brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh Angry passengers ransacked train stations and roughed up a station master Wednesday, after a railway workers’ strike left them stranded in eastern Bangladesh, an official and police said.
 
The Bangladesh Railway workers’ union called the strike to protest government plans to make the state-run service a state-funded independently managed corporation.
 
The workers are angry because they think they will lose privileges that government employees currently receive.
 
Striking workers barricaded rail tracks with logs and stones, forcing at least six express trains heading either to or from the port city of Chittagong to halt before they completed their journeys, said Bangladesh Railway spokesman Shafiqul Alam Khan.
 
Angry passengers climbed off the overnight express from Dhaka at Kumira station near Chittagong and beat up station master Abdus Salam who had stopped the train to prevent it from crashing into barricades further along the track, Khan said.
 
Salam was being treated at a railway hospital, he said.
 
Passengers also vandalized stations and trains at Fauzdarghat and Bhatiari after their trains had to stop before they reached their destinations, officers at the Railway Police control room said on condition of anonymity according to official policy.
 
Police arrested at least two people for vandalism in Bhatiari.
 
Khan said authorities were negotiating with the union.
 
The strike disrupted railway traffic on another 21 routes in the eastern zone, which is headquartered in Chittagong. Railway police have been deployed at stations to prevent any more trouble, Khan said.
 
Hundreds of passengers in Chittagong, some carrying children and luggage, were seen walking to nearby highways to look for alternative transport.

In our legends it is said that the goddess Ganga’s descent from the heavens would have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by tying it into his ash-smeared locks. To hear this story is to see the river in a certain way: as a heavenly braid, for instance, an immense rope of water, unfurling through a wide and thirsty plain. That there is a further twist to the tale becomes apparent only in the final stages of the river’s journey–and this part of the story always comes as a surprise, because it is never told and thus never imagined. It is this: there is a point at which the braid comes undone; where Lord Shiva’s matted hair is washed apart into a vast, knotted tangle. Once past that point the river throws of its bindings and separates into hundred, maybe thousands of tangled strands.

Until you behold it for yourself, it is almost impossible to believe that here, interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands. But that is what it is: an archipelago, stretching for almost two hundred miles, from the Hooghy River in West Bengal to the shores of the Meghna in Bangladesh.

The islands are the trailing threads of India’s fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the achol that follows her, half wetted by the sea. They number in the thousands, these islands. Some are immense and some no larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others were washed into being just a year or two ago. These islands are the rivers’ restitution, the offerings through which they return to the earth what they have taken from it, but in such a form as to assert their permanent dominion over their gift. The rivers’ channels are spread across the land like a fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty waterways, so wide across that one shore is invisible from the other; others are no more than two or three miles long and only a thousand feet across. Yet each of these channels is a river in its own right, each possessed of its own strangely evocative name. When these channels meet, it is often in clusters of four, five or even six: at these confluences, the water stretches to the far edges of the landscape and the forest dwindles into a distant rumor of land, echoing back from the horizon. In the language of the place, such a confluence is spoken of as a mohona–an oddly seductive word, wrapped in many layers of beguilement.

There are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea. The tides reach as far as two hundred miles inland and every day thousands of ares of forest disappear underwater, only to reemerge hours later. The currents are so powerful as to reshape the islands almost daily–some days the water tears away entire promontories and peninsulas; at other times it throws up new shelves and sand-banks where there were none before.

When the tides create new land, overnight mangroves begin to gestate, and if the conditions are right they can spread so fast as to cover a new island within a few short years. A mangrove forest is a universe unto itself, utterly unlike other woodlands or jungles. There are no towering, vine-looped trees, no ferns, no wildflowers, no chattering monkeys or cockatoos. Mangrove leaves are tough and leathery, the branches gnarled and the foliage often impassably dense. Visibility is short and the air still and fetid. At no moment can human beings have any doubt of the terrain’s hostility to their presence, of its cunning and resourcefulness, of its determination to destroy or expel them. Every year, dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by tigers, snakes and crocodiles.

There is no prettiness here to invite the stranger in: yet to the world at large this archipelago is known as the Sundarbans, which means “the beautiful forest.”