What am I doing here?

The whole world was blue in the morning when I stepped out of my little cabin and lent over the white railing. The ship was not moving and there was a cold smell of rust and oil and condensation and salt, and beyond that the rot-dark smell of the land: mud and fetid canal-cuts and buffalos and dried fish. But the land was out of sight. Everything was out of sight. There was no sky and no water and no horizon; just pale, damp blue nothing. Every few moments the haze-black outline of a little arch-prowed fishing boat would drift into view out of the murk, figures standing straight-backed and wrapped in blankets on the deck, before floating silently away again into nothing.

The ship had slithered out of Barisal at ten o clock the night before. I ate yellow biriyani with cardamom and shreds of chicken in a smoky brown room on the dock, then picked past dented oil barrels and up the greasy gangplank and the ship eased off into the velvet darkness of the delta, creeping along mud channels, sweeping the gloom with a flickering searchlight.
The cabin was little bigger than a cupboard, with a floor of rust and a dangling light-bulb, and brown linoleum tacked to the walls. The bed was barely two feet wide, and when I lay down I could hear the cockroaches scratching between the boards. I turned the light on and crushed five or six of them with my boots – they were the size of my thumb – but more always scurried out from under the sleeping platform, so I covered my face with the sheets and slept a heavy, leaden sleep.
And in the morning it was all blue.

This was a strange world: the frayed end of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Delta where the land loses itself in one direction and the sea loses itself in another, and there is a hundred miles where neither holds sway. A strange world, in a strange country of mud and creeping mist and boats and rickshaws and water-hyacinth and bright white darkness.
I slept again for an hour, and when I came out of the cabin onto the narrow green gangway a liquid yellow sunlight was seeping down through an air like milk in water. A ghosted stand of tall palms and a rotten bank of mud-crab shoreline had risen, very close, and the ship was turning in a creamy circle, and we slipped away with a slow-beating engine into the pale morning. The water was like grey smoked-glass and the black-tar fishing boats swam in and out of view.
The ship had a rust-and-soot-streaked yellow funnel, and a wheelhouse of dirty white with no glass in the windows, and we were due to reach the great smoke-and-grit port of Chittagong, on the eastern edge of the mud-delta where the land turns south and runs on, past Cox’s Bazaar to Burma, before sunset.

The blue of the dawn paled to a hot yellow, and hollowed to an aching white noon, and we rolled on under a great blank sky over empty brown water and there were no more fishing boats until we swung to a mooring in the running tide off Hattia Island at midday.
The shore was a hundred metres away, and it looked like all the shores in Bangladesh: smudged with a yellow haze, a long, level bank of mud with a long, low wall of palms further back behind it. There were hundreds of people ranked along the water’s edge, watching the ship, and dozens of the high-prowed black boats were cutting across the current towards us with clattering engines and crowded decks. They brought chickens on board to sell in the markets in Chittagong. They were packed into great wicker baskets like old-fashioned lobster pots and they swung them up over the sides and stacked them on deck and the ship smelt like a farmyard drifting in the mud-salt of the delta.
When we pulled away from Hattia the water was full of swirling brown eddies, and the deck was crowded with chicken farmers and clucking baskets, and the sky was yellow and there were no more boats and no more land.
I ate boiled rice and boiled vegetables and boiled river fish at a crooked table, nailed to the floor in a space under the bridge, and the light fell in through the rust-edged doorway in white sheets and the cook asked me if I was married.

The afternoon stretched and lengthened and softened behind us and the water was brown and there was no land. People, many of them, dozed among the oily ropes and the chicken baskets on the deck, limbs thin and angular under cotton lunghis and grubby white vests. Below deck in the third class dormitory it was noisy with the roar of the engine and the crying of babies and there was a smell of diesel and vomit and sweat, and I went back on deck thinking, a little absurdly, and a little nervously, of the pilgrim ship in Lord Jim.
I lent over the railing watching the water surging past. It was a silky opaque brown; you could see nothing through it. There was something about it that seemed shallow; it lacked the great pulsing confidence of the open ocean, and I wondered just how deep it was. And as I did I felt the whole ship rise a little, rear up a little, the voice of the engine changed to a shriller, straining pitch, and we stopped moving. Then the engine went astern and the water churned around us and we eased down lower, settled, and were hard aground. The water of the Bay of Bengal was very shallow indeed.

The haze had cleared enough to show that the nearest land was somewhere beyond the lost horizon, and it had been hours since the last fishing boat slid past. The dozing passengers on the deck shifted a little; a couple stood and peered over the sides.
I went up rusting flights of steps to the bridge. Crewmen in white vests were peering into the yellow distance in all directions; one of them, a short man with a thick grey beard, grinned at me a little nervously.
Some of the other passengers had clambered up the stairs too; the crewmen were ignoring them. There was a schoolteacher with a white skullcap and a young man from Khulna who was travelling with his sister and her five-year-old son. They both spoke English. The schoolteacher was angry; the man from Khulna was frightened.
The schoolteacher tilted his head back and clicked his teeth. “This country!” he said. “You know, the captain, he told me, he works for the shipping company, but they provide nothing, no equipment. You know this thing, what do you call this?”
“Binoculars.”
“Yes; he must buy his own binoculars with his own money. They have no navigation equipment so they don’t know where they are, and the radio is broken.” He clicked his teeth again.
“We are lost?” asked the young man from Khulna, nervously.
“Yes,” said the teacher, “and radio is broken.”
The young man shot me an agonised look; I smiled, sympathetically, and not wanting to be infected with his nervousness, I went back to my cabin.

Two hours later the sun was going down behind us and the water was draining on all sides, turning to a smooth blue-grey in the failing light. The warmth of the day was evaporating swiftly; it was January, and at night cold air moved down the delta from the north and you needed a blanket. We should have been in Chittagong by now. The lean chicken farmers were stalking around the deck, shivering and hugging themselves and peering into the wicker baskets.
Up at the bridge the crewmen were still peering in all directions. The schoolteacher was still angry.
“Every year we are having so many transportation accidents in this country,” he said; “every year so many boats are sinking, so many people are dying, and our government is doing nothing to improve safety standards.”
The young man from Khulna was increasingly frantic. “Have you seen the lifeboat?” he asked. It was hanging in a cradle over the starboard side of the ship. At some point, docking clumsily perhaps, the ship had been rammed; something sharp had hit the lifeboat and it had been cleaved almost in half. They had never replaced it, not that it mattered anyway – it was twelve feet long; there were hundreds of people on board.
The sun went away and the strange blue light returned, and the water emptied around us still further, and the great banks of black mud appeared in the murky gloaming, and we were dry on vast, empty mudflats. This really was a world where neither land nor sea was in control.
I wandered on the deck. The chickens were clucking more feebly now, and the shivering farmers were peering angrily into the baskets. Every so often they would haul out a limp, damp carcass, shake it, flick its feet, then, when they were sure it was dead, fling it overboard.
Down below the smell of diesel and vomit was stronger and the babies were crying harder. It was already very cold.
The young man from Khulna found me on deck.
“These men are angry,” he said. “Their chickens are dying. We should be in Chittagong already so they can sell them, but they think they will all die in the night.”
We went to his cabin. His sister sat on the edge of her bed smiling politely; her little son was curled miserably under a coarse grey blanket.
They young man was on the edge of panic. “There is no water on this ship, and so many people. The radio is broken; the captain is lost, the lifeboat is broken. I don’t know what will happen to us.”
I did my best to reassure him. “Don’t worry,” I said; “after a few hours the tide will come in and then we’ll continue; it’s fine.” But I was not so sure. I had been counting the hours on my fingers and was certain we had gone aground before high water. If that was true we would never refloat.
He shook his head. “I spoke to the captain. He is proud so he tells me everything is fine, but I can see that he is very worried because he is lost and he doesn’t know where we are.”
“But it will be fine,” I said; “the ship isn’t sinking – it can’t sink! The water’s too shallow! If we just wait here nothing bad will happen to us.”
He pouted and looked at me from lowered eyes: “There is no drinking water on this ship.”

I left him and went outside, but his fear was infectious. It was dark now and there was a single yellow lamp burning outside the wheelhouse but the night around us was utterly blank and empty. There was nothing out there and we were adrift in a vast void of land-sea-mud. I had horrible visions of hundreds of people surging over the sides into a broken lifeboat in a running brown current, and screams, and the water full of mud and chicken feathers. Or perhaps of a long file of thin people, hungry and desperately thirsty, scrambling down the anchor chain when the tide was low and walking away across the clinging mud towards an invisible and imagined shoreline, and the mist coming down, and the tide coming in very, very fast, the way it does in river deltas.
There was a full bottle of water and a grey blanket in my cabin, but I thought of the crying babies down below deck. Every few minutes there was the sound of a soggy thwump as the scrawny carcass of another dead chicken was flung overboard, down onto the mud.

I went back to my cabin and sat on the edge of the narrow bed, watching the thumb-sized cockroaches scuttling over the rusty floor. Quite suddenly I felt ridiculous, and selfish, and hopelessly self-indulgent. What was I doing here? What had possessed me to come to this country, to travel to these places where peoples’ lives were hopelessly grim; where there were horrible diseases and the drinking water was filthy and where several times a year ferries loaded to the brim with passengers went down through the mud and the water hyacinth and hundreds of people drowned? What was I doing here, in the name of – in the name of what exactly? Experience? A good story to tell? It was self-indulgent and selfish – no, worse than that: it was obscene. How dare I! How dare I flippantly wander around these places, revelling in my own absurd ability to find pleasure in dangerous and uncomfortable modes of transport; in dirty lodgings and filthy food. How dare I flippantly snatch my exotic photographs and scribble my flowery little notes. It was entirely reprehensible. There was no lifeboat and no radio, and no land, and no water and the chickens were dying, and how long would it be before the babies started dying too?
I turned off the light and lay down and listened to the scurrying cockroaches. I wasn’t at all scared like the man from Khulna; I was just angry with myself. What am I doing here?

***

I woke long after midnight and the ship was moving. I stepped out of the cabin and we were rolling over a vast sea, and for once there was no haze or mist or cloud, and far out across dark sea I could see a long horizon, unmarked by ship or land, and the sky was a great star-smeared dome and the water around us looked very deep indeed. There was no one on deck and no light at the bridge and the night was silver-bright.
I went back to sleep, and when I woke again we were at anchor, surrounded by water, and the familiar heavy-blank Bengali darkness had returned and I almost wondered if the strange starlit interlude had been a dream.
I peered over the rail, but the night gave nothing back. The mist had come down again, and we were, I guessed, still lost, far out at sea. And then, in a moment of such strangeness that a little pulse of electricity passed down the length of my spine, a dog barked, somewhere very close at hand in the darkness. Then I heard the sound of a motorbike engine, and then the pre-dawn prayer-call, echoing from some village mosque on an invisible shoreline.

When it was light there was an intense mist all around us, so thick that if you stood in the middle of the ship near the bridge you could see neither the bow nor the stern. Crewmen stood, leaning from the rails calling into the murk, and voices called back, and small boats nosed out of the fog from the shore and brought passengers and cargo aboard. This was a scheduled stop; we were late, but we were no longer lost.

It was midday before the fog cleared, very suddenly, as if someone was pouring molten gold down onto the ship, brighter and brighter every second, and then suddenly a palm-lined shore, and black village houses formed like a photograph, almost close enough to touch, and very quickly the day had lost all its strangeness, and it was the usual yellow light and vast white sky and we steamed on.
The farmers were going through the baskets: not all the chickens had died.
The teacher and the man from Khulna joined me leaning over the rail as we came into Chittagong at the end of the afternoon.
The teacher grumbled. “We are late more than 24 hours,” he said.
The young man from Khulna seemed a little bashful, ashamed of his very obvious fear the night before.
There were huge freighters moored in the channels. They dwarfed our little ship as we swung to a berth on an oily dock and the farmers leapt overboard even before we had squeezed onto the old tires, and began heaving the baskets of chickens ashore. People surged down the narrow gangplank and I was borne along in the flow, along the quay and into a maelstrom of bicycle rickshaws, all bells and chimes and bright decorations.
I clambered into one and the driver strained at creaking peddles and we pulled through a chaos of streets and gusts of cooking smells hit me from the pavement kitchens: oil and fish and coriander and grilling meat and I was suddenly hungry. The road was yellow and the light was long, and by the time I reached the cheap hotel on an alleyway near a roaring market I had quite forgotten my troubled moment the night before, somewhere out in the darkness of the delta, and I knew exactly what I was doing here.

© Tim Hannigan 2008