely overwhelmed and underwhelming. Secretly I was scared those hours of noise might dissuade Lachlan from crossing the border in Bengal: I was already attached to the idea. Fortunately Lachlan wasn’t dissuaded and jokingly I thought I’d found a new reason to visit: to research if all Bangladeshi families were like that!

First-hand accounts filtered in when we reached West Bengal. One or two foreigners we met had been to Bangladesh, and their comments were negative: there was more to see in India and we’d be better to spend time in South India. The Indians had a different idea: Bangladesh was beautiful, the people friendly and we would really enjoy our visit; any Indians who had been here wanted to come back one day. And the western-written guidebook we had agreed with the Indians.

I didn’t need to, but I’d bargained with Lachlan, ‘we have the visas, let’s go for five days and if we don’t like it we’ll just come back to India. After five days we’ll go to South India regardless.’

On the day we set off from Sealdah I was sick. The Kolkata hotel we’d found on our student budget was directly above noisy Sudder Street and it had no glass in the windows, which for me meant the end of sleep. We bought the tickets and took our place in the carriage of a Bangaon-bound train.

And there, in the carriage at Sealdah, Bangladesh was waiting.

Mahbub (not his real name) was a Dhakaiya businessman on his way home from a business trip to India. It wasn’t hard for him to guess, from our bloated backpacks, that we were on our way to Bangladesh too. He asked anyway, in English, and our affirmation was received with a broad smile. I don’t remember the specifics of the train ride adda so there can’t have been anything unusual in it. We must have talked about our trip around India and his, we would have asked about Bangladesh: exchange rates for Taka, tips on what to see and where to go, all the usual things. Mahbub promised to help us all the way to Dhaka.

These years later I can say it’s not surprising that this country would send an advance welcome, Bangladeshi hospitality being what it is, but I didn’t know that then.

At Bangaon, Mahbub organised a baby taxi (I’d never heard that term, for in India we’d always called them auto-rickshaws) to take us from the train station to the border. We cleared Indian immigration and customs without fuss and found ourselves at the Bangladesh gate.

And so I took that first fateful step inside your country.

This article is also published by Star Magazine, here: Bangladesh Waiting


This article is the first part of a series of five.  The subsequent related articles are here:

Bangladesh, the Tourist Guide (Part Two)
The Village View (Part Three)
The Song of Chittagong (Part Four)
Perceiving Paradise (Part Five)



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