I pull back the curtains for a view of the harbour, but can’t see it anywhere, and I’m on the tenth floor. Instead, there is a wall of concrete right opposite me, smeared grey-black as if it had been in a fire. Dozens of slight, spindly figures are at work on top of it, either demolishing it or building it. It’s hard to tell.
I fear this unpromising start to the day is not entirely fair on Chittagong. We’ve come here, after all, in search of industrial destruction and dereliction, at the legendary ship-breaking yards further down the coast, and have no time to investigate the old bazaar or the wooded hills that rise out of the heart of Bangladesh’s busy second city.
We drive out to the south, past the port that stretches along the banks of the River Karnaphuli, with its armada of mixed traffic, from break-bulk freighters to sailboats that look like sampans, waiting out in the roads. We follow the coast road through straggling suburbs and villages. Our driver hurtles along, firing off blasts of the horn at anyone and anything that moves. Basil notices that the driver’s thumb is in such continuous use that it’s worn a hole through the plastic on the steering column.
With some relief, we pull off the main road and up a narrow dirt lane to the ship-breaking yard, one of several along this coast that have taken advantage of a plentiful cheap labour force to grab a lion’s share of what was once a lucrative market. We’re welcomed by the manager of the yard, a bearded, thoughtful man with dark glasses and a wide, embroidered shirt, not the sort you’d expect to be running such a rough and ready business. He leads us up a concrete stairwell and out across a patio, past serried ranks of toilets and washbasins that have been stripped off the ships. He shows us into a room where refreshments have been prepared and we take coffee and biscuits looking out over a panorama of sanitary fittings and hear about the state of the industry. It’s not good. A quarter of a century since ship-breaking businesses first sprang up on this stretch of coast only two or three remain. The privately owned Bangladeshi yards are finding it very hard to compete with their state-financed Chinese rivals.
We walk outside and up onto the level above for a view of the yard. It is an extraordinary sight. Dismembered sections of once-mighty ships are scattered across a blackened, oily beach, like the remains of some disastrous invasion. Two ships stand off-shore, awaiting their fate. Furthest away is the Ocean Breeze, a sizeable cruise liner. With her trim white superstructure and matching navy-blue hull and funnel, she looks more like she’s on a maiden voyage than in her death throes. Nearby is a supertanker, the Luccott. Every now and then, a shower of sparks spills down her hull as the oxy-acetylene torches begin eating her away from inside.
I hardly notice the Bay of Bengal. It’s grey and neutral here, like a workshop floor, and it comes as something of a jolt to realize that this is my first sight of the sea in six months of travelling.
Above the shoreline, slices of ships sit marooned in the sand like giant sculptures. The further they are from the sea, the less recognizable they become, until great leviathans are finally reduced to their component parts, piles of pipes, cylinders, air vents, staircases, propellers, lamps, doors and portholes, stacked neatly next to each other.
The manager, who says it takes six to seven months to break down a big ship, tells me that the money is not made from spare parts but from the bulk steel. There is enough in each supertanker to build two skyscraper blocks.
I walk down onto the beach. The stranded sections, an entire boiler room, a beehive of exposed cabins, pipe systems like prehistoric animals, have a mournful beauty, but otherwise it’s like Dante’s inferno. The once golden sand is in a chronic state, pock-marked with grease, oil, human and animal excreta, sinister patches of blue asbestos and scarred by trenches gouged by steel cables dragging heavy metal up the shore. The work force, supplied by private contractors and brought in from other parts of the country, swarm like ants over corpses. Surrounded by jutting, often jagged, edges of solid steel, flying sparks, falling metal and billows of evil-smelling black smoke, they seem desperately short of protective clothing. Headscarves, oil-stained trousers and T-shirts, baseball caps and sandals seem to be the order of the day for labourers, but even skilled men like welders can be seen operating without goggles or workboots. Tools are basic. Apart from the oxy-acetylene torches, most of the demolition work is done with hammer and crowbars. I see a cylinder block being carried away by two boys of school age.
It’s not only ships that are on the scrap heap here.
On the main road outside, almost every shop is selling some kind of marine salvage, from taps and towel rails to crockery and capstans. One salesman stands proudly in front of a pond full of orange lifeboats.
Later, as our Biman flight from Chittagong descends into Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, I can see for the first time the full extent of the watery plain created by the great rivers. From up here I can easily believe the astonishing statistic that Bangladesh has 5000 miles (8000 km) of navigable waterways. Sometimes it’s hard to see where earth and water separate, as the coiling river courses twist and turn and tangle with each other. Villages, marked out by clumps of trees, cling to raised mud banks like vessels adrift in a flat green sea.
Nearer Dhaka the riverbank is lined with brick kilns, all built on the same pattern, symmetrically laid out around a single towering chimney, looking like ancient temples.
Apparently, there are 2000 of them around the capital, and though they look rose-red and eye-catching in the evening sun, every one belches out clouds of unfiltered smoke particles that drift across what they say is already the most polluted big city on earth. Well, whatever it is, we’re in it.
Day One Hundred and Twenty One : Dhaka
You need help to enjoy Dhaka. You certainly need help to understand Dhaka. Otherwise, you might easily be scared off. In 1971 the population was one million. Even conservative estimates believe that number to have grown to 15 million, and with 80 per cent of the country’s jobs located here, there’s little sign of this headlong growth rate slowing down. I’ve been warned that getting around can be slow and uncomfortable, but I have great faith in my companion Ishraq Ahmed, a short, canny man with a trim beard and an immense list of contacts.
This morning’s Bangladesh Observer carries front-page reports of the second hartal this week. Both leading parties use these one-day strikes as political weapons and there are reports of marches, arrests, accusations, counter-accusations and several deaths in violent clashes with the police. The paper’s mailbag seems united in condemning yesterday’s action. Today, Dhaka is back to normal. This means unmoving lines of cars, trucks, buses, and over-revving, smoke-belching tuk-tuks, interwoven with any number of the estimated 700,000 bicycle rickshaws that offer a sporting alternative to the traffic jam.
There seem to be very few rules of the road. Road sense, in Dhaka, is knowing how to get to your destination by any means possible.
‘It’s the only country in the world where every one has right of way,’ says Ishraq, with, I detect, a certain quiet pride.
There’s a bracing, nerve-shredding excitement to Dhaka’s street life, especially as we near the river, at the heart of the old city, where the traffic is infiltrated by hundreds of people weaving in and out of the crush, dodging from warehouses to shops to dealers with heads and shoulders full of anything from fish to electric fans and company ledgers to car parts.