Ice and Warm

‘I have lost my origin
And I don't want to find it again
Whether sailing into nature's laws
And be held by ocean's paws

Wanderlust! relentlessly craving
Wanderlust! peel off the layers
Until we get to the core’

                                                                                   

                                                                        - by Björk, from ‘Wanderlust’

Hurtigruten in Port

The sea was ink, black enough not to need night, which befit because there was none.  The boat had seemed altogether larger when things had been calm; but now it listed painfully, one side then the other; charting the seismic turmoil of the sea and my stomach.  It was cold: a few minutes in that icy water and death would find me.  Nobody could survive that.  I hoped the biting air would refocus attention, stave off the actual vomiting.  Being the only fool to be outside in that turbulence I sang loudly songs invented in Sydney with a friend when we were kids; not least about feeling warm.  The howling wind was my only audience.  Feeling warm: it was summer after all, but this was the Arctic Ocean. I hoped to make it through to the Vardø port.

I was eighteen then and living as an exchange student in Norway; six months into the year.  It was summer holidays and my Norwegian father had some business to attend to in Tromsø, in the country’s far north.  I could go if I wished, he’d said, to see more of Norway; he’d shout the plane fare but I’d have to look after myself when we got there because his schedule was hideous.  We’d jetted into Tromsø, 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and found the midrange hotel he’d booked.  Norway is expensive: it’s not something I could have afforded.

Winter nights and summer days are long in all of Norway but in Tromsø for approximately two months in deep winter the sun never finds the ambition to rise and for two months in high summer it never bothers to set.  Surely these are symptoms of depression?  Like a vagabond the summer sun restlessly travels the sky, dipping nearly to the horizon in the west before reconsidering, itching, scratching and reaching upwards again, only to, twelve hours later, similarly dip towards the east.  The summer sun is indecisive and insincere.

Tromsø is sprinkled about the sides of its fjord like chocolate decorations on a cake.  There’s a modest arched bridge spanning the water and the angular, layered Arctic Cathedral in white, sitting by the fjord’s edge like an iceberg.  But it’s that matter of light that brings the tourists, in winter to experience the sheets of the aurora borealis in the long night and in summer to see the midnight sun.

There was a cluster of tourists assembled on that minor mountaintop, still snow-dusted, to the north of Tromsø city.  Like the others I’d found a place to sit and gaze out towards the sun, now and then checking the small alarm clock I’d brought.  I’ve rarely been one for watches.  There were two elderly ladies nearby, Norwegian pensioners.  It was more than eleven thirty p.m. and as we waited for midnight we chatted. 

I remember those ladies because after a good while of Norwegian chitchat and under precisely what circumstances I do not recall I had to point out to them that I wasn’t Norwegian.  I needed to say it!  One of the ladies was quite shocked, explaining that from my speech she had no inkling I wasn’t a national.  The other said she’d thought there might’ve been a slight accent.  It was the first time I’d accidentally pulled off a good slab of the language without my foreign-ness being detected.  And with that, enough minutes had passed.  Just above the horizon, it was: the midnight sun.

Sami Lady

In the old days the small towns and fishing villages of the Norwegian Arctic were isolated; they still are.  In yesteryears there was a greater reliance on ships to bridge the distances and connect those communities to the wider world.  The Hurtigruten or ‘Express Route’ started in 1893 as a postal and cargo ship that sailed northwards from Norway’s second city Bergen, for more than two thousand kilometres and six days to reach the remote town of Kirkenes, by Norway’s short border with Russia. 

The Hurtigruten fleet still runs, though these days it caters as well to tourists.  With the popularity of the trip the size of the ships has grown and most of the fleet are more akin to luxury liners than to their smaller wooden ancestors.  With my Norwegian father occupied in Tromsø I’d decided to take the Hurtigruten across Norway’s Arctic scalp to Kirkenes, in itself a few days’ journey.

Skjervøy, Øksfjord, Havøysund, Honningsvåg: some of the scattered towns and villages where the ship would dock to unload and reload, with minutes or hours to walk around onshore.  In Hammerfest is the headquarters of the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society; on Magerøya is the North Cape with its distinctive metallic globe statue, a place celebrated as the northernmost point of continental Europe.  This part of Scandinavia is home to the indigenous Sami people, traditional reindeer herders with colourful national dress and quite moving drum-and-throat style songs.

In Norway’s north the tree line, the height above which trees cannot grow, usually associated with mountain tops, is reduced by the latitude to zero metres.  The cold makes the tree’s sap freeze; the permafrost prevents roots from growing.  In Norway’s north the tallest plant life consists of the rock-clinging mosses the reindeer eat.  But in Vardø the townspeople have tried to grow a handful of trees: in winter they are boarded up and heated, occasionally they have blossomed in the short summer season, sometimes despite the human care the trees perished regardless.

Reindeer

While I thought the Arctic Ocean was rough the day I reached Vardø on the way to Kirkenes, on the following day, when I waited by the wharf for the following Hurtigruten ship, I knew I had been lucky.  The passengers from this second ship, as they stepped off in Vardø looked shaken and stunned.  I asked what the matter was: the sea had been so rough people had been thrown out of their cabin beds.

On finally reaching Kirkenes I was exhausted.  Norway is expensive so I’d not been able to buy a cabin on the ship, just a ticket with nowhere to properly sleep before Vardø; and I’d economised on food.  Those were ‘packet of chips and glass of water for dinner’ days: what was of greater importance, money or seeing things?  In Kirkenes I found a hotel for the night which was a bit expensive for me, but I took in because it included breakfast the next morning, between seven and nine a.m. and I looked forward to that.  By early evening I was asleep.

On waking I felt utterly refreshed.  I knew it had been many hours.  Searching around in my bag I found the alarm clock, and to my horror it was already eleven.  I had missed the breakfast hour!  There was nothing to do about it so I packed up and headed out into the street, hoping to see a bit of the town before my flight back to Tromsø to meet my Norwegian father. 

I was quite a way down the main street, still disappointed that I’d missed breakfast, when I noticed something odd.  The main street of Kirkenes was almost deserted and all the shops were closed.  Surely they should have been open by eleven.  And then it dawned on me: twenty-four hours of daylight!  It was only eleven p.m.  Laughing at myself I returned to the hotel, went back to bed and got up, this time in time for breakfast.

I must have stayed at many hundreds of hotels over the years, houses, tents; slept on buses, trains, planes and boats.  The accommodation on my return to Tromsø was unique.  I’d gone back as planned to the nice hotel where my Norwegian father was staying, and reception gave me a note from him.  ‘I had to leave early,’ it read, ‘but I know the hotel manager and he is organising a free night for you.’  The hotel staff took me down a corridor to the janitor’s cupboard: a very small room where they’d rearranged a few things to fit in a tiny bed.  It was there among the mops and brooms, the spare sheets and pillow cases, towels and toiletry supplies that I stayed on the last midnight sun day-night.

Sami camp, for the tourists...

This far north and have you met the Clauses? Or maybe time to hop down south or head for heat if the Arctic's too cold.  Wanderlust!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Ice and Warm





Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway

The Cow Lottery

Hatiyan Landscape

In a new language, words are like stepping stones across a stream.  The more words you have the easier it is to cross, the less you have to jump; the more words there are, the easier it is to make Bangla-shaped friendships in a village.  So it was when first learning Bangla in Hatiya; even now there’s a limit on what can be expressed.  And when words are few, they have to count.

‘Goru Chor’ or cow thief: under normal circumstances it’s not a term of endearment. 

It started with pointing in the beginning.  The tea shop customers would indicate something and name it.  I’d parrot.  There were the easy words: chair, table, hurricane, glass and cup, with only the different pronunciations to master.  There were the three versions of ‘you’, aamne, toie or tui in Hatiyan, and no book to consult.  There were all the hideous titles, both in Hatiyan and standard Bangla, the bhai, apa or bubu, Mia, sasa, kaka or kaku, mamma or ma’u, dada, dadu, dadi and didi etc.  Which belonged to whom?  There was a time I’d just get creative and let loose, slinging titles together to address someone as ‘aamne boro choto bhai tumi Mia hagol kaka Saheb’ or some other random configuration.  It always got a smile.  The correct title had to be in there somewhere, in accordance with the laws of probability.

They were all my Bangla teachers, in the tea shops.  They’d point and say ‘biscuit’ and I’d say, ‘biscuit.’

Where words are few it’s anecdotes and shared memories that can fill out the silences to make new relations.  It was Khokon, for example, who donated several of those clay horses, the ghora, sold as kids’ toys at Hindu fairs, when we’d been unable to track down the elderly man who made them in the next village.  I’d wanted to take some to Australia to decorate a shelf and give to friends.  To me he became ‘ghora Khokon’ after that. 

With Emran I learnt how to criticize his tea, though it was no Prionkor-style brew.  I’d tell him, in singular words, it was so bad I’d only pay fifty poisa, half-price; he’d say it was so good it cost two taka, double price.  And we’d argue.  Truth is when he’d sit cups down in a row Situ would sometimes try to steal mine because it was always the best, the bideshi mezbaner cha or foreign guest’s tea.  Emran used to put extra milk in it.  And let’s not mention the time he served up a cup of dishwater for a joke, when he was a fraction late in stopping me from imbibing it such that it got sprayed across the table upon tasting.

In Emran’s case I was soon minding the shop, though I could barely speak to the customers and knew what nothing apart from tea actually cost, when he’d go home for lunch or to the market to buy something.  I used to take all the change from the drawer when I was in charge, and hide it somewhere; the other customers would laugh to see it, and then, everybody straight-faced in anticipation, Emran would return and whenever the first customer paid he’d automatically open the drawer to get change and find it empty.  He knew who to blame.

I don’t remember exactly why it was the two of them, Emran and my Yusup Kaku or Yusup Uncle, who is more or less the same age as me, who each became a goru chor.  I’m not quite sure how Yusup even became a Kaku.  Was it something to do with Alauddin?  Whatever the cause for many years I’d call out to Yusup with a hearty ‘Kakooooooo! Eh, Kakoo!’ and he addresses me as ‘Vatija’ or nephew. 

It might’ve been for that most important of village reasons, the Noakhaila because-because, that they became cow thieves.  It might’ve been because being a cow thief is a very bad thing to be in Hatiya so whenever I’d suggest it both Emran and Yusup would get so embarrassed while everybody else was laughing.  And when Situ was there to translate I’d embellish with the, ‘they’re very nice people in the daytime, but at night, make sure your cows are safe!’ or ‘please Emran, please Kaku, please give up your cow-stealing!’  It was amusing exactly because everyone knew it to be false.

They suffered for several years with my periodic antics, until I wondered if I shouldn’t buy them a cow, one each.  Ah, that was because Yusup Kaku already had a cow; it might well have been his major asset.  He was proud of it, large and well-fed; he showed it to me when visiting his place one day.  And his life was and is hard; he’d stay up all night sometimes fishing in the canal.  He used to set up one of those seesawing triangular-framed nets for those tiny fry they sell by the roadside at about six a.m. each morning.

Yusup Kaku gathering leaves, feed for his first cow, several years before the lottery

One market day I went to the cow market that takes place on the school field in the evenings; and one of the neighbours, a self-proclaimed cow expert, had already searched out and located two calves that looked healthy enough.  The first was a jungle-cow, caught from the mangrove forests along the edge of the Bay of Bengal where they roam freely; it had no manners and would kick at the earliest opportunity.  The second was as placid as a water lily; shy and timid.

The cost was no more than a week of lunches out from the office in Sydney; it was no matter, and in my absence the market authorities had decided to waive the small local tax paid on such transactions on account of me being the purchaser.  They shouldn’t have done that.  I was just presented with two proud certificates of ownership: it was the sole evening of my life that I owned any description of livestock.

You’d think leading a cow is an entirely straightforward matter, and I of course took the placid one while one friend or other led the jungle-cow kicking and bucking up the road.  But I’d never led a cow before and I didn’t know whether to be firm or gentle, especially when it refused to move; so it got a mixture of both and must have been completely confused until ultimately it fell over.  It was embarrassing.  I couldn’t do a simple thing like lead the world’s most sedate and cooperative cow.

Eventually we got to the tea shop; it was late.  We decided the following morning we’d have a little lottery, a flip of the coin, to see who got the jungle-cow and who owned the well-behaved one.

By morning a small crowd had gathered to witness the toss, and via Situ I was busily explaining that once they had these new bovines, their rustling days should be at an end.  Absolutely embarrassed as usual, they agreed to desist.  With the flip of a coin my livestock-owning hours ended: Emran took the jungle-cow and Yusup Kaku the other.  We drank tea.

A few months later Situ called me in Sydney.  ‘Your Yusup Kaku wants to know if it’s alright to sell his cow.’  He wanted to invest in a new fish business. 

Typical fishing establishment over the canal

IMPORTANT NOTE: This website does not promote discrimination against other ungulates.  It is not solely pro-bovine but also supportive of  reindeer, buffaloes, llamas and alpacas.


Also published in Star Magazine, here: The Cow Lottery



Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh