The Lunatic Express (16 page)

I asked Ashisha if I might see the captain, and he took me up a flight of stairs to the roof and a small wooden pilot house, and introduced me to Captain Lutfas Rahman, wearing blue denim jeans and jacket, buttoned up tight despite the ninety-degree heat, sitting cross-legged on the wooden chart shelf. The pilot house was simple: a big old wooden wheel and brass throttle, replaced by two stainless steel levers when the
Ostrich
had been converted from coal to diesel in 1995; a GPS and a compass. It had no radar. I asked him if the
Ostrich
was a good ship.

“No!” he said. “An old ship! A paddle-wheel ship is useless now; where in the world is a paddle ship used? Nowhere but Bangladesh!” He almost spat the words out. Shook his head. The
Ostrich
was owned by the government, which had no money. At least, he said, it was safe; it was the private launches that sank.

“I would like a new, modern ship. With a screw instead of paddles.” He’d been on the water a long time, starting as a deckhand in 1976, and he saw his wife and children in Dhaka every Sunday evening and Monday morning, before returning to Khulna again. It was a good job, but the pay was bad. “In Dubai I could make 150,000 taka [about $2,000], but here the government gives me just 20,000 taka [$290] a month. And there are no instruments on this ship so we rely only on my experience, and the rivers change all the time. I have seen many cyclones in my life. I have seen man, cow, horses, floating in the river going to the sea. I look and think, but I cannot help. I can only cry my eyes.”

.    .    .

I
WANDERED
out of the pilot house and sat on the wooden walkway across the
Ostrich’s
roof, my feet hanging off the side, watching the river flow past. It was late afternoon. Quiet. The river silvery blue, the banks green and lush. The sun strong, beating down; beads of sweat rolled down my back and my forehead. I wasn’t alone long, though. A young man climbed the stairs, saw me, and came over. He wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, and had a satchel strung over his shoulder. I braced myself for another wheeler-dealer, but Rokibal Islam was different. He was just nineteen, on his way from home to university. He was smart. Bright-eyed. And he told such a sad story, a story so common in places like Bangladesh. His father was the principal of the local high school. “But he was very, very honest. He believed in honesty, always. He told us that money wasn’t everything, that you should not be greedy.” But his honesty was challenged all the time. “Always people wanted money for his promotion. But he would not pay. They couldn’t fire him, but they could transfer him. So they transferred him all the time and he rode his bicycle to many different schools. Once he was offered a job as a forest supervisor, but it was a corrupt job and he didn’t take it and gave the job to a friend who is very rich now. He has four houses in Dhaka City.” Instead, his father died of cancer when Rokibal was fourteen. “We were so poor,” he said. “We had no money for tutors and then we had no money for school, even.” Rokibal read on his own, studied on his own, at home. He missed a year of school. But he muscled his way back, graduating third in his class. And now he was at university and thinking of a master’s degree.

At first I’d been worried, when he told me how poor he was, that he’d ask me for money, for help with a visa; so many did and I could do nothing for them. I felt guilty that those requests annoyed me. But he never mentioned it, and as the day turned to dusk and the river became a world of shadows for a few minutes, Rokibal told me about dating and dreaming and struggling, opening a crack into his world. He had a girlfriend, sort of, that he called on his cell phone, but it was no more than a little bit of talking back and forth. He would eventually marry someone arranged by his mother. “Yes, of course,” he said, frowning slightly. “There is no other way.”

I
T WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT
when we docked at Khulna. We squeezed and jostled through the
Ostrich
, out over bouncing wooden planks, and onto dirt streets, dark and rutted. I spent three days in Khulna and it felt like the end of the world. I didn’t know what day it was, what day of the week even; I had lost track of them. I was feeling just more and more out there, somewhere, alone on the planet. Tourists didn’t come to Khulna, or not many of them, anyway. My plan had been to take the Rocket to Khulna, then find a local ferry farther south toward the ocean, deeper in. I asked my hotel the name of the port and climbed in a bicycle rickshaw and off he pedaled. There were few cars, which made it quiet. Hazy. Cool, dust in the air, on the streets, the rickshaw, the storefronts, everything. Toward the river, we bumped slowly—the pedaler straining, sweating, slower than walking—over potholed dirt streets lined with trucks in swirling red and blue and yellow, and handcarts piled twenty feet high with barrels and PVC pipes. Cows and goats wandered and munched on garbage and piles of pineapple stalks and sugar cane. We passed open shops stacked with metal sheeting, and factories welding steel cabinets and bed frames, men in salwar kameezes and lunghis, and women in black burqas. Rubble and chickens and people, people everywhere, thick and pungent. Once off the rickshaw, though, I couldn’t find any ticket office, anybody who spoke English and could help me. Launches lined the wharf, but no one knew anything—just stares and shaking heads from old wrinkled men with few teeth and brown, weathered faces stained with betel nut and paan. It was like I was in a dream, a nightmare in which I couldn’t communicate, couldn’t cut through the lines of human interaction.

Finally, giving up, I returned to the hotel and persuaded the bellboy, whose name was Milton, to go with me, riding in the rickshaw in his black pants, white shirt, and tie, riding hip to hip, 300 pounds now, the driver drenched and straining. When I suggested it might be faster to walk, Milton shook his head, said no. And at the river, Milton found three men sitting at a desk in a wall-less room, in front of a weatherbeaten log book. They talked back and forth in Bangla, their heads shaking. “They don’t understand you,” Milton said. “They are ill-educated. Ignorant. They don’t know why someone wants to travel; why you’re here.” But finally it was revealed. There were no boats heading farther south, only a few short-haul launches going back the way I came; to get to Dhaka the
Ostrich
was the only answer, and it wouldn’t be back for another three days, leaving at nearly 3:00 a.m. “How about the train?” said Milton. The train station was next door, and we found a hulking man sitting at an old oak desk surrounded by ancient-looking equipment and huge bound ledgers three feet long. A train left nightly at 8:00 p.m.

I spent two more days in Khulna and I walked through the streets a celebrity. I couldn’t make it more than half a block without getting stopped, engaged in conversation. What country was I from? Why was I in Khulna? Was Barack Obama a Muslim? What was my profession? Bangladesh was the friendliest, most curious country I’d ever strolled through. I drank tea on a shelf carved into a tree on a streetcorner, got taken into the offices of a frozen shrimp importer, was given a tour of the local university by a boy accompanied by two young women covered except for their eyes. Workshops lined the streets, industry was personal and everywhere. Anvils rang and showered sparks. Shops made tin pails. Welders, all barefoot, squatted on dirt floors in shops the size of one-car garages. “Please, just if by some chance you meet someone interested in doing business in Bangladesh,” said Hossain Lukman, who stopped me on the street. “I know, I know, but you never know and you give them my name and contact information. We are a family and business is our business. We are honest and we can make a good business. Bangladesh is very poor but we work very hard.” I could barely get a word in; my protestations that I had no interest in business went unheard. Bangladesh was a place of worker ants, filled with tens of millions of them, curious, willing to do almost anything, eager for just about anything. Lukman was twenty-seven. “This is the honor of my family to be successful; it is very important right now.” The second I said the word
American
, people touched their hearts, nodded their heads to the side in reverence.

.    .    .

T
HE TRAIN BACK
to Dhaka was uneventful, but awful. I sat upright all night as doors opened and cold, damp air blasted in through the open windows and the train shook and rattled and distorted music roared, and we slid and bumped into Dhaka at dawn.

I
STILL HADN’T TAKEN
one of the thousands of private launches, though, and they were the real death traps of Bangladesh. So early the next morning I made my way back to Suder Ghat and bought a ticket to Chandpur, where hundreds had died in numerous sinkings and capsizings over the years.

Nose-in at a floating steel dock floated hundreds of battered, bent, rusting white steel ships, the waterborne equivalent of the matatus in Nairobi, the commuter trains of Mumbai. “Chandpur, Chandpur, Chandpur,” touts called, and I slipped aboard. The launches were all the same: one large, open deck lined with benches facing the bow and, above, an open, flat deck with tables and chairs welded to the deck. Sometimes these took 3,000 passengers; today there were only a couple of hundred. I counted thirteen life rings, and no rafts or lifeboats of any kind. A bronze bell on the bow rang and we pushed away, into the current and crowds of the river itself, under a hazy blue sky and a burning sun. Freighters and small wooden
nowks
, as the little pinnaces were called, hundreds, thousands of them filled with people and bricks and stacks of wood, some so overloaded that their topside rails were literally underwater. We passed miles of brick factories, barren expanses of sand around a tall cylindrical smokestack, each one an almost pharaonic scene of hundreds of bare-chested men and sari-clad women carrying buckets of sand and piles of bricks on their heads. It was the world unfiltered, raw, the water flat and greenish, perhaps half a mile wide.

As I was eyeing paper plates of some chickpea food that a boy was delivering from the deck below, a tall, boyish-faced man plunked himself down in the chair in front of me and introduced himself. Mohammed Amir Hosain, to be called Fardus. He wore green khaki slacks and a pink checked shirt, and he had a face as round as a ball. “Would you like some?” he asked, and whistled, calling the boy over and imperiously ordering.

“I am a soldier,” he said. “I am strong! Where are you from?”

“America.” The golden word.

“America is my hobby!” he said. “Would you like to have lunch with me when we get to Chandpur?” There was something about him. Kind. Open. I trusted him. I said I would.

Fardus whipped out two cell phones, placed a call, paused, said, “Fish or chicken?”

“Either one,” I said.

The chickpeas arrived, spicy and covered with onions and peppers and lime juice. Fardus insisted on paying. I suggested tea, and soon after, it arrived; once again I wasn’t allowed to pay. The sun beat down and the breeze passed and the engine roared, and every now and then a wooden launch appeared alongside and transferred a few passengers. As we neared Chandpur a woman covered in black, only her eyes visible, appeared. Fardus’s sister. He introduced us and I went to shake her hand; it came out, hesitated, and withdrew without our touching. “In our culture, no touching,” he said. “But it’s okay.” Chandpur looked like how I imagined Zanzibar had appeared in Richard Burton’s or John Hanning Speke’s time—a cluttered bazaar, a world of garbage and wooden boats, some under sail, women covered in black and naked children glistening and shiny and playing in the trash-strewn water. A narrow market of wooden stalls pressed in on a mud street. Fardus paused and bought apples and oranges; again he refused my attempts to pay. We crossed railroad tracks and cut up a lane between walls with doors and waddling geese, and all three of us piled into a bicycle rickshaw and slipped past small houses fronting ponds covered in duckweed. It was silent, no cars or even auto rickshaws, just the tinkle of bicycle bells, hundreds of them, and the sounds of voices, commerce, and hammering as we passed a row of rickshaw workshops. “That’s the government primary school,” he pointed out. “The mosque.”

People called out to him. “America!” I heard. “My mother’s sister,” he said. “My uncle. My cousin.” Fardus was home; everyone knew him and he knew everyone and every corner and tree and building. He started calling me “brother Carl.”

We bumped down the road, the driver straining with the weight of all three of us. “My mother is away on Hajj, brother Carl,” he said. “My father is dead. He was a textile worker. My father’s coffin is behind there,” he said, pointing down a lane. We passed men and women bathing in ponds, scrubbing and lathered in soap, dropped his sister off at a corner, and jumped off at a tree-shrouded lane paved in bricks. We hung a left down a dirt path, and came to a door in a wall, which passed us into a yard and a garden and a small corrugated-metal house. Fardus’s uncle, who had a long, stately nose, was waiting in a blue shirt and a lunghi with his two brothers, aged sixteen and nineteen. “We must wash,” said Fardus, who went inside and emerged a minute later shirtless and barefoot in a green plaid lunghi. “This is my favorite one,” he said. In the corner of the yard stood a pump, and we squatted around the pump scrubbing our faces and hands with fresh, cool water and a bar of soap.

A man appeared—I never knew who he was—and scurried up a coconut tree and started hacking coconuts off with a machete. Fardus expertly split them and emptied the water into a plastic pitcher, and then we all drank the semisweet juice, and munched on the fresh pulp. We went inside the house: one room with a double bed, another, bigger, with a double bed and table and television and wardrobe and a brand-new computer—they had no Internet connection—the ceiling bamboo, the floor bare concrete, smooth and cool to my bare feet. In a portico outside was a one-burner stove and some buckets, a woman with big eyes and a gold nose ring squatting in the dirt, cooking. It was a strange thing, a strange time. Fardus’s English wasn’t bad for the most casual conversation, but beyond the basics we couldn’t really go. His brothers and uncle spoke no English; I was there, in their house, in their lives, but there were great chasms of miles, distance, culture separating us. The food was served and only Fardus and I ate, the others sitting on the bed watching. It was delicious, though: huge piles of rice and chicken and fish, hard-boiled eggs, green spinachlike vegetables. We ate with our hands, Fardus urging me on and on, displaying a hospitality and generosity that felt overwhelming. Again, I had so little to offer; nothing, in fact, but myself. As always, my feelings were complex. Part of it looked idyllic: a quiet village, closeness of family and town, a place where you could be known and loved by everyone. And part of me knew the idea terrified me. It was the fundamental struggle of my life, between being connected and being separate, between being part of a group and being alone.