On the Road to and from the Sundarbans

  Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India
Saturday, December 15, 2007

On the Road to and from the Sundarbans

On November 30th, Baba and I drove an hour and a half out to the closest area of the Sundarbans for a meeting with the LDLM staff of the Sunderbans projects and then for a brief visit to a village on the way home. The drive to and from were worthy of an entire blog, so I will do a separate entry on the staff meeting.

GEOGRAPHICAL REMINDER: The Sundarbans is a low lying region of marshes and islands developed by the silt deposits of the River Ganges as it empties into the Bay of Bengal. East of Kolkata, it sits at the Northernmost tip of the Bay of Bengal, immediately bordering the coastal regions of Bangladesh. The region is historically poor in an already destitute area of the world, vulnerable to cyclones and monsoon flooding that drains into
the Bay of Bengal.

Along a Rural Road, Daytime:

On both sides of the road for the first 10-15 miles were lush fields with a wide variety crops, all different shades of green, including some fields of flowers. (Kolkata has a booming flower business for religious offerings at homes and temples.)

There were many priceless scenes on the road itself. Four men struggling to make a sharp corner with of an overloaded wooden cart (piled with poles about 30 feet long) before the whole thing crashed. In the fields, men in their cotton cloth wraps and headbands stooping over to work the rows of vegetables, others alone or in groups hoeing small, newly turned patches of earth near picturesque, humble shacks. Women walking on the road in the graying and faded cotton saris of poor laborers, with a baby on their hips, a basket of produce or huge bundles of sticks or grain on their heads.

Light Traffic in Market Town

There was an uninterrupted, heavy presence of foot and bicycle traffic on the road amid the constant flow of cars, trucks, motorcycles, and "van rickshaws". As you move out of town, "van rickshaws" become a major mode of transportation for both people and goods. They have 3 wheels (whether bicycle or motorcycle) with a 3x4 foot flat wooden platform over the back wheels behind the driver. It is common for them to have 3-10 people sitting around the edge of the platform, with an array of legs and bright saris dangling over the sides. Some even have a festive, bright red, yellow, or green roof to afford protection from the sun and on which to pile additional goods (large, stacked metal urns, canisters, baskets, etc.).

Van Rickshaw Traffic Jam

Those remind me of the Victorian type bicycle carriages that you can rent to peddle around seaside towns. These just have no seats. When not loaded with people, van rickshaws without a roof are loaded anywhere from 8 to 12 feet high with baskets, produce, straw, sticks, huge bulging bags, or even bricks.

On one side of the road there is a narrow canal (about 10-15 feet wide) with fetid, foul smelling water. As we get farther out of town, it widens to 50-100 feet across and the odor becomes much stronger. The rank odor of a sewer is impossible to describe, but all too familiar to me now, whether vague or nauseatingly strong. The wider canal has a distinct, coal black high water level line below the grass of the shore. When I ask Baba about the black rim, he tells me, "This is the waste of Kolkata. No one dares to use that water because it is too toxic, and the politicians will never spend the money to clean it up. "

Every few hundred or so yards, a large pile of new bricks sits, awaiting use: lots of construction is going on everywhere here, however poor the district. There is no end to the huts, small garage-size buildings of crumbling brick or worn cement, in various stages of disrepair, stretching along both sides the roadway. Many are dingy storefronts, some are homes. Almost as many are empty and abandoned. Open storefronts are doing business with the heavy foot traffic. Rural is not quiet or subdued in West Bengal. It is buzzing with activity and life. You would never see anything like this on a rural road in the U.S. Most of India's teeming billion plus population live in the rural areas, and they all seem to be constantly on the move, walking , bicycling, hitching a ride on a van rickshaw, or buying or hawking goods from a rickety stall beside the road.

Market Town Vegetable Vendor

Market towns cluster about every 5 to 10 miles, and they are furiously vibrant, chaotically active throngs of machinery, animals (cows, goats, and some of the saddest, dustiest, most beaten down looking dogs you have ever seen) and humanity. Everyone and everything is in everyone else's way. Huge black bulls with humps on their back and cows wander lazily in the midst of it al, or simply plop down to nap in the highway or in the busiest intersection in town.

Soon we have passed the agricultural area and are flanked on both sides by the dominant industry of this region: fish farms.

Family Compound by Fish Farm

Over time, most of the poor, small landowners have been forced under pressure from usurious moneylenders to sell their land. It has all been converted into mile after mile after mile after mile of shallow fish farms that stretch as far as the eye can see. They look somewhat like rice paddies, with more prominent, far less picturesque raised earth borders that lack any sign of green. Tiny little bamboo and straw shacks stand on stilts above the water, large enough for one person to sit or lie down. These are for the guards who watch the ponds to assure they are not being pilfered.

Precious few people are working these fish farms. One can only wonder about the poverty that intensifies among the local population. The workers here are the ONLY ones I see the entire day. I ask Baba, "if I buy fish in a restaurant, is it likely to have been grown in these waters?" He answers, "No. These are all prawns, for international export. That is where the money is."

Fish Farm Workers

We pass an area where all the bricks are made for Kolkata. The kiln operations are set back from the roadway, beyond fields of fish farms.

Brick Factory Overlooking Fish Farm

The Night Ride

The drive home to Kolkata in the dark after the meeting and village visit is an adventure in and of itself. It is pitch black outside, even in the market towns, every one of which are busier than any street in Kolkata that I have ever seen. Parked cars, trucks, van rickshaws line both sides of the road. Most of the vendor stalls and huts are open for business. People are everywhere: hopping on and off van rickshaws, buying a quick streetside snack or meal, doing all sorts of other shopping and socializing, casually mingling, walking across the highway where buses, cars, trucks, bicycles, motorcycles, are jammed to a full stop (and at every conceivable angle) or crawling forward with horns blaring. The only lights in this frenetic beehive of human activity are vehicle headlights and the occasional, dimly lit single fluorescent or weak halogen light bulb (powered by generator, there is no electricity here).

Back on the highway, there are many, many people on this road walking alone, in families or in other groups, crowded onto van-rickhaws, riding their bicycles, all passing one another, all with no light to warn you are there. Suddenly the back of a shirt is bouncing back at us in the glare of the headlights. We find ourselves nearly on top of a congenial group on a van rickshaw. They look completely relaxed and continue sharing a laugh. Our driver has to go slowly to keep from hitting someone. (An accident injuring a pedestrian can turn quickly into a riot in which the offending car , truck or bus is burned and the driver and passengeras assaulted). Cars, trucks and buses coming from the opposite direction have no such concerns, however, and barrel down on us in our lane at full speed, nearly driving us off the road on a number of occasions, as they pass those in their side of the road.

The energy of this life that is everywhere is palpable. No one seems in a particular hurry in the streets of the market towns or walking home. In the U.S., families would be at home sitting down to dinner, tucking their children into bed. I could not fathom the social pattern here until the other night, when someone explained to me that typically Bengali families eat dinner between 9:30 and 11:30 PM.