At half-past seven we reach a place called Jahlokati. An archetypal scene of passengers waiting beneath a spreading neem tree, a few thatched buildings and a tin-roofed warehouse, its walls stuck with political posters and daubed with slogans. The signs are only in Bangla, reminding us that we are well away from the cosmopolitan world of Dhaka. Well away from the hustle and bustle too. Though a lot of people are getting on and off here, the noise is as muted as the morning light.
As the gangplank goes down, the line of disembarking passengers begins to move, most of them balancing their possessions in bundles or cardboard boxes on their heads. Then the porters come aboard and take off the big stuff: massive, tight-strapped, white bundles that are manoeuvred slowly up the gangplank to the accompaniment of a chant.
The river is low and the root systems of the mangrove trees run along the banks like exposed wiring. A slew of fresh-cut logs is floating up against the shore and a man, balancing on one of them, dips his hand in the water and cleans his teeth with his finger.
The timeless rural peace is shattered by the warning sound of the ship’s horn, which reverberates around this quiet little place like the roar of a bull elephant. After ten minutes or so, the gangplanks are raised, provoking the usual last-minute rush, as people leap out of the bushes and race aboard.
Our kitchen staff have secured a sackful of green coconuts, which they split open for us, and we drink the sweet but cool milk as we pull out onto the stream again.
A few minutes later, a modern concrete bridge materializes, silently, shockingly, out of the mist, then slips away behind us and we’re back into the past again. Spreading rain trees, rubber trees and date palms cluster tight along the bank. A white-robed figure strides dramatically among them. Deep-hulled, tall-prowed boats, like Chinese sampans, bob up and down in our wake. I watch an immensely distinguished-looking man with a bushy, grey beard carefully prepare his fishing net. He tosses it into the water and slowly pulls it in and examines it. There is nothing there but mud. With infinite patience, he gathers the line, tosses it out and draws it in again. Nothing.
There is something about the dignity both of the man and his slow work that leaves an impression. And the fact that he never once looks up as a yellow 1920s paddle steamer with 700 people on board goes by.
The morning wears on. The sun grows stronger, but I find it hard to tear myself away from the deck rail. The dancing silver patterns of light reflected on the water, the gradual release of the countryside from the mist, the sound of a flute drifting across, all create a feeling of the world slowed down, a seductive and fragile sense of peace.
Moni and I are talking about this, about how the world’s most crowded country can offer such a sense of calm, and she asks if I’ve read any of Tagore’s work. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t. Rabandranath Tagore was the Shakespeare of Bengal. A crude metaphor, perhaps, but it reflects his status here. He was a poet and playwright and, though he was a Hindu, he wrote of the universal preoccupations of Bengalis and particularly of the countryside, which, Moni thinks, has changed not at all since he died over 60 years ago. He had an international reputation, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and being awarded a knighthood by the British, which he returned in protest at the massacre in Amritsar in 1919. (Evidence of which I saw on Day 30.)
A lot of Moni’s favourite songs are Tagore’s poems set to music and she sings some to me as the countryside he celebrated slips past. As Moni points out, he was sympathetic but never sentimental about the rural life. We are in what they call ‘cyclone alley’, and in Tagore’s time, just like now, this golden panorama of huge skies and wide water, of rice paddies and thatched houses, bordered by the long, dark outline of the mangrove forest, could be transformed overnight into a killing field by the storms that brew up over the Bay of Bengal.
One of the songs Moni sings tells of the bruised Bengali people standing in a line, crying, and asking their god to ‘speak into our ears and into our hearts and tell us there is good news’.
We stop more frequently now and in the middle of the afternoon pull up at the jetty of a small settlement rejoicing in the name of Moralgunj. Big crows eye us from the bare branches of a dying man-grove tree.
I’ve worked out that the relative importance of our ports of call can be determined by the number of gangplanks the ship puts out. Chandpur was a four-plank stop, but Moralgunj is only a two-plank stop. Mongla, where we arrive after 13 hours, is Bangladesh’s second port after Chittagong. It’s also where we bid goodbye to the Ostrich, and disembark down five planks, with a security rail on either side.
Day One Hundred and Twenty Five : Mongla to the Bay of Bengal
There is one task we have to complete today and that is to cover the remaining 90 miles (144 km) between here and the Bay of Bengal, and rendezvous with a forestry department launch, which will take me out onto the ocean and off into the sunset for the final shot of the series.
I’m up before five. Shower, pack my things together, grab a basic breakfast at the Hotel Pashur, then walk out past the bus station and down to the jetty, where two of the three boats on which our day depends are bobbing up and down on the water. They don’t inspire confidence. Named Feni 1 and Feni 3, after a frontier town north of Chittagong, they’re ex-lifeboats with a Do-It-Yourself viewing platform built on top and furnished with plastic chairs. The boat is steered from the top deck by a Heath Robinson rudder extension made from various pieces of scrap metal, into which is fitted a handle made from a tree branch. Well, not made from it exactly. It is a tree branch.
This whole unsteady collation is topped with a few lengths of domestic, wrought-iron railing and a sun canopy suspended from four sticks.
The crew is lively and enthusiastic. Unlike the engine.
We cast off at dawn and, as the light slowly improves, we can see our surroundings are as magical as yesterday. We chug through a clinging mist, past the temporarily exposed mudflats they call chars, islands that appear briefly after the flood waters recede and are instantly planted so that at least one crop can be harvested before the next monsoon washes the island away.
About an hour south of Mongla, the cultivated land comes to an abrupt end and we are hemmed in by the dark, impenetrable walls of the largest coastal mangrove belt in the world. There are few settlements down here, and the short, steep, slimy banks offer no landing opportunities. If one needed any further reason for staying away, the forest is also the habitat of the much feared Royal Bengal tiger, whom the people of the forest refer to as ‘uncle’. It’s considered bad luck to utter its real name.
Occasionally, we come across some fishing boats, at which, oblivious to our deadline, the cooks insist on stopping so they can investigate luncheon ingredients. They eventually settle on crab, sweet-water lobster and some of the largest prawns I’ve ever seen. Ishraq says these are of such quality that these small fishermen sell them on to bigger trawlers, which take them up to freezer plants at Mongla, from where they will be sent to the dining tables of the USA and Europe. It’s a business worth $100 million a year.
I watch kingfishers skimming along the shoreline and a fish-eagle with bold, rufous wings hunting in our wake, snapping up tiny fish and eating them on the wing. After a while, I drift into a deep sleep in which I dream someone shouts.
‘Michael! Crocodile!’
I wake up to hear someone shouting.
‘Michael! Crocodile! Look!’
And I do, just in time to catch sight of a grey metallic shape the size of a small submarine turn its panto-villain face towards me and slide into the river, sending out waves of repulsion and muddy brown water. I feel sorry for crocodiles. Just because God gave them teeth too big for their mouths and yellow eyes that open and shut like Porsche headlights you can’t imagine them ever having a single decent thought. But for all I know, they might be quite lovable, salt-of-the-earth reptiles who, given half a chance, might well help an old lady across the road and surprise us all by not eating her.