Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [155]
Maksuda’s whole life, her whole scaffolding of success, turned out in an instant to be built of tissue and vapor. There are too many people around her making similar discoveries. Jotsna Ujjal, in the adjoining hut, was doing well until, a few years before, a sudden flood ripped through their house. She and her family were forced to cower in the ceiling beams as they watched their possessions float away and sewage-laden water inundate their world. The children still have nightmares of poisonous snakes floating into their house, all the more real because it actually happened. Jotsna and her husband have a worse nightmare, having lost all their savings (poor Bangladeshis are in the habit of keeping years of dowry savings under the mattress).
From the high-rise apartments of Gulshan, Dhaka’s most desirable district, Karail fills the horizon, a shimmering plane of corrugated-metal roofs covering a thin peninsula in the middle of an inner-city lake. When I first came, nobody in Gulshan seemed to know how to reach the squatter enclave, though they spent all day looking at it. Karail appeared, to these better-off Bangladeshis, as an impossibly tight nest, or perhaps an infestation: hundreds of human silhouettes dangling their children into the lake to wash, or fishing, or lighting fires to cook. Packed into this dense space are between 16,000 and 20,000 people, living so close together that there are no gaps between their roofs.
After some exploration, between Gulshan high-rises I found a hidden mud-shore inlet, where dozens of narrow bamboo canoe ferries awaited. Once I had handed over a coin and made a precarious standing journey across the fetid lake and stepped onto the litter-crusted shore, the solid gray wall of Karail opened into a rabbit warren of tight passages, little more than a meter across, between walls of wood and tin. These alleys opened into wider dirt streets, invisible from outside, lined with shops, services, and small factories. I walked past a barbershop, a couple of DVD-rental huts, one crowded video arcade, hundreds of street-food fires, entire districts of ironmongers, dry-goods shops, ceramic kilns, woodworking shops, metalwork mills, plastic-moulding factories, and garment shops with dozens of employees, all tossed together from pieces of detritus and waste. Thousands of children run barefoot along the streets, pack into the two dirt clearings to play, and fill the lone video arcade. They are the unattended consequence of thousands more adults heading out into the garment-sewing jobs and domestic-service positions across the lake in the proper city. Child care and primary school are woefully scarce here.
In a shallow gutter in the side of the lane snakes a haphazard mess of a dozen half-inch plastic garden-hose pipes, the backbone of an improvised fresh-water system, connected to a distant water main and interlinked with handmade junctions and duct-tape repairs, which spray a fine mist of water every few meters and create a constant mysterious hiss. Each hose serves between five and 10 families, linked through a complex payment system. There are similarly chaotic webs of electricity (which everyone has) and cable and satellite TV (received by two-thirds of families). In the back laneways or inside the thin-walled huts, there is a round-the-clock background sound of livestock, music, television, cooking, children playing, people bartering and arguing, babies crying, small engines and sewing machines, family feuds and splashing water. It is delicately organized and alive with activity, fragile but substantial.
Karail seems uninhabitable. Yet it is eminently inhabited by people who have actively chosen and worked hard to get there. It was formed in the early 1990s on protected state land owned by the city’s Power and Water Development Board, and its residents have profited from Bangladesh’s decade-long political power vacuum at the beginning of the twenty-first