18/2/09 Shona Bangladesh

It was only during my recent sojourns to Hakimpur and Aftabganj that I realised what shona bangladesh really means. Of course, with my superb Bangla skills, I know the literal translation: it means ‘golden Bangladesh’ (and it’s from a Rabindranath Tagore poem that is now the national anthem). But the paddy was being harvested when I first arrived in Parbatipur, which meant that the fields were brown with the stubble and straw of harvest and I never really got the idea of a ‘golden Bangladesh’ (I’m going to do a whole post about rice later, so there’ll be more on this. Yeah, yeah, try to control yourselves).

As we cruised out of Parbatipur that day, however, the fields had been flooded, the seedlings had been grown and transplanted, and all of a sudden, the land was transformed. As far as the eye could see was an expanse of the most intense green imaginable. For mile after mile, it’s all I saw. The myriad colours, shades and textures of green render the word useless; they form a patchwork, dotted with the sari brights of working women, broken up only by the occasional stand of lanky palm trees.

Above our speeding motorbike the sky lazed, a hazy blue-grey almost painful to look at. The sun beat down, not too hot for now, but with the promise of fierceness to come. The wind on my limbs was delicious.

Later, after our work was done, we started back towards Parbatipur. As we sped along the same little roads as before, kicking up a trail of dust, the sun began its inexorable slide towards the horizon. As it went, its colour changed, glowing from white to yellow to orange in a matter of minutes. With nothing else to do, I simply watched as the changing light transformed the landscape once again. Mist was rising from the paddy fields, and, caught by the angling sunlight, it set the paddy alight so that the fields seemed to glow with the strength of their green. By the time we were motoring back into Parbatipur, the sun had sunk to a red orb, temporarily suspended above the glowing fields.

Bangladesh’s flag is green with a red circle in the middle, and I finally understand why.