The Lunatic Express (15 page)

“Yes,” I said.

He returned a few minutes later with paper plates of dal and naan and a vegetable curry, but there wasn’t enough to go around. Mustache insisted I take his. I tried to refuse, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I tucked into Raymond Chandler’s
Farewell, My Lovely
, even though reading on trains or buses often felt unnerving. Books sweep you up, take you away, transport you. I read Philip Marlowe’s gritty tromp through 1930s Los Angeles and stopped and looked up and felt totally lost. I wasn’t in 1930s Los Angeles or my living room or on my front porch. I was on a train hurtling through India. Suddenly I felt the dirt and heat and wind, and an utter aloneness, strangers crowded against me. It was one thing to be in it constantly, to be focused and present, another to forget it and myself for a few minutes, and then to be suddenly conscious of where I actually was—the puddles on the bathroom floor, so many eyes staring at me, all alone rattling through India. Which sent me into overwhelming feelings of alienation and disconnect, feelings that had been slowly growing with every mile, especially since Indonesia. Desperate to talk to someone, to touch, to feel love and human warmth—that was the flipside of my wandering. No matter whom I talked to in my travels, whether it was Moussa on the train in Mali or Fechnor in Mombasa or Daud on the
Siguntang
, I couldn’t kid myself. They were fleeting connections, shallow and temporary and no substitute for the real thing. As the steel train clacked and shook and rattled and a man with a leg twisted at some impossible angle hobbled by on wooden crutches, I wondered what I was doing there. For the first time I wondered if I’d been fleeing from human connection itself. If that’s why I felt happy on muddy dirt roads in the farthest Amazon—not the escape from bills and deadlines, the mundane details of everyday life—but from the emotional tentacles of human intimacy. Out here I could miss my family, my crazy parents and my friends. I could fantasize that I was a whole person who was just away for a job. There must be a reason, I had to admit, that I couldn’t stay home, that I always sought another adventure, that the idea of spending five months away from home on the world’s worst conveyances felt so good, that escape was so much part of my life. It was a stark realization. It hit me hard. It crashed down on me, swallowed me up. I scribbled in my notepad: I wanted to be known, not just for a few days by strangers passing me on conveyances. The truth was, I had a fear that if people really did know me, they’d flee, and I hadn’t felt known or understood by anybody for a long time because I’d hidden myself from them, kept them away. I looked around. Poor old Fechnor in Africa, still sad over the charcoal seller with trading in her blood; he and I, we were both hiding in places where no one could ever really know us.

By nine that night I was rattled. I had been sitting bolt upright on a hard bench by the open window for fifteen hours. Every muscle and bone in my body ached. I was hungry. The woman across from me winced, rubbed her stomach in distress, picked her nose. Her husband spat out the window, a tiny drop hitting my face, showed her his gums. And I was cold now and covered with a layer of black dust, my hair stiff and gritty.

I thought of Santoso holding my hand on Buru and how good that had felt. Maybe it was all starker in places like India and Indonesia or Africa, where family was everything, where there was no personal space, where there was no being alone, where everyone felt deeply connected to their home. Could I reconnect?

Couples rarely publicly embraced in India; there was no such thing as a public kiss even in Bollywood. But the staring couple across from me sat close; her head lolled on his shoulder as she fell asleep to the shaking train and the heat.

Mustache peeled an orange, broke it in two, and handed me half.

Emergency crews scoured a turbulent river today for more than 500 passengers missing and feared dead after an overcrowded ferry capsized in southern Bangladesh. Strong currents hampered the search for the triple-deck ferry, which sank Tuesday night with about 750 people on board, where three rivers—the Padma, Meghna and Dakatia—meet. The ferry capsized as it approached a terminal at Chandpur, 40 miles south of the capital, Dhaka
.

—New York Times,
Thursday, July 10, 2003

EIGHT
I Can Only Cry My Eyes

“O
H MY
G
OD!
This plane is so old!”

“It smells like sweat!”

“I’ve got some perfume.”

This plane was a Biman Airways Fokker F-28 headed from Kolkata to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was boarding in the midst of the Chennai American International School’s girls’ soccer team, a pod of energetic seventeen-year-olds in sweatpants en route to a soccer tournament in Dhaka. The plane didn’t look too bad, I thought. The carpet was worn thin, my seatback didn’t recline, the upholstery was horrid orange and green flowers, but it appeared as airworthy as any other. Sitting next to me was a young Bangladeshi with a bouffant, pointy black shoes, long sideburns, and an embroidered shirt with white snaps, who worked for Iran Air in Dubai and was going back home to see his family. His wife, as it turned out, worked for Biman.

I asked him how many planes Biman had. He had to think. “Working? Six right now. They have many others, but corruption is the problem. But these Fokkers are good.”

“Is it safe?”

He threw up his hands, tilted his head toward the sky. “God knows!”

I can’t say I’d ever had much of a desire to go to Bangladesh, but its ferries were the stuff of legend. There were a lot of them and they sank. All the time. The statistics were horrific, some 20,000 ferries plying 24,000 kilometers of inland waters, only 8,000 of which were registered, and of those, only 20 percent were officially “fit to operate.” More people died on ferries in Bangladesh than on ferries anywhere else—some 1,000 a year (between 1904 and 2003 there were exactly zero passenger fatalities on U.S. ferries). Between 1995 and 2005 a ferry sank nearly once a month, the vast majority from overloading and collision. On April 20, 1986, 200 died when the
Atlas Star
sank in the Sitalakya River. A month later 600 drowned when the
Samia
overturned in the Meghna River. The grim list went on and on, and often the actual death toll wasn’t even known, since no one ever knew how many people were on the ships in the first place. Five hundred when the
Salahuddin-2
went down in the Meghna in 2003. Four hundred dead in the Meghna near Chandpur. The situation was so bad the minister of shipping had thrown up his hands and said, “Ultimately it’s up to passengers to decide not to board ferries that are too crowded.”

It was one thing to read about Bangladesh and those ferries, another to see it and experience it firsthand. After checking into my hotel, I persuaded the bellman, named Taz, to hit the docks with me—I had no guidebook for Bangladesh, no map, no idea of anything beyond the macabre numbers. Dhaka, though, was like the human equivalent of those
National Geographic
specials in which a camera is inserted into a beehive or termite nest to reveal a teeming sea of bodies, so many you can’t fit them in your mind. I had never seen so many people—154 million in a landmass the size of Iowa, a population density of more than one thousand people per square kilometer. It was 15 kilometers to Sadar Ghat, the port, and it took us an hour and a half by taxi. “In a few years,” said Taz, “we’ll only be able to walk again; there are just too many cars.” We sat parked in traffic without moving for ten minutes at a stretch. “Look at this building,” he said, pointing to a hulk of demolished concrete. “It used to be twenty-four stories. But it was illegal, built too close to the road. The government said it had to be torn down, but the builder was a famous man and the prime minister said, ‘If you pay me it can stay.’ That’s how things work here. But he wouldn’t pay; I don’t know why. So the army came and broke it. Fifteen people died in the breaking.” We squeezed into and through the streets of Old Dhaka. A man, stark naked, walked by. Hand-painted wooden carts piled twenty feet high with barrels and boxes, PVC pipe. Tens of thousands of bicycle rickshaws, each a work of folk art, painted with elaborate peacocks, rockets blasting to space, Dollywood film stars with big beating hearts and enormous eyes, and plastered with old CDs and mirrors. Buses that looked like they’d been taken through a car wash that used sledgehammers, steel claws, and mud instead of buffers and water. Ancient wooden carriages drawn by two ponies and piled with people.

But the river. The Burganga River fulfilled my image of a romantic eastern port like nowhere I’d ever seen. You could almost walk across it on the thousands of wooden pinnaces powered by a single scull. Boats are form and function, their vernacular—if untainted by fiberglass, as these weren’t—are design perfection borne of local water knowledge. Seventy-foot bulk carriers with high bows and waists nearly at the waterline puttered past equally graceful small wooden water taxis packed with women in blue and gold and red saris. Crumbling slums elbowed hard against the banks, 500,000 souls, our boatmen said, in the immediate area. Heat and smoke. Laundry drying on the concrete banks. Incomprehensible numbers of people. The streets had been choking and close and acrid with exhaust; the river was flowing with life, open, a breeze riffling silver-brown water. And, of course, big white steel ferries, human freighters really, that lined the banks by the hundreds. They were battered and dented and carried thousands. Three thousand in the smaller ones, 5,000 in the larger ones. They plied short passage routes and I wanted to go as far south as I could, so Taz and the boatmen directed us up the river, and we bumped against the most fantastic craft I’d ever seen.

The PS
Ostrich
carried an odd nickname—the Rocket. She was 235 feet long, thirty feet wide, a double paddle-wheeled ship weighing 638 tons and built by the British Raj in Calcutta in 1929. It was two stories of rusting, dented steel hung with burlap and an official capacity of 150 tons of cargo and 900 passengers, which regularly swelled to 3,000. A tall Bangladeshi wearing a plaid madras lunghi and a white muscle T-shirt showed us around. Long and low-slung, it had first-class cabins opening off an ornately carved wood-paneled dining area and lounge; second class was in the stern, each cabin with a small sink and two bunks; the masses slept on broad but shaded decks. We wound around a labyrinth of stairways and over rooftops to a concrete room in which sat five serious-looking men with betel-stained teeth, who discussed my passage to a place called Khulna, twenty-eight hours downriver.

“What food do you eat?”

“Any food,” I said. “Bangladeshi is good.” They nodded.

“Do you need a special room, or can a Bangladesh man share a room with you?”

“No problem,” I said.

“OK,” they said, “you are most welcome to come. We had a foreigner once who needed special food and his own special place. That is a problem.”

The
Ostrich
was scheduled to leave at 5:45 the next evening, so I gave myself two hours to get to Sadar Ghat, but a block from the river the taxi stopped, totally surrounded by cars and rickshaws and pedestrians and horses and donkeys and motorcycles. “I can’t get any closer, boss,” the driver said. I pulled my bags out, and was set upon as if I were a fumbled football by a dozen crazed porters wanting to carry my bags. I grabbed one, handed him my bag—two other guys pounced on him, trying to rip them off his shoulders, but we fought them off and plunged into the crowd. Down a set of muddy, trash-strewn concrete stairs, fires burning on the banks, and onto a floating steel pier, the ferries docked bow-in, a line of them stretching for two hundred yards. And across a wooden gangplank onto the
Ostrich
, which was now a teeming city herself, gorged with people. I picked my way over them and through them, up a narrow wooden stairway, to four wooden doors near the stern—my second-class cabin. I’m not sure why, but I’d decided to take a bed. It was a moment of weakness; I’d slept on a lot of floors, had been squished and elbowed for months and I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. Or so I convinced myself. Looking at that steel floor, I’d forked over the cash for a bed. The man who’d showed me around the day before appeared; now he was wearing a red double-breasted jacket and black slacks. “I’m Ashisha,” he said, “and I am the first-class steward. You are welcome to eat in first class if you’d like. And if you need anything, anything at all, then you just tell me.”

Under a moon full and round and almost gauzy in the tropical night, the
Ostrich
shuddered and thumped, and we pulled out into the current. Boats were everywhere in the river, lit with flickering oil lamps. I leaned on the rail, and young men crowded around me, thousands of insects buzzing around the bare lightbulb on deck.

“Do you have an agent here?” asked a young man who introduced himself as Nipu Hossain.

“An agent? For what?”

“For tours, hotels, tickets. I can get those things for you instantly. And if you see something interesting, something you like, a sample of cloth, say, I can ship it. You and me. We can have a good business. You need a business partner.”

“No thanks,” I said, explaining that I was just traveling.

“Business can be good!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not interested in any business.”

“This is very easy, and the profits can be large.”

I looked him in the eye. “I’m not going into any business with you.”

“Yes, I see,” he said. “But the profits can be very good. All you have to do is to take my card and if you, say, have a friend who likes things and if you connect us, I will give you a percentage. As a gift!”

We slid past a mile of shipyards, steel hull after steel hull appearing as dark shadows on the beach, sparks flying from welders’ torches, flashes of heat lightning in the blue-black sky. Nipu and Sunam Roy, twenty-five, taught me Bangla.
Ami cha chai:
I would like some tea.
Dhonno baad:
thank you.
Dam koto:
how much?

“We are so poor,” said Roy, who lived in Chandpur with three families in a single room. “Culture is all we have.”

I suggested we have some tea, and we walked into the center of the ship, jammed with huddled masses on the floor. At one end stood a counter piled with packs of cookies and chips and nuts, sodas, a kettle of boiling water on one side and a man sitting cross-legged on the top, in front of a wooden cash box. I asked for a cup of tea, and men moved over, making room for us on the single bench reserved for tea drinkers in front of the stand. “Foreigner,” I heard, rippling through the crowd. We were tight, hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder on the bench, touching, always touching, in every passageway and in front of the snack bar. I asked about so many sinking ferries, and mentioned the statistic that a thousand a year drowned.

“It’s not so many,” said Roy. “And most get afraid and lose their senses. Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Where is your family?”

I tried to explain that I was traveling for work, but even that left them puzzled. I was feeling a little testy; it was hard to keep open to the crowds and the same questions all the time.

“Aren’t you cold?” they asked. The night was balmy and warm, but they shivered. “It is winter!” they said.

The hours ticked by and the men pressed in. I was surrounded all the time, the questions thrown over and over again: Where was I from? Was I alone? Why? What did I think of Obama? Finally I escaped to bed.

At midnight I awoke to cocks crowing. At 5:00 a.m. my roommate’s cell phone rang. At six I went out on deck, to a pink horizon, thick clumps of green water hyacinths floating in the khaki river. We turned up another river at eight, hard against wide expanses of swamped land in which water buffalo waded, past rice fields and thatched shacks, from which men, women, and children emerged to stare at the old steamer throbbing by.

The snack-bar cashier never moved, sitting cross-legged on the bar in front of his box all day and night, and he gave me a discount. In a corner a man stood talking into a microphone, his voice booming and distorted, the deck so crowded it was hard to move. A pair of teenage girls covered in black, only their brown eyes showing, sat on the tea bench, their eyes swooping over everything, and me, staring at me, elbowing each other, taking it all in. “That man is selling medicine,” said a man with a long beard and skullcap. “Take it and you will feel better! I don’t believe it, though.”

His name was Hasan, and he’d just retired after fourteen years as a bellman at the Intercontinental Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “I will now go into the stock business,” he said. “I will buy, hold, and then sell. In Saudi, it is a Muslim country. A woman can’t go out without a head covering, but my country is a little bit more free.”

“Which do you like better?” I asked.

“Well, we are a Muslim country so that is our way, but a little bit more free is good.”

Around lunchtime, Ashisha appeared, inviting me into the first-class salon. I felt guilty, but I went anyway, cutting through the massed humanity, the jumbles, opened a door, and passed into another world full of Western children playing Monopoly and men and women who looked just like me, playing guitars and munching on cheese and crackers under the veranda on the bow. The women’s hair flew in the wind, free, bare arms outlined in tight, short-sleeved T-shirts. Barefoot. Suddenly I saw them through the eyes of the men and women in their flowing robes and head coverings—so free, so cavalier with their bodies, no wonder men equated that with “easy.” The children shouted at the waiters imperiously and climbed on the rails like they owned the ship. Everyone had space to lounge and spread on the sofas and big, comfortable chairs. It was a different world entirely, and it shocked me. I had barely spoken to another westerner in a month. They were so easy, so relaxed, so unhindered; they were like candy, like a drug, like an unbelievable luxury; five minutes in their presence and I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to sprawl on the wicker sofa, sip a glass of wine, nibble on familiar crackers and cheddar, watch the children, who reminded me so much of my own. I wanted to hug them and tousle their hair. I wanted to talk and talk and talk, about whatever came to mind, without carefully picking my words. But I had to leave. It was like when I was reading and suddenly looked up in the Indian train, and couldn’t believe where I was. But this was worse. It felt heartbreaking. Instead of that wild feeling I got bursting into the Amazon, I felt weary and homesick. I wanted my own children laughing and playing Monopoly and my own friends drinking wine. I had to run away; if I didn’t I would have been swallowed up. And this was the worst part: hanging out with them threatened my ability to tolerate the tea stand amid the multitudes and the crushing solitude of the crowd and the unremitting poverty, which I didn’t even notice when that was all I saw. Up in first class the contrast was too great.