A Place to Stand

Village near Mongla, 1996

with guest writer Reja Ali Mobarak.

Bangladesh has changed, but we remember 1996.  Reja Ali Mobarak wrote his part in Bangla and the writers together translated it.

It was of cottage and mansion dripping with subtropical weathering, Khulna Town.  Soil and earth, the old buildings brought charm.

A simple archway on the footpath read ‘Hotel Sun King’ in metallic letters.  Before entering, I invited the guy from the bus to share tea and samosa, behind a curtained doorway across the street.  It was Ramadan.  We had endured his constant chatter for many hours; from the long, unbroken journey from Chittagong we were unshaven and exhausted.  He reclined and talked as I went to the counter to deliver up the few-taka bill.

***

I used to transport live baby chingri from my home in Hatiya to Foila.  We are lower middle class although my father was the union chairman.  The chingri business used to see out the winter months.  It was seventeen years ago.

I bore the yoke of village politics that caused my father’s strokes and the burden of maintaining the family that belongs to the eldest son was weightier than my age.  Sometimes life must run against the current.  While waiting for the commission agent in Foila to pay me, I came to Khulna.  My business partner Nazmul, from Khulna, had invited me many times; yet I chose the independence of a cheap hotel called Sun King.

In the mornings Nazmul would come.  By night, at his house, his mother would feed us.  I’d seen the pens of his chicken establishment.

The Sun King manager was old with thin, grey hair and gaps in his teeth.  We’d found the habit of sharing iftar together, the evening meal to break the fast.  It was still a few hours but I was counting, relaxing on the sofa under the window at the top of the stairs, in the small space that was barely a reception area.  The manager sat on a stool behind his pint-sized bench in the corner.  

I was sitting, with nothing to do, when I saw two fair-skinned foreigners and one Bangladeshi come up the stairs with too much baggage.  They asked the manager for a room and I stood, moved a few paces closer.  I was curious.

***

Language was a frustration.  I wanted to bargain with the manager directly but the non-stop-talker had the advantage.  I didn’t trust him much so after a few sentences I did what I wanted to do all day.  I told him to be silent.  I asked for a room, the koto, the how much, we’d already learnt.  The manager wrote a figure on a paper scrap: 150 taka for a double.  It was cheap; but we nonetheless went into auto-bargain.  It was South Asia and we believed that’s what one did.

As usual we turned to walk away in faux outrage.  But the old man didn’t shower our retreat with better offers.  We didn’t proceed beyond the first landing on the way to the ground floor.

***

It was strange: the manager told them the price and they walked away!  We always thought bideshis stay five-star, like at the Sonargaon in Dhaka.  I hadn’t had much experience with bideshis but because my father was Chairman they used to come to the house sometimes from the Red Cross.  I remember they’d sit at the table on the veranda and chat in English.  From a young age I was expected to serve their tea and my father would encourage me to speak English.  But I felt shame so mostly I was silent.

I remember how awkwardly they sat, straight-backed and serious, their faces tense.  It was nothing like when the neighbours would visit.  But these two, there was something different about them: they’d come to such a standard hotel, they were unshaven with messy hair.  I wanted them to stay there.  Fortunately they came back and I looked one of them in the eyes and in poor English said the room rate was okay.

***

That guy who’d been hanging out in reception said the room rate was okay.  I took a brief moment to study his face: he had very green eyes. 

But I was looking for honesty and we couldn’t rely on the non-stop-talker.  It’s really very odd but examining his face it wasn’t only that I thought he was probably honest: in some way I recognised it.  I told myself not to be stupid.  But we took the room.

***

I don’t know why he believed me and didn’t bargain further, but as they filled in the book at the counter I couldn’t help it, I read over their shoulders to know where they were from.  In the ‘Citizenship’ column he wrote ‘Australian.’

***

He read over my shoulder as I filled out the Register.  It was a bit rude.

***

When we talked to foreigners we felt as citizens of a poor country and because of the language problem in communicating, shame; but when he was bargaining with the manager I did not feel like that. When I saw him at first I felt as though I already knew him. I don’t know why.  He finished the work around taking the room and wanted to go there.  I don’t know much English but I asked him to share iftar with us.  He understood my offer easily, without even trying.

It was astonishing.  After about an hour he came from his room wearing lungi!  My eyes fell open at the sight: inside I was thinking, ‘maybe this foreigner doesn’t hate Bengalis.’  He sat on the sofa as the adhan sounded for iftar to begin.  The manager had chopped onions and chilli, mixing oil with muri.  I’d brought a few sweet jilabis and some piazu.

It was all laid out on a sheet of the day’s news. Nazmul was late and the bideshi’s friend was still sleeping.  He didn’t know how to eat with his hands and bits of the muri mix were sticking to the sides of his fingers and falling on the floor; although he didn’t understand Bangla he helped me to communicate.  He spoke slowly and understood my meaning when I knew the English words were wrong.  It made me so happy!  I wished to speak to him more after iftar but I didn’t know what he felt.

***

It was the only day in Bangladesh when I had a strong desire never to speak to another Bengali: a product of the non-stop-talker and the long journey.  Sleep was made complicated by the mosquitoes that came in through the big hole in the wall.  I decided to fight them no longer and got up, still with zero desire to connect with locals.  I didn’t want to start with the ‘country?’ and work our way up to the amount of my father’s salary.  Yet the idea of travelling was to meet people and learn something; and if I’d always maintained such a negative attitude we would have missed out on so much.  So when I saw him sitting on the sofa under the window and there being nothing else to do, my objections softened.  I decided not to judge him solely on the rudeness of having looked over my shoulder as I’d signed in. 

It wasn’t my first iftar. I saw him watching how I ate with my hands and was embarrassed for my lack of skill.  Afterwards we heard shouting from the street below.  Through the window we watched a really angry mob pass.  They were punching the air with fists clenched, chanting slogans, holding banners I couldn’t read.  It must’ve been related to the upcoming election.  Many Bangladeshis had spoken about politics. 

***

BNP was attempting to hold an election but Awami League was set to boycott. We watched an opposition protest march down the street.  I did my best to explain things from my perspective. He shared his experiences of Bangladesh, good and bad.  I felt so much shame when he said some Bangladeshis asked him for a visa, or tried to cheat him, that I could not look him in the eye. But it was great to hear that despite his young age he had visited many countries and it was rare how hospitable Bangladeshis were. On average he had quite a good idea about Bangladesh. What was stranger was that some ideas coincided between us.

Near Mongla, 1996

***

He told me about his family, his village in Hatiya and his business.  I’d seen Hatiya from the ship.  It was an island lit by dim kerosene light in the darkness.

We spoke of Australia but his questions came like a river, naturally and without being boring.  When he spoke about local politics without invitation water rose in my eyes and I only hoped he wouldn’t notice.  It wasn’t that he said anything new but as we were nearing the end of our stay in Bangladesh I suppose I had already started processing and there was this insurmountable disjunct between what seemed to be the suffering of poverty, and on top of it the political tensions, with the hospitality, even happiness that seemed in Bangladesh to be as common as earth.  In Sydney it is rarer.

The strangest part was that although his English wasn’t great, to comprehend his meaning was without strain.  In some things we thought similarly.  It made an impression: how could two people with entirely different backgrounds see the world so much the same?  I knew him.

He invited me to dinner but said we’d have to wait for his business partner Nazmul to arrive because they’d planned to hold a business meeting first. 

Nazmul was a young guy dressed in impeccable neatness from hair part to polished shoes.  Surprisingly he said I could sit in on the business meeting; I think he didn’t wish to leave me waiting alone.  So the three of us went to his room and found space between the bed and the chair that belonged to the little desk.  The room had no window; but it also had no hole in the wall. 

I thought it would be boring; but as they started conversing in Bengali I discovered a smile:  how absurd it was to be at a meeting between a Bangladeshi prawn seller and a chicken farmer.  The unfathomable Bengali language wanted to make me laugh!  I felt so privileged and fortunate and I had not overcome those feelings when he said quite suddenly their meeting was done.  ‘Are you sure you’re done?’ I laughed.  The meeting had lasted less than five minutes.

Dinner was biryani something at the hotel across the street.  I tried to pay the bill but there was no way he’d let me.  ‘I’ll get my own back,’ I thought happily.

***

I wanted to talk to him all night but I thought he would think badly if I talked too much, that I would disturb them. So we decided instead to visit the Sundarbans together and I would meet them at Mongla port the following afternoon. Afterwards I imagined I should have gone with them in the morning but mistakenly I thought they would mind it, as if I was a loafer.  I told them I had other business meetings, thinking I should go to Foila for money. 

***

I’d wanted so much he should come with us to the Sundarbans but it could hardly be expected he’d be able to just drop his business.  I asked a few too many times but lastly decided to press further would be rude.  But he agreed to meet us in the afternoon. I hope he hadn’t felt obliged.

A clod of earth was Khulna Town, earth connecting, the earth that brings a new place to stand.

find the elements
                          air
                     fire
             water
      earth
ether


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: A Place to Stand

Under the Sky, Not Far

Photos by Bernarda Asisti

High in the mountains of Urmiri, Hotel Gloria sits like stupid poetry.  Tucked into a minor Andean crease in the South American shirt, beneath the great plateau, the Altiplano, the lodgings at the end of the road, and without a nearby town, are unexpected.  Above, the Andean day-skies are of their usual intense blue and it feels as though they hold the power to, with some great invisible ropes, lift those very mountains into place and keep them there.  Maybe they do.  The sky feels close enough that you could touch it.  Maybe you can.

Yellow and somehow Pyrenees-looking the hotel may be, but its character is unmistakably Bolivian, from the dust in the wind to the bowls of round-potato soup and the llama steak on the dinner plates.  Just a few hours from La Paz, it’s not at all a bad destination for a weekend getaway.

The mountains of the zigzagging, narrow and dusty road in from Calamarca are brown and bare, and with the steep drop just beyond the road’s edge, with the hairpin bends and an old road tunnel, arrival is accompanied by a degree of trepidation and a sense of adventure.  For most of the way, there is only the gigantic valley, with the squares and lines of Urmiri village just discernable, far below, and further still, the winding fold at the lowest point of the valley to signal the flow of a small river.  It is only in the final stages of the doodle-of-a-road that the hotel comes into the picture, and there’s the dawning of the green to be seen.

That singular gully has been stone-by-stone terraced into gardens of wattle, geraniums and daisies.  Beyond the building are paths to follow, on a small scale, among clusters of palm and gum trees, between beds of variegated succulents in whirlpool design, and there are log seats to be found in small manicured patches of lawn that seem as temple-clearings to the ever-pervading Bolivian sky, or are perhaps for the giving of quiet reflection to poets.  There’s a small chapel in the garden in remembrance of that later God too, the one who immigrated to South America with the Spanish.  It’s that juxtaposition of organised greenery in the untamed mountains that surely would have made Wordsworth blabber and T.S. Eliot smirk.

The Andes are young mountains, twisted into place by the later tectonic disputes between the Pacific and South America.  The backbone of the continent, the mountains act as water source for the steamy jungles to the east; the Andes let the jaguars drink.  The mountains are also the birth vessel of the indigenous civilisations, earth mother of the Quechua and the Aymara.  Hotel Gloria is there now as rest stop for city dwellers, offering the choices of when to eat, when to walk about and when to do nothing.  The featured choice however, is not among these, but is rather when to swim.  In that reclusive gully the young Andes offer mineral pools, heated, steamy and pungent.  

On closer inspection the gully-of-the-pools is in fact two little gorges folded out of the mountain like the wings of a Japanese paper crane, and each is touched white with mineral residue as though Pachamama, spirit of the world, has cleaned her teeth there and forgotten to rinse out the sink after she was done.  On closer inspection the steaming sulphur-water gushes out of the dry creek bed like little stanzas and tumbles over the small mineral stalagmite constructions like rhymes and assonance.  The water flows into the black pool that has been constructed for swimming. 

The decision for me, the two Britons and one Kiwi was to swim of course and stepping in for the first time I wondered at how the mountains had made the spring, how the spring had made the yellow hotel and how the yellow hotel had made the flowers.  It’s the circle of life.

And after the first swimming session, and after lunch, we sat sleepily up on the front lawn and there was a donkey far below, with a boy and a dog.  I watched as they clambered, wandered, kicked and whistled down the zig zag steepness of goat trails, around cacti, being reduced to specks of movement on their way into the village.

I shifted into the cabana shade to continue the inactivity, wondering if donkeys and boys and dogs ever put a foot wrong and slipped.  Do the mountains ever take them?  But such were only my thoughts.

A Persian sitting there may have dissected the scene into tight intellectual squares and composed lines of tight verse.  A middle class Indian family might’ve unfolded a mat and sat to share food and chatter in honour of the beauty.  A Bangladeshi might’ve been in awe with a slight pitter-patter to the heart at the altitude and the steep drop in the land, while Ukrainians might’ve been more inclined to laugh and look for a bottle of wine to open in celebration. 

Yet this Australian with his friends was given to returning to the pool where the water held enough heat to warrant alternating between swimming and taking gaps of exposure to the cool Andean air.  He noted that it was at the pool where all the Bolivian guests were.  For them the mountain setting was usual rather than out of the ordinary; it was the spring water that was rare.

That night the Milky Way shone as a short, sharp stripe between gaps in the ragged higher hills.  And we swam once more. 

There was a shooting star that seemed, with a strong band of light, to divide the sky in two, nearly down to the horizon.  And when they saw it, the Britons started discussion on what a shooting star actually was, and they asked me.  I wondered if they’d never before looked up into the night sky and if that was so, then how was it possible for them to properly contemplate how small we are?

‘It’s the first shooting star I’ve ever seen,’ the Londoner said. 

I set about explaining the meteor basics in accordance with science; but it might have been better in the context of the mountains of Urmiri on that Starry, Starry Night, to have answered instead in verse, something about the spine of South America or Pachamama’s teeth, something of their Byron or Coleridge, something concerning the sky holding up the mountains or the birth vessel of the Andean peoples.  It might simply have been better to have attempted some kind of stupid poetry because it might have been more accurate.

Photo: Bernarda Asistiri

There are hot springs in Iran to try, you could stay in the Bolivian Andes a while or find some other mountains, or fight for your life in the Bay of Bengal and live to tell...


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Under the Sky, Not Far



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