Just after 5:00am on Chatteswari Road.
I remember many swim practices where a song would get stuck in my head, pursuing me up and down the lane for the entire two-and-a-half hours. The more insipid the song, the fiercer the chase (“M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E,” for instance. Or some song about a three-hour tour). Despite recent postings to the contrary, I think my ear worms are getting a tiny bit more sophisticated. Lately, these lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s “Barangrill” have been tailing me:
And you want to get moving
And you want to stay still
But lost in the moment some longing gets filled…
(Thanks, Joni Mitchell)
The smile and the hand are at odds.
I can’t stay still. It’s too hot to keep walking. Joni Mitchell gets me.
Bangladesh is suffering under a persistent heat wave (91F in Dhaka at 10:30pm last Thursday night); I’ve been getting up earlier and earlier for a morning walk to beat the heat and clear my head. It’s still a (pleasant) shock to leave the cool of Thames Tower and step out into the smoke and haze of the morning. By the time I’m on the main road the crows are sifting through the piles of coconut husks, cawing at each other to set their morning boundaries. The men walking past acknowledge me with a booming, “Good morning!” The women avert their gaze. Today marked the first time a dog took offense at my presence. I tried to remember if I absolutely should or should not establish eye contact. I blinked. He wagged. We parted ways.
The monkeys in Dhaka left me alone, what with all the cables to coil.
These morning walks do fill some longing. I feel a weird sense of accomplishment just finding my way back to the apartment. Everywhere I look something catches my eye; the photographs fail, but I like the challenge of trying to capture (ha!) the proliferate world here. To echo Ms. Mitchell, getting lost in the moment takes me out of the desire to control time (six more weeks; three more exams; a month’s worth of dental floss, maybe).
Some moments for you:
Sunrise at Chok Bazaar. Dennis has been accompanying me on FaceTime. I hold up the phone and show him what I’m seeing. When he saw the sun rising he snapped the photo on his phone. So, a picture in Chittagong taken by someone in Minneapolis. What next? Flying cars?
Me, in Chok Bazaar, sloppy at 5:15 in the morning. In the mirrors of a modern bank…
Parked.
Early morning ISKCON temple in Chittagong. Haribol! (Hi, John.)
Stairs and shutters at the Chittagong ISKCON temple.
Looking at a tea warehouse through the multi-tinted windows of the Asian University for Women on Chatteswari Road.
Some Bangladeshi men have obliged me by letting me take their pictures. Public life is patriarchal here (the prime minister, however, is female); approaching a woman on the street for a photo would be intrusive. Hence:
CNG driver in Dhaka.
Henna!
Cycle rickshaw driver outside the Alliance Française.
Happy student emerging from the reading room at Dhaka University.
Entrepreneur along the fence at a nearby park in Chittagong. He offered to check my cholesterol levels.
Cycle rickshaw driver in matching lungi, shirt, and collapsible hood.
Criminology graduate student and CNG driver. Excellent impromptu tour guides, both.
Chai? Cha? Tea? This gentleman serves them all.
100 degrees Fahrenheit at Dhaka University. He’s looking at the canteen where I bought a Mountain Dew for the first time in fifty years. It’s still gross and perfect.
You’re hot? I have fur.
And finally:
A crowd gathered at Dhaka University. A consensus emerged: I should pay for a cycle rickshaw to see the campus (I walked).
Oh, and this interloper:
Sitting for lunch at the Sikh gurdwara on the campus of Dhaka University. An oasis of quiet in crazy Dhaka. “Kindness as their deity and forgiveness as their chanting beads. They are a most excellent people.” Guru Granth Sahib Ji
As you’ve guessed, I spent last weekend up in Dhaka, roaming around and trying to immerse myself. My roommate Reza (who still lives in a separate apartment; not sure when AUW will move me downstairs) kept me company on the nine-hour, double-decker bus ride last Thursday evening. We talked about movies–he’s a cinematographer–and food and our families. I asked him about adda, a Bangla word I’d learned in Kolkata. Here’s a definition, courtesy of a BBC report:
“We are not expected to produce something out of an adda,” Aditi Ghosh, head of the linguistics department at University of Calcutta, told me. “It is a kind of unplanned mental exercise where we not just talk about ourselves and our families, but we go beyond that. It is about ideas and events happening all around us.”
An adda in Kolkata.
If two people can form an adda (Is it a noun? A verb? Both?) I’d like to think Reza and I did. I commented on every passing object (“Look at that tree!”) while he incorporated these observations into discussions about art history and politics and Bengali society. We talked about load shedding and the upcoming fuel crisis. I groused about the Christo-fascism that is eroding human rights in the US. He told me about “September on Jessore Road,” Allen Ginsberg’s poetic lament for the refugees of the 1971 War of Liberation.
“Millions of fathers in rain/Millions of mothers in pain/Millions of brothers in woe/Millions of sisters with nowhere to go.” Ginsberg’s poem on display in the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka.
Reza handed me his phone so I could read the poem off the tiny screen as the bus headed toward Dhaka. How do societies recover from such horror? Where do they start? We talked about this, about how the generations that fought this war are still with us, if they survived. We talked about Ginsberg and censorship and the dangers of denying the past. The mood shifted as we stopped at the requisite roadhouse in Cumilla (everyone has to get off the bus; everyone is heartily encouraged to eat). Reza ordered dal and rice and Pepsis to share. We chatted some more and almost missed the bus.
Nothing was solved, not even this less complicated question: “Why do people take offense at other people’s vegetarianism?”
Lots of okra in the dining hall. Might just drive me back to beef.
In high school my insightful friend Sarah coined the term “houseboat person.” I think this is akin to people in an adda. Think of this as a kind of geometry proof by way of explanation:
Friends are people who sustain us.
Houseboat dwellers are people who can live easily in close quarters.
Friends who can live easily in close quarters are houseboat people.
Time will tell if Reza and I will be houseboat people, but I was very grateful for his easy, unforced, interesting company.
Waterscape, waiting for a boat. Dhaka.
As for teaching, a student of mine came to office hours and gave me good talking-to. That morning, nearly half the class had arrived late and I had pleaded with them to make a better effort at being on time. She said, “They were raised in military dictatorships. You have to be firm!” Below is videotaped evidence of my iron-fisted pedagogy:
This video raises more questions than it answers.
The students at Dhaka University were eager to tell me about their own history with certain types of dictators, how authoritarianism tore their worlds apart. If I can do them remote justice, I’ll include their observations next time. An object lesson for us in the States, for sure.
Joy Bangla. On a wall at Dhaka University.
For now, I’m ending with another glimpse of Joni Mitchell and her song “Good Friends”:
No hearts of gold
No nerves of steel
No blame for what we can and cannot feel
Good friends, you and me…
Much love, whether we’d survive on a houseboat or not. Send me comments; we’ll create a digital adda.