Tigers and Mangroves : Bangladesh River Boat Evokes Past

With departure imminent, the people of the port of Sadar Ghat conspired to give the Rocket a send-off worthy of a great river boat.

Babies reached deep within themselves to wail out. What seemed to be every rickshaw pedalist in the city of Dhaka leaned on his bell. Boatmen on the tiny skiffs that serve as river taxis boomed their river chants. A young boy, trying to stow away, shrieked as a crewman cuffed him behind the ear and tossed him ashore. He climbed on again down by the port paddle wheel. Beggars whined for one last bit of alms.

The operator of a streetside roulette game gave his giant wheel one last forceful spin, making a piece of plastic clack loudly on the nails used as markers.

Queen of the River

The diesel engines began their throaty hum. Other, lesser boats backed off to make way for the queen of the river, the Rocket, flagship of the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Corp. Conversation quickened and then halted reverently. One youth, a model of indecision, jumped ashore at the last instant.

On cue, the setting sun paved a silvery path for the big sidewheel paddle boat to follow on its way down the channel to the Ganges. The Rocket was launched.

“Your dinner?” asked the porter. “English or Bengali?”

If there is a grander way to spend 25 hours than riding on one of the world’s last operating sidewheel paddle boats on one of Asia’s greatest rivers to the fringe of the mangrove forests where the last of the Bengal tigers live, it must be the product of some illegal, euphoric substance that has not been invented.

Pieces of Nostalgia

There are at least four paddle boats operating in the United States, including the magnificent 10-year-old Mississippi Queen. Three more paddle wheelers are under construction in Maryland shipyards. But these, like virtually all of the other paddle wheelers left in the world, are bits of nostalgia designed for affluent tourists--history preserved or even improved.

The past is not preserved in Bangladesh: The future has never arrived. Bangladesh is a relentlessly poor and cruel land. Fourteen percent of all babies born here die before they are a year old, often of cholera.

The waterways of this country are its main transportation routes and its agricultural lifeblood. But they are also its most powerful killers.

In 1970, a tremendous tidal wave swept up the deltas of the rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra, killing more than 500,000 people. In late March this year, an overloaded river launch flipped over in a vicious storm on the river near Dhaka, the capital, killing more than 300 people. When cranes righted the launch the next day, dozens of drowned people dangled from the boat railings.

So this river boat, with a draft of only 5 1/2 feet, a capacity of 900 passengers, known officially and affectionately as the Rocket, is not a gesture to the past. With all due respect to Bangladesh’s little airline, Biman, the Rocket (built 1929, Garden Ridge Shipyards, Calcutta, India) is still considered the finest way to get about here. In some cases, in fact, it is the only way.

The Rocket’s route begins at Sadar Ghat in Dhaka. It winds a serpentine path down the Ganges to Chandpore, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra meet and spread out like a sea. After traveling south and west to Barisal, a major city virtually inaccessible except by water, the Rocket heads due west through the region’s confusing web of rivers and lesser waterways.

At one point, it skirts the northern fringe of the 4,000-square-mile Sundarbans mangrove forest where the last 400 wild Bengal tigers roam. Finally, the route jogs north to Khulna, capital of the poorest of the four political divisions of Bangladesh.

Children Along Banks

Each stop along the way is celebrated by children running along the banks toward the landing pier as soon as the paddle boat comes into view. This must have been how it was in the great Mississippi steamboat days of Mark Twain.

“Drays, carts, men, boys all go hurrying from many quarters to the common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time,” Twain wrote in “Life on the Mississippi.”

At no point on the journey is the Rocket ever alone on the water. The smaller and faster double-decked motor launches constantly speed past, most of them dangerously overloaded. Ancient Bengal river craft with colorfully striped rectangular sails appear on the horizon and silently pass. There are hundreds of barges and innumerable small fishing craft seeking the hilsa and bedki fish famous in Bengal.

Aboard the Rocket, fish are served for breakfast, even with the “English” meal, perhaps as a kippers substitute.

A Dreamlike Scene

It is in the crepuscular light that the river is most dreamlike, just at the time when objects blur, fade into their shadows. At one such time, the Rocket passed a barge on which hundreds of Muslim men prayed, their heads bobbing rhythmically. At another, it came abreast of a massive galley propelled upstream by six straining oarsmen.

North of Chandpore, a man approached who introduced himself as “K.M. Hossain, joint secretary, Ministry of Food, government of Bangladesh.” He had been sent from the capital by the martial-law president, Lt. Gen. Hussain Mohammed Ershad, to visit villages and build support for an upcoming referendum.

The river at this point stretched for miles in all directions. The captain of the Rocket hesitated and positioned the boat before heading across to Chandpore. The waters here are often treacherous.

“This is the place in the river that when I was a little boy my father would gather us all together and say, ‘We place our lives in the care of Allah,’ ” said Hossain.

Muslims, Hindus Together

Hossain talked of the time when all of Bengal, the mostly Muslim eastern half that today is Bangladesh, and the majority Hindu half that is the state of West Bengal in India, was united. Muslims and Hindus lived side by side in those days.

Why can’t Bengal be united again? Hossain was asked. Why can’t the Muslims and the Hindus live together?

“When I was a boy in school, all the Muslim boys had cake for their tiffin (lunch), and all the Hindus took banana,” he said, by way of explanation. “I do not know why this was. But no Muslim took banana, and no Hindu took cake.

“Of course, there were other things, too. We ate beef and they did not. We ate garlic and onion. They said we had a bad smell.

“One day, I was playing with my Hindu friend, and I chased him through his house. I was young and thought nothing of it. But when I got home, my parents told me I had done a terrible thing.

“The Hindu family claimed that I, as a Muslim, had made their house unclean. Because of this, they threw away all their dishes. These were small things, you might say, but they were becoming big things.”

A Pod of Dolphins

The next morning, the boat was escorted by a pod of bottlenose dolphins. At the port of Chalna, cargo ships suddenly, incongruously appeared in a scene that, only moments before, had seemed absolutely primitive, pre-industrial, incapable of producing any such transport.

Immediately south of Chalna loomed the magnificent Sundarbans mangrove forest, a solid wall of 100-foot-tall trees that seemed the very heart of darkness.

“There is no human habitation inside there,” said Ajmal Hossain, a Bangladesh forestry expert who was a passenger on the Rocket. “There is not enough fresh water for drinking.”

In all of Bangladesh, the third most densely populated country in the world, this is the only place where no one lives. Perhaps for this reason it is treasured by the Bangladeshis. They delight in talking about the men who have disappeared in its fastness and the tigers that still prowl the mangrove.

Lights on Horizon

Finally, a bank of electric lights appeared on the horizon--Khulna, population 800,000, but a city without an airport and, on this night, few automobiles and trucks.

Khulna is a very poor city, and its residents are carried through the streets on bicycle rickshaws. Their bells fill the night air with a cheery jingle that mocks the poverty they represent.

On the way to a hotel, the rickshaw driver stopped to pour oil in a small glass jar with a cloth wick.

He hung the jar beneath the carriage of the three-wheel rickshaw. “For light,” he explained.

The only way to return to Dhaka quickly from Khulna is to take a two-hour bus ride north to Jessore, where Biman Bangladesh Airlines plies a route to the capital.

The flight takes 25 minutes to cover approximately the same distance covered by the Rocket in 25 hours. But somehow, that day, the flight into Dhaka seemed much longer than the boat ride out.