Bangladesh Tourism Board
Beautiful Bangladesh
A country is mostly the things people do every year without being asked. These are six of them.
Every April the mawali take their boats into the Sundarbans to cut wild comb. They go without protection because the smoke is the protection, and because the honey pays for the year. This is the oldest working relationship anyone in Bangladesh has with a forest, and it is negotiated tiger by tiger.
Kash grass flowers at the end of the monsoon and then the whole thing goes over in a fortnight. It grows on the newest land in the country, the sandbars the rivers put down last year, which is why the fields move. Bengali autumn is officially two months. In practice it is this.
The Jamuna is braided, up to fourteen kilometres wide, and it rebuilds itself every year. New islands, called chars, rise out of it and are settled within months. Others go under. There are people in this country whose family address has moved four times without anybody packing a truck.
A pal para is a potters' neighbourhood, and it exists because the kiln is shared. One firing, many families, everybody's work in the same pit. The wheel is turned by hand or by foot, never by motor, and the shapes have not changed much since the terracotta on the temple walls upcountry.
Every evening about a hundred launches leave Dhaka for the south, all within the same hour, from a terminal with no obvious system that works perfectly. Horns, gangplanks, tea sellers, and families running with bedding rolls. If you only do one thing in Dhaka, stand on the top deck of a moored launch at six and watch.
Chandranath sits on a hill above Sitakunda and pilgrims climb it barefoot in February for Shivratri. It is 1,020 steps, it is not easy, and at the top on a clear day you can see the Bay of Bengal on one side and the hills going into Tripura on the other.
