The Unfortunate Doorman

Karim, from the village to the mega-city

I can’t say I’m much of a hijacker, which in Dhaka means a mugger.  To the best of my recollection I did it only once, making a pistol with my fingers.  I can’t look much like a hijacker either, assuming hijackers have a look, since even after demanding the money I had to announce what I was doing.  But once the activity was established, my chosen victim reached into his pocket without hesitation and pushed a wad of change into my pistol cum hand.  With chaotic Dhaka for a backdrop sometimes it’s the little instances of sweet madness that give so much sanity.  For example: me and Karim.

He was really rather innocent when he first came to the city, the doorman with the great misfortune of having been assigned to work on my building.  He had all that village politeness about him and you could tell he was from a good and decent Faridpur family.  It was before he got used to city ways.

In truth it’s all too easy to blame the mega-city for corrupting him.  In truth I may have played a minor role; although it might be altogether better to blame my friend Situ, who may not have corrupted Karim specifically as much as the entirety of the building’s security protocols. 

The building has all the standard systems: guests are supposed to be announced via the intercom and they’re supposed to sign in and out, for the obvious reason that strangers can’t be walking around willy-nilly.  The problem with such systems is that they’re not Situ-proof. 

Situ has this annoying habit of being unduly likeable.  He’s always had it.  So while all of the other guests were busy signing in, being announced, arriving with the full complement of propriety and civility, from the very first day Situ had the ability to pass the gate freely without a solitary word of challenge.  There must’ve been at least four different doormen since I moved in and umpteen casuals and there’s not been a single occasion he has ever signed in or been announced on the intercom.  If he went to a bank it would hardly surprise me if they spontaneously invited him in to inspect the vault.  It’s the way the world chooses to interact with him.

And I might not have minded much if it’d stopped there.  But within a few short weeks he’d developed cordial relations with several of the neighbours and once I caught him casually signing off on a letter from the building committee to the residents.  He might be a regular visitor, but he does not live there! 

By the time of Karim’s arrival it was really getting to me, Situ’s generic niceness.  There wasn’t much I could do about the most of it, though I tried.  I made a point of saying to Karim, ‘he’s not a resident.  He could be just anybody off the street.  Make sure he signs in!’  It never happened.  Rather, one day we were stopped as we came in the gate such that Situ could collect his mail!

Well, at the very least I could prohibit the salaams, I thought.  Unfortunate Karim faced quite a conundrum: on the one side there was my instruction, clear as crystal, that Situ was banned from receiving the usual ‘assalaamu alaikum’ greetings; on the other side was his heritage and the values of his upbringing.  How could he not provide a friendly, respectful greeting, just as he did with everybody else?

We’d walk out the gate together and Karim would be there looking sheepish and awkward after giving a salaam to me and having to refrain from giving one to my friend.  He felt so badly about it that apparently the next time Situ arrived alone, I heard, Karim gave a full-hearted apology, along the lines of, ‘I am so, so sorry; I really want to give you a nice greeting when you come…’

After that Karim used to give a salaam to me but before I had the chance to accept it, Situ would take it, with a sudden ‘walaikum salaam’ returned.  In short, he started stealing my greetings!  For this I would chastise Karim who’d swear that it’d really been meant for me.  Blame Situ, blame the mega-city, but by this stage Karim was starting to relax.

From there it’s true to say the whole foundation of the doorman-resident relationship began to unravel.  Somehow there came about a new system by which Karim, who by his very nature and I don’t mean to be critical, is a bit salaam-happy, was restricted to a singular inside-the-gate salaam and a singular outside-the-gate salaam.  It was then discovered that an outside-the-gate salaam was not an on-the-road salaam since by that stage I was officially off the property and out of his salaam jurisdiction; though truth be told he sometimes sneaks those in regardless.  It all became quite complex, the technicalities of the greeting arrangements.

And of course with the in-the-gate and out-of-the-gate system the challenge arose: to make it to the gate and slip a foot through before Karim noticed such that he’d officially missed one.  I understood he felt at home the day he proposed a credit system such that he could give three on the following occasion to make it up.  And there are delays on getting into the lift now.  Karim sneaks up from behind and just as the doors close they suddenly re-open and he’s there giving one very impressive and hearty final salaam before I go upstairs.  It’s a kind of salaam-bonus.

When all is said and done I suppose he’s really rather a good guy, Karim, even if he can’t stop the rain or restore the power during load shedding.  I may have mentioned to him that a really good doorman can do anything, and he does at least give an estimate of how many minutes it will take for the rain to stop or the power to come; better still he’s become a proficient explainer in creatively accounting for the inaccuracies of his rain and electricity forecasts.

Meanwhile all the drivers hanging out in the garage area are entertained; meanwhile there’s the constancy of Situ wandering about as he pleases. 

And in those little emergencies he’s great at helping out by getting the odd supplies.  He knows I prefer the milk from brown cows rather than the black and white ones, and that the origin of the tobacco in the cigarettes should be Kushtia rather than Chuadanga.  I hope he doesn’t actually ask these things to the shopkeepers. 

So he’s settled in, and all the formality of the innocent newcomer is gone.  Karim’s no longer shocked if he’s having lunch and I say, ‘is all that eating really necessary?  What about your duty?’   Or when I call on the intercom and begin by asking, ‘where are you now?  Are you absolutely in front of the gate, exactly and precisely?’  It’s logistically impossible to be in front of the gate while talking on the phone.  So there’s a snigger.  ‘I’m standing a little to one side,’ he says.  What I mean is he got used to me. 

And that interchange, the ‘me-and-Karim-at-the-gate’, has become a miniscule slice of the life of the ever changing mega-city.  It’s just another of the millions of asides in the great dramatic production we call Dhaka, a little sigh between the city’s chorus and verse.  Needless to say I couldn’t go through with the hijacking caper and he got his change right back. 

One day I must find the time to take him up on his longstanding invitation to meet his family.  What’s it like there, Faridpur?

Also published at: http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2011/12/02/impressions.htm

Karim, not exactly in front of the gate, but a little to one side.

Karim, safeguarding the street

'Milk from the brown cows and Kushtia tobacco, please'

FrOm hERe?
                  sAiL
riDE
         SWim
wALk
                                         SiT










Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh

As We Are

I’m thinking of Rashid and Zahid and Humar.  I’m thinking of the mirror man who makes the glass with which we see ourselves.

For the tourist it spells abundance, India.  With its millennia chronicled in stone, at forts, castles and in the ruins of ancient citadels; and its spirit dancing in the mystical myriad of mosques, gurdwaras, churches and temples; from its sky-embracing peaks to its biting Thar winds, India mirrors all we are.  But of this, you are aware.

The traditional tourist towns need to be savoured and honoured.  There’s no disclaimer to add.  Yet it’s not only tourists who flock to those places.  There are also touts, also rogues, also tricksters.  And there’s a greater risk: with so very much to see between castle and fort, and in the bustle of the business of all the seeing, it’s absolutely possible to neglect the very seeing of it, India.  And that would be a shame.

Yet for the malady there’s a remedy and it’s simple.  When the touts have been paid and whatever scams have unfolded, just unfold the map and close the eyes and let the index finger waggle away in small circles of fate until it randomly drops upon the paper.  And go there, where the main sight is likely called India.  Go there, in the very way we went to Patna. 

The mirror man was waiting although we didn’t know it and neither did he.  He must’ve been busy that afternoon with whatever mirror men of an afternoon do, as we arrived at Patna Junction train station and checked into a nearby hotel.  Even from the station we could tell: people stared at us in a way that in the traditional tourist towns they didn’t, and it seemed exotic, rather like for a westerner it should be, India.  Without inhibition they dared to look into the mirror.

We’d thought to see the old town.  It’s a normal thing, except Patna’s arms spread wide and from colonial Bankipur the old town was still tens of kilometres to the east.  The locals directed us to some kind of tempos and we powered off, squashed in and unaware just how many bumps there’d need to be.

We were told to get out on a large metropolitan road.  How could it be the old town?  The sun was lowering and the mirror man must’ve been moving about in preparation for evening when we wandered, directed by locals, down an alleyway.  It turned out the alley was connected to others in a great maze of alleys and although we knew, the guide book had said, there was a gurdwara to see, it was just as well to let the alleys take us as they pleased.  People stared.

We met the mirror man first in actuality, but I’m thinking of Rashid and Zahid and Humar.  Night was impatient by then.  The sky was darkening and in the midst of the alleyways we had no hope of knowing which one might take us to the main road.  Humar was there.  He was our age and more than a bit surprised to see two foreigners in his street.  We wished to ask directions but as it turned out he spoke almost no English.  Yet he took us, it might’ve been by the arm, to his nearby house and we had to stoop to get in his front door.  He understood when we said ‘Australia’, although we’d already learnt to say it in the Indian manner, ‘Os-tre-li-a’, for he mimed cricket.  His mother was soon enough busy making tea as we sat, not knowing how to communicate.  We really wanted to be going but we’d come especially to see it, India.  It was afterwards that Humar went to fetch Rashid and his English. 

Like us, Rashid was a university student and he’d never met any foreigners before.  We learnt that Humar’s father was a train driver, often away somewhere down the line, and at Rashid’s insistence we agreed they’d come the following morning, all the way to Bankipur, to show us their Patna, India.

The following day was of rickshaws, two in procession, as the four of us roamed about Bankipur.  They took us to the landmark silo, the domed Golghar that we climbed to admire the view of the Ganges.  They took us to the museum to be impressed by the tricky displays of mirrors and the box that made it look like your head was detached from your body.  They took us to the zoo where we rowed a boat on a small lake.  And they took us to Mayfair for ice cream.

Rashid asked numerous questions about Australia and we did our best to answer, taking turns on his rickshaw.  Humar was a bit lost for words.  Rashid was enthusiastic about his coming graduation, in economics I think; but his ambition was tempered by concern about job prospects.  Bihar was poor then. 

There was nothing wrong with Bihar, Rashid said, but there was political instability that had slowed development.  This was in the days before Jharkhand.

By evening we were back in Old Patna, and we did visit the gurdwara, Takhat Harimandirji Patna Sahib.  It’s important since it’s one of only five Takhats or Holy Seats of Authority for the Sikhs.  Guru Gobind Singh was born there in 1666.  As for us, we already knew of that Sikh tenet which proclaims all humans equal and who would not be impressed? 

Two years later it was, when I stopped by for the second time.  We’d kept in touch by post and I stayed at Rashid’s house, and met his younger brother Zahid, and heard of the troubles with the Naxals in the villages.  It was another few days to chat and learn, not least counting in Urdu.  Rashid’s fears had been founded: he was a graduate, ambitious but after two years still unemployed.  He was thinner and he felt it, I believe, shame for his situation, though the city’s economy was no fault of his.  And when I left the second time, they presented in silver and topaz a handcrafted ring. 

But it was before all of that, before the zoo, before the gurdwara, before Rashid and Zahid and Humar.  There’d still been daylight when we’d stopped for tea on our own in a little shop on one of those alleys.  One of the customers had struck up a conversation and he said he made mirrors.  He asked if we wished to see them, as his house wasn’t far.  So we’d agreed and gone a short way together before he told us to wait, disappearing into a shack.  When he returned his face was sadder than the winter Ganges.  His wife, he had to say, wasn’t prepared for visitors.  I thought perhaps she had only one sari which on that day had been washed.  Or perhaps it was a fight. 

Either way, the mirror man felt it I believe, shame for his situation, but he shouldn’t have: he’s the man who makes the mirrors by which we see ourselves.  As he is, so we are.

There’s good news from Patna in more recent years.  There’s been revival and double digit economic growth.  Bihar had the fastest growth of all the major states in India and tourist numbers have multiplied by six.  Patna is transformed, I believe.  Yet just I hope, and sadly contact was lost with time, that in all its gusto the upturn didn’t forget them, Rashid and Zahid and Humar; and of course Mr. and Mrs. M. Man.  Yet just I hope Mayfair is still serving ice cream.

By the whims of an index finger we saw it, India.

...and if Ye travel further to the east, Ye shall findeth a place where chatting is as a national sport, a city that sayeth yes, and a a quite necessary mountain.  Waste not time lest Ye becometh tired...



This article also published in Patna Daily, here: As We Are

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: As We Are








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The Rishka Wisdom

It pulls to the side of the road at the start of a downpour.  With a push and a click of the metal sidebars the hood is lowered and fixed into place.  A plastic sheet of some impromptu variety is served across passengers’ legs just as a waiter spreads tablecloths in the expectation of diners.  The motion re-starts and the journey continues, with the driver, often uncovered himself, giving in to the drenching delivered by the sky.  There’s virtue in putting one’s own comfort second.  There’s merit in caring for strangers.

In the tyres and mud guards, from handlebars to hood and right down to the panel of imagination, the canvas of rickshaw art at the back, in the rickshaw is wisdom.  Often called ‘rishka’ by the villagers, every day chapters of this vehicle’s sacred texts are recited and inscribed anew across this city’s roads, championing the potholes and taking the occasional short cut along part of a footpath.  In muddy patches the rishka wisdom leaves its imprint traces: the new learning of new journeys etched into the land.  Traffic rules can be as they may, but the rishka wisdom has its own ways.

Long before we heard the broadcasts of rising seas and melting ice caps, before climate scientists became accustomed to death threats, it was there.  A beacon of clean transport the rishka said, ‘consider the air; consider the planet we share.’  And of employment it spoke, the reward that may come with some effort.  The push on the pedal gives the motion to families being fed and the most basic needs being met.  In a hostile world there’s dignity in the pursuit of honesty.  The rishka says that too.

The global centre of this particular branch of knowledge is Dhaka.  The tinkle of the bell is more than a ‘get out of the way!’  It’s a philosophy that tells us to take care with our life’s course such that it may not impinge upon the freedom of others; it’s a warning that the world is full of dangers and with care we should tread; and it’s courtesy.  The rishka bell is music; it’s the chorus call of the city.

The rishka is also about communication: in the dodgem chaos drivers call to each other.  They shout and scold and curse; and sometimes offer the greetings of friends with polite inquiries as to where the other is going.  In any case the rishka’s is not the wisdom of silence but of finding one’s voice.

The rishka’s is a discourse of opportunity and making the most of every space that offers itself in life, of finding space where there is none while working towards achieving a goal.  Somehow everyone fits within the limitations of the road, as the rishka wisdom favours inclusion and a singular society.  The values of patience, ingenuity in problem-solving and, in the event driver becomes technician, of multi-skilling, there are, and while it may be frustrating for pedestrians when in a queue the rickshaw wheels touch there’s also togetherness in that, and consideration, be it belated, as the driver swivels the wheel to let the pedestrian squeeze through.

And although there’s the sometimes violence of an uncouth passenger or car owner who slaps a rickshaw driver for some silly and inevitable scrape, there too is the wisdom: the face-slapper is revealed as a fool, the measurement of bad behaviour is set and the lesson in how not to deal with life’s frustrations is for all on display.  There’s no answer in violence, unless of course it’s in Mohammadpur where passers by may rally around the rickshaw driver and in his defence deliver one.  Possibilities have no end.  The rishka says all people are both good and bad.

In every guide book it shall be written and by many a local it shall be said: always agree upon the fare before stepping into a rickshaw.  As a basic instruction it has an apparent soundness to it: pre-negotiated fares are a vaccine against arguments at the destination and a remedy for the minority of tout-drivers or tight-fisted passengers intent on battling it out down to the last solitary taka.  With agreement in advance the day runs more smoothly and there’s added convenience to be had.  And yet the rishka wisdom says such advice can be wrong.

There’s little more rewarding when at the end of a ride on asking how much to give the driver says ‘give as you will,’ when they mean it.  It’s not as yet uncommon, that cultural inheritance.  But only then it comes, the opportunity for the passenger to consider their means and the driver’s efforts in order to arrive at a mutual understanding; and when the fare is on the generous side of fair it strengthens community, creating an ever so temporary bond and a departure blessed with a tiny dollop of respectful human connection.  The rishka wisdom says: goodness too needs a space to inhabit.  Sometimes it’s up to us to give it one, by throwing caution to the wind and taking a chance, by indulging what the villagers might call the ‘rishka riks’.

And here’s a secret: chatting to the driver along the way and using words like ‘thank you’ often brings out the best, and if there is time, why not stop for tea along the way?  So while perhaps the pre-negotiated fare is good to cover uncommon routes or longer journeys, it remains but a transaction, while the post-negotiated is a human interaction and of benefit to us all.

Still there shall be the smaller number of occasions when post-journey negotiations don’t run smoothly.  Still there shall be the lessons: negotiating skills and dispute resolution which can be useful in bigger situations, at work or at home.  These are the times post-altercation when walking away with a bitter taste in one’s mouth there’s the opportunity to ponder, ‘how could I have handled things better?  What can I do differently next time?’  But by experience, how else do we learn?






Ah, but the rishka's is not the only wheel of past-present-future, and inspiration can be found too in that river that watches the small city; yet, regardless, it's so that ultimately time will find its way back to the place where the world ends.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Rishka Wisdom




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Dracula's Jumpers

Inside Bran Castle.  Photo: wikipedia

 

Exposed beams of brown wood held the ceiling and brown wood made the floor.  Neither small nor large the room accommodated neither light nor ventilation.  Rather it was musty, dull and brooding.  Bats could have lived in it.  There was almost no furniture, although centuries ago it might have been a place of small medieval gatherings, that modest space inside the castle at Bran, first built by the Saxons of Kronstadt in the 1370s under the privilege of a Hungarian king. 

The old lady, I can’t tell of her face: it was years ago and she may have been slightly stooped in her posture.  But she was shrunken and seemed to have all the ages and upheavals of Romania within her.  Despite it being summer, she wore an odious light cardigan in an unfortunate pea-green.  Conspicuous for the absence of other furniture, beside one of the walls was a brown wooden chest, of the usual type, rectangular, with a rounded hinged lid.

Unexpectedly she made us wait and as we watched she crept about like a stowaway, first to the one side of the room then the other, clutching each doorway with the curl of her bony fingers and poking her little head into each passage beyond.  There’d be no witness to her plan.

It was certainly a place where things could happen, nestled in amongst the lightly rolling and slightly wooded borderlands that divide the mysterious regions of Wallachia and Transylvania.  It was Bran Castle, famed as the home of that murderous, villainous and bloodthirsty vampire, the fabled Count Dracula.  Once satisfied we were alone the old woman turned.  From the far doorway she came and with bony curled fingers we were beckoned, closer, towards the brown wooden chest.  She looked guilty.

Romanians are a people whose temperaments are as wide as the sky.  As the steely chilly clouds winter brings, so their spirits can be tested and down, and with the summer they can crackle with a brightness outdone only by the sun.  It’s anecdotal, read-about, said-about and seemingly-witnessed, but it would explain the divergence between my summer experience and my brother’s narration: he’d been there just six months before.  The change of season might’ve been the reason. 

Regardless, there is indeed some difference: unlike most of the neighbouring nations in Eastern Europe, Romanians are not cool and cynical Slavs but rather, like Italians and Spaniards to the west they are Latinos, hot-blooded and expressive, which we’d observed but the night before.

Settling into humble lodgings in the minor town of Râşnov, on our way to Bran, we’d headed out for dinner and found a nondescript local venue.  There were few customers, but a group of maybe five young Romanians sat nearby and with ease our conversation spread.  They had just graduated from high school and were out celebrating, they said, and I wondered where all the other students were, though Râşnov wasn’t large.  Of all of them I recall Nini because, and I’m not quite sure how it came up, he was a self-confessed geography addict and we were soon quizzing each other about obscure capitals: I caught him in the Pacific Islands, beside Australia, where he did not know to give a Funafuti to my Tuvalu, and he caught me with his neighbour for I’d forgotten that his Moldova’s answer was correctly my Chisinau.  But for the most part he was faultless on his capitals, no doubt.  I’ll give him that.

After we’d connected, that group of friends invited us to another place on top of a hill by the town.  There was a white building and tables in the garden and a poor unfortunate couple, a middle aged woman with a dump of heavily styled bottle blond hair and her man were attempting to canoodle in romance.  We utterly destroyed their moment, as the only other patrons.  And we were rowdy and boisterous by then.  The woman took initiative.  She left her man to scream at us: she really yelled, such that we should be more considerate and refined.  A season of anger rolled across from her table.

Not much unusual there but the Romanian part came next, I thought.  After some time and several bouts of scolding we discovered the need to take a photo of our Romanian-graduates-and-two-Australians group.  ‘Excuse me madam,’ Nini said…  It was remarkable.  From one minute sounding as if almost ready to throttle us she obliged, and moments later, featured with her man amongst us, in the snaps.  The antagonistic parties had merged like noodles, almost in an instant!  What a change! Hot-blooded and expressive, changeable, arrange-able and connected: all the seasons in her.

Count Dracula is fictional of course, but based upon a real historical figure.  Prince of Wallachia in the 1400s, Vlad III was perhaps not a vampire, but it hardly means he was nice.  His nickname says it all, ‘Vlad the Impaler’ with reference to his favourite execution method, and with victims that are said to have numbered in the tens of thousands, his infamy spread across Europe.  Perhaps his temperament went up and down, at the ready to snap and impale.  It’s not to say he never tried to have quiet romantic dinners with one of his two consecutive wives.  Perhaps his was but a more extreme version of that read-about, said-about and seemingly-witnessed Romanian fashion: all the seasons in him.

Bony curled fingers clutched the latch of the chest, that following afternoon in the castle.  She looked around once more to see nobody coming, then at us, before opening the lid.  It wouldn’t have been out of place had there been blood or gore or an infant vampire in that chest in the castle at Bran.  But instead she unfolded, lifted out, not less than ingenuity and survival.  With the upheaval of Romania within her and the post-communist era to greet her old age, she’d taken to knitting and I don’t know if she was a paid guide at the castle or not, but in that chest was her little secret: the garments sideline.

Surprisingly though, even her cottage industry had a ghastly side to it.  Politely one could say she was new to the craft or mention the deterioration of eyesight common to old age, for her range of offerings was coarsely knit and in style, no less other-worldly than a vampire.  There were jumpers in vomit yellow and jumpers in mottled maroon.  There were lopsided hats in beige which should have been round; and it could be a failing of memory but I seem to recall the sleeves on the jumpers were not necessarily and entirely of the same length.  One might be for a short and stout gent while its mate was orang-utan suitable.  At the very least I’d be sure to count the number of fingers on any gloves for sale there.  It was Dracula’s castle.  It was frightening.

But, ingenuity and survival, she’d tried; and I tried nonetheless to find something that might be vaguely of use, to support her, to encourage her, to reward her little venture; but alas, after viewing all the stock there was nought, not a single item I could bring myself to purchase.

Weeks later at home in Sydney I met my brother, and we spoke of our separate travels in Europe’s East.  ‘Did you meet that old woman selling jumpers from a chest in Dracula’s castle?’ he’d said and we laughed, comparing notes on her special artistry.  ‘I bought a few things,’ he confessed, and truth is, in retrospect, I wish I’d bought a few things too.




More knitwear? Well of course the jumpers are smaller in Lilliput, and coloured-pencil-set designs are sometimes worthwhile... but whatever, as long as it's winter, without dispute.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Dracula's Jumpers

About Mrs. Val

Mrs. Val (Centre) with her wonderful daughter and Aunty Val (left)

There were gloves and a scarf in it, not to mention a woolly hat, the day Val took me to their family apartment to her mother.  Donetsk in Ukraine is a city of about two million people and four full seasons.  It has forty-plus summers and minus-twenty winters and we’d not reached the summer yet.

It took me a while to come across her name these years later.  It’s Tanya.  I suppose it’s a peculiar habit to get about renaming people quite independently of whatever arrangement of letters the rest of the world has granted them, but I often do.  It’s why her regular name didn’t come easily, because I never used it.  It may be my mother’s inheritance, because in her family several of the names in use have no correspondence to birth certificates.  As with Bengali newborns, in my mother’s family allocating names is like clothes shopping.  Names need trying out first, it takes them a while to fit and sometimes they get changed before they suit.  It’s unfortunate for it’s neither very creative nor as a title correct, but by virtue of being Val’s mother it was Mrs. Val that settled in to be her name.  There is significant doubt she knows I call her that, but none that she wouldn’t much mind.

Mrs. Val lives in the usual Soviet apartment block, tall, slightly dour and similar to all the others thereabouts.  I lived in one too, that the language centre had rented for their native-speaker English teacher.  Outside the block was the arrangement of dilapidated swings and previous seesaws amongst the still leafless trees that marked the usual generous allotment of space between the several blocks in the cluster.  Val and I followed a path of worn damp earth to the stoop of the building.

The block had eight or so floors to it, which meant inside it featured one of those gorgeous old lifts of the criss-crossed iron out door variety, doors to be pushed apart by hand, of the laminated plywood inner door variety, door to be opened by hand.  With some luck once all the doors were shut again the little light in the lift would turn on automatically and hopefully upon pressing the chunky black plastic button for the floor the little engine would whirr.  Luck and hope: they were with us on that day.

Mrs. Val seemed a little nervous when she opened the door.  I was too.  In part it was because like her daughter and I, she was an English teacher, though in her achievements Mrs. Val was on an altogether higher level.  Ukrainian English teachers: how I admire them!  To think they had studied the language for five years at university without the benefit of having had the opportunity to converse with a native-speaker.  In Soviet times there had been the occasional guest lecturer, so they said, but because of politics it’d hardly been possible to have a chat one to one.  On the very earliest occasions some of them spoke with me, there remained a slight hesitation with regards to how their language skills when confronted with a native would fare.

Just inside, we removed layers: gloves, scarf and shoes; before she led us into the sitting room.  I took it in, Mrs. Val and the room.  Isn’t it funny how new experiences can sometimes gently accidentally touch upon a childhood moment and bring to the present warmth and light?  Mrs. Val made me remember the elephants.

When I was six or seven one of my father’s work colleagues used to live on the corner down the street.  They were family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery and my parents used to take me there when they’d go to visit.  While in that house there hadn’t been much for a kid to do I used to enjoy it: it had a kind of happiness in it that used to rub off.  So while they spoke about adult things I would busy myself with the elephants, the big, medium and little black wooden ones that must’ve emigrated from Africa to settle as a herd by their fireplace.  And Mr. Montgomery would serve one of his concoctions of soda water and lemon flavouring, with a plastic drink mixer or even one of those little umbrellas in it.  ‘Be careful with the elephants,’ my father used to say.

At a basic level it was the red of Mrs. Val’s hairdo that linked her with Mrs. Montgomery, but more than that it was the ambience of her living room.  Mrs. Val spoke gently with an accent rich in that Russianness which once was East Ukraine.  She spoke about the changes in the classroom: how once teachers had been dedicated enough that if one of the students was absent they’d take it upon themselves to visit the family in person to inquire the reason.  She still had that quality.

When she spoke of that and because of the tapestry on the wall I thought of Iran.  The tapestry seemed like one Iranians might choose to decorate their apartment, and her words about teaching I’d heard from one of her Iranian colleagues, Farhonde.  Mrs. Val was calmer I suppose.  Farhonde always specialised in energy and not a day under sixty she was, when she started the snowball fight on the slopes of Damavand.  Yet how much they had in common: teachers to the bone.

After the Soviet collapse the economics of things were more than tight.  In the larger capital, Kyiv, teaching salaries might barely cover the cost of the transport to get there and home again.  In Donetsk the situation was hardly better.  Mrs. Val used to spend her free time at her small land plot on the city outskirts, digging in and digging out potatoes.  I know she enjoyed that but there were times it’d been a little more necessary than it should have been; and of course the pension system she had spent her whole working life anticipating was more or less gone.  I don’t suppose while westerners were celebrating the Soviet collapse they thought much of Mrs. Val; but on the other hand without political change I couldn’t have met her so freely.

Donetsk is a city of mines: they’re dotted about even inside suburban areas and from Mrs. Val’s balcony you could see a few slag heaps rising up from the horizon.  From my arrival in Donetsk I used to consider myself a bit of a miner, though while others went underground in search of coal the minerals I sought were new experience, new culture and new learning.  Of the other sort of mineral I cannot tell you, but in what I fossicked for Donetsk was incredibly wealthy.  From the balcony Val pointed to the slag heaps.  ‘When I was a kid,’ she said, ‘I used to think those heaps were the mountains of Georgia.’  It was the opposite from me, for I’ve always found distances reduce as we grow.

‘Well…,’ it was the silvery and the sublime, the word Mrs. Val used, drawing it out slightly and peppering it through the conversation.  It was a word she’d crafted to mean anything, dependent on the occasion.  Sometimes it was an acknowledgement we were sharing an imperfect world; sometimes it was like a solitary drum beat to mark time. But mostly that tiny word held an exact and easily comprehensible meaning: nobody brings to it the adaptability she does.

‘Well…’ she said, standing.  It was time to prepare lunch.  I don’t know, just I followed her and in the kitchen we sat making pilmeni, Russian dumplings, together.  We pushed the meat filling into the folded pastry and crafted little scalloped edge packets with our fingers.  Mrs. Val’s pilmeni were neat and exact; mine were inexperienced and shoddy.  And sitting there I was at home.

I remember too the salt.  Val had left the living room during the meal and after some minutes, returned.  ‘What have you done with it?’ she asked her mother, a little demandingly.  ‘I’ve hidden it. You’ll never find it!’ Mrs. Val said, unapologetic, and, turning to me added, ‘she eats too much salt.’  ‘Yes, she does,’ I said without thinking and we laughed.

In the classroom, it’s Mrs. Val I think of: if ever I managed to be half the teacher she is then I did well.  Even without seeing her teach I knew it, that she was the professional high-water mark.  And isn’t it nice to imagine a Mrs. Val world?  There’d be no battlefield in it, only the classroom.  In Australia, the Federal Police would not have recently completed jungle training to prepare to potentially shoot pellets at the Afghan asylum seekers who arrive by boat, many of them children, in order to force them onto a plane to Malaysia.  In a Mrs. Val world there’d be no need to refuse to help people or to expel foreignness.  ‘Well…’

After several hours we left, and walking down the stairs I said, ‘your mother is wonderful.  So I don’t know what happened to you!’  Val stopped in her tracks, shooting an arrow of a glare; but we were well passed the stage where she could not know the meaning was opposite.  With me, she had long since lost her licence to be genuinely offended.  It’s the way of things.

And in Dhaka we’re reduced to the text box.  After chatting away with Val a few months ago, as we were winding up, I typed, ‘and when you see your mother, tell her I love her.’  ‘I know,’ the message came back, ‘and she loves you too.’ ‘Well…’





Mrs. Val may teach, but did she ever face the challenge of the the skull in the classroom, or have to overcome the language barrier to explain about the buffaloes or accidentally end up as a juice-drinking golfer?  Such things can happen, believe you me...


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: About Mrs. Val

English by Association

It was business.  The company had sent their guy from mainland Noakhali to liaise with Situ’s distributorship.  He thought he was doing it tough in Hatiya, without unabated electricity, without all the mod-cons.  There was a big chair for the office in which only he sat and from there, in manner and clothes, and not least with his preference for the English language, he sought to put his stamp of town-man company-man quality on display, presumably for the islanders to take benefit from.  Although he was Bangladeshi, he spoke only in English and on that account Situ responded only in Bangla.  He showed some degree of sympathy about it: he must have known it can be hard for people living in the deep islands to polish their English.  It happened while I was in Sydney: he didn’t imagine Situ’s English by association.

Situ’s English, what are the adjectives?  One could say interesting, unique or poetic.  I usually refer to it as nice.  Understand: it’s not a criticism.  Until I can rattle off Rabindranaths in Bangla I’m in no position to criticise, and over the years he’s learnt a great deal with little specific assistance from me, in part because sometimes it felt to correct him was only ruining his particular English version.  Why should he conform to the more widely established norms of the language when he was creative enough to make his own?  For example, Situ has a fondness for verbs that would seem to invoke the principle of ‘why use only one verb when several will do.’  Phrases like ‘I am understand’ and ‘it can be happen’ were his signature phrases for many years and as I certainly have no aversion to verbs what did it matter if he was a little liberal in their application?  Yet still I foolishly drove them to extinction in the name of correctness and now they are absolutely missed.  His English is not as nice as it once was.

I appreciated too his having adopted his own grammar system and more than that, his talent for word discovery.  ‘Languages have thousands of words in them,’ he used to say, ‘so is it so strange if I should discover one?’  It happens also in Bangla, and when he teaches me a new Bangla word I have to ask, ‘is that one in the dictionary?’  Sometimes the answer is, ‘not yet.’  Playing with language: it’s a Hatiyan, a Noakhali thing.

In the days before the company sent their man it wasn’t only English that was in the foreground.  There was also Chinese.  It was at the time I was headed for Taiwan that Situ so kindly offered to teach me a few words, and he wasn’t going to let the minor fact that he didn’t know Chinese stand in his way.  ‘Chìng chó,’ was the word he discovered for ‘hello’.  He taught that.  ‘But what if I get to Taiwan,’ I asked, ‘and nobody understands your Chinese, what will I do?’  ‘China is a big country,’ he replied with confidence, ‘there are many variations.’  We at least started to greet each other with a hearty chìng chó in the days before that departure.  For us it became basic Chinese, though I confess I was much too shy to try it out for real, in Taiwan.  Better to leave it as Hatiyan Chinese.

It’s not only me who has respect for Situ’s English, in HatiyaHHH.  On hearing us talking, on knowing we are friends, it takes some bravery for any of the locals to challenge his English.  Where he gets the grammar wrong even in the company of those better qualified or with more experience, it’s easy for them to doubt their knowledge, because I understand him.  In the village at least he’s earned a reputation for having superior English: there are souls who think he’s somewhere up around, as they would say, a double-Masters PhD. level.  I think his English is even nicer than that.

It’s not that often foreigners make it to Hatiya.  Some, like those young Dutch women, pass through as part of their N.G.O. duties, and when they perchance stopped in the local market in our village, the Bengali N.G.O. workers accompanying them sought out Situ.  They were having trouble communicating with the Dutch, they told him, and asked if he could bring his superior English to their aid.  Flabbergasted and embarrassed, Situ met the Dutch and did his best.  I’d wager there were a few too many verbs involved.

On another occasion he was busy in the local market when a couple of locals arrived by Honda from the main town, Ochkhali.  It was a hospitality emergency.  ‘Andrew’s friend is there,’ they told him excitedly, urging him to go with them.  Situ was puzzled.  Surely he would know if one of my friends was on their way to Hatiya.  On arrival they took him to Hotel Singapore and led him upstairs to where ‘my friend’ was staying.  He knocked and after a moment a young Japanese girl cautiously opened the door.  ‘Do you know Andrew?’ he asked.  She was afraid to see a stranger inexplicably standing there.  ‘Which Andrew?’ she replied.  ‘Okay, I am understand,’ he would have said, and apologised.  Situ told the girl’s self-appointed local well-wishers not to disturb her further, that she was scared and as a random tourist, they should let her enjoy Hatiya and Nijhumdwip in peace.

‘You are the only English-speaker I can understand,’ Situ used to tell me and it proved true the day I put him on the phone to speak with Val, one of my friends from Ukraine.  She is an English teacher but as is to be expected her accent is influenced by the usual velvety Ukrainian-ness, and it’s never easy on the phone.  After a rudimentary hello-hi I took the receiver.  ‘He was really difficult to understand,’ Val said honestly, and afterwards Situ said, ‘can you really understand her?’  He was amazed.  Extra confusion may have arisen from her dogged willingness to follow the established grammar forms she’d studied at university.

The sun had set by the time I arrived in Hatiya again, after Taiwan.  I hadn’t seen Situ yet; he didn’t know what day I would come.  I was just near his office when I saw him ahead on the road.  I let out a full-voiced ‘chìng chó’ through the darkness.  ‘Is it really you?’ he called.  I was back.

But it was years later I first met the town-man, company-man.  He still had his big chair.   Situ, who had never uttered a single English word he finally learnt, had an Australian friend, and we talked with fluency, be it perhaps of a form unrecognisable elsewhere in the universe.  I am understand.  He was dumfounded.  Perhaps the islands weren’t so remote after all.  He was a little nervous to speak his English after that.

More recently I studied French in Dhaka, it can be happen, and on seeing my text book Situ decided French was really rather easy, just like English with a few extra letters and odd-sounding words thrown in.  And so there were text-messages, there still are on occasion, in Hatiyan French.  ‘Yo la starta sour la Noakhali,’ he will send.  It means, ‘I’ve started out for Noakhali,’ even if the world over there are no other French speakers to recognise that particular sentence.  France: how many colonies did they have?  There has to be quite a lot of linguistic variation in it.




With Situ's studious training I was set.  After that, how could language be a problem in Taiwan?  But of course it didn't start there.  Many years earlier came the man on the train, at the start of things, and many years before that came the university of walls, curtains and furniture.  Yet even that wasn't the start...



This article also published in Star Magazine, here: English by Association




Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh

From Bolivia, with Love

Mrs. Das models her alpaca sari-shawl

Like a line of porcelain dolls they sat, one, two and three, on the couch in that living room three thousand six hundred metres and nine floors above sea level.  There was no mistaking them in their multi-layered skirts, with their long plaits either side, in their cherished bowler hats.  They were ladies of Aymaran stock, indigenous citizens of Bolivia.

Knit two, purl one, so the patterns went, knit three, purl one, as the knitting needles clicked, as the ladies transformed the library of yarn on the shelves about the living room into jumpers, knit two, and cosy woollen hats with ear flaps, purl three, or vests for spoilt pet dogs in the cold-climate west.  The fleece was especially soft and warm, as it was not sheep’s wool but from alpacas, that smaller relative of the llama to be found in Bolivia’s villages, knit one.  They knitted items for export; they knitted for an essential salary in Bolivianos.

We had few words, knit three, purl one, for my inadequacy in Spanish was oftentimes equalled by theirs and of Aymaran I knew not a word.  But I could smile and say, with flexible grammar, simple things like ‘would you like a cup of coca tea?’  Their chatting would stop, knit two, they’d giggle to each other, purl one, and agree.

In the kitchen I arranged the metallic camping mugs, one, two, three and four and got to work on making the local brew, easy enough with just a coca tea bag and boiling water.

The apartment in the Bolivian capital of La Paz belonged to a knitting cooperative, and they were village ladies, oftentimes victims of domestic violence and / or single mothers.  I taught English but in that space I’d rented a room.  As the steaming yellowish cups of coca tea met the coffee table they’d smile and giggle.  Coca tea can prevent altitude sickness and remove hunger, but we liked its taste, knit five and purl two.

‘They’re not used to being served tea by a man,’ my landlady, also my student, explained of their laughter.  These were the little things that once were, in that place so far removed from the Bangladeshi delta.  It was near time to leave Bolivia when I bought the box of coloured pencils.

Little gifts for Hatiyans, it was always hard.  Sometimes Australians would say, ‘just take a bunch of second-hand clothes.’  I don’t suppose you can expect them to understand the difference between charity and friends.  I’d always had a budget but wouldn’t be giving anything I wouldn’t be happy giving anyone else; and it should be something a bit special.

Example: in Bolivia they play zampoñas or pan flutes, traditional instruments for mountain music, of many bamboo pipes of varying length arranged vertically; unlike the horizontal standard flute.  The player has to move the instrument across their mouth to blow in the tube that makes the note they wish to play.  Nashir used to make his own flutes, he taught himself, and some evenings we’d walk Hatiyan villages and he’d play flute songs to our Chad Mama, or Moon Uncle.  In Bolivia, Nashir’s gift was an easy choice.

Nashir with his Bolivian Flutes

 

The women were always harder.  For men lungee would do it.  The Indonesian lungee is of thicker cloth and is longer; hotter but more robust than the Bangladeshi variety.  I’d bought a stack of those once in Kuala Lumpur on my way towards Dhaka.  The shopkeeper had been surprised.

So I sat with coloured pencils and paper, picturing the brightness of saris, mapping patterns of Hatiyan inspiration.  With slight embarrassment I showed my amateur sketches to my landlady, the head of the cooperative.  ‘Can the ladies knit those?’  I tried to tell her of the delta island villages; where the shawls they’d make would go.  But honestly, who can explain Mrs. Das? 

I was back in Sydney when the packages arrived.  My landlady said the ladies had really enjoyed trying new patterns and colours, knit six, purl two.

About a month later I flew to Dhaka.  Amma, my Bengali mother, said the size was a little small: that was my doing in part, but also how they’re worn in La Paz.

Hatiyans know about gifts much better than westerners do.  I’d always marvelled about how if you gave anything to Situ’s kids, within minutes they’d be shared: there was a bunch of cheap bangles for his daughter once.  Soon all the neighbours’ daughters had one or two on their arms. 

And I won’t forget the perfume.  I’d bought the one my Australian mother and sister liked, a bit expensive but cheap-smelling I couldn’t give. Mrs. Das, my Didi, you know what she did?  Bless her.  She opened the bottle and sprayed everyone in range with some.  She shared.  As I watched those fine droplets propel into the air towards her son, her husband and the neighbours: a kind of alchemy I knew it to be.  She was turning materialism, no less, and possession, into community and love.  It was so simple.

And the shawls, and the Bolivian tablecloths I’d bought at the witches’ market in La Paz, which in Hatiya became shawls, they were shared.  Mrs. Das’s son would as often wear hers; in another house, knit two, purl one, it kept toes warm in the winter nights.  How I wish the ladies could meet their Hatiyan counterparts.  Communication would be hard; but I’m sure, knit three, purl one, they have much in common.

I tried to explain the Andes Mountains and the desolate villages of the Altiplano where potatoes grow between icy winters and droughts.  In the delta I tried to explain the alpaca.  But honestly, who can explain what one of my Bolivian students had once called ‘the strange country in the middle of South America?’

A year later back in Bolivia, in that living room, just quietly, I noticed a few of my little pattern creations had found their way into some of the other items, knit one.  From my pencil maybe they’d come, but in inspiration, purl two, they were patterns from Bangladesh, with love.

As for Nashir, I don’t know if he ever mastered the pan flute like he manages with his home-made ones, though he could certainly get a better sound out of it than I could.  I’ll have to ask him.  But a few years later I saw it at his house in the glass showcase.  He told me a Noakhaila family had wanted to buy it for a sizeable sum.  I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d sold it, knit two, but he’d told them, purl one, it was a gift and not for sale.

And... knit two, pearl one, read about the benefits of life in a mega-city, knit three, pearl two, peruse the 'can I be your pen friend?' tour, knit five, pearl four, enjoy the challenge of the luggage mafia...  Your new jumper is now ready.  Pattern completed.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: From Bolivia, with Love

Rubban in her Bolivian Tablecloth cum Shawl

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Metro Dreaming

Now that it’s apparent that CNG drivers were only using the meter as a special tribute to the Cricket World Cup and Dhaka’s back to her usual self, it’s hardly surprising when inching through the jams that one’s thoughts are sometimes given over to the metro dreaming.  With the regularity of newspaper announcements on the subject I can’t be the only one.  But what sort of metro will it be?

The number and width of the rails, the carriage and platform dimensions, above ground, below ground: let the engineers tackle such trivialities.  More important are the cultural dimensions, for in any city the nature of the mass transit system is a window into the community’s psyche.  A metro system is far more than transport.  It’s a cultural statement.

In Switzerland trains have a habit of leaving early while Tokyo is renowned for employing ‘pushers’ whose job is to shove more people into each carriage before the doors close; and in Stockholm’s tunnelbana the stations are so imaginatively decorated they’ve become a tourist attraction.  It’s said to be the longest art gallery in the world; the Moscow Metro disputes this. 

Will Dhaka’s version resemble Sydney’s trains where businesspeople sit in neat rows ignoring each other or incline towards Kolkata’s trains where groups of commuters pass uncomfortable hours by playing cards, chatting and sometimes thumping out a drum beat on their books or briefcases while singing aloud to entertain the whole carriage?  It’s not only passengers who can sing.  There was one occasion, highly unusual, when a conductor in Sydney decided rather than simply listing the names of the coming stations over the PA system he’d sing them operatically.  It got everybody smiling; though being Sydney there’s every chance he got in trouble for not being sufficiently mechanical.  Could singing conductors work in Dhaka, perhaps with tabla and harmonium?  How about rhyming station names to promote poetry?

In the Ukrainian capital Kyiv there’s the history of the Cold War in the metro, with the Soviet-constructed stations built to double as bomb shelters in the case of nuclear attack.  The escalators are long, steep and rapid; the platforms far enough under the earth to wonder if it shouldn’t be getting a little hotter down there.  One of the deepest stations in the world is in Kyiv, Arsenalna at 105.5 metres below ground.  For a cheap set fare for which a blue plastic token is purchased, any length of journey is allowed.  Now that’s equality!

In Ukraine commuters were chivalrous.  For gentlemen to stand up for ladies was expected behaviour and any sitting male risked being publicly rebuked if they made a woman stand.  A chauvinistic practice to be sure, and I made that point on the bus with my friend Tanya, when I’d stand at the stairs as we got out and extend my hand for her to help me down, just to show it could be done the other way around.  But in actuality it was quite impressive, chauvinistic or not.

On the other hand, one of my colleagues in Kyiv, Valery, complained that on the metro people played music so loudly he couldn’t concentrate on his reading.  I thought he was being oversensitive, imagining a Sydney scenario with someone listening to their headset at high volume such that the drum beat resounded slightly in the adjacent seats.  But no, he meant a guy with a ghetto blaster, no headphones, pumping Russian rap at a deafening level, so I discovered.  In general Ukrainians had a high level of noise tolerance; and in Dhaka too I can’t imagine many music-related complaints.  People might tend to enjoy it.

Dhaka possibly doesn’t need the peak hour Kolkata train scenario: those passengers hanging out the door, hanging onto other passengers, one of whom in the inevitable chain has an actual grip on the train itself, though already here the trains feature the air-conditioned top class passengers perched on the roof.  Sydney trains meanwhile document changes in national dietary habits over the decades, in the form of the three-person seats which have somehow reduced over time to fit approximately 2.5. 

The underground metro of Kolkata is a little like Stockholm’s, a tourist attraction, be it for a very different reason.  There’s a really interesting human phenomenon which occurs at the terminus stations.  I saw it several times, what could be called the Dum Dum Phenomenon.  Along the platform at the precise points where the doors of the carriage of the new, empty train are due, people cluster like grapes on an otherwise empty platform.  For the most part they stand politely and quietly.  The train arrives.  At the split second the electric doors open the businessmen commuters transform into something of a rugby scrum, pushing and tiger-wrestling into the carriage in a seat-finding free-for-all.  The best part comes at most fifteen seconds later when the participants are sitting upright and sedate, unfolding newspapers and reading glasses, the absolute model of gentility.  There’s a kind of instantaneous collective amnesia about it: the just completed seat-scramble simply did not happen and is visible only vaguely in the resigned despair on the faces of the businessmen who didn’t push quite hard enough and have to stand. 

The Dum Dum Phenomenon may be a comment on colonialism: the scramble for resources followed by the victor suddenly behaving like an aristocrat.  I suppose it’s better to be orderly but those brief metro scrums are mildly hilarious so perhaps in Dhaka something could be organised irregularly, like a Scrum-Sunday tradition when train boarding decorum is outlawed, to keep things a little boisterous and fun.

In Kolkata they try to keep it clean, the metro, be it a kind of subtropical-clean; and it can’t be easy when you’ve got an enormous black bull taking a rest beside the ticket window.  I certainly wouldn’t like to be in charge of sweeping around him. Clean is an uncontroversial desire for any metro.

I’d like to walk under an inspiring quote from Nazrul, Rabindranath, Sufia Kamal or their fellows at every station entrance; and it’d be nice if the stations featured Bangladeshi architecture on the outside and village-style interior décor.  How about bamboo thatch decoration along the carriage ceilings?  Could there be a section with a tin roof to catch that monsoon rain sound that’s so divine?  Would it be at all convenient to have sitalpati or woven mat upholstery on the seating, which would certainly be cool on the hot days?  And if spitting is not to be banned perhaps each carriage could feature ornamental made-in-Dhamrai brass spittoons in the corner? 

Outside the station entrance it would be nice to see some permanent well-spaced tea shops, also selling fuchka and chatputi snacks, to make the metro a social place, and perhaps each station could reserve room to provide a number of real beds for Dhaka’s homeless people such that they don’t need to sleep on the ground.  Whatever the eventual model, there’s one characteristic from the Tehran metro that doesn’t need emulation.  It’s up and running now and most probably fine.  I’ve not seen it but I do recall in the mid-90s the only thing running in Tehran was the joke about the city’s metro which had been ‘under construction’ for several decades! 

In Tehran they finally got there and so one day will Dhaka.  It’s going to be a tough job trying to incorporate the enormity of Bangladeshi culture into several hundred square metres of platform and a fleet of carriages.  The engineers have it easy.  But for now there’s little to do but head out onto the roads.  For now, there’s only the metro dreaming.




Announcement: "The following metro service is an express service.  First stop is with the knitting ladies in the bowler hats, thence all stations to a promise is a promise, followed by the Russian kitchen revelation.  This metro service will terminate at the village of changing perceptions.  Please enjoy the journey."

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Metro Dreaming

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Turning from the East; Turning to the West

The Lady of Riga

There’s a kind of folk wisdom in her, that lady high up who holds aloft the three stars: she knows the power of songs that brought the end of the Soviet Union to Latvia; she lasted through every changing season.  Even in winter when nature says it’s not possible she’s standing in a forest of flowers with her sanctity guarded night and day.  I saw that on my second trip to Latvia in 2002.

Once, in the Soviet season it was illegal to look at her, I was told, the independence monument in the middle of the plaza beside Riga’s old town.  It was because she remembers the first independent Latvia of 1918 - 1940.  The three stars she holds are for the three regions of the first Latvia: Vidzeme, Kurzeme and Latgale.

A few streets away another lady, older and shorter, is adorned in a red jumper, red gloves and a silly red hat.  She stands by her ghetto blaster, which blasts golden oldies as she dances in obscure movements to entertain the passers by with her high speed yoga.  Those pedestrians are on their way to the retail sector which spreads across the city like a blanket of snow, and Christmas Street is crowded with customers.  Latvia by then was racing, restored and energetic, towards the European Union.  It was strange for the city where only a few short years before primary school children had been jealous of Anta’s Australian-purchased barbie dolls.  Barbie dolls were not available in Latvia in Soviet days.

Christmas Street, old Riga

Five and a half years after the first time there was a phone call placed from Vilnius, Lithuania to the offices of the Latvian National Academy of Science.  I wanted to catch up with my old friends; and although it’d been vaguely arranged I’d decided to come a little earlier.  There’d been letters but I hadn’t spoken to Dzintra in many years and in my mind her Latvian accent had been lost; on the phone it came rushing back and made me smile. 

‘Are you sure it’s okay if I come and visit you?’ I asked.  She sounds as excited as me.  

‘When?’

‘How about the day after tomorrow?’

It was afternoon when the bus from Vilnius arrived in Riga, after rattling through somewhere not too far from Bauska along the way.  It was late November, the fields icy, leafless and grey.  The bus station in Riga is by the train station by the Latvian National Academy of Science.  The doors were still heavy and there was still an old lady in a glass booth, as there’d been the first time, and she still didn’t speak English; but it hardly mattered because I had a name.  The enquiries lady directed me to a random other lady by the lifts who knew Dzintra and figured out which floor she was on.

Turning

The first moments belonged to just looking at each other again; remembering that decades-long week, half a decade before.  She hadn’t changed.

‘Well, looks like work is finished for today,’ she said.  It was 3.00 p.m. and highly unlikely work had actually finished but we went home anyway.

Her daughters had grown: Antra had become a Chevrolet-driving accountant; Anta had become something of a fully-fledged person and was studying nursing.  Antra had spent time in the States but Anta who’d inherited an Australian accent from her childhood months in Melbourne still readily pronounced all the twenty-seven odd syllables in the word ‘home’, just the way Australians do.  At her workplace they called her ‘Skippy,’ she said.

I was leaving for the local shop on that first day of the second time and I said, ‘okay, thanks, see you in another five years,’ as I walked out of the apartment.  Dzintra choked me with my scarf: in late November, Latvia dons scarves. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no!’ she said.  It was nice to be all twenty-seven odd syllables of home in Riga again.  Just as before, each hour was a year together.

Antra found herself inclined to offer a Chevrolet tour to Latvia’s mid-west, to an now icy sculpture garden really made for summer.  We headed out along the freeways on Riga’s southern edge; cause to remember Belarusian and his rusty lorry.

It’d been towards the end of the first trip, when I’d decided that as much as I enjoyed staying at Dzintra’s place I should see a bit more of Latvia so, as well as not to outdo my welcome, I said I’d be heading west for a few days.  They’d suggested a picturesque little village called Pavilosta I believe; to get there first I’d check out Liepaja the Port City.

There’s not much to tell of those few days; it was indeed very first part, the trip to Liepaja which was most remarkable.  It was difficult to get cars to stop on the freeways out of Riga, and I’d decided to hitch-hike as a more sociable means of A to B despite that with a few tiny brown coins I could’ve bought a bus ticket.  I’d thought of giving up when eventually a rusty old truck had stopped.

‘Liepaja?’ I’d asked.  That town was far away, for Latvia; yet strangely that truck was headed all the way there, to the port.  The journey was hideously slow and the worst part was I couldn’t speak to the driver.  We did however exchange cigarettes: I was smoking Camels and he had this heavy Russian brand he thought I couldn’t handle.  Somehow I worked out that the driver was a Belarusian; the first I’d ever met.

Just when the long journey mostly in silence seemed as if it couldn’t get any worse, the driver decided to be a Samaritan and stopped beside another truck, broken down, to see if he could help.  The other driver I understood was also Belarusian.  As they talked and worked at fixing the other truck, so they had a little food: some bread and a chunk of white substance they said was called salo. 

I’m not sure how I understood it, maybe the other driver spoke a little English, but the salo was a block of salted pig fat that was a traditional Belarusian specialty and my truck driver’s grandmother had made it for him especially, in her Belarusian village.

The middle-aged truck driver had a round enough figure and when he bent to check out the mechanics of the broken down truck so it happened he had a split in the back of his pants all the way down the seam; perhaps his village grandmother didn’t sew.  The other truck driver laughed at him and so did I.  As there were so few words to share I said not much more than, ‘salo,’ meaning eating too much makes you fat and splits your pants!  They caught the gist of it and thought it hilarious.  Later when we’d eventually arrived in Liepaja the driver didn’t let me leave immediately; not before he’d rustled around to find the rest of the chunk of his grandmother’s home made salo as a parting gift. 

I walked off down the road, towards the centre of Liepaja to find a hotel, with my luggage in one hand and a small plastic bag of Belarusian home-made village salted pig fat in the other.  I can’t say such a scenario has happened to me anywhere apart from Liepaja.

After some hours Antra’s Chevrolet arrived in the pretty hills at the sculpture garden.  The sculptures were modern and interesting - a bridge with colourfully painted toilet doors on either end, wooden koalas holding Latvian flags in the trees, and upside down tree fixed into the ground. And there were some real wild deer.

Christmas in old Riga

Afterwards we sat in the small town nearby, in the Chevrolet, eating home made jam with spoons from the jar, munching bread and drinking tea. The cold was such that I would be inclined to use the word 'very' to describe it.

Back in Riga, in the evening we went to the Christmas Tree House, a huge restaurant decorated for the festive season, with rabbits and deer made from lights, and a large Christmas tree. The cellar was the place to head for, a traditional Latvian cellar alehouse, where the honey beer is made on site. Anta was with us then, and we drove there in the same old, grey singing Ford that they’d had five and a half years before. It still sang with the gear changes.

Anta says she was surprised that I drank because I seemed so nice. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I reminded her that last time I was here she was fifteen or whatever so I was hardly going to invite her to the pub.  Dzintra says, ‘may be she doesn't know that the first thing we did when we met was go out for a beer?’  It’s not true. We looked at old houses first. It was a good umpteen minutes before we drank beer.
 

The word for juice in Latvian, ‘sula’ is backwards for the word for beer, ‘alus’.

Sunday started unusually for me. We went to church.  Latvia shares its Protestantism with Estonia to the north, while Lithuania is Catholic.  The reverend looked like he wasn’t old enough to have completely finished with acne yet, but he spoke well.  I could tell by the sound of his voice and his eye contact though I had no idea what he said. I did my best singing hymns in Latvian that I didn’t know the tune for and Dzintra said I read the language well. There are lots of s-type sounds in Latvian in various forms.

Let the Musicians Play!

After church we walked to the old town to attend the private concert of the Latvian National Academy of Science at the House of the Black Heads, a very beautiful and recently reconstructed building that recalls Latvia’s colonial legacy: Latvia once had two colonies, at the mouth of the Gambia River in West Africa and on the island of Tobago in the Caribbean.  The decorations were really interesting because the style is strictly European but the models of the statues include many Africans. We sat in the Versailles-looking room at the top, a huge hall with about twenty chairs around the four walls. The side walls were more or less full; and Dzintra and I ended up at the far end in the place usually reserved for a king and queen. Let the musicians play!

The interesting thing was that the composer of the modern classical music, apparently famous around the world, was present and explained each piece before it was played on the piano, violin and flute. It was like we’d travelled back in time, were seated in Vienna and listening to the new music of a young Mozart. The flute player was especially good; her face moved with the music such that she was actually performing rather than simply playing.

Apparently that room has bad acoustics if it gets crowded, and also if there are only one or two people there. We had just the right number and it sounded magnificent. 

November

Third stop for the afternoon was the cemetery. The day was the Day of the Dead, I was told: when in Latvia people go to the cemetery to light candles to remember the deceased.  Hundreds of people and hundreds of candles decorated the acres of forested cemetery, and the scene was brilliant in the snowy evening.  The Latvians don’t only light candles for relatives, but by tradition also at the graves of famous actors and poets and other contributors to Latvia.  In the cemetery there was a war section and a section devoted to victims of the KGB.

We find the memorial to the first President of the first Latvia, before the Second World War. The memorial stands at the end of a long boulevard in a prominent position, except the Soviets planted a row of trees in front of the monument so it could no longer be seen from a distance. I guess they hoped the Latvians would forget.

In the evening I went with Anta to her local pub in a place I call Wahroonga, from Sydney geography, for its leafy streets and large houses on decent blocks. We drank a backwards juice or two in the loft upstairs. A black cat sat on my leg.
 

We returned to Jurmala where Anta studied then; no swimming in winter, no board shorts in tow.  Amongst the pine groves modern mansions were growing, being built to complement the mossy Soviet ones.  Latvia was changing.  Indeed the day before I’d arrived was the day the three Baltic States were invited to join NATO.  For many years the country had been turning, little by little, away from its East to face its West and people were really excited about the NATO invitation.

‘I’m so glad they took us,’ Dzintra said.

Travel?  It's about new thinking..., chance meeting...,  challenging the usual... and occasionally about interpreting artistic masterpieces...

Riga, Big City of the Baltics