Dinner with the President

His Excellency Mohammed Hussain Ershad is the only Head of State I have ever dined with. And he was later put in prison, though for misdemeanours of state, not for having dined with me.
It all began with a journey from Rome to Dhaka in a first-class seat on Biman Bangladesh Airlines. I particularly remember crossing the Strait of Hormuz in the dark and looking out at the moonlight glinting on the inky black waters of the Persian Gulf, punctuated here and there by the lights of flares on oil-rig platforms. I also recall stopping at Calcutta, to wait for the fog to clear over eastern Bengal. A group of women in saris appeared to be having a barbecue on the runway, however I assume that they were mending the tarmac, but we were too far away to be able to confirm that. Though not my first contact with Asia, this was my first visit to the Subcontinent, as we call it in Britain. It started with the overwhelming smell of Indian cooking that was so evident as soon as one walked onto the plane. The stewardesses in their regulation silk saris were beautiful, submissive and charming in a regulation manner, and the in-flight entertainment was neatly divided between recitations of the Qur'an and various channels that offered Bangladeshi popular and patriotic music.
There at Zia International Airport were the usual symbols of Asia. Amid the limousines a woman with a dried up breast at which a starving infant was trying to suckle held out a skeletal hand for money. There was dust, noise and colour, but little heat, as it was March. Outside the Sheraton Hotel the pavement was occupied by the cardboard shacks of recent migrants from the countryside. And with the usual abrupt contrast each of us foreign delegates was allotted a brand new car and a personal driver. "Yours is number 443", they told me, but I could not read the numberplate as it was in Sanskrit. Meanwhile, a Bangladesh Army soldier was detailed to stand guard outside my hotel room. The poor man must have been bored to distraction, so I tried my best to be charming and generous to him.
We headed west in a coach, past endless queues of lorries with "Allah protect me" painted elaborately on their sides in yellow and red curlicues, and buses crammed with passengers, most of whom were clinging precariously to the roofs. While waiting for the ferry to cross the Brahmaputra at the point where it makes a confluence with the Ganges we received an object lesson in poverty. Ignoring the circus of camera-toting foreigners a family that lived in a bamboo hut were slowly going about their business. The husband soaped and washed himself in a muddy hole full of water while his wife dredged up some of it, soap and all, in which to cook the lunch. The river was so wide that the trip across it took hours; time enough, in fact, for the deck hands to catch prawns and curry them on the deck floor. We finished the meal with betel nut and paan leaf, which turned my tongue a rich vermilion hue.
How fascinating to watch the dhows with their patched lateen sails lazily slip past on the currents. Some were laden with white cattle, others with sacks of rice. The music of Bangladesh divides neatly between the rhythm of the bullock-cart and that of the river boat. But the rivers are fickle and when we were there, floods had just swept away the homes of 30 million people. The ripples of sand covering the fields were the largest I have ever seen. It was all encapsulated by a conjurer who performed at the national theatre between exhibitions of dancing and singing. At intervals he picked up a glass and filled it with water out of the sleeve of his jacket. On one of these occasions, he preceded this routine by saying, with heavy irony "And my next trick is very dangerous--Bangladesh water!"
The Bangladesh Government also provided me with Rita. She was small, dark and ravishingly beautiful, but a girl of very few words. Her elegant sari left a large bare stripe of coffee-brown midriff, and her hair, straight, black and lustrous, was long enough sensuously to caress this expanse of slim female flesh. Such was Rita's taciturn nature that it took quite a while to establish that she had just finished a Master's degree in Business Administration. She was quite unfathomable, but I had the odd sensation that great passions burned beneath her sphinx-like exterior. Oddly, they seemed to be directed at me, though I would be hard pressed to say whether this was because, in my expensive Jaeger suit, I represented all that was out of reach for an ordinary girl in this benighted country, or whether it was genuine romantic attraction. In any event, I judged the cultural gap between us to be insurmountable. I like Indian food, but I could not face a lifetime of curries and chapatis.
At one point Javier Perez de Cuellar arrived. This mournful Peruvian with a limp handshake and vacant expression was at that time Secretary General of the United Nations. We revelled in being in his company, but it was the office, not the person, which attracted us. Later in the day a garden party was held in his honour on the lawn outside the National Parliament. Courtesy of my car and driver, I arrived before Perez de Cuellar and his wife. The way in was lined with the pick of Bengali maidens, each more astoundingly beautiful than the next. The last in line was an absolute stunner, and she knew it. Without a shadow of a doubt some enormous prize in the form of a super-rich husband awaited her when she was ready to leave finishing school, but is it really adequate recompense for such outright beauty to be picked up like a trophy (and perhaps later discarded if her beauty faded)?
When we were eventually accommodated at circular white tables on the lawn we heard the wail of sirens as the motorcycle outriders of the Secretary General's cortege appeared in the distance. When the Perez de Cuellars made their way into the compound their Bangladeshi hosts threw open the lids of wicker hampers and let a thousand white doves fly into the air. The result was very different to the desired effect. A rain of white excrement came down from the sky. Dignified Arab ambassadors dodged left and right making guttural exclamations, and the British Ambassador's wife withdrew delicately under her broad-brimmed garden-party hat. An elderly Scots professor of engineering donned his gold-rimmed spectacles and peered quizzically at the grey splodge that striped its way down his tweed jacket.
The rest of the afternoon involved endless speeches which had to be toasted in fruit-juice (Russians, in particular, would never tolerate such abstemiousness, so I hope there were none in the audience) while fighting off the clouds of mosquitoes. I particularly noted how the academics from the National University ate their rice with cutlery, while those from the seven provincial universities rather more efficiently scooped it up with their hands.
Another day we set off for the Brahmaputra by helicopter. I sat in our machine with my feet resting on the yellow fuel tank wondering what would happen if the gauge were faulty and looking out of the window, which swung open in the wind of the rotors. Below us, villages appeared and disappeared, with vegetables drying on the tin roofs of the huts and boats half sunk in the mud of the ponds and paddies surrounding them.
We touched down close to the river bank on land so flat that we could see vast distances to infinite horizons. But Bangladesh has an average population density of more than 950 people per square kilometre, and our presence had been noted. Curious villagers came out from distant huts, driving hump-backed cattle towards us across the fields and flinging themselves into streams that were too deep to ford on foot. Ten minutes later a dense mass of several thousand people had assembled and we had to take off again before it became too dangerous to do so because of the crush of onlookers.
We touched down a second time on the banks of Bangladesh's third river, the Meghna. As I looked out of the window I noted that an army officer was laboriously whitewashing a circle and an 'H' on the ground for us to land on. However, he had left it too late. At one point he looked up, astonished, to see our three helicopters rapidly approaching from above. Then the wind of the rotors caught him. The paintbrush flew out of his hand and, in slow motion, he fell over backwards as the bucket of whitewash rolled briskly into the bushes leaving a large white stripe on the ground. The rest of the journey, by river boat, was uneventful and relaxing.
In the Raja's Palace in Dhaka there is a ballroom in which there is a fresco, or at least a wall-painting. It depicts a ball in which the British overlords and their wives are dancing and the Raja, in full evening dress, looks on, attended by his bejewelled wives. In the light of history the scene is quite distasteful for all it implies about feudalism and colonialism. But it is also striking because of the quantities of fabric that the figures in the picture are arrayed in: the men in their stuffed shirts and tail-jackets, the women in acres of skirt and layers of bodice. I saw this room again in the heat of summer and could not imagine, in the days before air conditioning, how they kept their sang froid without fainting.
The piece de resistance of the trip was dinner at the Presidential Palace. With our gilt-edged invitations in our pockets, we summoned our drivers and set off for this oriental colonial building with its domes and ogee arches. A white-gloved flunky opened the door as the car stopped with military precision exactly at the entrance. We were following the British Ambassador's old but elegant Rolls Royce and the Italian Ambassador's dilapidated Fiat 131. I stepped out and look at the red carpet, which seemed to stretch away under the chandeliers to infinity. My companion, a Head of Department at the University of Siena and normally a bit of a martinet, was so intimidated that he slunk out of the car with his head between his shoulders. But I grit my teeth, straightened my suit and marched up the ceremonial way. Anyone I met who was in uniform I saluted, and anyone in mufti I shook hands with. I have a distinct feeling that I shook hands with cabinet ministers (they were all there) and their secretaries indiscriminately, but there was no time to make the distinction. At the end was the President of Bangladesh looking demure and thoughtful: well he might, given the heavy sentence for corruption that the judiciary handed out to him some months later.
My next visit to Bangladesh was equally memorable. It took place in high summer when the temperature was 40 degrees and the relative humidity 86 per cent. I recall stumbling along a road in the Old City and circumnavigating a curious pile of grey objects. As they were exactly the same colour as the asphalt of the road, I assumed that they were road mending material, but a closer look showed that they were the intestines of a large animal. Indeed, the whole visit had an oddly visceral theme to it, as I thought while watching a goat being sacrificed in a nearby Hindu temple. Goats were not the only thing to be sacrificed there, as this ornate building painted in deep yellows and reds had recently suffered a pogrom by enraged Muslims, bent on sacrificing a few of the worshippers there.
In the ferocious summer heat we took a boat ride on the Buriganga River. Water buffalo lay submerged up to their nostrils under a bridge and stacks of red mangrove root, pillaged from the Sundarbans along the coast, the last haunt of the Royal Bengal tiger, lay drying in the sun. The shacks of the poor migrants were clustered along the dykes and raised banks of the river, ready to be washed off again in the next great flood. The political music of Jagjit Singh rang in my ears, and though I understood none of the words, the sound was both threatening and tragic.
In some ways my most enduring memory of Bangladesh, besides the floods and the sight of tiny girls with the distended bellies of outright hunger, was gained in the District of Comilla, not far from the border with Assam. After visiting an ancient temple site and an agricultural college, both set in groves of mango trees, we retired for the night to a hut in a jackfruit plantation. Large, knobbly Jackfruit protruded oddly from the trunks of the trees and the silence was punctuated only by the plopping of tilapia fish in a pond full of lotus flowers and an occasional click as our guard fiddled with the magazine of his rifle (there were bandits in the area, which contained some of the last tropical forest in Bangladesh). Then, deep in the night, the jackals started howling. The sound was both mournful and restful. It punctuated my dreams, colouring them with melancholy. And so from there it was home to America, looking down on the Makhran Mountains of southern Iran, dusty and deserted, fascinating and etched clear in the sunlight.