A Sojourn in Srimangal
Outside the window of our tatty rail carriage, rice paddies drift past in emerald blazes and the sky appears vast over the alluvial lowlands of central Bangladesh. Inside, the train’s trundle is pierced by the cries of chai wallahs, whose persistence fails to disturb the gentleman sharing the compartment with us. He continues to read his newspaper peacefully and offers me some homemade chitoi pithas, a type of Bengali pancake filled with grated coconut and date-palm jaggery. On and on we roll across the seemingly infinite floodplains. And then, some five hours after our departure from Dhaka, hills begin to spring up, their gentle slopes mantled with verdant tea plantations.
Bangladesh is rightly known as one of the flattest nations on the planet. Three mighty Himalayan rivers — the Ganges (known here as Padma), Brahmaputra (Jamuna), and Meghna — converge on these plains, offloading their silty luggage as they fan out across most of
