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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