Uttarbanga 0.1 — Part 2 | উত্তরবঙ্গ ০.১ | দ্বিতীয় পর্ব

21–23 January 2023

Rifat's alarm woke everyone before dawn. Breakfast was the most common morning meal in Bangladesh — plain rice with mashed potato, fried egg, mashed tomato, mashed aubergine and lentil soup. It reminded me of home. Since leaving in 2011, morning rice had quietly disappeared from my routine. Today it came back. We finished our tea and set off for day two, destination: the northernmost point of the country.

The bus to Panchagarh had no concept of stability, which became obvious from our seats at the very back. We arrived intact. First stop: Rock Museum — a government women's college running its own collection of ancient stones and archaeological finds. Unusual but genuinely interesting. In the college courtyard, the district's first experimental tea garden.

Next: Banglabandha, the northernmost border. The local bus was packed, but watching school children cover mile after mile in the same cramped conditions to reach school made my discomfort feel trivial. Through Tetulia, where livelihoods depend on stone extraction from the Mahananda river.

At the zero point, we took photographs. The milestone showing distances to Siliguri, Gangtok and Thimphu gave me a moment of pause — so close and yet we weren't going. But seeing the distance to Teknaf, the southernmost upazila under Cox's Bazar — my district — felt strangely personal. Standing at one end of the country with the other end carrying your home.

After lunch, we rode to Kazi and Kazi Tea Estate. Unlike Sylhet's hilly gardens, the flat terrain here gives the plantation a completely different character. The trees had been pruned back for winter, so the full greenery was absent, but the resort inside — cottages arranged around an artificial lake, natural flowers in bloom — felt less like a place to visit and more like a place to stay. Rashed bought sweets for the group.

We missed the sunset over Mahananda. From Tetulia, we boarded a Hanif bus to Rangpur at seven in the evening, arriving near eleven at night. Mefta's mother had stayed up cooking. Deshi magur fish, vegetables, dried fish mash and aubergine mash — a deeply satisfying late dinner.

January 23rd — woke at eight to freshly made bhapa pitha and chitoi pitha. First bath in three days. Rice with chitol fish and shutki mash followed.

I had once joked to Mefta that people in the north don't eat much fish. Somehow that must have reached his mother, because every day I am eating a different freshwater fish caught from their own pond. The generalisation was wrong.

We headed out at half past ten to Pairaband, birthplace of Begum Rokeya. Nothing much to see. Then Tajhat Zamindarbari — an elegant early twentieth-century white building, surrounded by winter flowers tended with evident care.

Lunch back at Mefta's was substantial — polao, beef, roast chicken, fried fish, small fish curry. Above everything, the pigeon curry stayed with me. Rashed's technique of discarding every bone and eating only flesh caused collective distress around the table.

Afternoon at Carmichael College. Large campus, historic buildings, dust a persistent problem. Photographs at the banyan tree. Begum Rokeya University — small but tidy. Chikli Park, where we played video games like children for a while.

The evening brought an invitation to Niloy's elder sister's home. How she managed that spread while managing school and a small child, I cannot fathom. Late into the night, cards were played, her and her husband's love story heard over tea, and I fell asleep before the first episode of 1899 had ended on Netflix.