Srimangal and Sylhet Trip: Day 1

I’ll have to split the post about last weekend’s trip into three parts to make it more manageable. This post will cover everything that happened on Thursday July 1st, the first day of the trip.
After eating breakfast, we set out around 8 AM. Shanta and Atif came with us, as did Rozima, Shamim, Farzana, the professor who had lectured us on Wednesday (who I will call ‘the professor’), and one of his former students. Including our luggage we managed to fill up the bus.
I love driving. You get a feel for distances and a real picture of life in the countryside. This is even more true in Bangladesh than in the US. In the US, what you see from the interstate isn’t necessarily representative of the people who live in the area. In Bangladesh, since the roads are new impositions on the landscape, you can truly see what life is like around it.
It took forever for us to drive through the Dhaka suburbs. The professor called it a giant, expanding octopus and I can see where he drew the comparison. While we were still within the corporate zone of Dhaka we passed through a village area. At one point in this village area we were stopped in traffic, and a family came out to look at the bus full of bideshis. They seemed very friendly, and let me take their picture before the bus moved on.
After a long time we reached the outskirts of Dhaka and then the open countryside. The countryside was partially like Dhaka but mostly different. There were rickshaws and CNGs everywhere we went, even, to my surprise, in tiny little village areas. Every town we passed through had a monument in a traffic circle that reminded me of the monuments in the older parts of Dhaka. Since it’s the rainy season, whole areas of the country were flooded; men paddled boats through the open plain and fishing nets were everywhere. The Bengali fishing technique involves a net held by tall poles, and these contraptions dotted the flooded landscape. Sometimes I would see a man standing in a boat beside one of these fishing nets collecting his catch. Another common site was fruit and vegetable sellers sitting by the roadside with a basket of newly harvested produce. We drove through one town that had a fruit market full of jackfruit and lotkon fruit, which are little round yellow fruit with two sections on the inside, each with a hard seed in it. To eat it, you peel the skin and suck the fruit off of the seed. The teachers bought a bunch from a vendor through the window so we could all try it. As we drove on, I noticed that the flat green floodplain with occasional rows of trees and houses looked like the farmland in central Ohio. The professor explained that Bengalis always like to have trees around their houses and purposefully plant them there. He said that there is a noticeable difference when you pass out of the Bengali cultural area going toward Delhi in India; toward Delhi the houses are one place and the trees are another, but in Bengal they’re clumped together. The professor also told me about the Bangladesh division of land into lowlands, intermediate lands, and highlands. We passed through all of them during our trip, and there was a distinct difference in landscape and farming styles.
We drove through Srimangal town and through some tea gardens, or cha bagans, on the other side. We soon passed some cha bagan workers on their way to or from the tea fields. I’ll write more about the cha bagan laborers later in this post. We stayed at a tea resort that night, which was located among the cha bagans. The bungalows were old and not very nice, but ours had a wonderful view out back. Everything smelled fresh; the air was so much cleaner there than it is in Dhaka. We ate lunch in the resort clubhouse before heading out.
Our first stop was a village of a tribal group named the Tippera. The professor visits fairly frequently, so he knew the people there and talked to them. The first thing I noticed about the village was that their houses were made differently from other Bengali village houses I had seen. We were met by some really cute little kids and two women weavers. The women showed us their wares and I bought a lovely orna. Then I went outside and talked to the kids for a little bit, using my small amount of Bangla to ask them what their names were. The weavers took us to see their looms, which were sunken into the ground and different from any loom I had seen before. We then had to leave so we could get to our next stop.
Our next stop was a cha bagan laborers’ village. The bus parked next to a big field with a few stores along one side and a large pavilion a lot of children were waiting for us. It was a school holiday, but they had come to meet us. The professor greeted them with namoskar, which in Bangla is the Hindu greeting. Bangla doesn’t really have a non-religious greeting, so you have to choose based on religious affiliation. The cha bagan laborers must be Hindu. The kids were very cute and happy to see us. I talked to some of them, asking their names and anything else I could think of saying. Shamim, one of our teachers, picked up a drum and played while one boy sang. He had a wonderful singing voice. Then some of the children performed a dance for us that involved rapping sticks and moving in a circle. They had obviously practiced for a long time. We handed out candy and pencils that the program had bought. While we were about to leave the women were returning from work in the fields, carrying large baskets on their heads. Cha bagan laborers live in a state of extreme poverty and semi-indentured servitude. Their ancestors were recruited from tribes in India in the 1800s, and they are not allowed to go outside the cha bagans. These restrictions are loosening a little bit now, but they are still restricted in their access to education and knowledge about the outside world. They are paid 1 taka/day, in addition to a food allowance and access to a small paddy field. I walked back into their living area and, although they live in such poverty, they are still better off in terms of housing (and probably food) than many poor in Dhaka. My interactions with the children left me wishing that I knew more Bangla, so I could ask them more things about their lives than just what their name is.
We then went to the village of another tribal group, the Monipuri. To get there, we had to walk through a village and a raised road among the rice paddies. The scenery was breathtaking. Along the road there was a shopping strip with five stores selling handmade Monipuri merchandise. I bought a lot of things there, including a sari and some bags. As I came out of a store I heard the sound of a loom and the professor asked if I wanted to go find the weaver. I did, and we walked into the village proper to find him. He turned out to be an old man weaving by the light of a single lamp. I asked if I could take a picture, and got some good ones as he wove. Across the street another weaver brought out some ornas she had woven, and I bought one from her. Then we went back to the shopping area. Shanta and Farzana, two of the teachers, and a few of us were still in the stores after it got dark and started to rain. We had to hurry back across the dark fields to the main road in the rain.
Near where we had parked there was a tea cabin famous for its 7-layer tea. The tea really had seven layers, and each layer was a different color and flavor. No one is allowed to know how it’s made; they even lock the door while preparing it. My favorite layers were the top three, which tasted like ginger.
We finally went back to the resort for dinner. The bungalows were old and nasty, but our room had a gecko in it. Geckos are called tiktiki because their noise sounds like that, and they’re a great thing to have in one’s room because they eat mosquitos.