Ramblings of a Jajabor





It was not random.  It came about from the first visit to Bangladesh in 1996, three weeks, as a backpacker.  Bangladesh was my fifteenth country.  I still can’t explain why it was so, but on leaving at the end of the three weeks, my heart was so heavy with regret and my mind so weighted in the certainty Bangladesh would be of importance in my life, that it remained unfinished, that it’s surprising the tyres of the bus didn’t burst as it rumbled towards the Benapole border.

I can say this: it shouldn’t have been so.  Of the other fourteen, of course Australia was home and Norway, where I’d spent a year, I called my second home.  There was a day far from me now when I’d wandered across the tarmac in a small Norwegian regional airport, braving the icy chill of winter, to take my place on the flight to Oslo for connecting to Sydney some days after that.  That was a farewell, certainly.  I’d felt dead and there were small private tears of both happiness and sadness for the home I was going to and the home I had left.

It was most natural in those days to speak in Norwegian.  I thought in Norwegian, to reach Norwegian conclusions and make Norwegian decisions.  I even dreamt in Norwegian, which was most amusing when the dream featured Sydney family and friends who could suddenly speak Norwegian too.

And it was funny, you know, on the plane to Sydney, the first leg to Copenhagen.  I sat next to a local on his way to Lebanon to serve in a U.N. Mission, and we’d chatted for about twenty minutes about what he was doing when eventually he’d asked, ‘and where are you going?’

Australia,’ I said.

‘Are you going on a holiday?’ he asked.  For perhaps just that one moment the language was mine.  I was chuffed.

In comparison to Norway, Bangladesh was entirely another kettle of fish.  It’d been just three weeks, twenty-one days or so.  The time was nothing, the duration insignificant.  There is no simple explanation why leaving Bangladesh also brought tears, this time big, subtropical, public ones.

Having thought about it, it could be as simple as personality.  Nations have personalities as much as people do, and just as when we meet other people, so there are nations and cultures we have more commonality with, in thinking, ideas and values, than others.  Nations are like clothes, the one that’s the right size, style and design is really going to suit you best.  The being born somewhere has nothing to do with it, I can say that now: birthplace is just about there needing to be a place to start. It has no more relevance than that.

So what was it about Bangladesh that so connected?  Of course the people, the sincerity, openness, honesty: things I value.  Of course, include the hospitality.  But it was greater than these things.  It was Bangladesh the teacher: all countries have their wisdom no doubt, but for a westerner the Bengali culture and mindset is so challenging that even fifteen years later I am learning.  I am still a student; Bangladesh the great teacher.  And from my experience not all places can do quite that. 

It was the creativity, undoubtedly, though on that first trip I don’t think I knew it, but it is there in everything from the humour to the thought patterns.  There was adventure: every day different and exciting with little to predict what would transpire, and living here now, Bangladesh remains a country of constant surprises.  Yesterday there were suddenly camels in the middle of Dhaka.

There was of course the natural beauty, the warmth of the earth and awe of that endless entanglement of rivers.  Bangladesh made me understand how mountain scenery, while nice, is something for others to adore.  I am not a person of the hills; I belong to rivers and plains.

The poverty was not on the ‘good’ list of course, though it did challenge the substantial materialism and selfishness that many Australians will agree characterise that society, qualities growing, ever growing.  The poverty was shocking, but from it, perhaps to over-simplify matters, arose three outstanding qualities: humility, endless optimism and hope.  Bangladesh is quite probably the world’s largest deposit of hope; in these qualities, culturally, it must be one of the world’s richest countries. 

Should not analyse such things, should not.  Best for things to just be as they are, or were; and in trying to explain I have only diminished the experience because the emotions on leaving Bangladesh that first time was like having all of the world’s food in my stomach at once.  You could describe every part but it would barely touch upon the whole.

Yet if there was to be a little moment that summed up that first departure it would’ve been on the bus from Mongla to Jessore, a day before the border but the time when there was no more distraction, for the first time, from the inevitability that we would go.  We’d just said goodbye to Situ, turned down his invitation to go and meet his family, then in Dhaka, instead.  The bus had started and as I mentioned, there were the jungle tears, teeming with life and richness.  But that’s not the thing, it is this: there was a man across the aisle, an ordinary Bangladeshi, nothing to do with us.  As much as I’d tried to conceal the water coming out of my eyes, the sadness and joy and everything between, he’d noticed.

He beckoned Lachlan, my Australian school friend who I’d been travelling with.  ‘Your friend is crying,’ he’d told him, with specific words or gestures I don’t recall.  Lachlan said, ‘it’s okay, don’t worry,’ or some such thing. 

And that was that, an exact template of the two: in Bangladesh there is no ‘private’, and community is stronger than anywhere else I’ve seen: concern for others whether you know them or not.  In Australia people do not necessarily, sometimes out of a respect for personal space wish to interfere, though I would not say that has particularly been my experience in the years since.  But culturally it is true, to be a purest, which is probably why when they do interfere they do it so oppressively.

Neither approach is better than the other I would suppose: the individual, the community. Both have pros and cons about them.  In the end all I am trying to say is that Bangladesh is different to Australia, and that Bangladesh, with me, struck an unbreakable chord.  I belong to the rivers and the plains.

I knew with undeniable certainty Bangladesh held life importance; but not how.  I knew I wasn’t finished there and I missed it every day, from that first departure onwards.

To treat my Bangladesh de-tox., back in Sydney, there was not a lot I could do; but I wrote letters to Situ and the others, and I wrote a research paper on Bangladeshi Labour Migration to Saudi Arabia as part of my B.A., which included written interviews with Bangladeshis, the questions sent to friends from the trip, to Hatiya, Comilla, Chittagong, and answered by labour migrant returnees they knew, and posted back to Sydney.  Situ was lazy on that score: he organised but one.

Iran, U.A.E., Oman, Philippines, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Germany, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, New Zealand; Iran again, U.A.E. again, Lebanon, Syria, Eritrea, India again… that’s the list that comes between the first and second trips to Bangladesh: two years.  Dinesh, Kasra the Content, Cyrus from the fixing shop, Hamid, Farid the Fighter, Ebdasam, Malek, Monica, Osama the Swimmer, Marivic the nearly Nun, the Igors, Nini the Geography Champion, Dzintra and the Singing Car, Tony by the Cave-Church, Omar, Tewelde and the Shrugging, Hissing and Feeling Groovy, Ghidey and the Date with Malaria, Daniel, Emanuel, Sammy and Astor of the Coffee Ceremony… those are some of the new names that come between the first and second Bangladesh-es; some of the names that predate all the Hatiyans except Situ.

It might be odd to imagine that despite having such a yearning to know Bangladesh better so many other places and people happened first.  It’s the result of curiosity to see the world, more of it; a self-doubt, wrong, wrong and wrong, that perhaps Bangladesh was not my favourite country and if I saw others I would know it.  

And I have no regrets of course, for each of those other places, each of those other people: my life would be less without them.  But through those two years it is equally true that the pull of Bangladesh did not weaken.  It was there on the journeys through Asia, Europe and Africa and through university terms in Australia.  It was there in letters, written and received. 

Bangladesh was important.  I would go. I waited. Bangladesh was waiting.

Skip ahead to the end of university, second trip, two weeks, and third, four weeks, completed.  It was becoming clearer that with study done I would go to Bangladesh again: the plan was for a year.  Maybe after that I would be satisfied I knew the place.  That idea struggled about inside somewhere, finding room, slowly growing; and I’d started saving the salary from the full-time job I’d taken while studying as an external student for the last six months of my law degree.

It was one morning that I woke knowing it was time; I felt it as sure as the sunshine coming through the window.  I didn’t say anything.  I just went to work as normal and upon arriving at the office, resigned, giving the required two weeks’ notice. 

It was my second job and I’d only been there a month, not the best experience.  Within the day I’d booked a flight and gathered the papers to organise a visa.  There was shopping to be done: a few gifts to take.

There was only one little thing I couldn’t do: tell Situ I was coming to stay at his house for a year.  There was no international phone line to Hatiya then so I could only wait for him to ring me when he was somewhere on the mainland; and I’d hoped he’d ring in that two weeks so I could tell him; but he didn’t.  To send a letter was a waste of time, as from experience I knew it often took a month to reach Hatiya.

So I just went.  It’s not that I had the slightest niggling of doubt that he would say no, to the staying a year.  There was absolutely no chance of that.

I arrived in Dhaka, struggled out of the airport with my luggage, took a taxi to the bus station, found the Noakhali service; four or more hours later I got down, somehow ended up on a local bus that took what seemed forever to reach the Number Four Ghat, and I’d had to travel the last part by rickshaw.  That had never happened before and has not recurred since.  Luckily I was in time for the sea truck to cross the river, and after three hours I reached Hatiya, organising a baby taxi to take me southwards down the island, the last hour. 

I pulled up on the main road some hundred metres or so from Situ’s house, which fronts a smaller road.  It was evening; it was dark.

As it happened Situ’s house was difficult to recognise.  I’d been there but six months before, and it wasn’t the house that had changed, but the landscape.  The green of monsoon had been replaced by the yellow and brown of winter’s palette, and in front of Situ’s house were two large bails of rice-hay that hid it from view. 

There was a local: I didn’t know him then, Iman Ali.  He was witness to it, my arrival, and he was surprised to see a foreigner there.  Of course not everyone knew me then; and he didn’t.  I think he’d been working in Chittagong during my last two visits, but even if he wasn’t it was only a few people I’d become acquainted with, mainly Situ’s family.

So I asked him if it really was Situ’s house there, down the side road, and though he could have just pointed he led the way.  He was excited.  Outside the house, in the dark, I called Situ’s name a few times.  In later years I was more inclined to call out ‘musafir’ or traveller, the way wanderers used to do in Hatiya in the old days when they sought alms or were begging; but I didn’t know that yet.

After some moments Situ came out of the house already on his way into a state complete shock.  He’d recognised my voice, and stood staring in utter disbelief, for several minutes.  ‘Is it really you?’

I’m afraid it was.

Minutes later, inside, settled, starting to believe that these were in actuality waking moments that he was living, I mentioned to Situ the small fact that I’d decided to stay for a year, if that was alright.

He used to say later that he’d felt he should honour my decision; but it wasn’t like that.  All he did was agree, without reservation, just as I knew he would.  And with that agreement my new life he inaugurated. 



Meet Dzintra and the singing car, or Emmanuel, Samuel and Astor of the coffee ceremony, or head off in search of the mirror man...




Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh

The Tea and Coconut Rule




I remember so many invitations, though it was in later years that it really got out of control.  There were occasions when someone would want a time for lunch or breakfast or dinner and, flicking through the mental obligation list, after some minutes I’d suggest a week into the future: the earliest vacant meal slot. 

I remember the demands from my friends in the village to the south for a fixed time.  For many years I used to refuse to nominate one, knowing all the trouble that would result: five courses minimum, slaughtered chickens, no expense spared.  It was the same with Selim who used to invite me to a banquet every single year.  Initially I used to refuse him too: all the trouble his wife would go to, the finances of a rickshaw driver and fish deliverer with enough children to his name.  It never seemed right to sit in his place, on the bed in the front room of the mud-floor straw-roofed three-roomer, if you count the semi-outdoor kitchen at the back, and devour this and that, then more of this and more of that; then more still until firmly refusing more.

But after some years I changed my mind.  I decided that it was wrong to not accept invitations on the basis of another person’s financial condition; that to effectively decide how my friends should spend their meagre incomes was disrespectful.  The upside of accepting invitations graciously was that the household benefited too, and all the adjoining households, for Hatiyans share.  Selim’s wife would prepare small mountains of food that I would peck at, with the vastness of the leftovers distributed to all comers: mostly all the children, Selim’s children, the neighbours’ children, the various nephews and nieces and a few others I couldn’t place.  And they would all be excited; like a festival day, that was not a bad thing I thought.  What they may not have appreciated was that the most thankful person there was always me: those invitations meant a lot.

No, on the question of invitations, Selim in particular wore me down, and because he lived close to my house and I would see him every day,  I suppose there was no way he wouldn’t have gotten a date and time out of me at some point.  It cost the lives of chickens it did, many over the years.  Once he rode his rickshaw to the main town solely for buying shrimp, called chingri in Bangla, and tomatoes, neither of which were in season but both of which he knew I would eat: the odd chingri being an exception to my no-fish diet.  Well, they’re not fish actually but crustaceans.  He managed to buy just one chingri and a few smallish tomatoes, and I hate to think of the exorbitant rates he must have paid for them, out of season.

At Nashir’s house, at his father’s, Alauddin’s and at the other cousins’ places, there were many meals too.  There was dancing and singing from Alauddin’s daughter, and all sorts of homemade delights from all the Bhabis.  I remember one occasion, I felt really terrible about it, that Nashir’s wife had warmed paish or creamy rice on the clay oven, and when she brought it to the table I saw that she was pregnant, and not just pregnant but very, very pregnant.  Their son was born the following day!  I asked Nashir why he’d invited me at a time when his wife really didn’t need guests.  He said she didn’t mind, or something along those lines; and the undeniable fact is, nobody who actually knows Hatiya would disagree, that she really didn’t mind.  Hatiyan women are so: they can manage almost anything.

But my friends in the south were at a substantial disadvantage compared to Selim.  The house was far so it was only now and then that I’d visit; at which there’d be puffed rice or muri, shredded coconut, guava or starfruit if in season, of course tea, and really persistent requests for a fixed time and date such that proper food could be prepared.  It was the friends in the southern village who were last in my giving in fully to Hatiyan hospitality.  The same logic applied: if I should not impose a ban on various friends’ hospitality closer to my village house, why were the friends in the southern village an exception? 

Poverty brings many disadvantages.  I don’t need to list them; but should it also prevent entertaining guests, wasn’t that just another disadvantage I would be burdening them with, those villagers I’d learnt to have so much respect for?  And so in the end the southerners got their date, their son played the harmonium and I ate until it hurt.

The only thing I could really do was to reciprocate.  It was never often enough and there were a few problems, the main one being that I was alone, so reciprocating meant Situ’s wife and the other ladies in the house would end up with the cooking responsibilities, while Situ and his brothers would bring in all the supplies.  I paid the bill, such a puny contribution, and when I was allowed by the guests I would serve them, just the way they’d done for me at their houses.  It used to make them laugh, and sometimes I had to sit and chat instead.

Actually, some of the guests, the ladies, used to come early and help with the preparations: in that sense it was usually a shared event, and my brothers and Situ would act as waiter alongside me, when I was allowed.  The other thing I wasn’t satisfied with, about the lunch parties, was that for the most part, thankfully not always, my friends would come alone, without wives and neighbours and the kids.  I mean it was easy for me to extend generosity to my friends because we spent so many hours together in the tea shops, so I used to shout rounds of tea, cigarettes and betel leaf.  I’d always wanted in particular at the lunch parties to host the wives and kids.

There were other little customs to hold onto as well, ways to give back.  One I remember is that when somebody’s close relative dies it is customary for the neighbours to send a big pot of rice, and other food, such that the mourning relatives don’t need to cook.  I was able to do that at least once, when Selim’s wife’s grandmother passed away.  It was rainy season and I remember Situ and his brother trudging off with several pots without proper lids, through the mud in the night, delivering the food I’d organised and Situ’s wife had prepared.  I’d wanted to deliver it personally but with my lack of confidence slipping and sliding along the muddy monsoon roads, especially at night, I’d thought that if I took one of those pots it might end up being devoured by a pothole or a rice paddy instead of by Selim’s extended family.  It was particularly slippery that night for it was raining quite heavily.

But most of what I’ve described belongs to the later years, when I’d visit Hatiya once a year for the most part, when accepting an invitation from a household was only possible once a year, such that it could not be so harmful to household budgets, as I lived in Sydney and would soon be gone again.

One time I remember hosting a party while living in Hatiya, in 1999.  It was Easter; maybe that was the first party.  In those days most Hatiyans had never heard of Christianity; even now you’ll find many who are rather sketchy on the details.  But in that year we’d just celebrated Eid-ul-Adha and also one of the Hindu festivals, I don’t recall which.  I’d been quite impressed at how the Hatiyans shared their festivals, respectfully too, like inviting Hindus for Eid lunch but obviously minus the central Eid food item of beef. 

It was normal that I should also share my ‘Eid’.  So we’d decorated the house with pictures of chickens and eggs and ribbons, about the only references there were to Easter as such, and then sat down to a purely Bengali lunch.  They’d arrived with no idea what Easter was and pretty much left the same way, though I did try to explain its meaning.  But for them the only important part was that it was my Eid; and for me the only importance was I could share something with them.

Yet in the earlier part of 1999 the situation with invitations was rather different: it took quite a while before anyone invited me to their houses, despite the curiosity and fondness for entertaining guests.  There was a general reason for it: shame.  Things have changed a bit since then, but poverty brings with it a yoke of shame and the Hatiyans, as much as we used to have fun in the tea shops, took time to understand that their financial position as far as I was concerned could not any relevance to friendship.  They thought, and I use a generalist ‘they’, that I would feel uncomfortable since their houses were small and simple; and perhaps also that I would think less of them if I saw where they lived.  Even Situ had once thought that the first time I went to his house. Besides, I don’t think they were overly convinced in the beginning that they could provide food I would eat.

Then, it was after some months, somebody plucked up the courage to extend an invitation.  I think it might have been Leku; he was one of the first.  Whoever it was, they discussed it at length with Situ outside Rofiq’s tea shop: what I would eat, would I really feel comfortable, etc. etc.  From my side I started early with the ban on lavish expenditure, the ban that Selim would later conquer. 

‘Of course I’d love to come,’ I would respond in general to invitations, ‘but only for tea and green coconut, and if you serve anything else, one single item, then I will leave!’  Situ used to translate the strict instruction.  Green coconuts were available everywhere so there was no difficulty in it.  They’d climb the trees and knock off a coconut; then cut it with a machete, making a little hole on one side through which to empty the coconut juice into a glass, or to insert a straw though that wasn’t a village thing but what the roadside sellers in the cities might offer.  Coconut juice can be a substitute for saline, so it was good for my health, and it’s refreshing in the heat.

With the strict instructions, tea and coconut, it was generally possible to only have three or four items at the house visit: tea, coconut, a packet of biscuits and maybe some homemade cakes.  They couldn’t help themselves really: tea and coconut never meant exactly tea and coconut, not for a Hatiyan.

The first few hosts had been nervous about me visiting their houses, for the reasons already mentioned. I naturally enough enjoyed myself and felt entirely comfortable in their homes, why should I not?  And then others would ask afterwards about how it all went, and the friend who’d hosted would tell excitedly just about everything that I’d said and done, and specifically everything I’d eaten.  Needless to say, the number of invitations grew quite rapidly; not least because many of my friend’s wives wanted to see what I looked like, after hearing about the goings on at the tea shops.  Much as later they’d want to see Raja, my pet dog, to know what he looked like.

Soon enough the villagers knew that if I had to negotiate the thick muddy laneways during monsoon that was okay, if I had to wade through water to reach their front doors that was okay, and if it was really hot well, that didn’t matter much either.  There were times I was really tired because sleeping through the hottest nights was not easy, nor if there were mosquitoes about; so sometimes, it can be that the guest went to sleep after tea and coconut on the bed in the front room of the hosting house.  This was understood as a compliment, that I felt comfortable there. 

My only condition for visits was the tea-and-coconut rule, which I don’t believe a single Hatiyan ever followed to the letter, not really.  But it kept at least the chickens alive.




More about tea? Prefer coffee? Or papaya juice perhaps?

Another version of this article published in Star Magazine, here: Tea and Coconut Rule




Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh

Village Food




I faced the days of May without the luxury of a fan that year, living in a tin house transformed into a mini-furnace by the season.  I would wake drenched in sweat and as soon as possible pull up a chair under a tree, the coolest location available, for inside was hotter than out.  There wasn’t the joy of the pond in that stifling pre-monsoon month when water levels are low and the water of a dubious freshness.  Most days there wasn’t even in the air the slightest stirring.  Now too, post-solar, barring the handheld pencil-battery-powered variety, you won’t find an electric fan in Hatiyan village households, and May punches still, with all its brawn.

There were not infrequent, not common bouts of diarrhoea as my stomach became Bengali-tough, and usually some measure of skin irritation going on, fungus of some description.  Worst of all were the problems with food, for Hatiyans eat rough red rice and all manner of fish; and while I realise it’s close to criminal non-activity in Bangladesh, especially along the shores of the Bay, I must confess that things which breathe water don’t usually sit well with me. 

I don’t eat fish is what I’m trying to say, except in Norway for reasons of my teenage life’s course, an anomaly and another history.  And in Hatiya I tried.  Ask anyone: red rice three times a day, fish small and bony, larger and fleshy, it was like that at first.  The fish kept coming and I started getting thinner.  Bangladeshis always think it’s the chilli that’s the issue, but not for me.

This is not a list of complaints, not a whinge.  I’m trying to explain how, in those days I still consider the best of my life, my endurance was being tested.  For a Sydneysider to live in a Hatiyan village independent of the external assistance one might expect from any project or programme was physically trying.

How many villagers wasted muscle-power twirling those thatched hand fans to add a little breeze to the room, I couldn’t account them.  I remember my brothers Choton and Komol doing it a lot. When it came to ailments, there was always my Bengali mother or one of the many bhabis or sisters-in-law to nurse me well, and just about anybody to head off to the pharmacy; and just about any pharmacy to open at any hour.

As for food, it underwent a kind of evolution: a succession of new dishes prepared and tested until I became acquainted with the full range.  It was unfortunate that chicken korma came late, I would say.

Situ used to leave early, many days, many dawns, for the main town to find out if they were planning to slaughter a cow, such that I could eat beef.  Sometimes he’d return with a bag full of beef, sometimes empty handed, and often before I’d woken.  There were no mobile phones then to make things easier. As for chickens, of the small-boned extra-tasty deshi or native variety, Situ used to joke that I’d single-handedly accounted for half the island’s flock. 

My mother tried what she called Bihari dal, more solid than the usual Bengali preparation.  And of course, I can never forget how many families around the village became involved.  In the tea shops there used to be lengthy discussions about my diet:  Bangladeshis still routinely ask if they don’t know me, because of the central place in Bengali culture reserved for food. 

‘Don’t worry about breakfast tomorrow,’ some friend would say, translated by Situ, and I’m recalling Alauddin when I write that, ‘my wife said she’d make it.’  That’s how the pitha or local cakes were discovered as a breakfast staple, along with a glass of milk from one of the various bovine-owning neighbours. I think maybe Emran most often used to deliver the chicken’s eggs; duck eggs I wasn’t allowed to eat much as they made the skin itchy. 

In the bazaar Nashir used to grab my arm and pull me in the direction of the tea shop that specialised in piazu, or onion rings; he will still do that.  I remember too the soft type of pitha wrapped in banana leaves that Leku’s wife made; and after six months, when I was leaving, Leku complained to Situ, ‘if it wasn’t for the food he could stay here forever.’ There was no politeness in it: and the day I left we cried, both Leku and I, and several others for that matter.  I would mention that Leku seems to have spent the past fifteen years without aging, though from the beginning he was old.  He’s always seemed like a sixty-plus, even when climbing trees to harvest some fruit or branch, even when his personality is more thirty-minus.

Since then we’ve all of us become mature: now we face departures valiantly, more like westerners do, though personally it’s still something difficult, to depart Hatiya; even now, when home is only fourteen hours away in Dhaka.

It’s rather shameful to have had such a pretentious stomach and it’s different now:  Hatiya offers feasts of pulao and biryani rice on special occasions, noodles, delicious doi yoghurt, fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs, duck, pithas and Bihari dal à la mother’s recipe.  But in those days I got progressively thinner, my appetite dissolved; by the time I returned to Sydney I was so thin my friends were a bit worried, though in Hatiya I was yet to feel underweight.




Yes, but what happens when the villagers come to the city?  And what about City Food?

Another version of this article is published in Star Magazine, here: Village Food

The Arguments for Winter

Winter Sunset, More og Romsdal, Norway

An Open Letter from Dhaka to the People of Norway

To the people of Norway,

I know what you’re thinking: in Bangladesh there isn’t any Winter.  I know this because when I lived in Norway many Norwegians said the same thing about Sydney, a city where Winter is marginally colder than in Dhaka.

I want you to know, things are relative.  It’s not that I don’t remember that first week in Oslo, when I got used to wearing what felt like my entire wardrobe at the same time just to step outside the house; or that I’ve forgotten the preparation: the multiple socks, the boots, the gloves, taking off gloves again from having forgotten to do up shoelaces first, re-putting on gloves…  I recall how, with so many layers of clothing, bending arms and legs conjured the image of a tin man in need of oil and yes, I learnt to tap the snow off boots before drawing them into a vehicle.

There was that morning in the first week when my hosts said in English it was ten degrees outside.  It’d sounded good: occasionally Sydney can be as low as ten and I’d expected worse from a Norwegian Winter.  You know of course they meant minus ten, which I discovered on stepping out the front door; that in your country the minuses are often just assumed. 

Swans on a soon-to-be-frozen River, Oslo
And there was that problem with my hair.  As usual I’d styled it in the morning using a little water.  How was I to imagine that after several outside minutes I’d have a hairstyle of ice?  I remember slipping along the footpaths, trying to find the sprinkled gravel you use in public spaces to create grip.  I remember walking home from school across that frozen river, following somebody else’s footprints.

I learnt the meaning of your temperatures: up to minus ten was okay, towards fifteen meant icicles on the chin and loss of feeling in the cheeks and nose; beyond that the pain in one’s frozen ears really set in.  I don’t remember you having the flies’ eyes like they do in Dhaka; maybe you should.

As said, things are relative.  How else could it be that in my first Australian Winter thereafter I barely bothered with jumpers?  The reverse happened: after most of the year in Bangladesh I once found myself wearing a jumper during the Australian Summer.  It’d been over thirty degrees and I noticed people around me were in shorts and t-shirts; but to me it’d felt a little nippy.  It takes time to adjust, climatically speaking, please understand.

I want you to know that despite the lack of minuses, and the usual Winter sports like skiing and shovelling snow off the roof, the Bangladeshi Winter is real. 

Don’t consider please the middle of the days, without the evening to morning chill in the air, the time of day you might be tempted to label ‘Summer’, if not a particularly warm one.  Forget that it may come to pass in January’s Dhaka that you consider swimming around noon. 

Winter Mountains, More og Romsdal, Norway
Just know that in Sydney, if you made one of your ‘this is not winter’ comments in the middle of August, on one of those gusty, rainy days, nobody would be amused as they slipped on their caveman-inspired Ugg boots, an Australian specialty, and turned up their electric heaters. And neither would people be amused in the Dhaka of January.

For while I am not in the habit of speaking on behalf of Bangladeshis, I would take a risk on this occasion to let you know: we feel cold.  Just look around Dhaka and you’ll see it, the public rugged up in intricately embroidered chadors or shawls, with scarves surgically bandaged about the head; or western-inspired in jumpers and jackets.  There are all those beanies, sometimes gloves and scarves, items that true, aren’t common in Sydney

It may look sometimes as though many Dhakaites are prepared for the impossibility of imminent snow; for we who live here, impossible is not how it feels.

Then there are the flies’ eyes, those thermal earmuffs that fit like sunglasses only around the back of the head, and lend a person a look from behind that’s slightly reminiscent of an insect.  I am liking those flies’ eyes: in blue with white polka dots, in tartan straight from the Scottish Highlands, the military camouflage variety or the leopard skin.  And as they’ve multiplied across Dhaka of late we cannot doubt that Winter is with us.  Nor can you.

A Mild Winter in the Trondelag Mountains, Norway
And just on the side, I tell you I bought a pair of fly’s eyes, in urban grey camouflage for thirty taka from a vendor at Farmgate.  I mention this thinking you could pick up a pair or two for home, though the material might not be thick enough for your Januaries.

While it’s true in Dhaka nobody has to change their car tyres to cope with the slippery conditions on Winter roads; while the days are not short and dark as occurs in what you call Winter; and while I understand the reason you talk so much and often about the weather is simply because there’s a lot of weather to talk about; please bear in mind that in Dhaka also, we have our ten degrees, we have our fifteen.  The pluses are assumed, absolutely, and the trees keep their leaves, but of course the CNGs and rickshaws are not enclosed vehicles, remember that, so as we get around there’s a wind chill factor to be accounted for.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the water.  It was actually my grandfather who pointed it out; he was more practical than me.  Back in Sydney after Norway he’d asked how you stop the water from freezing in the pipes during Winter.  I believe you spiral a small copper wire around the pipes and send a low current through it to prevent the water freezing, is it so?  

The Mountains of Trondelag, Norway
And in the mountains I recall such a system can be unavailable such that the water does freeze and it becomes necessary to find fresh snow to boil down for drinking.  But this alone is not the measure of Winter and besides, there are many in Dhaka who know the feeling of turning on the tap and nothing comes out, be it for different reasons.

So don’t mind as we find ourselves rugged up under a blanket at home in the night, in my case with the ceiling fan running on full to keep the mosquitoes away.  They are indeed less at this time of year.

In Bangladesh many people look forward to Winter as their annual hill-station away from the heat, but still, you mustn’t scoff as we shiver at the tea shops holding our tea cups with both hands, as in Christian prayer, to promote heat transfer to our palms, or as we devour those piping-hot chitol pithas or rice-flour cakes from the roadside stalls in the foggy evenings.

Try to understand our Winter in Dhaka, though it may slip in and out of the city as readily as a foot into the bindings of a Telemark ski.  It is Winter.  Perhaps you might even find room for sympathy.  Enjoy your snow, skiing and rømmegrøt or sweet cream porridge; and spare a thought for the people of Dhaka as we face Winter, we too.

Best Regards, Yours Truly, etc. etc.




If you're into seasons, you might like the monsoon. Or you could just take it easy in Barbados, or maybe on a smaller scale in Lilliput.


Also published in Star Magazine, here: The Arguments for Winter

Advent Lights, December, Norway







The Big Wheel



from Hatiya
In the dawn I heard the first light chanting across the rice paddies and the forest islands where the households lay; over the ponds and into the echoes and recesses of the St. Martin’s canal that runs north-south by the main road.  I saw the circular rumble of the muscular wooden wheels marking their time as steadily as the rhythmic minute hand on a clock.  This was the day’s birth; the wheels making record of it.

Out front was a bullock who can’t have harboured the slightest query of what he was doing or what he was for.   He can’t have, because as surely as the sun followed its circular twenty-four, similarly it was with the wheels behind him, the wheels which bid he push on. Day upon day upon day was in the turn of those wheels.  It was his narrative.

And being as natural as the tal palms and the rain trees, as endemic as the earthen pots each winter tied to the date palms to collect sap, it was usual that for me too the bullock and his cart at first raised no question.

from Tullamore
The approaching evening for my great grandfather would at one time have meant finding a suitable campsite, preferably with a watercourse of some kind nearby so as to make a billy boil.  He would’ve had to think of his family, his wife and the many children bundled up and piled upon his steam engine with those large iron wheels, flat fisted and suitable not for railway tracks but for the road. 

With the hissing sight and rusting sound he was busy welding past with future, all those years forward in what must have been the 1920s; the time when he drove his family across the back of New South Wales from the Tullamore wheat fields to the Pilliga Scrub, in that week or two journey.

The nights he would light by his violin.

My grandmother wasn’t there but she was a romanticist at heart, the way she painted the history with the details of longing retained after maybe eighty years.  She wasn’t there and yet it was her history; why I take now the liberty to tell it in the outline of my voice. Why I remember Tullamore, a place I’ve never been.

That part of her life experience had eluded her as she’d been stuck in that boarding school in the pretty little village with the Nuns.  She’d always wanted out, to spend every moment with parents and brothers and sisters, or at least with her grandmother on the farm; so much that she’d once prayed for chicken pox such that the Nuns would take pity and send her home from fear of the other school girls being infected. 

That prayer returned, she explained, for in the turn of the wheel she did contract chicken pox: except that the Nuns shut her instead in an attic, largely alone and lonely, until the contagion dissipated.  It was a lesson in what not to pray for, a lesson she took to the following century to tell a grandson.

Nonetheless her heart was there still, on the back of her father’s steam engine with her mother and brothers and sisters, as it puffed the miles along the dusty roads.  And in that sense the experience she had, despite the absence of her presence.

from Hatiya
It’s not usual to have your grandmother’s memories but standing there in the turn of the wheel morning on the Bengali island I felt that.  Away to the north were landholdings and dusty country laneways: perhaps flatter and rice-dedicated, and perhaps without the old man’s lean of the whiskery-barked eucalypts or the gentleman-hop of the kangaroos, but… it was her father’s time returned. And now it was mine.

It’s not usual to without the blink of eye watch the ox-cart rumblings when your birthplace was Sydney in the 1970s.  Mine is not a life of those large wooden wheels; except that it is.  And that question struck: when an ox-cart is unflinchingly ordinary where is my home?

Perhaps there never had been answer to it, perhaps an answer always was; except that from then on there will be none, never, and with unshakeable clarity, an answer there, forever. That’s the big wheel.

from the Pilliga Country
The kettle boiled, around the kitchen table we sat, in the old fibro house of my grandmother.  As the tea was poured she’d sow memories into her younger generations; and captivate with the easy loving meander of her history telling ways.  To her it was like a duty to capture the goodness of others, the ones who left before her; to keep alive their memories for when she was no more in the world to attend the task.

Her family cut their life from the pine trees in Pilliga country; in the forests where there dwelt yowies.  Her father made the steam engine into a sleeper cutter for the burgeoning railway trade.  They got water straight from the river with a water box. These things became my grandmother’s youth… joined in unity to my young adulthood.

The kettle boiled, around the kitchen table we sat, and spoke of Hatiya.  She heard the social life of the village and of Bengali culture.  She used to marvel at the ways of doing things: the washing clothes by hand, the means of cooking; things she remembered her mother doing.  She used to look over the photos and ask the names: Selim, Bhabi, Emran, Khader, Komol… She had the patience of the years and she’d take time going through each photograph.  I told funny village stories to match the pictures and she liked that. 

The thing is she really saw those photos: even when she was almost entirely blind.

I guess her approach, the love for her family and her humility made it easier to know Hatiya; and in these things she was not absolutely Australian, but had within her the temperament of Bengal.  I never told her that.

It sits still now, my great grandfather’s steam engine; a feature in a tiny town park far from everywhere.  It’s scratched and jumped upon by the foraging generations of the future as their parents prepare sandwiches on the boot of a car.

from Sydney
They forget they do, as they run around like digital maniacs in the sound of flashing lights and gleaming glass: they forget their memories from the 1920s, the ones forged by their grand and great grandparents in times not exactly distant: the times of big iron wheels.  And from forgetting they find themselves special.  Perhaps it’s time to re-boil the billy?

from Hatiya
They can forget too for the wooden wheels are gone now; a generation born that has never heard them with their own eyes.  It’s hard to imagine, the way Hatiyans cradle their eucalypt leaf-shaped island in their arms, close to chest; but it can be and it can have been, in a turn or two of the wheel.  It’s better to hope for the preserving quality of tea. Perhaps.

from Dhaka
‘Forget the past and embrace the future,’ comes SMS-ed across the New Year’s midnight.  And yet how can it be that the past is forgotten while ever it remembers us and listens to our actions?



Of course, no one would blame you if you tried to meet the mirror man of Patna, or went to Transylvania to stock up on knitwear.


Also published by Star Magazine at: The Big Wheel






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