None of the boats on the river look like the sort you’d find at Henley Regatta, but ours is easily the scruffiest tub on the Pijain. The metal hull is leaking quite spectacularly. A series of small fountains erupt from the bottom of the boat as if it had been raked by tracer fire. The eight-year-old picks up a plastic bottle and bails out enthusiastically, stopping every now and then to flash me a big, reassuring smile.
By the time we reach the furthest of a succession of gravel bars I’ve developed considerable respect for my under-age crew.
All around us there are people sieving, sorting and sifting alluvia. Pencil-thin wooden punts are packed with boulders and gravel until they are so low in the water that it seems one extra pebble might be enough to sink them. This low-tech quarrying looks to be a family activity largely undertaken by the very poor. Out in mid-stream young boys dive for stones. From the bank a line of elderly men toss roped buckets into the water and slowly draw them in. Wives and sisters are sizing the stones and putting them in piles.
Wandering in the middle of all this are relatively affluent daytrippers, who obviously see this stretch of the Pijain as something of a beauty spot. They sit in chairs, buy soft drinks off the heads of itinerant salesmen and have their photos taken. A group of boys and girls walk arm in arm, suddenly breaking apart to splash water at each other. Bearing in mind that Bangladesh is 90 per cent Muslim, it’s interesting to see girls, unveiled, hand in hand with boys in public. It’s a reminder that, unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh is not an Islamic republic, it’s a secular democracy.
As I scramble off the cheerfully leaky boat back onto the shore, thinking what an odd and unfamiliar world this is, where holiday-makers mingle with crushers, trucks and small hills of gravel, I hear my name called in a Bangladeshi-Cockney accent.
‘Michael!’
A man detaches himself from a family group and bounds up to me.
‘I’m from Milton Keynes.’
He’s a chef in a restaurant there, coming back to visit his home country, a rich man by Bangladeshi standards. He says there are many like him from this part of the country.
On our way to Sylhet, we see the other side of the coin. The roadside is lined with piles of stones, carefully sifted and laid out to be crushed, either in machines or by roadside gangs, very often female. Many of these stoneworkers have come across the border from Myanmar and are not welcome. The Burmese immigrants in Bangladesh are as much of a sore point here as the Bangladeshi immigrants are in India.
Near Sylhet, the stone industry is replaced by undulating tea gardens, and we spend the night at a plantation home turned into a guesthouse called The White House and run by a slow-moving, chain-smoking, very bright, very laid-back man called Kais Chowdhury.
This was his family house. It was burnt down in the vicious war of 1971, when this country was called East Pakistan and the Pakistan army came in very hard to quash any hopes of secession. They lost and, helped by the Indian army, Bangladesh came into being at the end of that year. But it left behind scars and a lot of people who claim to have been ‘freedom fighters’ at that time. This substantial, spacious and attractive house, with its deep verandahs, is, sadly, in slow decline. Water squeezes arthritically from the taps and disappears even more slowly down the plugholes; the wiring is eccentric and some switches require considerable effort just to find them. The White House has some grace and charm but it also has a fatal inertia, as if it’s being slowly strangled by the rich profusion of tropical flowers and shrubs that spill over onto it, mounting the walls and climbing over the balustrades.
All evening and long into the night, trucks from the stoneworks thunder along the road close by. Kais says that the opposition party has called a hartal, a protest strike against the government, for tomorrow, and the truck-drivers are hurrying to get their work done before the morning.
It’s apparently the second hartal this week. After the steely discipline of Bhutan, my first day in Bangladesh has been, well, different.
Day One Hundred and Eighteen : Sylhet
‘The Londonis’ is the local name for those Bangladeshis who have made a lot of money from running restaurants and allied businesses in places like Brick Lane in East London and brought the money back to build opulent houses in their home country. Sylhetis, more Assamese than Bengali, have a reputation for being clannish, for sticking together and helping each other, and have done particularly well in England. The evidence is all over the town, in row after row of fresh-built mansions in the International Rich Style. The paint is hardly dry on some of these urban palaces, stacked with a riot of cornices, columns, pediments, balconies and burglar-proof fences. They should, one feels, all be set in ten-acre compounds, but there’s no room here, so they jostle together in streets that have not yet been paved.
Abdul Rahman was one of the first successful Sylheti emigrants to Britain. He meets me outside a multistorey block of apartments he’s just had built. He’s dressed simply in a lungi (a long white cloth worn round the waist and legs) and a hand-embroidered white shirt. He is carrying a hookah and puffing at it nervously. His wife died five days ago and he’s not sure whether he should be talking to us at all. But in the courtyard back at his house, with various members of his family watching from the doorways, he proves to be engaging company. Mr Rahman has had three nationalities thrust upon him in his lifetime. Born an Indian in 1929, he became briefly Pakistani, when Muslim East Bengal was hived off at Independence in 1947, and finally Bangladeshi in 1971.
Despite being in his late seventies, he’s an energetic, impulsive and tactile storyteller, all eyes and teeth.
‘When I went to England first,’ he turns towards me, wide-eyed, as if about to divulge an enormous secret. ‘There was not any motorway at all. Wasn’t any motorway in England.’
The conversation veers from the Pinteresque, ‘Do you know Bewdley?’ to the Pythonic, ‘The only word I knew was “garlic”.’
This didn’t help when he got his first job, in a steelworks. When a workmate asked him how old he was, he had to guess at what he meant.
‘I gave him my tongs.’
The man asked him again how old he was.
‘Then I give him my overalls.’
Eventually, Abdul Rahman learnt English well enough to attempt his first, and perhaps most important, deal. He sold a chicken he’d bought for two shillings and sixpence to someone for ten shillings. By the end of the next year he was a poultry magnate, selling 12,000 birds a week, and, in the process, becoming the first official halal butcher in England.
With colourful hand gestures he illustrates why he considers halal killing to be superior.
He mimes a man holding a chicken.
‘English way, squeeze and pull. We think this is a cruel way.’ He pauses again, mouth open wide.
‘Muslim way, you cut like this. Very sharp knife, quick throat, let the blood out, and she very nicely sleep. This is halal way.’
He maintains that the houses he’s put up in Sylhet are for his extended family and not for profit.
‘That is our tradition here.’
In any case, it cost him a lot of money. Land is expensive here, he says, more expensive than London or New York.
‘Because the people who run my country, they always want money for this and that.’ Bribes, he alleges darkly, are an essential part of any transaction. His hand is on my arm again and his eyes bore into mine.
‘I speak true. I always speak true.’
There is a pause, and then a last big, toothy laugh.
Day One Hundred and Nineteen : Chittagong
Have a lie-in this morning. Unfortunately, it’s at the Harbour View Hotel in Chittagong. I have a distinct feeling that they are demolishing the room above me. Roars, thumps and metallic crashes above my head mingle with a tumult of car horns in the street below and ear-splitting bursts of pneumatic drilling from a building site opposite.