The Modern Jajabor

The road chooses the jajabor; the jajabor chooses not the road.

A meeting of jajabors while on the road is a surprisingly uncommon event.  Many days may pass without hint of another, and in settled periods the absence of even evidence leads one to wonder if others at all exist.  Yet there are the travel websites, with postings like ‘I left home three years ago on a three-month trip.  I’m never going back.’  The jajabor’s footprints may be light but they step, nonetheless.

When one jajabor does meet another, in my experience it’s a happy event, a meeting without formality and no more constraint to it than the hopping about of a sparrow on a windowsill.  There’s calmness in not needing to explain or greatly elaborate; to without effort pursue simple talk of adventure, with travel tales consumed as readily as rice.  Jajabors don’t ask the questions settled people do.  They don’t need to.

Of course it’s jajabors of the modern variety of which I write, the ones who use passports and planes; but I should explain first about using the Bangla word, jajabor, which is something similar to the English word, nomad.  It came about by accident.

In Dhaka people speak of the Bedey.  I’m not sure if it’s the Bedey who visit Hatiya Island, but in the winter months the nomads come, setting up their n-shaped tents in thatch and plastic sheeting on any patch of empty land. 

I’ve heard the Hatiyalas say the ones who live on boats can drink brackish, delta water; that they barely set foot on land.  I’m not sure how much is true.  Like nomads or semi-nomads in many countries they have a reputation for trickery and fortune telling.  It may well be undeserved.  Still, as in other parts of the country, when the nomads visit Hatiya they camp wherever they find ground and are for the most part left undisturbed.

Yet it wasn’t the presence of the traditional nomads in Hatiya that led me to learn the word surprisingly early.  I don’t suppose ‘jajabor’ is usually considered basic Bangla.  It was because of the Assamese singer Bhupen Hazarika, who sings that famous Bangla tune Ami Ek Jajabor, I am a nomad.  Unlike in the lyrics I didn’t reach the Mississippi, but I did like the idea of the song.

Learning about his thoughts is a way to understand our own.

Modern jajabors face shared problems and chief among them is explaining to non-travellers about travel.  People ask, why travel or why travel there?  The reasons are many and to account for them properly would require a conversation of some length.  It’s not always called for, especially as the result is likely to be disappointing.  Non-travellers usually have other priorities and a differing world view.  They don’t understand.

For example, one jajabor I know, an Italian Mexican-born one currently ‘pausing’ in Bulgaria, said that when asked why he lives in Bulgaria he just says the girls are pretty.  The Bulgarians are content with that and it circumvents the need to elaborate.  A more sophisticated reason might be that since he was young he was fascinated with Eastern Europe and one thing led to another.

It’s funny: I taught him the word ‘jajabor’ and he discovered its opposite, the term for people who prefer a life in one place.  He called them: ‘sedentarians.’

When it comes to explanations, I have similar troubles.  When Australians asked why I was moving to Ukraine some years ago, I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to live in a country that begins with a ‘U’.’  It started people listing: Uruguay, Uganda, Uzbekistan… it was so much easier, it didn’t take hours.

In Hatiya, when I used to visit almost annually from Sydney, the circumstances were even more difficult when a Hatiyala would ask, very occasionally, why.  My Bangla was still very basic and more than that, I simply did not know how to speak of the inspiration of travel.  I could not explain how much there is to learn from other cultures or properly clarify how much enjoyment I took from their company, that in even the basic elements of their daily lives, which they take for granted, I found new wisdom and, often, hope.  How could I say that I wanted to understand their life experiences and way of thinking in order to better comprehend mine?  What is universally human, what is cultural and what is the individual?  I would’ve liked to have explained such ponderings, but I had no ability.

So instead I simply pointed to the tents by the road and said, ‘Ami ek jajabor’.  The answer made Hatiyalas laugh.  It was a simple statement, but it made me start to wonder…

The last modern jajabor I met was probably that British-born one in Kolkata a few years ago.  His name was something plain like Ken or Mike and we met in the queue at the Bangladeshi Consulate while organising visas.  He also didn’t have a pen.  Besides that there was little about him to suggest he was a jajabor.  It was when we started talking that I could imagine it.

The jajabor consumes travel stories like rice.

The first sign was that his travel plans sounded complicated and evolving.  He was down from Korea, had been to Bangladesh, was in India on a detour due to a wedding invitation that had surfaced and wished to return to Bangladesh en route back to Korea.  He taught English, he said, which is not atypical for a jajabor.  I started to consider… maybe, yes maybe…

And the sedentarians wonder what the jajabor is searching for; and it makes the jajabor laugh.

Perhaps because I know Kolkata I did something unusual for a jajabor, I asked Ken or Mike if he wanted to go for a meal when our visa work was done.  I write unusual because jajabors rarely team up.  They follow their own journeys and despite having much in common, say goodbye as easily as hello.

So we chatted more, somewhere up on Park Street. I heard about his circles in the sand, his plan to see South America for at least a year before teaching again and then setting out for African wanderings.  He never wanted to return to the U.K .Naturally I spoke of Bangladesh and the pull of the Meghna River; and he said he had liked Bangladesh. 

Even in the distant sunset the jajabor can find himself

But what I remember most fondly about Ken, or Mike, is when I asked what he would do when all the travelling was done.  I wanted to see if his answer was the same as mine. 

‘I guess I’ll decide which country I like the best,’ he said, ‘and I’ll stay there.’

‘You’re lucky,’ he continued, ‘You’ve found yours.’

More recently I sat in a party in Dhaka, with shondesh and delicious home cooked savoury items on a plate and I confessed to a Bangladeshi who lives in Sydney that I’m actually a bit of a jajabor.  His eyes lit up at the idea and he said eagerly, ‘Well, I moved to Sydney so perhaps I’m a jajabor too?’  And maybe it’s true.  It can be that the scope of jajabor-minded public is far broader than I was used to thinking.  When I consider it, in many Bangladeshis there are certain signs: curiosity, adaptability, a sense of humour and love for going places, even if that means not further than visiting relatives in another district, as far as opportunity allows.

Yet this jajabor may have progressed to being an ex-jajabor.  His jajabor life may be done.  Or could it simply be that from around-the-world-and-back-again he found himself perfectly content within the most jajabor-minded majority culture of all?

In many Bangladeshis are signs: curiosity, adaptability, a love of going places...

Weighing up the options

Which road chooses you?

A. the mountain road, to Bolivia?

B. the camino del sur, to Argentina, Chile & Uruguay?

C. the delta road, to Bangladesh?

D. the spiritual road, to India?

E. none of the above.










This article is also published in the Star, here: The Modern Jajabor

Et Fjell Er Nødvendig

Hatiyar te butikk

Unnskyldninger for feilene i den norske ... jeg gjorde som jeg kan!

er vakker. Morgenen tilhører til kingfisherer som, i strålende blå jakker, stuper å fange fisk fra kanalene; den dagen er for store øgler som rasler i buskene og mungoer som løper med hastverk over et landlig spor. Ettermiddagen er eierskapet av bøfler som velter seg halvt nedsenket i en dam, på frivakt fra plogen, og natten er domenet til jinns og bhuts og deres selskap, hyl av rever og smertelig gråter av villkatter.

Det er i de lange kveldene som ikke var så lenge siden opplyst av parafin lampe, i te butikkene, blant landsbyens menn sosialt samvær, der selv usannsynlig planlegger lyd grav. Situ er å klandre for min gramer bari eller landsby hus prøvelse, for ikke bare gjorde han donere sin familie og sitt nabolag å innrede mitt liv med gjestfrihet så rikelig som monsunregnet, men fordi han også har en reisende-sjel.

På kveldene, mellom chatter over prisen på grønnsaker, nyheten om en forestående ekteskap eller en nylig død, ville vi lage reiseplaner for underholdning, oversatt til å inkludere de andre landsbyboerne. Stort sett var de overdrevet: templer i Thailand, til Nord-Norge for å se på midnattssolen, eller den australske villmarka med sine endeløse strekninger av himmel. En gang han oppført et budsjett for en tur til Ukraina via Moskva. Jeg fortsatt le om tallene: $ 7.97 for en togbillett for å reise tretten eller noe timer, $ 5.61 for et hotellrom ... ja, det er overdrevet og jeg husker ikke nøyaktig, men prisene alle sammen var litt på den lave siden.

Du kan alltid fortelle en reisende. Det er ikke med antall stempler i passet sitt, men i deres øyne. Bare snakk om reisen og en reisendes øyne skal stå opp i påvente av umiddelbar avgang. Øynene mine har alltid forrådt meg på den måten og det gjorde hans også. Det var bare gjennom tilfeldigheten av våre ulike fødestedene at jeg hadde fått den luksus av å besøke mange land, mens Situ ikke hadde utforsket utover Bangladesh.

Jeg pleide å ta med når jeg kunne, reise bøker som listet over alle verdens land, de grunnleggende fakta og noen bilder. Han pleide å ringe meg i Sydney og si, “Jeg har nettopp lest om Malawi”.  Hans kone pleide å klage på at han ikke ville snu parafin lampen ned til svært sent fra drømme seg rundt i verden gjennom bøkene, og innen et år, fra perm til perm bøkene ville bli slitt etter å ha blitt lest så grundig. Det er all atferd som kan forventes fra en reisende.

Som det er mellom venner, er spottet forventet atferd mellom oss. Jeg pleide å liste de landene jeg hadde sett, telle dem i subkontinental måte ved hjelp av skrukker i fingrene, deretter begynne å liste landsbyene rundt omkring som var Situ sine reiser liste. Og jeg pleide å si: “du trenger å se et fjell. Du kan ikke ha et vellykket liv uten minst ett fjell i det.”

“Jeg har vært i Bandarban,” han alltid svarte.

“Hvis de er fjell, blir da hvorfor det kalles ‘Hill Tracts’ på engelsk? Nei, trenger du et stort ekte fjell, med klipper og snø.”

Med fleiper jeg kom til å vite at jeg ville ta ham et sted, at jeg skulle finne ham et fjell. Slike ting er viktig.

Selvfølgelig ville jeg ha nytte også, siden en første tur til et utenlandsk sted er en utrolig opplevelse som aldri kan gjentas, den neste beste ville være å vitne en annen reisendes første tur til utenlands.

Det skjedde i 2004. Det var ingen internasjonal telefonlinje til Hatiya i disse dager, så Situ brukte til å ta slitsomme turen over elva, tre timer, hvor han måtte overnatte, bare for å få noen minutter på telefonen til Sydney. Jeg hadde planer for den vanlige besøk til Hatiya, det som skjed nesten hvert år. Men den gangen sa jeg, “vi ses i Kolkata.” Man kan ikke se i gjennom telefonlinjer, men jeg visste hvordan Situs øynene så ut da han hørte det.

Forresten Situ hadde alltid sagt at han ikke ønsket India, fordi “det er den samme som Bangladesh.” Men selvfølgelig er der ikke to land som er det samme, selv om de kan være grener av samme tre. India var lett overkommelig på en Sydney lønn og for ham visum ikke ville være mye oppstyr. Jeg visste at han ville nyte det. Jeg hadde alltid.

I hvert fall han organiserte pass og visum, det er noen historier i det men beste at han skulle fortelle det. I hvert fall han tok seg til Benapole, Indias grensen, med buss, og han nesten fanger lungebetennelse på sin første aircondition busstur, og deretter krysset han grensen alene.

Imens jeg ringte Kolkata, hvor heldigvis har jeg en venn også, Jayanta. Han har en særegen, veldig tørr humor, og han hadde nettopp blitt gift. Jeg var ennå å møte sin kone.

“Så din kone,” Jeg spurte, “er hun hyggelig?”

“Når du kommer til Kolkata,” sa han, “du kan observere og bestemme det selv.”

Jeg spurte om det ville være noe problem hvis jeg hadde en kamerat denne gangen, fra Bangladesh.

“Hindu eller muslim?” spurte han.

“Muslim”.

“Er han et godt menneske?”

Jeg sa at han var og Jayanta besluttet å stole på mine ord.

Slik var spenningen som magen min kom ikke ned til å lande på Dum Dum flyplassen sammen med flyet: Situ bør være der med noe hell. Jayanta bør være der med noe hell. Jeg møtte Situ først. Han hadde ventet hele dagen, nysing fra bussturen, og han hadde kjøpte påfølgende tre-timers billetter for å vente inne i terminalbygningen. Men han ventet og var nysing i India! Jayanta hadde brakt en venn med en ekstra motorsykkel, så det var ingen problemer med å dra til huset sitt hvor vi bodde et par dager, hvor de to ble kjent med hverandre.

Jayantas kone var deilig, jeg bestemte meg.

Det var mange nye opplevelser for Situ på hans reise: første masala dosa, et Sør Indiske rett, første iste og iskaffe, nå alt lett tilgjengelig i Dhaka.

Han hadde sett med forferdelse den historiske moské nær Pandua, West Bengal. Den ble delvis bygget fra ødelagte hinduistiske templer og du kan se ansiktene til hinduistiske guddommer i deler av murverket. Mer inspirerende var sameksistensen av hinduistiske hakekors som dekorert Mehraben, det sentrale punktet i moskeen. Situ sa i Bangladesh han hadde blitt undervist ankomsten av Islam i subkontinentet hadde vært fredelig. Pandua sier at det var ikke helt slik.

Det var varmt den dagen vi gikk for å finne hans fjellet, det var kokende. Med svetten velter ned ansiktene våre som en liten foss, ved Siliguri jeepen stativet og satte kursen for Darjeeling opp i fjell, foreslo jeg at vi trengte å ta ull genserer ut av ryggsekken min: Jeg hadde tatt to, siden Bangladesh vintrene er ikke fullt så kaldt som i Sydney og Situ ville trenge i de minst Sydney-styrke klær for hva som ville være utvilsomt den kaldeste dagen i livet hans. Han trodde jeg var gal, i varmen. Det var godt over tretti grader, og jeg ønsket en ull genser!

Jeg lager små vitser om jeep tur: Situ var så redd, mens vi rundet noen av de vertikale precipes langs veien, at han holdt på siden av jeepen så intenst at lagene av huden på hendene kom av. Sannheten var at, selv på min andre gang, jeg var litt nervøs også.

I Darjeeling, Situ brent seg mens han tok sin første varm dusj. Det er logisk egentlig, hva han mente, at det varme vannet fra springen ville komme ut på et sett, behagelig temperatur, en enklere system enn å måtte regulere den med kaldt som vi faktisk gjør. Det kunne har vært sånn. I Darjeeling så vi på i ærefrykt mens skyene fra under oss løftet i løpet av morgenen og fortsatte opp over oss mens vi spiste frokost, og i Darjeeling så vi den hvite horisonten frisyren av Kanchenjunga fjell, et navn Situ snart begynte å bruke til å kritisere min Sydney-størrelse buk.

Himalaya er hvor Hatiya kommer fra, ved Ganges, av Brahmaputra. Himalaya er Hatiyar mor.

Tilbake i tebutikker noen uker senere, hørte folk i undring som Situ beskrevet dem om “byen over skyene”.  Så han fikk sitt fjell på slutten.

Darjeeling by

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Metro Dreaming

Now that it’s apparent that CNG drivers were only using the meter as a special tribute to the Cricket World Cup and Dhaka’s back to her usual self, it’s hardly surprising when inching through the jams that one’s thoughts are sometimes given over to the metro dreaming.  With the regularity of newspaper announcements on the subject I can’t be the only one.  But what sort of metro will it be?

The number and width of the rails, the carriage and platform dimensions, above ground, below ground: let the engineers tackle such trivialities.  More important are the cultural dimensions, for in any city the nature of the mass transit system is a window into the community’s psyche.  A metro system is far more than transport.  It’s a cultural statement.

In Switzerland trains have a habit of leaving early while Tokyo is renowned for employing ‘pushers’ whose job is to shove more people into each carriage before the doors close; and in Stockholm’s tunnelbana the stations are so imaginatively decorated they’ve become a tourist attraction.  It’s said to be the longest art gallery in the world; the Moscow Metro disputes this. 

Will Dhaka’s version resemble Sydney’s trains where businesspeople sit in neat rows ignoring each other or incline towards Kolkata’s trains where groups of commuters pass uncomfortable hours by playing cards, chatting and sometimes thumping out a drum beat on their books or briefcases while singing aloud to entertain the whole carriage?  It’s not only passengers who can sing.  There was one occasion, highly unusual, when a conductor in Sydney decided rather than simply listing the names of the coming stations over the PA system he’d sing them operatically.  It got everybody smiling; though being Sydney there’s every chance he got in trouble for not being sufficiently mechanical.  Could singing conductors work in Dhaka, perhaps with tabla and harmonium?  How about rhyming station names to promote poetry?

In the Ukrainian capital Kyiv there’s the history of the Cold War in the metro, with the Soviet-constructed stations built to double as bomb shelters in the case of nuclear attack.  The escalators are long, steep and rapid; the platforms far enough under the earth to wonder if it shouldn’t be getting a little hotter down there.  One of the deepest stations in the world is in Kyiv, Arsenalna at 105.5 metres below ground.  For a cheap set fare for which a blue plastic token is purchased, any length of journey is allowed.  Now that’s equality!

In Ukraine commuters were chivalrous.  For gentlemen to stand up for ladies was expected behaviour and any sitting male risked being publicly rebuked if they made a woman stand.  A chauvinistic practice to be sure, and I made that point on the bus with my friend Tanya, when I’d stand at the stairs as we got out and extend my hand for her to help me down, just to show it could be done the other way around.  But in actuality it was quite impressive, chauvinistic or not.

On the other hand, one of my colleagues in Kyiv, Valery, complained that on the metro people played music so loudly he couldn’t concentrate on his reading.  I thought he was being oversensitive, imagining a Sydney scenario with someone listening to their headset at high volume such that the drum beat resounded slightly in the adjacent seats.  But no, he meant a guy with a ghetto blaster, no headphones, pumping Russian rap at a deafening level, so I discovered.  In general Ukrainians had a high level of noise tolerance; and in Dhaka too I can’t imagine many music-related complaints.  People might tend to enjoy it.

Dhaka possibly doesn’t need the peak hour Kolkata train scenario: those passengers hanging out the door, hanging onto other passengers, one of whom in the inevitable chain has an actual grip on the train itself, though already here the trains feature the air-conditioned top class passengers perched on the roof.  Sydney trains meanwhile document changes in national dietary habits over the decades, in the form of the three-person seats which have somehow reduced over time to fit approximately 2.5. 

The underground metro of Kolkata is a little like Stockholm’s, a tourist attraction, be it for a very different reason.  There’s a really interesting human phenomenon which occurs at the terminus stations.  I saw it several times, what could be called the Dum Dum Phenomenon.  Along the platform at the precise points where the doors of the carriage of the new, empty train are due, people cluster like grapes on an otherwise empty platform.  For the most part they stand politely and quietly.  The train arrives.  At the split second the electric doors open the businessmen commuters transform into something of a rugby scrum, pushing and tiger-wrestling into the carriage in a seat-finding free-for-all.  The best part comes at most fifteen seconds later when the participants are sitting upright and sedate, unfolding newspapers and reading glasses, the absolute model of gentility.  There’s a kind of instantaneous collective amnesia about it: the just completed seat-scramble simply did not happen and is visible only vaguely in the resigned despair on the faces of the businessmen who didn’t push quite hard enough and have to stand. 

The Dum Dum Phenomenon may be a comment on colonialism: the scramble for resources followed by the victor suddenly behaving like an aristocrat.  I suppose it’s better to be orderly but those brief metro scrums are mildly hilarious so perhaps in Dhaka something could be organised irregularly, like a Scrum-Sunday tradition when train boarding decorum is outlawed, to keep things a little boisterous and fun.

In Kolkata they try to keep it clean, the metro, be it a kind of subtropical-clean; and it can’t be easy when you’ve got an enormous black bull taking a rest beside the ticket window.  I certainly wouldn’t like to be in charge of sweeping around him. Clean is an uncontroversial desire for any metro.

I’d like to walk under an inspiring quote from Nazrul, Rabindranath, Sufia Kamal or their fellows at every station entrance; and it’d be nice if the stations featured Bangladeshi architecture on the outside and village-style interior décor.  How about bamboo thatch decoration along the carriage ceilings?  Could there be a section with a tin roof to catch that monsoon rain sound that’s so divine?  Would it be at all convenient to have sitalpati or woven mat upholstery on the seating, which would certainly be cool on the hot days?  And if spitting is not to be banned perhaps each carriage could feature ornamental made-in-Dhamrai brass spittoons in the corner? 

Outside the station entrance it would be nice to see some permanent well-spaced tea shops, also selling fuchka and chatputi snacks, to make the metro a social place, and perhaps each station could reserve room to provide a number of real beds for Dhaka’s homeless people such that they don’t need to sleep on the ground.  Whatever the eventual model, there’s one characteristic from the Tehran metro that doesn’t need emulation.  It’s up and running now and most probably fine.  I’ve not seen it but I do recall in the mid-90s the only thing running in Tehran was the joke about the city’s metro which had been ‘under construction’ for several decades! 

In Tehran they finally got there and so one day will Dhaka.  It’s going to be a tough job trying to incorporate the enormity of Bangladeshi culture into several hundred square metres of platform and a fleet of carriages.  The engineers have it easy.  But for now there’s little to do but head out onto the roads.  For now, there’s only the metro dreaming.




Announcement: "The following metro service is an express service.  First stop is with the knitting ladies in the bowler hats, thence all stations to a promise is a promise, followed by the Russian kitchen revelation.  This metro service will terminate at the village of changing perceptions.  Please enjoy the journey."

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Metro Dreaming

Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh

India Will Decide: Article Index for articles about India

Legends of the Brahmaputra

Guwahati (Photo: Rituraj Bhuyan on wikipedia)

Rivers are story-tellers; the Brahmaputra is no exception. Just as their waters carry the filaments of earth to deposit at will along their changing course, to become the fields of the farms on which our houses are built, so rivers carry ideas. Thoughts are shaped and rearranged at their own meandering pleasure.

From its broad sweep across the plains of Assam to the teardrop islands of the Bangladeshi delta, the Brahmaputran currents flow with legend. An actor to a tee, even its names are many: Brahmaputra, Jamuna and ultimately part of the Meghna, from the mountains to the sea. In the south, on the island of Hatiya, the legends collect like silt and focus on a name: Kamrup-Kamakhya.

By the time we reached Guwahati and the start of the first visit to Assam for both of us, Situ was settling into India and enjoying each new discovery, as of course any traveller would. I enjoyed the wonder of his wonder.

We visited the major sites, the temples: a small ferry took us to the Umananda Mandir on an island in the river; the priest at Navagraha Mandir gave prasad or blessings amid a troop of monkeys prancing about inside and out; and by bus we reached the important Kamakhya Mandir.

The Kamakhya Temple is itself a place of legends.  One version of the principal legend is as follows: once, when the goddess Devi Sati’s father King Daksha organised a blessing ceremony called a yagna, he did not invite his daughter or her husband Lord Shiva. At the insult to her husband Sati jumped into the ceremonial fire and killed herself; and on seeing her dead body Shiva became enraged and commenced the dance of destruction, the tandav.  With the Earth on the verge of destruction, Lord Vishnu with the help of his chakra started cutting Sati’s body into pieces which fell across the country.  It stopped Shiva’s dance and the world was saved.  The places where Sati’s body fell are considered centres of power and Kamakhya Temple is said to be where her reproductive organ fell.[i]  

Similarly, Kalighat Kali Temple in Kolkata is said to be where the toes of the right foot fell and Sitakunda Chandranath Temple near Chittagong is said to be where the right arm fell.

There were two things that excited Situ which I didn’t appreciate. ‘Kamrup is a district!’ he’d said with elation, and ‘Kamakhya is a temple!’ I’d asked why he was so taken with these two place names.  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said and I’d left it at that. I didn’t imagine he wasn’t telling me because it involved superstition, something he wouldn’t normally pay attention to. He was a bit embarrassed.

Kamakhya Temple, Kamrup District (Photo: Daimalu on wikipedia)

We took a day to visit the ‘Poa Mecca’ mosque east of Hajo.  I was telling Situ that as people say it is a quarter Mecca, which I’d read in the guidebook, that to visit four times is said to be like undertaking the Hajj, he should be sure to take namaz when we went there.

He was strangely insistent he wouldn’t be able to take namaz because he didn’t have a topi or prayer cap to wear. I bought him a cheap one from the street. It was then he confessed: in Hatiya he went to the mosque irregularly so was unsure he would know exactly what to do! ‘Well how do you do it when you do go to the mosque in Hatiya?’ I’d asked. ‘I follow the others,’ he said.

The night before our trip to Hajo he practised in the hotel room how to do his prayer. It’s not as if I could shed any light on it.

The mosque was really memorable for two reasons: because unfortunate Situ couldn’t concentrate on the namaz he was taking inside from imagining me outside laughing that he wasn’t sure how it was done; and because of the Imam, who afterwards gave a special blessing to us both and then said to make sure we visited the Hindu temples in the town before returning to Guwahati. One of those Hindu temples had been built on the ruins of a Buddhist temple before it.

In West Bengal and again in Assam we’d seen the tolerance and intolerance of India: one religion’s destructiveness towards another as well as beautiful cohabitation. In particular the Imam directing us to the Hindu shrine was an enlightened gesture.

A few weeks later Situ and I crossed the vastness of the Meghna, three hours it took, from the mainland to Hatiya on the rusty but sturdy vessel they call the sea truck.  Hatiya is fashioned by the river: there are few better places to appreciate the power of nature than standing at Hatiya’s riverbank and watching the erosion.  A few days in Dhaka can mean the tea shop with the water views where you had your tea before you left is now in the river, or moved elsewhere in the market. Meanwhile on the southern shore sediment grows Hatiya ever larger.

By the light of the kerosene lamp in the tea shops, Situ would relate our journey to our friends: and they were fascinated. For hours he would talk and show photographs, about Poa Mecca, riding elephants and wild rhinoceroses: all our Assamese adventures. But when he said we’d been to ‘Kamrup-Kamakhya’ the villagers were entirely astounded.

In Hatiya from time to time come travelling salesmen, with bags of tricks and special powders, with various potions of dubious merit in attractive glass bottles and sometimes a cobra or two to charm, for advertising purposes; always they have tall and fantastic tales to share; entertaining with loud voices and wild claims, they draw a crowd and drum up sales. ‘In Kamrup-Kamakhya,’ they say, ‘there is a magical bucket and if you step inside it you can fly to anywhere in the world!’ ‘In Kamrup-Kamakhya,’ they say, ‘there is a lion on an island in a river, and if the lion roars…’ well, a certain part of the male anatomy falls off!

For Hatiyans, Kamrup-Kamakhya is a mythical place so far away that anyone who goes there never comes back. Thus when we said we’d been there, some of the locals looked at us as though we’d just conquered Everest.

The Hatiyan Hindu community were particularly interested in the Kamakhya Mandir, which no one seemed to have known about previously; yet soon enough our pictures of the place, and the other mandirs of Guwahati featured in several of their homes, stuck into the thatched walls or decorating home altars.

Situ goes to the mosque regularly these days; he easily knows his namaz.  It’s the talk of By-the-Big-Bridge.  I suppose like the rest of us he got older.  We still remember the Indian trip, now and then, on Hatiyan evenings illuminated by solar power.

Shaped by the seasons and carried by the river are ideas. A little bit of fact gets scattered as the river negotiates southwards. The Brahmaputra – Jamuna is a legend-shaping river that silently deposits stories as sediment in the Meghna’s delta islands.

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[i] http://www.religiousportal.com/KamakhyaTemple.html

This article is also published at:  Legends of the Brahmaputra (Star Magazine)

The preceding part of this adventure is published here: A Mountain in Need

A view across Guwahati to the Brahmaputra (photo: Tasiruddin Ahmed on wikipedia)

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A Mountain in Need

Darjeeling with Kanchenjunga just visible!

Hatiya is beautiful. The morning belongs to kingfishers in brilliant blue swooping to catch fish from canals; the day is for large monitor lizards rustling in the bushes and a mongoose darting with urgency across a rural laneway. The afternoon is the buffalo lazing semi-submerged in a pond, off-duty from the plough; and the night is the domain of ginns, bhuts and their company, the howl of foxes and pained cry of wild cats.

It is in the long evenings which were not so long ago lit by kerosene lamp, in the tea shops, amongst the village men socialising, where even far-fetched plans sound grave. Situ is to blame for my gramer bari or village house affliction, for not only did he donate his family, his neighbourhood to furnish my life with hospitality as plentiful as the monsoon rains, but because he too has a traveller’s soul.

In the evenings, between the chatter over the price of vegetables, news of an impending marriage or a recent death, we’d make travel plans for entertainment, translated to include the other villagers. Mostly they were over-the-top, the temples of Thailand, the north of Norway to see the midnight sun of the Arctic summer, or the Australian outback with its endless miles of sky. Once he listed a budget for a trip to Ukraine via Moscow. I still laugh about the figures: $7.97 for a train ticket to travel thirteen or something hours, $5.61 for a hotel room… okay that’s exaggerated, I don’t remember exactly, but they were a little on the low side.

You can always tell a traveller. It’s not by the number of stamps in their passport, but in their eyes. Just talk of journey and a traveller’s eyes will get up in anticipation of immediate departure. My eyes have always betrayed me that way and so did his. It was only through the accident of our different birthplaces that I’d been granted the luxury of visiting many countries while Situ had not explored beyond Bangladesh.

I used to bring when I could, travel books listing all the world’s countries, the basic facts and a few pictures. He used to call me in Sydney and say, ‘I’ve just been reading about Malawi.’ His wife used to complain that he wouldn’t turn the hurricane lamp down until very late from dreaming his way around the world through the books; and within a year, cover to cover they’d be worn from having been read so thoroughly. It’s all behaviour to be expected from a traveller.

As it is between friends, mocking is expected behaviour between us. I used to list the countries I’d seen, counting the Sub-continental way using the creases in the fingers; then start to list the villages around about which was Situ’s travel list. And I used to say, ‘you need to see a mountain. You can’t have a successful life without at least one mountain in it.’ ‘I’ve been to Bandarban,’ he’d reply. ‘If they’re mountains, then why is it called the Hill Tracts? No, you need a big mountain, with cliffs and snow.’

With the joking I grew to know that I would take him somewhere; that I should find him a mountain. Such things are important.

Of course I would benefit too, since one’s first trip to somewhere foreign is an incredible experience that can never be repeated; the next best thing would be to witness a fellow traveller’s first trip abroad.

It happened in 2004. There was no international phone line to Hatiya in those days, so Situ used to make the somewhat arduous trip across the river, three hours, where he’d have to stay the night, just for a few minutes on the phone to Sydney. I was planning the usual visit to Hatiya; it happened nearly every year. This time I said, ‘we’re meeting in Kolkata.’ One can’t see through phone lines but I knew what his eyes looked like when he heard it.

Funnily enough Situ had always said he didn’t wish for India because ‘it’s the same as Bangladesh.’ Of course there are no two countries the same, as much as they might be branches of the same tree. India was easily affordable on a Sydney salary and for him the visa wouldn’t be much fuss. I knew he’d enjoy it. I always had.

Somehow he organised the passport and visa; there’s a few stories in that but best that he should tell it. Somehow he took himself to Benapole, nearly catching pneumonia on his first air-conditioned bus ride, and crossed the border alone.

Meanwhile I rang Kolkata, as fortunately I have a friend there too, Jayanta. He has a distinguished, really dry sense of humour, and he’d just gotten married. I was yet to meet his wife. ‘So your wife,’ I asked, ‘is she nice?’ ‘When you come to Kolkata,’ he said, ‘you can make your own determination.’

I asked if there would be any problem if I brought a friend this time, from Bangladesh. ‘Hindu or Muslim,’ he asked. ‘Muslim.’ ‘Is he a good person?’ I said he was and Jayanta agreed to trust my determination on that count.

Such was the excitement that my stomach didn’t descend to land at Dum Dum along with the plane: Situ should be there with any luck. Jayanta should be there with any luck. I met Situ first. He’d been waiting all day, sneezing from the bus ride, buying the consecutive three-hour tickets needed to wait inside the terminal building. But he was waiting and sneezing in India! Jayanta had brought a friend with an extra motorbike, so it was no trouble to power off to his place where we stayed a couple of days, during which they got to know each other. Jayanta’s wife was lovely, I determined.

There were many firsts for Situ on his trip: first masala dosa, first iced tea and iced coffee, now all readily available in Dhaka. He’d seen with dismay the historical mosque near Pandua, West Bengal. It was partly built from destroyed Hindu temples and you can see the faces of Hindu deities in parts of the brickwork. More inspiring was the coexistence of Hindu swastikas decorating the mehrab, the focal point of the mosque. Situ said in Bangladesh he’d been taught the arrival of Islam in the Sub-continent had been peaceful. Pandua says it wasn’t absolutely so.

It was hot the day we went to find his mountain, it was roasting. With sweat pouring down our faces like a minor waterfall, at the Siliguri jeep stand and headed for Darjeeling, I suggested we needed to take the jumpers out of my bag: I’d brought two since Bangladeshi winters are not quite as cold as in Sydney and Situ would need Sydney-strength apparel for what would be undoubtedly the coldest day of his life. He thought I was mad, in the heat. It was well over thirty degrees and I wanted a jumper!

I make little jokes about the jeep ride: Situ was so scared, as we rounded some of those vertical precipes along the roadway, he held onto the side of the jeep so intensely that layers of the skin on his hands came off. Truth was even on my second time there I was slightly nervous too.

In Darjeeling, Situ burnt himself while taking his first hot shower. It’s logical really, what he thought, that the hot water tap would come out at a set, comfortable temperature, rather than needing to regulate it with the cold tap. It could be like that. In Darjeeling we watched in awe as the clouds below us lifted over the course of the morning and continued above as we ate breakfast; and in Darjeeling we saw the white horizon hairstyle of Kanchenjunga, a name Situ would soon be using to criticise my Sydney-sized belly.

The Himalayas are where Hatiya comes from, by the Ganges, by the Brahmaputra. The Himalayas are Hatiya’s mother.

Back in the tea shops some weeks later, folk listened in wonderment as Situ described to them about ‘the town above the clouds.’ So he got his mountain in the end.




This article also published by Daily Star at: A Mountain in Need

The second part of this adventure is published here: Legends of the Brahmaputra

Hatiyan tea shop

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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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