Moderately Important People

1997, We were new to Bangladesh, but we had already been allowed to join the ‘American Club’ just because of our passports. There was another member, a South Asian American, who was promoting their home region of Shillong as a tourist destination. One of the joys of this forgotten northeastern province of India was that it was on high land and thus much cooler than our low, swampy Dhaka. So of course I was interested in visiting this cool resort. In fact, we even heard that Shillong had been a ‘British Hill station’ so that was intriguing as well. I have never liked the heat so I wanted a break myself.

Now let it be know that aside from my preference for cooler climes we felt nothing in common with the old British colonists, Lew was working as a UN volunteer and I at a local salary, we were not working under the ‘rule Britania’ paradigm. This was a sore point for us. Once somebody had tried to call me ‘memsahib’ and I had nearly fainted in shame; they caught on quickly that I was no such lady and from then on they just called me ‘bideshi’ (which literally means ‘not from our country’). But as a northern bred woman I was keen to experience the cooler weather of Shillong.

One small impediment stood in the way of this epic holiday however: the border between Bangladesh and India up there near Shillong was officially closed. It was not a war zone, just a forgotten backwater that nobody crossed. I guess that there had been ‘hill tribes’ around there who hadn’t wanted to be part of either the Anglicized India or the Muslim Bangladesh, so they had resisted modernization in border skirmishes some dozen years earlier. Strange as this story sounds today, it was the reality of our ‘pre-globalized’ South Asia of 1996. Remember we were still in a time when email was a new novelty and our land lines often had ‘no line’ with which to call – rich people would pay staff to hold the phone until they heard a dial tone and then shout for their boss to come use the phone. This meant that we lived in local realities that each had its own quirks.

Luckily our acting tour guide friend, however, knew how to contact taxi drivers on both sides of the closed border and was able to work with us to organize our trip. We would fly from Dhaka to Sylhet then we were to take a taxi –  a real car taxi (of which there was not one specimen in Dhaka) – to the Indian border and then we would walk across the hundred meter or so of ‘no man’s land’with our visas to India in our hands. Then another taxi (read private driver of course) would meet us and drive us up the road to Shillong. Google maps says that it is a four-hour drive today straight from Sylhet airport to Shillong, but for us that border crossing represented a real impediment. We had our Indian visas stamped into our passports and well in hand, but Lew was very worried that he didn’t have a proper work visa for Bangladesh yet, which we may have to show on his return – it was still pending so we were officially tourists; and nobody else on earth was a American tourist going from Bangladesh to India at that time. Once safely into India we planned to drive for more than three hours, with our private taxi, from the border to the hill station. Of course, it would be up and around an impressive mountain range to get from the delta that is Bangladesh to the hill station that is Shillong.

Being on local incomes we felt this trip was too expensive, so we invited another professor from Lew’s university to join us and help with the costs – private drivers are quite a luxury that we were not yet used to. Thank goodness, Malinda was a great road buddy, not only was she a skilled photographer but she helped with taxi expenses, and she was great fun to have around.

So come the day of our trip, we needed two baby taxis to get out to the Dhaka Airport but we divided up the 2 children between the 3 adults and off we went. Terry, who was ten at the time, had trouble waking up and said his muscles hurt all over. I figured that he had done too much exercise in school the day before, but he was definitely off his game. We had already bought our trip so we went anyway. He came with me and Malinda in one Baby-Taxi, and Sadie went with Lew and the luggage in another of the three-wheeled, lawnmower engined, tuktuk contraptions all the way to the airport. Dhaka never had any car traffic on the roads in those days, but there were tons of pedestrians, bicycle rickshaws and ‘baby taxis’. The pollution from these tuk-tuks was enough to make Lew and Sadie sick if we let it pile up inside, so we kept the curtains (used instead of doors) open to the beggars and lepers who would reach in asking for money and/or blessings. I tried to give alms to the little girls in particular, but on our way to the airport we moved fast enough not to be bothered.

The puddle jumper airplane to Sylhet was fun, especially with our enthusiastic six-year-old daughter Sadie. Having a child look out the window on the miles of rice fields made it all very fresh and new (not that I was used to rice paddies, but as an adult I tried to be nonchalant).

Meanwhile Terry was going downhill health wise, thankfully he slept on the airplane.

We arrived at Sylhet airport to find a very excited driver of a fully operational Mercedes Benz, who was holding a sign board that had Dr. Fulton printed in big letters. Now Lew was only 36 years old and had only recently finished his PhD, before getting his visiting professor job at the Independent University of Bangladesh, so we hadn’t expected such royal treatment. We weren’t complaining though. At least not until the man drove through town as if we were in a high speed race straight outa Hollywood. He used his horn much more than his brakes and he explained in an excited voice that we were VIP. Luckily Lew was in the front seat, because I would have been screaming in hysterics the whole way. It was not fun. And by now Terry was really quite sick: he had a fever so I was holding him on my lap in the back seat praying that he would just get better soon enough to enjoy our holiday.

We went as far as a car was allowed to drive and then we walked across a ditch, like the flood control drainage gulleys one sees in the west in the US, except that this one wasn’t paved. It was dry though. I had to carry Terry by this time, he was almost in tears because he felt so bad. But he was trying to be brave.

Sadie felt great and Lew had her hand, he was nervous because of our ‘bureaucratic anomaly’ (his lack of a work permit for Bangladesh). It was due any day now, and he had been promised to have it before we travelled, but ‘you know how it goes’. Luckily, we figured, the Indian border police wouldn’t care about our Bangladeshi visas as long as our Indian visas were good. We had another week of our vacation time for the Bengali government to deliver Lew’s certifications via email before we had to return.

Everybody at the border was very impressed that Dr. Fulton had brought his family and lady colleague to visit India as tourists and they proudly stamped us through and sent us along the forest path which traversed the ‘no man’s land’ on the Indian side of the border. We obediently stayed on the path, as we were literally afraid of landmines if we strayed it.

Our next driver was waiting in the car park about a seven-minute walk away and again I was glad to sit in the back for the long drive around winding mountain roads. I joked that I would be sitting on the floor by the end of the trip.

There is a strange politio-geographic reality in that region in which the country of Bangladesh is basically surrounded by a natural mountain wall, I mean cliffs and waterfalls coming from India into Bangladesh. The Muslim country is a delta with lovely topsoil but not a stone around (they import stones from India) and the larger neighbor is highland all around. I’m sure there is a geological story to tell and I suspect it has to do with the subcontinent of India smashing into the Himalayan range, All I know is that it makes for an obvious country border.

We made it to the ‘Hill station’ in Shillong after a thankfully uneventful, if harrowing, drive up the mountains to the highlands, that honestly reminded me of Scotland in a treeless kind of way. I washed Terry and put him straight to bed and our kids began their week of eating know chicken and mushroom soup mix everyday. Thank god they were happy with eggs and toast for breakfast, but they weren’t having any fancy curry dishes thank you very much.

The building was old colonial grandeur in an authentic ‘down-at-the-heals’ kind of way. Lew correctly labeled it ‘faded glory’ because we were reminded of bell epoch memsahibs having their fires refreshed by the ‘bearer’s each evening before they dined in state. I imagined the morning croquet and lawn bowling in the sweet-smelling, birdsong freshness. Each room had warmly blanketed beds, a fire place and leaded glass windows with little diamonds of glass forming big, picturesque windows. This was all created in dark brown wood, well-seasoned, from days of yore.

We stayed for a week and went daily on a trip to one wonder or another usually driven by our private taxi. We saw waterfalls and amazing mountains and even some old dolmens, and old obelisks from pre-historic times. The standing stones were just out in the old fields, looking lonely and forgotten, nobody to tell their stories. But I saw a denuded landscape that I felt sure used to be wooded and verdant and was now rocky and bleak.

Meanwhile Terry was just a weight that we carried around. He hardly complained but he was clearly sick, his fever came and went and I just made sure he had plenty of clean water. But I didn’t walk out to the incredible waterfalls or lakes either. Malinda, Lew and Sadie left me and Terry sitting in the car while they went out on their adventures. He slept, I sat peacefully. Terry’s health did worry me, but he never got a fever so high that I felt the need to force it down with cold baths or pills. I just sat with him and gave him sips of water.

He was still sick after our holiday, only now he was getting a really weird rash on his shins and ankles. By the time we got back to Dhaka and I was able to talk to a doctor, we figured out that he had suffered from Dengue Fever (also known as ‘bone-break fever’ because it reportedly hurts so badly). It is carried by a daytime tropical mosquito (he must have been bitten at school) and so it was not contagious to us near him in the highlands. It is a serious disease that he must never get again and people do die of it. For Terry, it just ruined his holiday…..and mine.

Still going to Shillong felt like a real reprieve from the crowded hot city that was Dhaka. We were fully removed from our day to day life and the holiday served its purpose by providing a “change of air’.

But as we headed back to Bangladesh, Lew became really worried about his lack of work visa. Of course the Bengali government officials hadn’t sent it to him. He was very afraid that we would be denied entrance to Bangladesh and that we would have to stay in Shillong – which we couldn’t afford. I figured that the rural border crossing police wouldn’t understand our subtle rule breaking and that we could just go in as if nothing was wrong. In the worst case, I argued, we would leave Bangladesh for good and return to Virginia. This scenario didn’t ease Lew’s nerves though. Our trip down the mountains to the border was really wrought by nerves and ‘plan B’s. We were all terribly scared when we got to the border, sure enough the guys didn’t speak enough English to understand our situation and we were passed through as the VIP we were pretending to be: Dr. Fulton was proudly welcomed back to Sylhet.

Our same driver was waiting for us, everything was perfect, and again he drove like there was nobody else on the roads all the way to the airport.

At the airport our proud driver took us loudly to the VIP entrance as he thought appropriate. Sadly he was sent away because the authorities didn’t think that we were VIPs. Poor driver was practically in tears. He argued passionately on our behalf in Bengali but he couldn’t make the airport authorities believe him.

So, totally crestfallen, he had to take us around to the plebian entrance as if we were mere mortals.

Lew scraped together some backsheesh to give him as he soothed his battered ego (the driver’s battered ego) by explaining that ‘yes we are moderately important people, I am a doctor, but I guess we are not very important people’ and we sent him on his way.