Naila says that, despite Grameen’s success, the potential has barely been tapped. Only one million of the 140 million in Bangladesh have been connected through the mobile system, and Grameen Phone, half owned by the Norwegians, is now the biggest single investor in the country. The concept has been exported to poorer rural communities in places like Malaysia, Thailand and Ukraine.
The pace at which Naila and her PR team work is very different from the leisurely diurnal rhythms of this soft, warm, inviting countryside and once away from the village her mobile starts up again and doesn’t stop until we’re back in Dhaka.
For those able to survive the sound and fury of the capital there is a reward. Ishraq puts it simply.
‘The best international cooking in Southeast Asia.’
And he’s determined to prove it. Last night we ate some fine Chinese, surpassed tonight by a wonderfully authentic Lebanese dinner. And tomorrow, yet another strike day has been called, so we can stay in bed and sleep it off.
Day One Hundred and Twenty Three : Dhaka to the Delta
Life down in the delta rarely makes the news. Goings on in Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet hog the headlines. But today is different. In between all the hartal horror stories, the New Nation has a mention of the Sundarban Islands, my final destination. Apparently, the decomposed remains of six villagers, killed by man-eating Royal Bengal tigers, have been discovered deep in the mangrove forest. I sort of wish I hadn’t read that.
On the way to the boat terminal, through lanes crowded with commerce and alleyways of go-downs where old men, still calculating by abacus, sit cross-legged beside sacks of rice or swat flies away from fruit stalls with feather dusters, we pass an incongruous set of cast-iron railings. Behind them rises the Ahsan Manzil, a wedding-cake pink building that was the palace of the Nawab Abdul Ghani, a Muslim and the largest landowner in East Bengal at the time of the Raj. By all accounts, this influential man was also a man of learning and culture, and his son Salimullah founded the Dhaka Medical School. The Pink Palace, as it’s known, has been restored to its former glories and is a reminder of the beauty that lurks beneath the surface of this scuffed and overworked city, and makes me wish I’d had more time to explore.
The Sadarghat boat terminal is Dhaka at its most exasperating and exhilarating. Everyone fights for everything: parking and unloading space, space at the ticket counter, space on the long pontoons, space on the boats that moor up against them. No-one is actively hostile, they’re just there. There where you want to be, and in huge numbers.
After many wrong directions, I eventually find our boat and can’t understand why I hadn’t seen it earlier. With an ochre-painted superstructure and massive paddle wheels, the PS Ostrich is an old-fashioned, pleasing shape, like a great nautical sausage. It is part of the Rocket Service, pride of the succinctly named Bangladesh Inland Waterway Transport Corporation. The identification plaque records that its Year of Built (sic) was 1929 and that it was ‘Renovated and Dieselized’ in Narayagonj (just outside Dhaka) in 1996. It accommodates a total of 700 people on two decks and has 24 places in First Class.
I step onto the gangplank. Below me, the water is thundercloud grey. An evil-smelling, viscous grease-slick covers the surface of the Buriganga like lacquer. Then I’m shown to a flight of steps with a banister rail in polished wood, which leads up to the first-class accommodation. Here, the world is transformed. The cabins, their numbers in polished brass, lead off a long and gracefully proportioned state room, down the centre of which runs an elegant mahogany table. The wood panelling on the walls is painted a subtle combination of light and dark grey, and interspersed at intervals with fluted bas-relief columns picked out in gold leaf. Outside, a covered deck set with tables and chairs offers the enticing prospect of cocktails at sunset. Sadly, this being a Muslim country, there is no bar on board, but Ishraq, ever ingenious, has access to supplies of his own.
Five minutes before our scheduled departure time the Ostrich emits two sonorous blasts from its horn, warning late-arriving passengers and waterborne tradesmen selling hard to the open decks below us that departure is imminent. We cast off and pull away from the seething Sadarghat dead on time, narrowly avoiding collision with one of the many ferries fighting for our place at the pontoon.
Ishraq has invited a friend of his along, a delightful lady called Mahjabeen Khan, but known to all as Moni. She is probably not far from my own age, but is blessed with a good head of glossy dark hair and intensely dark eyes. She was born in Guwahati, Assam, but at Partition in 1947, her family, being Muslim, moved from there to Sylhet in what had become East Pakistan. Looking back now, she can see that trying to turn East Bengal into a part of Pakistan was a terrible mistake.
‘They wanted us to behave differently, look differently, eat differently, dress differently. We were always a secular country.’
She and her seven siblings, six sisters and one brother, were sent to high school in Dhaka and encouraged to study a musical instrument. Moni discovered a talent for singing as well as playing and turned professional, until she married an ambassador and spent 15 years in Washington and Bangkok. Her husband, Abu Zafir Obaidullah Khan, was not just a diplomat and scholar but one of Bangladesh’s leading poets. Her story seems to paint a portrait of a charmed life and it’s quite a shock when Moni reveals that before she met Abu Zafir she had spent 12 largely unhappy years in an arranged marriage.
But before all that, when she was 13 or 14, she and her family took the Rocket Service when they went on holidays down south. She remembers its formality: the crisp linen tablecloth and gloved waiters in white uniforms with braided epaulettes, brass buttons and matching white turbans.
Tonight, there’s less ceremony. People eat at different times. A tasty, fleshy local fish called bekti is served, but not with white gloves.
A thin, bespectacled man introduces himself after supper. He spent several years at the Botany Department at Sheffield University and, in one of those serendipitous moments that give travel a good name, I find myself on both the Ganges and the Brahmaputra swapping stories with a Bangladeshi botanist about the church I used to go to when I was nine.
The waterways of Bangladesh seem to operate on the same philosophy as the roads of Dhaka, an improbable synergy that, by the most dangerous means possible, successfully accommodates every kind of river user. None of them seem to have lights or horns. And as we don’t have radar, Captain Mohammed Rahman has to rely on instinctive judgement.
I’m in bed in my cabin reading Patrick O’Brian when we make our first stop at Chandpur. There is a lot of noise and light and the sound of shouts and the slap of sandals, and the loading and unloading is still going on when I put down my book about Napoleonic sea battles, feeling that, perhaps, past and present aren’t so far apart.
Day One Hundred and Twenty Four : Chandpur to Mongla
Up at six. It’s a soft, drowsy morning. The banks are shrouded in mist, from which fields and trees occasionally emerge, tinged with diffused morning sunlight. The mist and the water mingle, giving the impression that everything, on water and land, is floating.
From a map on the wall of the state room and a few enquiries of the waiters, I work out that we are west of the main river channel and south of Barisal, heading slowly through a maze of curling rivers in the rough direction of the Sundarbans National Park. Breakfast is a disappointingly routine affair, enlivened only by discovering that my bottle of ‘Mum’ mineral water is proudly labelled ‘Official Drink For the 10th Asian Conference on Diarrhoeal Diseases’.