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Development experts call such behavior the economy of resilience, and Bangladeshis are nothing if not resilient. But the stark fact remains: with the creep of salt, life here is steadily becoming untenable.
I stand with a cluster of men and women from Tatinakhali, staring out over the monotony of the shrimp ponds. "So are people leaving?" I ask them.
"Ten percent want to stay, but 90 percent would leave if they could," a middle-aged man answers. The young people above all dream of city life, he says, of getting an education. But they have neither the money nor the connections to make it happen. The older ones are too attached to the land and the way of life. Building a home and a fishpond, a yard to dry and winnow rice, a patch of cultivable field, is a 20-year investment of time and labor that is hard to relinquish. When it happens, family migration, first seasonal and then permanent, follows a familiar pattern that is repeated across the world: the breadwinner leaves for a local town, then moves by stages to the city; having established a tenuous means of subsistence, he calls for the family to join him. But since the tiger attacks got worse, whole families are beginning to leave together.
"Where will they all go?" I want to know.
Islam takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. "I don't know," he says. "I just don't know. What I do know is that Bangladesh can't deal with this on its own. It isn't possible to handle the migration problem within this country's borders."
In any given country, the capital city is the customary magnet for desperate migrants running from rural poverty. But this capital? Dhaka?
Over a cup of nasty instant coffee (the only kind you can get in Bangladesh -- no Starbucks here), I sit and talk with Professor Haroon ur Rashid, chairman of the architecture department at Dhaka's North South University and an expert on urban planning and sanitation. He's a small, owlish man with a pungent sense of gallows humor. His English is impeccable.
"The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen grew up in Dhaka," Rashid begins. "He once told a BBC interviewer that his children saw him as a man without taste, because he said he liked every place he had ever visited and could happily live anywhere. There was only one exception: Dhaka. That was unlivable." Rashid grins -- rather incongruously, it seems to me, for someone who actually has to live here.
The capital of Bangladesh seems at times to be dissolving into its constituent elements. If it's made of iron, it's rusting; if it's vegetable, it's rotting; if it's brick, it's reverting to mud, to river sediment. Survival here seems an unfathomable challenge. On the Buriganga River, the wharves are crowded with those decrepit three-story vessels you read about on the inside pages of the newspaper: Overcrowded ferry capsizes in Bangladesh: 400 feared dead. Dhaka's waterways are clogged with raw sewage and lined with stilt houses and squatter shacks made of tin, tar paper, and palm fronds. People cluster on the banks to bathe, brush their teeth, wash clothes and cooking utensils, defecate, and fish in these waters. Even in the more upscale neighborhoods of Gulshan and Banani, where diplomats congregate, a misstep in the dark can drop you through a pothole into an open sewer. By the end of the day your clothes are suffused with the stench.
Uncountable beggars -- street children, bird-thin old women, blind men, people with nightmarish deformities -- tap on the car windows at every stop. And there are many more stops than starts. With virtually no functioning traffic lights, the streets are an impossible gridlocked snarl, loud with the clamor of car horns and rickshaw bells. (Dhaka has at least 600,000 rickshaws, some say 800,000, their drivers earning barely two dollars a day.) The whole chaotic scene is enveloped in a thick, gray-brown blanket of smog. Bangladesh produces only one-quarter of a metric ton of CO2 emissions per person each year (the U.S. figure is almost 25 tons), and you can be forgiven for thinking that most of that comes from the streets of Dhaka.
"In 1953, when it was the capital of East Pakistan, the population of Dhaka was half a million," Rashid tells me. "The big population explosion came in 1971, after the War of Liberation, when people could opt between living in Pakistan or in Bangladesh. Now it's growing at about 6 percent annually. Most of the newcomers are from the countryside, people with no skills who work in low-wage, marginal occupations. The city has grown by accretion, not by planning. In terms of infrastructure, water, services, sanitation, Dhaka is a total disaster. God only knows what it will be like in the future."
Already Dhaka is one of the most populous of the world's megacities. By some estimates the population has reached 14 million, though Rashid disputes that. He thinks the true figure is probably closer to 12 million. Even by his more conservative math, the population of Dhaka will double, to 24 million, in the next 12 years.
"And now, on top of all that, there's climate change," I say with a frown. "Is the government thinking about that as it tries to predict how many more rural migrants are going to come to the city in the next 10, 20, 50 years?"
He just looks at me, as if I've asked a very stupid question, then says, "I doubt it."
But if Shahidul Islam is right, and Bangladesh can't handle the human tide on its own, where are the refugees supposed to go? What safety valves might relieve some of the pressure?
No one has ever quite known what to do about environmental refugees. Norman Myers, an Oxford University professor who writes extensively on the subject, calls it "one of the foremost human crises of our times." By 1995, he says, the last year for which reliable estimates exist, at least 25 million people worldwide had been driven from their homes by environmental degradation. He expects that number to double by 2010, as global warming kicks in seriously, sea levels rise, population increases, and available resources dwindle. Yet these people have no legal standing under the United Nations Convention on Refugees. This is not some arcane question of international law. What it means is that when they flee their homelands, they have no rights that trigger access to the tents, the camps, the emergency food supplies and medical relief that are supplied by the international community. They're pretty much reliant on their own resourcefulness.
For Bangladeshis, one traditional place of refuge has been India. To many people in the areas we've visited, the border is an artificial construct that they have always felt entitled to cross at will. Where a river forms the frontier, a few hundred takas is enough for a "broker" to ferry them across by night. If it's a land crossing, a similar amount will usually persuade the border guards to look the other way.
India is now trying to close down this option. On our last day in the south, we drove a few miles west from Islam's hometown, Satkhira, to the border post at Bhomra. Soldiers lounged around with guns. A line of colorful trucks waited for permission to cross. A few yards short of the barrier pole, a narrow dirt road branched away to the right, paralleling the frontier. Our Land Rover started to make the turn, but the officer in charge stepped over briskly and held up a hand. He considered our foreign faces, Len and Diane's cameras, walked back to the hut that served as his office, called his superiors for instructions. Then he put the phone down and shook his head. Not a chance. For what the road would have led us to is a newly completed stretch of the fence that India is constructing to keep out Bangladeshis, a double line of concrete posts and barbed wire. When it's finished, the fence will be 2,500 miles long, longer than the U.S.-Mexico border.
The fence idea has been around for years, but it's taken on new impetus in the last two or three. The reason: India's anxiety about terrorism. In 2002, a radical Islamist group machine-gunned the U.S. cultural center in Kolkata. Then, out of the blue, came a wave of several hundred bombings in Bangladesh -- including one suicide attack -- in the latter months of 2005. These incidents were attributed to a local jihadist group called Jamatul Mujahideen, the Party of Holy Warriors.
All of which brings us back to Osama bin Laden, and thence to a second safety hatch that has beckoned to Bangladeshis desperate to flee environmental degradation in the rural areas and urban collapse in the capital. I'd seen graphic evidence of this on my way to Dhaka, when I changed planes in the oil-rich emirate of Dubai. The airport is opulent beyond description, its main concourse lined with gigantic artificial palm trees and twinkling fairy lights, the only discordant note being the hundreds of Bangladeshi migrant workers curled up asleep on the floors.
It's estimated that two million Bangladeshis are now employed in menial jobs in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Debt bondage is not too extreme a term for their condition; to get an employment visa, each must make an up-front payment of $2,000 or more to a recruiting agency. By the time their contracts expire, it's more than likely they will have been exposed to the fundamentalist Wahhabi, or Salafi, strain of Islam. This is a world that is well captured in the movie Syriana.
It's also a world that is antithetical to Islam as it has historically been practiced in Bangladesh, which has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, exceeded only by Indonesia and Pakistan. Islam here has always been of the moderate and peaceable variety. It is strongly shaped by Sufism, the mystical strain of the religion that emphasizes self-knowledge and the individual's closeness to God, and is often intermingled with the traditions of the minority Hindus, who make up a little more than 10 percent of the population.
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