Banglafornia

California started as an idea. Photo: Ron Eagle.

California. The first known mention was in the 1510 romance novel “Las Sergas de Esplandián” by Spaniard Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. In the novel, California was an imagined island populated by black Amazon women, without any men. West of the Indies, California was the closest thing on Earth to paradise. California started as an idea.

A street in Dinajpur.

Moulvibazar. I’d taken the opportunity to wander the Kulaura back blocks – my last evening. The dark, dog-legged roads wound through fields interspersed with Londoni mansions. What percentage of rooms in those homes was unoccupied at any given moment? I’d taken the opportunity to be alone: not an easy feat.

It was a usual highway-side shop in one of those under-construction buildings. It could’ve been a mechanic workshop or a hardware store. But TV was showing cricket and cans of Danish condensed milk lined shelves along the far wall. There were maybe five customers.

A Californian rickshaw wallah, San Diego. Photo: Ron Eagle.

I ordered tea, sitting on the bench by the door – and the finale to my solitude lasted approximately thirty seconds: inevitable Bangladesh! The man covered in sawdust started the usual run of questions – where I was from, what I was doing – that deshi curiosity that sparkles with genuineness, as common as water.

After a minute of talking he said with a big smile, “Please let me pay for your tea. It would make me happy.” I gently refused several times to no avail. An invitation to visit the furniture workshop across the road followed. Ah, the hospitality – I know, I know, it’s everywhere...

Meanwhile there was genuine regret when the tea wallah didn’t have my cigarette brand. He felt the need to explain his stocking arrangements – why it couldn’t be available.

Meanwhile at the bus stand the ticket seller thought to say, “If any stranger gives you food along the way, don’t take it!”

Moulvibazar. In days we’d made a tiny shard of history, her and me. The way things go.

A street in Dinajpur Town.

They spoke in Sylheti and I’m going to miss it. With the scraping over the ‘kh’ it felt delectably Arabesque – I couldn’t speak it of course but the simple sentences mostly found their meaning, if I couldn’t always identify every word.

Sylheti language seems to carry urgency – perhaps languages do when you can’t understand them clearly. A basic ‘hello, hi’ sounds terribly important. It’s so important that there’s no time to open mouths much or bother pronouncing every syllable. I was thinking it would be an ideal language for farewells at train stations, you know, that movie scene when the train starts moving and the friend on the platform starts running to keep up with the window where the passenger is. In Sylheti it seems they could say so much more in those final seconds.

And any Sylheti aboard the Titanic probably narrated the entirety of their life story in the last moments before jumping onto the lifeboat. Well, ahem – first impressions...

On the several occasions I was asked about Sylheti I’d taken to responding, “Eta haglami bhai! Noakhaillar Bangla sobche shondor!” “It’s foolishness! Noakhali has the most beautiful Bangla!” The first part got them laughing, particularly the haglami which should be paglami. The second part got them started... but... “jaitanno, khaitanno,” it always sounded more like a Sylheti trying to imitate a Noakhali accent than the genuine article.

Dinajpur. Maybe it’s better to look forward? It’s time to head west to a new idea. It’s time to find my Banglafornia.

Dinajpur sunrise.

I’ll be heading for the sunset across the great plain right to the end. There’ll be miles of road to cover, hours of tar disappearing under wheels. There’ll be rivers to cross and excitement. It might take a while to get there. It may be hotter – perhaps there’ll be palm trees.

A San Diego trolley car waits for rickshaws. Photo: Ron Eagle.

The idea of California has changed. It’s like, bikini roller-blading women on beachside strips rather than Amazons. There are surfer dudes, like, listening to groovy music. Everyone is attending, like, thrice-weekly therapy sessions and injecting botox. They “do” lunch and liposuction. People say “like” a lot according to the preconceived California cliché.

Dinajpur is a thought to explore. So what do we know? Well, there’s the distinct disadvantage of high expectations. You see, I’ve hardly met a person from Dinajpur I didn’t like. They seem so straightforward and thoughtful: I’m expecting sincerity on the whole. I’m thinking there’ll be a bit of Santali culture, a dollop of archaeology. Thinking there’ll be a tolerant blend of Hindu-Muslim and not expecting language troubles.

The Dinajpur idea is so strong that in Dhaka when a rickshaw wallah says they’re from Dinajpur I don’t bother pre-negotiating. You just expect fair price, said once, money in hand not looked at. Indeed on the handful occasions where it’s not proved true, I must confess I’ve been known to criticize, “But how can you make trouble? You’re from Dinajpur!”

But is it really like that?

And yeah, okay, so Dinajpur’s a bit more northwest than California would be. It’s really more of an Oregon. But hey, who knows anything about Oregon?

Lily More, Dinajpur.

Will a Californian rickshaw wallah take his money without looking at it?

This article is published in The Star magazine, here: Banglafornia.

Leaving 26

Moving house is like juggling.

How many small things there are – power plug adaptors, free-range pencils and pens, the movie poster, those decorative wooden fish that sat unnoticed for five years in the hallway… Moving house is no small feat.

Amongst it all was the Bangladeshi flag that spends the bulk of each year in the cupboard. I bought it from one of those sellers who are once again wandering the streets with flags of increasing proportions dangling in line from a long pole. It’s December and each December my flag has been in the habit of hanging itself in front of the living room in anticipation of Victory Day.

I fixed last September for the task of moving from Dhanmondi 26 to a smaller place better suited to a new job that would see me often out of Dhaka. How many things there were to arrange – locate new flat, negotiate, give notice, find transport, locate packing boxes and pack them. It’s like juggling, fitting all those extra concerns into one’s life.

Then again, sometimes living in Bangladesh feels like juggling too.

find flat, negotiate, arrange truck, pack, arrange new truck, unpack...

The truck hired for the first of October decided it wished to arrive a little too close to midnight – overbooked – everybody moves on the first. It was a nuisance but I realised that waiting for the hopefully more reliable yellow baby-truck hurriedly arranged for the second was a blessing. It meant one final evening in 26.

Temporarily relieved of moving duties I decided to take a walk and incidentally I found a whole lot of other things that belonged to that address – memories. The grocer insisted I stop for a chat and that an invitation to the new place was essential. The tea shop across the street, in the spot where Abdul’s tea shop used to be, wouldn’t charge from gratitude that about a year earlier I’d offered him a Grameen-style micro-credit loan to start out.

The shopkeeper beside him is Abdul’s brother, recently returned to 26 and now occupying Farook’s old spot. Both of them used to give credit including cash advances when I first moved to Dhaka and there was an end of month salary squeeze.

Those tea shops remind me of the BDR mutiny.

Like many others, I was coming home from work amid rumours of shooting on the streets. Nobody knew what was going on. I failed in my first attempt to reach 26 by rickshaw because someone suddenly started running down the street near work, which caused hundreds of others to do the same. I jumped off the rickshaw and ran into a nearby market to hide – from exactly what I didn’t know. The whole city was jittery.

A few hours later I cautiously tried again, opting for the narrow back streets of Lalmatia. 26 was spookily empty when I arrived and yet, as a sign that the world was not quite at an end, Abdul and Farook were both there ready to serve tea. “There’s shooting going on and you’re open?” I said.

I called my friend Situ in Hatiya to tell him something was going on in Dhaka. “Go inside and lock the door!” he said firmly. I remember looking down at the cup in my hand, “Okay, but first I’ll finish my tea.”

There were numerous other events of course – the Shahbagh Movement which stands out for being peaceful, the Hefazat rally – events that had little impact on 26 as such – unlike the uncountable number of hartals that are forced upon all Bangladeshis. During one of them, a friend had to jump out of the window of a burning bus on nearby Satmasjid Road, and along with many others he ran into 26, where he stopped to knock at my front gate. Not knowing him the doorman didn’t open it. Fortunately the danger had passed. I heard about it later.

On another day I was going to the office, then in Gulshan, and the CNG I’d hired made it barely fifty metres before a group of men stopped the vehicle and started to smash its windows and tear the back cover. The young driver was as terrified as I was – I jumped out (fortunately the lock was on the passenger side) and considered involving myself in a scuffle to protect the driver – but I had my laptop with me and anyway, the driver managed to flee in his half-destroyed vehicle. It was later I heard there was a CNG strike going on. I was lucky there’d been no fire.

But of course the bulk of memories from 26 are not these. In the meantime it’s where my Bengali Amma spent a week recuperating after a minor operation – and she used to talk about her childhood in Bogra and how things were way back when. I’ll never forget the look on villager Siddique Bhai’s face either, when we found him with his wife and adult son in a crammed hotel in Farm Gate – in Dhaka to start chemotherapy – and we took them home and they saw for the first time where they would be staying. He was so thrilled at the sight of what was for them a little luxury that he said his pain was gone!

There were others too. One night I counted five patients and nine guests, all Hatiyalas, with a range of conditions from a broken hand to diabetes, with the extras sleeping on mats in the living room.

It was at 26 that Situ cooked chingri shrimp for my Australian parents before we all left for Hatiya, that afternoon when my Dad went momentarily missing on a rickshaw. It was at 26 where Dad put his elderly bones to the test to jive with the energetic kids of my cleaner – who from then on call him Dada.

It was also to 26 that the whole Bangladeshi family came when Situ suffered a brain aneurysm, underwent brain surgery and nearly died. His wife Lovely ran the household while his brothers and I decided what to do for his treatment.

Of one hundred with his condition it is not an exaggeration to say that only one will make a full recovery – most don’t survive – and in part it was because of 26 that Situ was the one. And later, well on his way to recovery, he finally had the courage to verbalise what we had both been thinking – “I am aliving,” he said one day, in his creative English, in the 26 living room.

Situ's wife Lovely helps him take his blood pressure in 26 living room.

Come to think of it, even the mosque committee stayed with me while they visited Dhaka’s Hatiyala business community in the hope of finding funds for the village mosque extension. It was Ramadan and we used to share the iftari they’d arrange each evening, although I wasn’t fasting.

It’s funny how in Bangladesh life goes on through the various crises and mostly unsavoury political tremors. Even in the memories both personal and political parts are there. It’s a bit like juggling.

Now I am in the new flat, starting with new memories and the Bangladeshi flag is in the cupboard.

I haven’t been able to bring it out this year – not because its usual hanging spot is kilometres away but because, with people being burnt alive in buses and having their skulls blown open by bombs, it seems insensitive.

Those sacrifices of 1971 for an independent, free nation: in these most recent days, it’s not always easy to understand what it was for. Perhaps I’ll give 16 December a miss this year. Maybe the flag can come out when Bangladeshis have a political environment that points to a better future, one that is sufficiently mature to truly honour the memory of those great sacrifices.

Sharing iftari with the village mosque committee and Bangladeshi family.

This article published in Star Magazine, here: Leaving 26