I decide traveling with Peter is a complete waste of time. He’s not the pathway to the key. He’s just a confused young man who makes bad choices. He is a guy who lives by whim. he doesn't think. If that is what I was suppose to learn from him, consider it learnt.
I’m leaving Calcutta, The train antiquated, rusty and bent with age, rolling and rocking, rhythmically undulating out of the black hole, Calcutta. The train moves slowly, less than five miles an hour. Naturally and casually in my soiled T-shirt and blue-stripped pyjama bottoms, behind the big window, I watch forever at life being lived out, babies squatting in the mud, thin men in colourful sarongs and bushy moustaches bunched up at the crossings, the huts and hovels, the roofs made from corrugated aluminum, broken boards of lumber, tires, old bike parts thrown atop for weight, storage. Everything is brown, grey or rusty, rotting.
We roll out, cautiously avoiding the mass of humanity living in this thin strip alongside the tracks, deliberately moving toward our terminus, gradually getting there, the journey the adventure, the travel the learning, the arriving can wait, it will happen when it is time for it to happen.
In Calcutta, I slept on a cot, on the hostel roof. After midnight, the city would slowly go quiet. I would have a smoke, laying on my cot, looking up into the starless black sky. I would listen to the backpackers breathe, toss and snore. I would listen to the tuktuks, and the barking dogs, life continuing on and on into the night.
I have this idea that India was once a great nation, think about the Raj, the British taming the masses, building on a system, establishing rail networks, good government.
I’m slipping out of Calcutta (and India) during Holi, a festival where the Hindus throw coloured dye on passersby. At the border, I have to jump into the river before the guards would let me into Bangladesh. I walked into the nearest village and waited for a bus...
Every language has a certain sound, a lilt. Bangladeshi is no different. Everything rolls in Bangladesh, has a b and a d and sometime a c. Even if the word doesn’t contain these consonants, the way people speak sounds like it does, like talking with your lips through a mouth full of sweet green grapes. “Gbood morbning gbood sir, Yoorgb up berry early”. “Early bird catches the worm”, I say “Ahh, ha ha, yoos yos gbood one, sir anb so tgrue”. B before g except after c. A short train ride from downtown Calcutta, I cross into the realm of fragmented time, the land that time forgot, a stalled economy near the bottom of an easy hill. No gas. Arriving at the border in the wobbly back of a bicycle rickshaw, unrecognizable under holi powder, mayhem in the streets as Hindus go wild with festival. “Holi holi”, they say, throwing brightly coloured powder at you and dousing you with plastic cups of water. I jumped into a slow river before the border guards would let me pass. Then a short walk through the boggy flood plains of Bangladesh to the nearest town and train station. I look up at the board. It’s blank. No arrivals. No departures. At the ticket office I ask. “When is the next train?’ Gbood sir, I'b doob not kgnow” This seems unusual, especially as I’ve just arrived from India where the trains are the be all and end all for mass mayhem. Half-nude barkers come down chockablock aisles screaming “Chaaaiii chaaaii chai cha cha cha chachachaacha”, making sweet tea with thick buffalo milk and brown sugar, served in smudged sherry glasses. The station is a microcosm of Bangladeshi life, people are sleeping, eating, playing, working, staring at me. “Well, if I may ask, good sir”, picking up the wordy politeness of the region, “when was the last train?” Deadpan “1973, gbood sir”. It seems that most of the country railroad tracks (near the border with India at least) were ripped up during the breakaway war with Pakistan. Hmm, this is going to be rougher than I thought, no train travel. In Dhaka, I arrive five days later, on my birthday and an overnight and overcrowded ferry, a rusting, leaky, third world cast off. I celebrate by buying a pair of white and blue plastic dice and a watercolor paint set. (A dice dictated purchase.) I”ve become a diceman, randomly careening through power failures, bad food and water and solitude. Life is for the living, I say.
Bhogra lunch
Harder to figure out than Chinese algebra, the script of this language, I walk alone through the streets looking for buses that will announce the bus station. No trains since the 70’s, I”ve been told by a man with a newspaper, he shows me a picture, pointing to himself, “that’s me” he says, lining up to vote seven years ago”. He shows me today’s date and says, “See that little boy”, pointing again “that”s my sister’s kid, Rudy. He lives in Dhaka now, working”. So, they are trying to pass off the recent election as free and fair yet no one I talk to had voted, or even seen any polling stations. Bangladesh, a basket case, I love it here when I’m not being electrocuted in my guesthouse room by stolen, ungrounded electricity, when I’m not being annoyed by childlike Bangladeshis, parodies of themselves, when I’m not being jostled and pounded by the crowds and the bumpy, dharmatic roads. In Bhogra, hanging around, which is what you do in these, stops, so far off the beaten track, feeling like Livingston slashing through the jungle. Victoria Falls. I watch, lounging carelessly with a smoke, some young boys swimming in the town’s water supply. Some teenage boys approach and tell me the mayor wants to have lunch with me. ‘Oh?, OK”, I say. “but you had better go back to you hotel and change”, they say. I review my shabby looking attire and wonder how raggedy, a clean-shaven dice man can get. I change into my “border clothes’. The mayor is a local fat cat and after a brief howdyado in the foray of his clean, sparse home we are seated around a large sunny table with his wife and young daughters. “So, how do you like my country?” he begins. As all Indians, Bangladeshis, Napalese, and assorted Punjabis, Tamals” ask this, I am ready with “Oh yes, it is so beautiful and green and lush, too bad the people are so poor”. The perfect answer. “Who are you here with?”, he wants to know. “Alone”. I say. (I ditched moon-faced Wendy in Rajasthan, Peter in Calcutta. If the fortuneteller was right, Wendy is on her way to a horrible death. Too bad, I only travel with people who make me smile. “And what brings you here?” he asks. “I was in India,” I say, “and just thought I’d have a look”. “But who are you here with?” He tries again, “The UN? The red cross? A mission of some kind?” Finally I get it. “No, no”, I say “I’m just traveling through. The trains are out of commission, as you know, and I just can’t stand long bus rides over bumpy roads, so I stopped to hang out in Bhogra for a day or two, see the sites, you know. It is the provincial capital…" “Yes, yes, of course. So, you are not with any agency?” “No, ‘fraid not. Not pleased. Puzzled.
Bangladesh is hot, muggy, crowded with men in summer shirts, sarongs, thin arms, thick moustaches, cloudy eyes, faces smiling idiotically. With me in my striped pyjama bottoms and Australian bush hat, purchased in Delhi, a needed cash splash with the burning eye of God sending dizzying corkscrew shards of energy into my head, on a budget of $10 a day all inclusively wearing me down, wearing me out.
Bangladeshi countryside is flat lush luscious green, muddy mud mud, life is slow, not easy. Electrocuting myself every couple days, with my electric water boiling prong and tin camping cup, a morning jolt with my cigarette and tea, I scream oh ya hahahyah, shake it off. Throughout the countryside, they steal electricity, in the city there are too many other ways to die to mention, but life is cheap when so meagre.
I sprint for the border. India.
And, after dark there is no power in this town, this town with no name, somewhere north of Rangpur, spooky out there, with the walking dead, I kill cockroaches in the bathroom for something to do, marching in with my Coleman oil lamp, stomping two or three before they flee into the squat toilet.
Tomorrow, I abandon this. Walk back into neoteric India. Ironic, how distances in a flat and airless country, seems so insurmountable.
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