Photo by Keven Law. Licensed through Creative Commons.

Just back in the country, still half on Bangladesh time, I found myself wide awake at 5:30 a.m. and thought I might as well go downstairs and work on my Mongolian monument-in-progress. Then I heard the crow.

He was the loudest performer in the dawn clamor of birdcall, but I noticed him not because of his volume but because of his sense of number. He gave three caws, no more, no fewer. Then he paused for maybe a minute and gave three caws again.

It was always three. Over and over, like an Allied radio operator sending out a coded signal to agents behind enemy lines only able to tune in for a few seconds before the Gestapo showed up and broke down the door. Caw, caw, caw. Caw, caw, caw.

Why three, I wondered. At this time of year it’s probably not a nesting call or a flocking call, so presumably it’s a mating call. But what is attractive about three calls? And why always three? Birds are well known to work a surprising number of variations on their basic patterns, perhaps to stand out from the crowd. Was this crow hoping a female crow would admire his endurance and consistency? “Can’t say I’m impressed by his vocal stylings, and heaven knows, he has the color sense of Henry Ford, but he’ll be a good provider, and that’s what counts.”

So this was running through the back of my mind as I painted away, carefully filling the loops and curious thorny branches of the ancient text, when after a while I realized he was now cawing in groups of four. Caw, caw, caw, caw. Caw, caw, caw, caw.

This struck me as pretty odd. If the number three was important, what was it about the number four that was more important? And if consistency was important, as the repetition suggested, why abandon it for some other number? And was it significant that it was a higher number? Was he second-guessing himself, anticipating the female crows mocking him for being such a dullard, and trying to denote that yes, he was capable of consistency but he also had ambition, that as the crow flies, he was a crow who was going places?

The four-pattern repeated itself over and over, and a strange thought began growing in my mind. What if he were working up through the numbers? Was he going to move up from four at some point and start cawing in fives? No, that was absurd. It would imply that the crow could count.

Not count objects, necessarily, nor understand the theory of number, but that he would have a kind of rhythmic awareness that allowed him to add another beat. In fact, maybe that’s where our own sense of number came from–not from counting our fingers but from our inherent, heart-and-lung-and-walking-feet-driven sense of rhythm that gave us a pulse–and at some point we became aware of that pulse as a series of separate strokes?

I didn’t really believe this at all, and I certainly didn’t believe it of a crow, but before I knew it, there he was, cawing in fives. Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw. Over and over. At no point did he revert to three or four, or even two or one. He was a crow with a sense of purpose: he was going somewhere with this vocal pattern, and it was starting to be only a question of how far he would go.

This was getting seriously interesting or seriously strange. I knew that crows, like all corvids, are among the most intelligent animals on earth, capable of using objects such as sticks as tools, and so on, but I couldn’t believe their intelligence had been measured by zoologists whose tests included math. Committing myself to the lowest standards of research, I went to Wikipedia, which told me that crows have been known to collect nuts too tough to open, fly over to a busy street, drop them on the road and wait for a vehicle to come along and do the hard work for them. This is impressive as an evolutionary survival skill, but counting? What is the survival value of having–and broadcasting the fact that you have–a basic understanding of numbers?

Wikipedia also announced that crows’ vocalizations “are complex and poorly understood” and included “counting out numbers,” but the phrase was so poorly constructed I wasn’t sure if it meant “delivering an evenly-paced series of caws as if counting,” or “delivering a repeated quantum of caws as if aware that each cluster contained the same number of utterances,” or (and I seriously doubted this one) “delivering caws in groups that increased in number by one.” Really, a crow could have written a better sentence.

My crow, meanwhile, had now gone off the IQ charts and was going “Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw, caw.” Seriously. He was up to six. I stopped painting to pay attention. Six, six six–and then, just once, he went back to five.

At once, he resumed his groups of six, but now a whole new set of questions arose. Had he simply been distracted, like a knitter getting a phone call, and lost count? Had he temporarily lost confidence in his ability to sustain groupings of this size, and faltered? Or had he reached the limits of his sense of number? After all, we humans do the same: our ability to remember numbers falls off dramatically if the number consists of more than seven digits. And I seem to recall from my reading of the Guinness Book of Records at the age of ten (yes, we’re still setting a low bar for our standards of research, here) that there’s a tribe in New Guinea who count only as far as three, possibly because their word for three (which as I misrecall is something like iepivngrwtigrwphgcnptirhnlvirsthlisrhtclsiruhlirtncligig) is so long they’d die of old age if they tried to count any higher.

As if to confirm this last suspicion, or possibly to announce that dawn was now over and day was underway, my crow abruptly stopped. I must say, I’m glad: if he had kept going to, say, eleven, or sixty-eight, I would have been so unnerved I’d have lost my ability to concentrate. In fact, I’d probably have given up Endangered Alphabets altogether and joined my near-neighbor Bernd Heinrich in bird research.

I was, however, struck by one last idea. (I think that’s six ideas I’d been struck by, so far, but by now I’ve lost count.) I had always assumed the band Counting Crows intended its name to imply a human in the act of enumerating corvids–and once again, my trusty mentor Wikipedia states that the phrase comes from a traditional rhyme: “One crow means sorrow, two crows mean joy, three crows a wedding, four crows a boy, five crows mean silver, six crows mean gold, seven crows a secret that’s never been told.” Note that this folk-rhyme or children’s rhyme stops at seven, the number that is neurologically the limit of our numerical comfort zone. My crow was only one short of the human limit.

Now I can’t help thinking of the band differently, not as Counting Crows but as Counting Crows. I see them on stage, all in black, maybe wearing cloaks. The lights come up. The drummer raises his sticks. He croaks out the count-in: “One, two, three, four….”

The other evening, as I was heading out through the upper-middle-class residential district of Gulshan to dinner with friends, I quipped, “Every road in Gulshan comes with its own pile of sand.”

Actually, sand is just the start of it. Road 12, the road I’m staying on, in what would in most capital cities be the embassy district, is maybe a hundred yards long but currently has three separate piles of bricks, a large stack of bags of cement, two separate piles of demolition rubble, several stacks of concrete slabs and a variety of other assemblages that might be symptoms of either creation or destruction. That evening, as we were returning through the uneven, unlit streets around midnight, our driver nearly impaled the car on a bundle of bamboo poles, each maybe 20 feet long—the South Asian equivalent of scaffolding—tied to a small cart in the road.

Even though today is technically yet another day of general strike, the steady hammering of manual construction echoes up and down the leafy street. A makeshift bamboo-and-blue-tarp café, the kind found all over south Asia, has been created against the wall of one of the villas, and half-a-dozen guys are standing or sitting around it, sipping tea amid a debris of tossed-out cans, cigarette cartons, paper and plastic. A cement mixer churns in front of the shell of a concrete building under construction; a boy descends a ladder from the cavernous second floor, a woven basket of sand on his head.

The entire scene has an air of slightly grim maintenance, of a step backwards driving each step forwards. The monsoon mud has been scraped into manageable heaps next to the deep guttering. Within the past 24 hours, one massive pothole at the intersection at the end of Road 12 has been loosely filled with what seems to be shattered pottery, which makes a crunkling sound when driven over. Another deep pothole, almost a sinkhole, has had a large tree branch thrust into it so vehicles won’t drive into it and emerge in, say, Cleveland.

All these apparently random observations on urban construction are not because I’m planning a late-in-life career change and qualifying as a civil engineer. They’re because of Blade Runner.

Back in the first of these Bangla blog entries, I wrote:

“As global warming melts the polar ice cap, that moisture has to go somewhere. Some of it causes the oceans to rise, or in our local case Lake Champlain, which set new records for flood levels and then refused to go back down. Much of it, though, falls as rain or hangs in the air as water vapor. Some say the world will end in fire, Robert Frost wrote, and some in ice. My hypothesis is that it will end in rain. It’s not the temperature that will be the end of us; as they say in Florida, it’s the humidity. Or to give this situation a more imaginable form, think of the landscape of Blade Runner: the world as one great collapsing city, under endless rain.”

I wanted to know whether Dhaka offered a glimpse into the future. Into the end of the world, in fact.

Sure enough, we’ve had humidity so thick you can virtually stand a spoon up in it. Sure enough, the city of Dhaka is not unlike the makeshift, wired-together, ancient-and-modern-used-parts Los Angeles of Blade Runner. And interestingly, both the fictional city and the real one speak a constant mélange of several languages in the same sentence, the most obvious sign of the globalization of culture, or at least of expression.

So why is it that Dhaka doesn’t have that depressing, dark, verge-of-collapse feel, that surly Philip K. Dick apocalypse?

Mainly, it’s that Ridley Scott’s view of the end of humankind is driven by the dystopian view that the end of the world will come because we caused it. We will get the future we deserve.

I don’t get that feeling in Bangladesh at all. Even though Bangladeshis themselves complain about their government, the pollution and the traffic, it’s clear that what’s going on here is not the self-inflicted decay of a once-great civilization. It’s the result of an ongoing 40-year struggle to survive.

Let me explain.

No country has ever had a more painful birth.

When East Pakistan pushed for independence from West Pakistan and the Awami League, a nationalistic party, won a majority in the 1971 national elections, West Pakistan sent in troops on a massive scale. One of the worst acts of genocide in modern times took place, with the Pakistani Army killing somewhere between 200,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis. Mass graves have been discovered as recently as 1999.

When it became clear that a combination of Bengali and Indian troops were gaining the upper hand and that the Pakistani Army would have to withdraw, orders were sent down to cripple the infant nation by systematically killing its doctors, engineers, artists, writers and teachers, focusing in large part on students and faculty at Dhaka University. The archives suggest that the Pakistani army, with the assistance of local collaborators, systematically executed an estimated 991 teachers, 13 journalists, 49 physicians, 42 lawyers, and 16 writers, artists and engineers.

Another way in which Pakistan tried to kill the young country at birth was by torturing, raping and killing its women. Some 200,000 women were raped; the Pakistani Army captured young women from Dhaka University and middle-class homes and kept them as sex slaves in their barracks. It was the tactics of the armies of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, only 20 years earlier.

To say that the Bengalis who founded Bangla Desh (the land of Bengal) were forced to start from scratch, then, is like saying the Donner Party had a tough winter. It’s an amazing achievement the country isn’t still that pile of sand, that cart of bamboo.

The country is also extraordinarily vulnerable to natural disaster. The Bay of Bengal, narrowing and getting shallower as it approaches Bangladesh, concentrates wind and water to such effect that in 1991 a cyclone struck Chittagong at 150 m.p.h., driving a storm surge twenty feet high into a coastal area that at the driest of times is barely above sea level. More than 130,000 people were killed, some ten million were left homeless, and the resulting spread of water-born infections killed thousands more. The same scenario has been repeated depressingly often before and since.

The atmosphere in Dhaka, then, no matter how humid, is not one of caustic dystopia or fin-de-siecle ennui; it’s one of a people trying, literally, to keep their heads above water.

I say “literally,” because a new danger is emerging: of all the countries of the world, Bangladesh is most vulnerable to the effects of global warming—not only because a single-meter rise in ocean level will drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, throwing extra stress on the already overcrowded cities, the economy and the healthcare system, but because one of the features of global warming seems to be more extreme weather forms: storms like the 1991 cyclone may become the rule than the exception.*

This danger, more than any of the other difficulties facing Bangladesh, is the only one that might fall into that Blade Runner you-humans-will-get-what-you-deserve category. So any time you hear someone denying the validity of the science involved or insisting it be called “climate change” rather than “global warming,” tell them to spend a few weeks in Bangladesh. They’ll be picketing the governments and the major corporations before the month is out.

* I’m grateful to the research of Farhana Haque for information that forms the basis of this paragraph.

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