Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (26 page)

Rivers, sea, and forests converged at the border town of Teknaf. In grimy rooms lit by fluorescent lights, a police chief and an intelligence officer complained to me about “criminals and stateless people all from Burma who were raping, looting, begging.” Local Bangladeshis were unemployed because the ethnic Rohingyas—Muslim refugees from the western Burmese state of Arakan—were willing to do the same jobs for less money. Muslim solidarity here was wearing thin. One local politician told me, “The Rohingyas deal in arms, drugs, any sort of crime. If you catch three criminals, there will be at least one Rohingya among them.”

There were a quarter million Rohingyas in southeastern Bangladesh, with thousands in refugee camps. There were rumors of Saudi NGOs recruiting Rohingyas for terrorist projects. “You can hire a Rohingya to kill anyone you want for a very small price,” one local claimed. What these stories really told me was not that the refugees were criminals; only that they were hated.

The Rohingyas were part of a beautiful hybrid Buddhist-Hindu-Muslim civilization in Arakan where the influences of Persia and India crosshatched with those of Siam and the rest of Southeast Asia. Arakan’s current isolation and lost Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism, which flourished owing to old trade routes, “is part of Burma’s present-day poverty,” writes the Burmese intellectual and U.N. official Thant Myint-U.
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The Arakanese once held Chittagong to the northwest and Pegu to the southeast, even as they were at other times oppressed and brutally vanquished by the Bengal sultanate and the Mandalay-based Burmese kings. It was a rich history, with a culture replete in Sanskrit and Islamic learning.

The Rohingya village I visited near Teknaf was one of the worst refugee camps I have seen anywhere in the world, and I have seen many in some of the most destitute parts of Africa. It housed about ten thousand people, and was literally crawling with small children. The makeshift houses of bamboo and plastic wrap were each built against the other. A recent tropical storm had stripped away 10 percent of the roofs.
Diarrhea, skin diseases, and respiratory infections predominated among the illnesses, a charity worker from Doctors Without Borders–Holland told me. I was surrounded by refugees, and plied with stories about rape and forced labor in Burma, as if this were the late eighteenth century and the Court of Ava (near Mandalay) were rounding up thousands of Arakanese for building and irrigation projects.
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The Rohingyas have vaguely Asian features, even as their complexions resemble those of Bangladeshis. They embody the racial and cultural linkage between the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and as a result are despised both here and in Burma. Only a world of more flexible borders will free them.

Traveling north back to Chittagong, my bus plowed through one newly formed swamp after another. It was only a week into the monsoon: no cyclone, no tropical storm, just normally heavy rains and mudslides that had killed more than 120 people in forty-eight hours nearby. Off to the sides of the raised road on which the bus traveled, the dark brown water reached up to the bottom of the corrugated iron rooftops. In other places, men gripped their skirtlike
longyis
in waist-deep water. Whole tree trunks were being swept downstream as rivers flowed only a foot or two under bridges. On these bridges, hordes of young men had gathered with ropes, fishing for free firewood as it passed beneath. Soon, high mounds of wood were piled up, later to dry. As I said, this was the beginning of the monsoon, with heavier rains expected in July and August.

Society coped as well as it could, often ingeniously. A cascading series of text messages on cellphones warned of danger ahead. Signal flags were set up on beaches to forewarn of incoming water. Disaster supplies had been pre-positioned in some places as part of an increasingly sophisticated early-warning system. The Bangladeshi army and navy were available in case of major catastrophe. Otherwise, in many ways it was up to the villages and the NGOs to deal with the natural world.

T
he low-hanging monsoon clouds shut in the sky like a late afternoon in November. Again I was on a raised road lined with dank, frothy green water pits. Everywhere across the sea-level-flat landscape were bicycle rickshaws, paddy fields, and mountains of logs, bamboo, and jackfruit. The repetition told a story: an economy of subsistence agriculture, where the majority of people lived in bamboo shacks, and where the land was being deforested. Yet it was this landscape, one had to remind oneself, which, along with that of China’s, was the basis of capital for the British East India Company, the successor to Portuguese and Dutch power in the Indian Ocean. The wealth of Bengal—its large, dense, hard-working population and vast stores and production of basic commodities like rice, sugar, spices, and vegetable oil—accounted for 50 percent of the company’s total trade.
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Also because of its textiles, Bengal was a trove of riches for earlier empires as well. Bengal, “a land so fertile it transcends them all,” writes Camões in
The Lusíads.
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Here was where the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal trading networks overlapped. Islam spread here in the Middle Ages with the original clearing of the forest and the agrarian expansion that followed, just as in the present-day deforestation and the spread of poor-quality urbanization is leading to an ideological intensification of religiosity. Brick mosques were common: square, with single domes, and occasional terra-cotta ornamentation, inspired, the scholar Richard M. Eaton tells us, by the shape of curved, thatched bamboo huts and pre-Islamic Buddhist temples. Even amidst the most beautiful of these mosques, there was a scraggly wildness to
East Bengal, something that has historically to do with the greater severity of the monsoon here because of the proximity of the Ganges delta.
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After seven hours of driving southwestward from Dhaka, the bus reached the Bangladeshi-Indian border town of Benapole. A swarm of beggars, porters, and rickshaw drivers awaited the passengers. Bargaining commenced. I settled on a bicycle rickshaw that took me the half-mile distance to the actual border for the equivalent of fifty cents. A second man transported my luggage on a creaky wooden oxcart. A third took my passport. The point was to employ as many people as possible. I tipped half a dozen people, some of whom handed me—sold me, rather—forms to fill out. Through the opaque confusion there was a system, though. My passport reappeared later in a filthy shack after it had been stamped. A succession of officials looked warily through my passport and luggage. It seemed that there just had to be something suspicious about a foreigner who traveled by bus to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) rather than fly.

An hour later I walked through a clanging, rusted iron gate into India, where the same garbage-strewn station awaited me, with makeshift hutments and scrawny dogs, tormented by flies, which I was careful not to step on. I filled out entry forms in an alley, crouching on the ground next to the young man who had handed them out, and who also changed my money. Nowhere on either side of the border did I see a woman.

Land borders expose the naked truth about a country. Crossing once from Mexico to the United States, in the space of a few feet I journeyed from a world of beggars, crumbling sidewalks, and rusted signage to an alienating, protective bubble of precision building standards—that is, from a third world society to a nervous first world one. What this land border showed me about Bangladesh was not surprising—a poverty-wracked country of weak institutions; what it showed about India was how far it still had to go to be a real global power. It was the very sameness of both sides of the border that was shocking, given all the upbeat media reports about the Indian economy.

Yet, as soon as I reboarded the bus and started out toward Kolkata there was a dramatic change in the countryside. The strangled-in-greenery landscape of Bengal continued as before, with the same piles of logs everywhere. But rather than corrugated iron, I saw clay tiles on the roofs. There were clotheslines, potted flowers, an elegant if mildewed balcony here and there, some gabled windows, and actual tea shops: signs of domesticity that made the ratty sprawl of Bangladeshi towns
appear untamed by comparison. I noticed women in jeans and tight tank tops—yes, I was no longer in a predominantly Muslim country. There were cash machines and many signs in English. In Bangladesh everyone spoke Bengali, so there was no need of English as a lingua franca as in India, with its various languages and dialects.

After three hours the bus reached the outskirts of Kolkata.

“There is beggary all over India, but nowhere is there beggary on the scale of Calcutta’s,” observes the British travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse, in the course of describing often-limbless, Brueghelesque figures who invoke one’s charity everywhere in this city of more than 14 million, a city whose very name evokes despair.
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The word “Calcutta” is taken from Kali (Kalikata), the Hindu goddess of disease, death, and destruction. Robert Clive, who consolidated British rule over Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century, labeled it “the most wicked place in the Universe.”
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Rudyard Kipling called it “the city of dreadful night.” Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India a hundred years ago, said its “huge and palpitating slums” were a disgrace to British rule.
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Kolkata’s poverty in our own age is famously documented by Dominique Lapierre in
The City of Joy.
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It was in Kolkata where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime ministering to the poor, confirming the city’s hellhole status.

But when judging a place, it all depends on from where the traveler has arrived. To arrive in Kolkata by bus from Dhaka, the capital of next-door Bangladesh, is like arriving in West Berlin from East Berlin during the Cold War—a trip I made several times. The grayness is gone. Instead of the rusted signage of Dhaka, there is a profusion of giant swanky billboards advertising global products, glowing in the night like backlit computer screens. In Dhaka, traffic is dominated by creaky old bicycle rickshaws; in Kolkata, by late-model cars. There are, too, the sturdy yellow Ambassador taxis, the zippy little Indian-produced Maruti family cars with catalytic converters, and the many luxury vehicles.

Yet the rickshaws that you see in Kolkata provide a signature image of exploitation worse than anything you will see in Dhaka: one human being is not merely being transported by another, who is furiously peddling uphill, but by one who is actually running uphill, pulling the rickshaw like an animal on his bare feet.

Kolkata can be obscene. One day I walked out of a tony espresso bar—its windows cluttered with credit card stickers—that offered an eclectic Indian-cum-globalized cuisine of extravagant mocha cocktails
and
paneer tikka
sandwiches. As I left the air-conditioning for the broiling street, I was careful not to step over the whole families sleeping on cardboard along a sidewalk where men and women urinated. A young man began to follow me. After several blocks I still could not shake him. He put his résumé as a documentary film producer in my face, and desperately pleaded with me to hire him. “I realize I am invading your privacy, sir,” he said, “but what am I to do? Perhaps you are angry with me. I will stop bothering you, but only if you give me a job.” He was neatly if poorly dressed, out to make an impression. In the United States we have the luxury of junk mail offers and telemarketing calls, allowing you to tear up the piece of paper or hang up the phone. In Kolkata, such unwanted entreaties take a very personal form. Street solicitations here are a form of cold calling. Escape is impossible.

Kolkata demonstrates that poverty is neither exotic nor fascinating. It can be dull, numb, devoid of meaning, and monotonous. The poor, like the dead, are invisible except when they confront us with their “loathsomeness,” then they are like an “open grave,” writes William T. Vollmann in
Poor People
, a book that, by its very calculated repetition, shows just how wretchedly uninteresting poverty is. Poverty is not exotic, it has no saving graces, it is just awful.
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In its own perverted way, the caste system grants an individual some rights, and thus alleviates a bit the disgrace of poverty. “The Indian individual has no existence other than within and through his caste; outside it he is lost, no longer a man but a social outcast, a nonentity,” writes Madeleine Biardeau, a mid-twentieth-century French Indologist. In traditional India, she explains, “man means nothing in himself.” Even among those with large houses, families tend to cluster in the same room, while the others stand empty. “Fear plays a large part in this clinging together … an undefined, nameless fear; the fear, quite simply, of being alone.”