English translation below.
English Translation:
My Bangladesh
I’ve been given the world’s most difficult
task: to write just one thousand words about our Bangladesh,
or my Bangladesh,
the one that has been in my life for the past sixteen years. How to choose which morsels of information to
include? I would not attempt such a task
except that the request comes from a newspaper of renown, Prothom Alo, to
contribute to their anniversary edition no less, so I have no choice but to
try.
‘Why do you live in Bangladesh?’ It’s hardly an uncommon question. CNG drivers laugh. ‘Bangladeshis go to Australia,’ they say, ‘and you are
coming the other way?’ Hospital staff
once admonished my friend, saying, ‘Tell him not to waste his life here!’ If I say that I like living in Bangladesh, local
reaction ranges from puzzled bemusement to perplexed wonder. And that in itself is reason to admire Bangladesh.
I’d like to say it’s different in Australia, but
it’s only different in the sense that while Bangladeshi thought stems in
general from humility and lack of international experience, Australian reaction
stems from prejudice and lack of international experience. My sister said once, disparagingly, ‘But it’s
a developing country.’ Apart from a few
hours in Mexico
I don’t believe she’s been to a developing country so she doesn’t know what
she’s talking about. My oldest brother
meanwhile commented that Bangladesh
was Hindu: to his mind some version or other of India. Bangladesh remains a country that
is less well-known.
To the CNG drivers I say, ‘Okay, but in Bangladesh the
hardest part is work. If you have a reasonable
income then it’s a fantastic place to live.’
To my sister there’s nothing to say. Her views are immutably negative. It was with bewilderment in her voice that
she told me over the phone how much Mum and Dad enjoyed their visit last year,
to Dhaka and the village in Hatiya. Bangladeshis meanwhile were delighted to see
the village photos on Facebook, of Mum in a sari and Dad in lungee. Those clothing items were gifts from my
Bengali family, the one who by neither blood nor marriage became my Bengali
family over the course of sixteen years, for more or less no reason than
because it happened. There’s a
particularly nice photo of all the parents together: Mum, Dad and Amma. My Abba passed away before I met him.
Bangladesh: how to explain? I could do
worse than start with this afternoon, when I was on the phone to Dinajpur to my
Bua’s mother. After a belated Eid greeting it came: the dawat.
I know it’s a cliché, the tremendous hospitality of Bengalis, but I am
forced to mention it because it’s true.
‘If a Bengali has five taka in their pocket,’ a Dhakaite friend said,
‘they’ll spend ten buying tea for their friends.’ Although I never seem to have the opportunity
to take up most of these dawats they
arrive almost daily; and while some of it has to do with being a foreigner, I’ve
seen how liberal and hospitable Bengalis are to my friends also, fellow
Bengalis. So it isn’t only because I am
a westerner, at least not all the time, and in Hatiya it never is, not anymore.
Of course hospitality and thoughtfulness
are culturally specific. I saw that on
the day Mum and Dad travelled on Hatiya’s rough dirt roads by motorised tom tom
to Rahmat Bazaar on the coast, near the beach where I once played kabbadi with Nashir and his
cousins. It was a slightly brave journey
because those roads aren’t in good condition and the tom tom nearly fell
through a hole in one of the small concrete bridges.
Mum and Dad are in their seventies and at
Rahmat Bazaar they were tired, although my mother was actually tempted to take up
Pankaj’s offer of a haircut in his tin shed saloon. Instead he cut mine. But we couldn’t leave because Arif the tom
tom driver had to take his children home from their school examination and we
had to wait for him. We took rest at a
nearby house on hastily arranged chairs in the shady yard.
Well, there was a bit of a fuss: the
householder tried very hard to make us stay for lunch, although I don’t know
him as such, and even though we declined he secretly sent for supplies from the
bazaar in order to start cooking. To him
it was unthinkable people could walk into his yard and not be fed more than tea
and biscuits.
Well, there was a bit of a fuss: my mother
was greatly concerned because, in her Australian thinking, we’d intruded. ‘Are you sure they don’t mind us sitting in
their yard?’ she kept asking. It
reminded me of how I was when I first came to Bangladesh. In Australia thoughtfulness sometimes
centres on privacy. When the tom tom returned
my mother, in English, warmly thanked our host for letting us sit there, which
he had no hope of comprehending, not meaning the language but because thanking
a Hatiyala for sitting in their yard is a bit like thanking the air for letting
us breathe it. In any case the
householder was still frantically negotiating: if he couldn’t feed all of us
then maybe just my friend’s children who were with us? He should be feeding someone!
‘Do you know him?’ my mother quizzed me
later.
‘Anybody would do that.’
Cultures grant us new ways to think. Just as my mother’s thoughts were totally
logical and obvious, so were the Bangladeshi thoughts of hospitality. It is just one tiny example of how things
differ. Why Bangladesh? It’s because there’s so
much to learn here, so many qualities to admire and welcome experiences to
have. It’s because Bengali ways have
become as natural and obvious as the Australian ways I was born into.
And it’s odd that feeling that used to be,
when I would visit Bangladesh annually: on leaving Sydney by plane with the
predictable ‘going away’ thoughts going on, only for the plane to descend
twelve hours later into Dhaka, with an undeniable but technically incorrect ‘coming
home’ happiness welling up inside.
Australians would over analyse that last sentence, seeking to rationalise
and capture it. And in this instance the
Australians would be wrong: it’s the more poetic and spiritual, easy acceptance
of things that Bangladeshis demonstrate which gives the answer here. Sometimes things just are.
Andrew Eagle is an Australian citizen who has been a
regular visitor to Hatiya, Noakhali, for the past sixteen years and considers
Hatiya, where his friend Reja Ali Mobarak (Situ) is from, also to be his gramer bari. For the past four years he has lived continuously
in Dhaka and he contributes regular articles to Star Magazine of the Daily
Star, Prothom Alo’s English language sister concern.
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