Coal Street

Coal Street, Barapukuria Coal Mine, Parbatipur, Dinajpur.

Coconuts, jackfruit, fish, papaya and rice… there’s generosity to its geography. Bangladesh has a landscape that perpetually gives.

It’s the morning and I’m sitting in Saju’s living room. It’s not his Dinajpur Town residence but the old cottage in a row of old cottages at Phulbari’s Barapukuria Coal Mine: the place he calls home on workdays.

The housing strip is called the old staff barracks. It currently houses various employees unable to be accommodated elsewhere. Forty-three-year-old Md Shajiul Islam, Saju Bhai, is the mine’s assistant manager in the mechanical sector. He’s been working there for just short of eleven years.

The minor concrete laneway features cute front gardens of vines and fruit trees – papayas and mangoes – but the street has no name. Unimaginatively I’m calling it Coal Street.

Inside, from the thought-about check curtains, the spotless cane sofa set, the general order, you can tell Saju’s wife has been there. But she’s not there now – she’s in town. Breakfast is done and I’m sitting alone. Saju’s gone off somewhere, promising to be back soon.

It’s strange to be in Saju Bhai’s living room. For one thing there’s a guest house at Barapukuria, where the mine managers suggested I should stay. Foreigners usually do. There’s a club, a large pond and long tree-lined driveways – Barapukuria has those British-style trappings almost as though wishing it were a tea plantation.

But it’s better to stay in Coal Street. It’s more personal, more real.

The simple life in Coal Street.

It’s also strange to be there because I only met Saju a few days earlier. It was largely coincidental. Like many in Dinajpur I’d taken to spending at least a part of each evening at the enormous Boro Math – the colonial-era field not dissimilar to Kolkata’s Maidan. The Math is the town’s pride and wholly suitable for adda, the art of chatting.

Funnily enough we’d just been talking about how I might visit the mine when Saju arrived. It was Friday. He was home. Everything settled automatically and immediately, with no more effort than a ripened coconut falling. Hospitality is a second gravitational force in Bangladesh.

Unusually, as it happened I wasn’t at a total loss as to visiting the mine. A friend in Dhaka had seen on Facebook that I was in Dinajpur. He had a friend working at the mine – they’d once done a short IT course together and in Bangladesh any engagement that gets beyond a “hello, hi” holds significant risk, like a monsoon raincloud heavy and ready to burst, of becoming the start of a long friendship. My friend thought to ring me so I could meet his friend. It was only a matter of digging out the guy’s number.

I’d considered waiting but it all proved unnecessary and when I mentioned my friend’s friend’s name – Kamol Mollick, Saju said he was his next-door-neighbour.

Bangladesh is diverse and chaotic but somehow among the huge randomness of 160 million it’s often there’s some sort of contact or connection waiting nearby. It’s difficult to comprehend entirely how it works but there’s always that innate village-ness proximity lurking.

Saju Bhai.

Sitting in Saju’s living room I’m contemplating the previous evening – a small, strange thing in particular – a mobile phone charger. Off his own bat, Saju thought to enquire if my phone needed charging. When I said maybe it did, he sought the specific charger to fit. Someone on Coal Street had the right one.

It’s such a small thing but the charger seemed symbolic: the living room snacks before the dinner in the coal canteen (with apologies that Saju’s wife wasn’t there to provide a home-cooked main meal); the checking every detail for sleeping in the guest room – extra blanket on the side in case of cold snap, internet access… electronic repellent or mosquito net?

Bengali hospitality, is it culturally-genetically coded? There’s a genuine happiness from another’s happiness and comfort from the comfort of others. I’m wishing I could be more like that. I know for a fact I’d never think to ask a guest if their phone was alright.

I suppose I grew up in Australia. Much of Australia is ruggedly beautiful – there is hospitality too but it’s different. It arises more infrequently, less expectedly, from a harsh geography.

In between thoughts, a middle-aged woman with a round face and rounder body, in a pleasant green sari, wanders in off the street through the open door leading to the garage. I wait for her to say something but she doesn’t. She crosses the small living room right in front of me. I wonder if she’s a burglar. I wonder if I should disturb her at all, if, in Bangladesh, even a burglar might not expect to feel welcome.

Australian thinking cap on: it’s strange. Bangladeshi thinking cap on: it is as it is… and I’m smiling a Bangladeshi smile at the thought.

I’m slightly pleased when I see her open the fridge door. It’s surely not usual for thieves to primarily target refrigerated foodstuffs no matter what the cultural context. She seems to be loading various vegetables in her arms. She’s taking the lids off plastic containers in the freezer that might contain fish or meat.

I wait to see what happens next.

Arms fully loaded she turns back toward me and as she finally starts to speak I notice a few teeth missing. “Is your home far?” she says.

By this stage I’m almost certain she’s no criminal. What I don’t yet comprehend is that she’s cooking my lunch. She looks after Coal Street when wives are away. She leaves as unceremoniously as she entered.

Koi fish, shing fish, chengra fish, tiger fish, a not-sure-of-the-name fish and turtles… Kamol’s house next door features an aquarium and when I met him on the previous evening there was some talk of its inhabitants. He’s thirty-five, an assistant manager, electrical sector who was also batching that day – his wife on a home visit to Khulna. His twin girls normally tear around the little street, so I’m told. Coal Street must have been missing their noise.

Friend of friend equals friend… Friend of neighbour equals friend… I was doubly qualified and it was no small feat to persuade Kamol not to make tea. In any case, word had travelled Coal Street and there needed to be a visit across the road to Sattendra Barman’s house – he is also an assistant manager.

Friend of neighbour equals friend… Friend of friend of neighbour equals friend… With his wife at home, all hope of not having tea was lost.

She was once supposed to study in Australia but at the last minute she couldn’t go. It might have been good for her career but I wonder if it wasn’t a happy twist of fate.

I know, yes I know… Australia is the dream country, I hear it often. Yet it can only be from taking the little things – the important things – for granted; from assuming it all just continues on the other side of an ocean. Life in Bangladesh can be a struggle, of course… but Coal Street… who is it that would need to leave that? Big house, flashy car… what I’ve never properly understood: Why?

Later that morning I visit the mine. There are known-people to wave hello to as I do the rounds.

And afterwards there’s feedback from Mr Mollick via my friend in Dhaka. “I only wish I could have done more for him.” I should have let him make the tea.

Could the Bangladesh government perchance, or the Barapukuria Coal Mining Company perhaps, not send some foreign aid to Australia to teach Bangladeshi hospitality methods? I wonder. Feeling guilty: at my place will have to do better than coffee and biscuits… will need to think about other people’s mobile phone batteries.

Coconuts, jackfruit, fish, papaya and rice… sorry for distractions… I’m supposed to be writing about coal…

The distraction of Coal Street.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Coal Street

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