Rivers.

by Chaitali Mitra (India)

I didn't expect to find Bangladesh

An old Bollywood song playing on the radio mixed with my mother’s dry remark,“..we should have just gone to Bhutan”. We were driving to Kolkata airport on a particularly humid day. Visions of people living in cheap plastic tents floated in my mind as my mother grumbled again about spending her summer break in Bangladesh. The first building in Dhaka was like a ghost of the 70s; paint chipping in the corners, old furniture, but strangely clean. A stray cat gracefully walked over to the Bangladeshi side unnoticed, while we waited our turn at the immigration counters. ‘This is a strange place’, I thought. A week later, my parents flew back to India. A little scared and alone for the first time in a foreign land, I proceeded to meet an online friend. ‘‘Audacious!’’, my mother would say. Unknown to her, Shabir and I made our way to Sadarghat. The oldest port of the region, a ghat crammed with travellers, boatmen and street vendors alike, it extends into the mighty Buriganga via a wooden landing, gently swaying with every ripple. Our launch, as Shabbir called the small ships, wasn’t there yet. I caught sight of a man taking a dip in the pitch black waters and looked away pinching my nose. The landing moved abruptly, as if hit by a small earthquake. Above our heads, a huge launch was pushing its way through a small gap between two others anchored to the ghat. ‘Launch!’, I smiled. I had heard my grandmother, my Thamma use that word so many times in her stories. This was before the partition of 1947, before World War II. Every time her family had to go somewhere, they would take a ‘launch’; to buy new clothes, to go to a hospital, sometimes just to hop around during Durga Puja. The third launch was slowly shoving the other two aside. People held on to their belongings; vegetables baskets and all, while the whole platform trembled. The launch had almost made it to the front; a huge jolt, and everyone went back to their routine. Shabbir had appeared with two tickets for a launch heading south. Ours was out of a World War II movie. Everything on deck and in the cabins had a stale smell, while also being surprisingly clean. Feeling a little awkward to be alone with a known stranger, I stepped out of our cabin. We had started to move. It was getting colder and the city lights on the other end of the river were fading away into the purple sky. I sat there thinking about my childhood, all of the afternoons with my thamma, her white sarees, white hair and white skin glistening while she animatedly shared her stories of Bengal. The Bengal that is Bangladesh now. The sweat stuck to me like a second skin. I didn’t mind. I was back in my grandmother’s stories. The black waters turned crystal clear, night turned to morning and we transferred to an old bus. As the bus reached a river, I looked to the right to see a half made bridge in the distance. “It takes them decades to make a bridge in Bangladesh”, said Shabbir, “So we just travel by rivers here”. Was I in my grandmother’s story now? Was I in the 1920’s? “We used to travel by rivers, it was all that there was!”, Thamma had once told me. Like clockwork, the bus hopped onto the Ferry along with scooters, motorcycles, dogs, humans, chickens, and together we crossed the narrow river. Two excited kids swam alongside the ferry trying to overtake it. ‘Just like my thamma would have’, I thought. A friend would later say that Bangladesh can’t be as beautiful as my photos made them to be. He had only known Bangladesh as the Bangladeshi refugees that each Indian has learnt to overlook. I saw something else; a deep green and dark blue separated at the horizon for as far as you could see. She had died a few years before I reached her Bengal but my thamma will always be my favourite storyteller and Bangladesh was like stumbling into untouched stories from my grandmother’s childhood.