Without the Window, It's Not Worthwhile

Without the window it’s not worthwhile. To think of the exorbitant rates of plane tickets, how soon the journey is over, clearly the most valuable item up for grabs is the view. Consequently, it is entirely unsatisfactory to slum it in the aisle or worse, squashed between unwelcome strangers in the middle seat, especially when the price is the same. Those other seats are simply a rip off for people who know no better, who cannot have enjoyed a window seat previously. Without a window seat it’s not worth flying. It’s perfectly reasonable not to board the plane.

These are not my words. While I tend to prefer the window I would not refuse to fly; nor would I expend so many words explaining my preference. For Iqbal, silence was a negative waiting to be filled. His tips and stories came like a flash flood, bowled you over with barely time to recover before the next flood began.

Farsi is a language of exquisite beauty. It’s the language of great literature, of poets like Hafez and Saadi and simply to hear the language spoken is like a melody from heaven. The phrases used even for everyday speech are poetic and enlightening. Of course Iqbal couldn’t appreciate the entirety of it, but from his Urdu he could glean enough. He was Pakistani and it was a dreadful loss for my Australian friend Lachlan and me to be in Iran surrounded by the sweetest language unable to comprehend a single word.

Farsi is beautiful. I would say we might have told Iqbal we had Farsi lessons and were more than beginners, but it’s not easy to spit into a raging torrent. And yet, Iqbal was very likeable.

We were on the same flight from Bandar Abbas to Chah Bahar in eastern Iran, in Iran’s Baluchestan. Flights were very cheap in Iran with one way fares as low as ten dollars due to the appalling, for the Iranians, exchange rate. I don’t think we met on the plane, as Iqbal found the window seat in front of mine – but as we needed transport from the airport into Chah Bahar town, we shared a taxi.

It’s unacceptable to use somebody else’s bathroom. If one needs to use the bathroom they should certainly do it before leaving home, before arriving at another person’s home as a valued guest. Children should be instructed same. There is nothing worse than visiting another man’s bathroom – it will leave the host wondering if it was them you came to see or if you only came to use the plumbing.

No comment from me.

Chah Bahar has its Baluchi ways that were significantly different to most of Iran. Baluchis were mostly Sunni and their clothes harked more to the subcontinent than to the country’s west. The only difficulty, common to all port cities in Iran, hotels for foreigners were expensive. As Iqbal really was a nice guy, the three of us agreed to share a room, with two single beds and a mat on the floor for me, in between.

It was in that small period between the turning off the light and the sleep arriving, with the very last of the day’s chat winding down, when I heard one of the strangest sentences ever. We were finally asking Iqbal why he was in Iran. Through the darkness I heard him say, “I lost my jeans. I’ve come to find them.”

Politeness says a small reply is in order, something along the lines of “oh, that’s nice” or “I hope you find them.” I don’t recall if I managed to squeeze something out, but I was entirely grateful for the darkness – nobody could see me biting hard on my lip to prevent laughter from bursting out. It was helpful that I couldn’t see Lachlan’s face at that stage, because I knew he would be having great difficulty holding his own laughter back. But the silence – it was no longer a negative waiting to be filled – it was substantial, unbearably heavy and with the force of a category five cyclone. That silence couldn’t be resisted.

I heard the first busts from Lachlan’s closed mouth – and then we roared laughing, both of us – unseemly, rude and for several minutes, unstoppable. Iqbal didn’t understand what was humorous.

There were some obvious questions – why would a man lose a pair of jeans in a neighbouring country – had he been there before or were they somehow smuggled over the border? How regularly is it that people travel abroad in search of missing trousers?

When the laughter eased and we sought explanation it became apparent we’d misunderstood. It wasn’t his jeans he’d lost but his jinns. He’d sent them to Iran and they’d not returned. Of course, the concept of losing one’s jinns also raises some obvious questions – but it was better not to ask. It was time to sleep.

We took the plane on to Zahedan, the capital of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province and not very far from the border with Afghanistan. Iqbal was with us – he was going the same way – and he was still a rather good and likeable guy. So we stayed at the same hotel.

If you ever happen to get shot in the leg, it’s certainly no excuse for interrupting a dinner party. Particularly if it’s a family birthday party and others are in high spirits in the hope of an entertaining night over a meal, then it’s better not to mention the shooting. As for the blood that’s dripping on the floor under the table, a fistful of napkins can help, and if it’s done discretely nobody need know. Then, once the meal is completed, it will possible to drive the wife and children home before quietly continuing on to check into a hospital.

It was the first moments in Zahedan that I started to consider that Iqbal might indeed have some kind of superpower. Lachlan and I had gone to buy water and I was discussing Iqbal’s flourishing communicativeness. I said, “He can talk on any topic. He could talk for an hour about his socks!” Socks was random; yet minutes later, back at the hotel when we went to find Iqbal to go sightseeing, he was just putting on his socks.

The best socks are made with thicker wool by Afghans. You can buy them at the Afghan market and other socks simply won’t compete – Afghan socks are warmer and more comfortable and never get holes in them because they are hand knitted. Once you’ve worn Afghan socks you’ll never wear others. If it’s not Afghan the socks aren’t worth buying.

Zahedan is picturesque with its backdrop of jet black hills. We took to the city’s photogenic suburbs with their mud brick houses. It was inevitable that in the mix of buildings we’d end up standing on somebody’s roof. What was unexpected was that the householder came rushing out and asked us not to stand there because it might collapse. Instead, he invited us to come in for tea.

We chatted with the Zahedani and he was rather impressed by our Farsi. For some reason, maybe his accent, we could understand him well while Iqbal struggled. “These two have come from the other side of the world,” said the Zahedani, “and their Farsi is good, but you come from a neighbouring country and you can’t understand.”

Yet he really was nice guy, Iqbal. So what did it matter if he’d lost his jinns? It could happen to anybody.

The story of apparel cannot be told by jeans and socks alone... There'd need to be...

a stylish one-button cardie...

                        various knitwear items in vomit green...

         a bit of millinery from an isthmus...

                                                                                         a sari shawl in alpaca, of course!

                                     the very latest in elegant, chic, forest wear...

                       and a time when you were more dressed than on any previous occasion.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Without the Window, It's Not Worthwhile

No Please, No Thank You

It was Gulshan, for dinner.  ‘Do you enjoy living in the East?’ the Australian woman said, her first words to me on that evening, with enough vitriol in her tone to strip rust from a pole.  Why the bitterness?  I was confused.  I rarely think of East and West: and if I did, East might mean Russia or China, not Bangladesh.  Bangladesh is a South Asian nation but mostly I think of it as: Bangladesh.  It requires no reference point.

My Bangladeshi friend Situ was there, thankfully, and in the short conversation that followed she made mention of how she cannot tell the difference between Bangladeshis, Indians and Pakistanis, which might be alright if she didn’t work with these communities in Sydney.  She challenged my saying that Bangladesh was not India and required Situ to attest the fact the two countries actually differ.  And when I suggested Bangladeshis might be flashier in style than at least their Paschimbangan counterparts, she indicated Situ and said ‘I don’t see any gold anywhere!’  She’d been in Bangladesh for less than twenty-four hours.  It was her first visit.

She spoke of her trip, maybe a week, to a village in Western Ukraine.  The scene was of poverty, despair and people who didn’t know how to fix the village water pump.  They had kitchens smaller than her Australian bathroom.  ‘The country’s been ruined!’ she declared, ‘It will never recover.’ Then she almost spat out the word ‘Russians!’  I might not mention such unfortunate inanities except that she was certain her pending visit to a village in Jessore would be identical.  ‘I already know what it’s going to be like.’ 

For an Australian, a visit to a Bangladeshi village is a significant opportunity to learn, not only of Bangladesh but of oneself.  It seemed a shame that such a great opportunity might be lost before it began.

Fortunately we didn’t have to stay.  As we left she was busily telling a young Bangladeshi girl, maybe six years old, ‘In English we say please and thank you!’  She wanted to force the girl to say ‘please’ before handing her a candy.  There was some irony in her instructing on manners and it made me wonder if I had ever been so culturally judgemental. 

The young girl didn’t know what to do.  I wanted to say, ‘Look, it’s there, her ‘please’ is in her expression.  It’s in her shyness which means respect.’  I wanted to say, ‘Leave her alone!’ or ‘How about you learn some Bangla?’  But there was no point.

Reality: if an English-speaker sits at a Norwegian dinner table they’re likely to be shocked.  ‘Pass the salt!’ they’ll say, a little too directly.  On the Norwegian street, passers by stare, while in Sydney it’s usual if you catch a stranger’s eye to look away or smile.  The difference was significant enough that when I first went to Oslo at age eighteen the street staring used to have me scanning my clothes to see if there was something odd.  T-shirt is back to front?

Yet within days I’d learnt that Norwegian phrase takk for maten, ‘thanks for the food,’ to be said after every meal.  I learnt takk for sist, which means ‘thanks for the last time we met,’ and can be said on re-meeting someone.  In Australia there are not similar customs or not in the same way.

Reality: if an English-speaker goes to Iran it’s the locals who might be shocked.  You can’t just say salaam to greet someone; it needs to be a slightly sung, full-hearted salaaaam! to matter.  There might need to be a kiss on each cheek.  Farsi has several phrases for ‘how are you?’  It might be insufficient to use only one; and there are three versions of ‘thank you’, often strung together and with a ‘very much’ thrown in. 

There were other unique systems: Iranians will seat the most important guest furthest from the door and all things should be offered three times and twice refused before being accepted on the third offer, which is the genuine one.  More informally I remember scenes of Iranians passing handfuls of sunflower seeds down the intercity bus, row by row, passenger by passenger, until it reached the foreign guests!  When it comes to the verbal ‘thank you’ alone, Iranians leave English-speakers for dust.

Reality: in Thailand there’s the system of wai-s.  A wai involves palms together and shows differing levels of respect, dependent upon where the fingertips are placed.  A wai above the head is for Buddha or the royal family.  Fingertips that are positioned under the nose are appropriate for elders, under the chin for friends and below the chin for children.  Mere words are not required.

Reality: Bangladeshis are mostly polite, especially in the village; and it might sound strange but I used to wonder how they managed it since there is a deficit of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to an English-speaker’s ears.  It’s because in terms of sophistication, Bengalis leave English-speakers for dust.

Think about all the gestures the foreigner must learn.  There’s the ‘sorry’ pat on the shoulder if you accidentally bump someone in a crowd.  There’s the ‘even sorrier’ arm stroking, often favoured with friends or creditors.  There’s the perhaps old-fashioned ‘very sorry,’ displayed by sticking the tongue out, tugging on ear lobes and doing squats; and I once saw the ‘extremely sorry’ of hitting one’s cheeks with one’s own shoes! 

There’s the sharing a cup of tea to end a dispute and the process of village mediations that must go back for thousands of years.  We can show respect by offering or taking things with both hands.  Splitting bills, as is common in the west, is out of the question and within many a Bangladeshi family the concept of sharing property like clothes or jewellery is taken for granted. 

Think about the degrees of ‘you’ that no longer exist in English.  In place of every aapni, imagine if you put a ‘please’: how much more prolific they would be than in an ordinary English sentence, because aapni is there in every verb.  Tumi and tui may also have politeness when they indicate closeness or caring.

Think about the greetings.  It took me time to properly understand how all the villagers saying assalamu alaikum or namaskar were not simply saying ‘hello’ or ‘good morning.’  Walaikum salam, I could happily respond, without having a clue as to the respect present within the exchange. 

Years ago, it was common after a handshake to put your hand to the heart; and there’s the hand-to-mouth-then-heart gesture if your foot accidentally touches someone, the gesture that makes the villagers laugh when I do it because I’ve added a little signature flick to the end of mine.  Beyond that, there are indescribable smaller gestures, a look in the eyes or a smile of delight: nobody seems to do these things the way Bengalis do.  And let’s not even get started on the jamai, the son-in-law!  These ways of expressing politeness, caring and consideration are harder to fake than the verbal version.

Unfortunately, telling that girl to say ‘please’ is not a neutral act.  It is a cultural imposition that sets the English-speaker’s way as the standard to live up to and be judged by.  Let’s not do that anymore.  This is the twenty-first century and we tried that last century. 

The girl can be polite in the very many local ways available and if she wants to attend English class or go to Australia later, let her learn the petty forms of politeness then: it’s easy to adjust to the Toyota model if you’ve been taught to drive the Mercedes.

It’s understandable the Australian woman didn’t know these things.  What’s sad and embarrassing for another Australian is that she couldn’t imagine she didn’t know.  Then again, she didn’t know the Cold War ended either.

In these heady days of a nationwide reaffirmation of what it means to be Bangladeshi, there’s this minor matter I’d like to throw into the pan: Bangladeshi manners.  I’m busy trying to reduce my use of dhonnobhad, the verbal thank you.  I want to drive the Mercedes!

It's not only about manners of course, but different ways of thinking, perhaps what a culture sounds like, or even perceptions of paradise. 



This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: No Please No Thank You














Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh

Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway

The Fixing Shop

Masouleh

They’ll be thinking I’ve forgotten the buying of the meat from the village butcher, an old man in a thick dark coat and beanie, sporting grey stubble about his chin.  The meat in long cuts was hanging on hooks in a stall street side, and in the winter of the hills of Gilan there could be little concern it wasn’t cold enough for the meat to be preserved.  They’ll be thinking I don’t remember how they carried the beef back to the village house of tan adobe and flat roof, how they took to the meat with a large knife borrowed from the neighbours’ in preparation for the evening’s meal of kebab.  It may be true that one can’t remember everything but there’s no forgetting Hamed and his friends, no overlooking Cyrus from the fixing shop.  Those days hold memories of the lasting variety.

It was a random walk through the main bazaar in Rasht that started the events.  It was at least afternoon and possibly evening by then.  Rasht is a city of a million people not far from the Iranian shoreline of the Caspian Sea and while the city has a noble history of which its denizens are no doubt proud, for the tourist there didn’t seem to be many outstanding sites and it was a situation that made a walk among the clutter of businesses in the bazaar a particularly worthy expedition.

There was a shoe shop owned by identical twins, mid thirties I would say.  Were their names Hasan and Hussein?  They took the time to give us tea as we admired the footwear and it was tea in the Iranian tradition, of a deep brown transparency, free of milk and straight from the samovar.  In Iran tea is sucked through a sugar cube, ‘ghand’ as they call it, held in position by the front teeth.  Not far from the shoe store was the business Cyrus called his fixing shop.

Cyrus was busy when first we saw him, engrossed in his usual habitat of screwdrivers and wires.  From across Rasht people could bring whatever devices they had, cassette recorders, radios and TV sets, maybe even a fridge, for Cyrus to set about fixing.  These days he probably operates on many a mobile phone too, surgically attaching a wire, snapping open plastic casing.

To say ‘salaam’ in Iran is for the most part akin to embarking upon a friendship, especially if you’re a stranger.  ‘Guest is God,’ the Iranians say.  It was therefore usual that the salaam we offered randomly to Cyrus became a conversation, that the conversation became tea and that the tea became a plan to travel into the mountains on the following day.  The residents of Rasht would have to make do with their broken TV sets and malfunctioning cassette recorders for a day or two, thanks to us, but they’d understand: Cyrus had guests so it was to be expected that he’d down tools.

He wanted to take us to the village of Masouleh, and we said his plan sounded very good but only if he really had the time.  What would happen with the fixing shop?  It was a silly, foreign question of course but in Sydney it’s barely thinkable to take time out for newly met strangers.  We like Masouleh too, Cyrus said.  Then there was that other Iranian inclination, which would be the same in a Bangladeshi context, the hurried enlistment of friends in any adventure, to assist in any venture.  That’s how Hamed came into the picture, with Hamid and Akbar besides.

I think the car was Akbar’s and it was a small white Peikan, that famous and infamous Iranian version of vehicle for which there was a lengthy waiting list of local purchasers and, if what the Iranians said was true, an equally long queue of Peikan owners waiting for repair work to be completed.  Even Cyrus couldn’t fix a Peikan.

With the four of them and the two of us, four squeezed into the small back seat, we set out on the following day with music blaring and a flat road ahead that saw at first the ever diminishing suburbs of Rasht before proceeding into open country.  It wasn’t very far to Masouleh, it wasn’t far until the road started on its inclines and curves up into the mostly leafless winter forests.  It might seem odd to be driving off with four strangers into the remote hills of Gilan but across Iran such a circumstance is not to be considered.  They even share taxis, long distance, there.  And how else could we have learnt that in Rasht people didn’t speak Farsi but their own language, Gilaki, and that in Masouleh they had yet another language?  It’s a Talysh speaking village, Masouleh.  We asked how they would talk to the villagers and they said it wasn’t easy but they could understand something of Talysh too.

Of all Iranian villages Masouleh is one which stands out, for its beauty and uniqueness.  It’s built on a relatively steep hillside and features adobe houses, the flat roofs of which have a penchant to serve as pathway, roadway or yard to the house higher on the hill.  To walk on the street and to walk on the roof are synonyms in Masouleh, though the village itself is car-free.  They parked the Peikan, I remember, in a kind of turning circle just before the final u-bend into the village, at a place where the narrow hill road had been widened a little, and together we made our way into Masouleh on foot.

 

They’ll think I don’t remember how while we were busy exploring the village and taking photographs they got to work finding a house to rent for the night.  And with accommodation found, negotiated and paid for, Hamid and Akbar left us with the promise of returning the next morning to pick us up again.  That evening there was kebab and naan bread, to be certain, and tea heated in a small kettle that fit nicely atop the tubular gas heater, of the slightly battered and rusty type that is common in Iran, which is sometimes used to cook upon as well, and is prone to minor explosions of puffs of gas, not entirely dangerous but enough to singe the eyebrows if one happens to be looking into it wondering why it won’t light.  I write this from experience.

This photo is from wikipedia

There was a long conference that ran that evening, about Shi’a Islam and the West, about Australia, about Iran and Gilan and the finer points of the fixing business.  We slept on the floor on Persian rugs that night, shivering a little but otherwise content in the village of Masouleh in the hills of Gilan in the nation of Iran.  It was of course a Talysh sleep we encountered.

And despite efforts we were not allowed to pay a single riyal, not a solitary touman, for the Masouleh trip.  As was not uncommon in Iran we felt guilty about the local hospitality, that we were a burden.  We later learnt the value of arriving with gifts, boxes of Armenian biscuits by the kilo, especially keshmeshis, and flowers, but there wasn’t always the possibility to do that and in Masouleh for comfort we had to suffice with their words.  ‘We like Masouleh too.’ 

They’ll think I’ve forgotten because with all the languages and people it’s not really possible to stay in touch with everybody all the time.  But we don’t forget so easily, our memories of the kindness of strangers.  Do we?  Talysh and Gilaki memories are of the type that linger.








Hospitality comes in many varieties.  There is the tea-and-coconut type, or the avian admiring type, or  hospitality of the whistling grey Ford variety.  It's not surprising, since, let's face it, even Osama likes guests. 


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: The Fixing Shop

About Mrs. Val

Mrs. Val (Centre) with her wonderful daughter and Aunty Val (left)

There were gloves and a scarf in it, not to mention a woolly hat, the day Val took me to their family apartment to her mother.  Donetsk in Ukraine is a city of about two million people and four full seasons.  It has forty-plus summers and minus-twenty winters and we’d not reached the summer yet.

It took me a while to come across her name these years later.  It’s Tanya.  I suppose it’s a peculiar habit to get about renaming people quite independently of whatever arrangement of letters the rest of the world has granted them, but I often do.  It’s why her regular name didn’t come easily, because I never used it.  It may be my mother’s inheritance, because in her family several of the names in use have no correspondence to birth certificates.  As with Bengali newborns, in my mother’s family allocating names is like clothes shopping.  Names need trying out first, it takes them a while to fit and sometimes they get changed before they suit.  It’s unfortunate for it’s neither very creative nor as a title correct, but by virtue of being Val’s mother it was Mrs. Val that settled in to be her name.  There is significant doubt she knows I call her that, but none that she wouldn’t much mind.

Mrs. Val lives in the usual Soviet apartment block, tall, slightly dour and similar to all the others thereabouts.  I lived in one too, that the language centre had rented for their native-speaker English teacher.  Outside the block was the arrangement of dilapidated swings and previous seesaws amongst the still leafless trees that marked the usual generous allotment of space between the several blocks in the cluster.  Val and I followed a path of worn damp earth to the stoop of the building.

The block had eight or so floors to it, which meant inside it featured one of those gorgeous old lifts of the criss-crossed iron out door variety, doors to be pushed apart by hand, of the laminated plywood inner door variety, door to be opened by hand.  With some luck once all the doors were shut again the little light in the lift would turn on automatically and hopefully upon pressing the chunky black plastic button for the floor the little engine would whirr.  Luck and hope: they were with us on that day.

Mrs. Val seemed a little nervous when she opened the door.  I was too.  In part it was because like her daughter and I, she was an English teacher, though in her achievements Mrs. Val was on an altogether higher level.  Ukrainian English teachers: how I admire them!  To think they had studied the language for five years at university without the benefit of having had the opportunity to converse with a native-speaker.  In Soviet times there had been the occasional guest lecturer, so they said, but because of politics it’d hardly been possible to have a chat one to one.  On the very earliest occasions some of them spoke with me, there remained a slight hesitation with regards to how their language skills when confronted with a native would fare.

Just inside, we removed layers: gloves, scarf and shoes; before she led us into the sitting room.  I took it in, Mrs. Val and the room.  Isn’t it funny how new experiences can sometimes gently accidentally touch upon a childhood moment and bring to the present warmth and light?  Mrs. Val made me remember the elephants.

When I was six or seven one of my father’s work colleagues used to live on the corner down the street.  They were family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery and my parents used to take me there when they’d go to visit.  While in that house there hadn’t been much for a kid to do I used to enjoy it: it had a kind of happiness in it that used to rub off.  So while they spoke about adult things I would busy myself with the elephants, the big, medium and little black wooden ones that must’ve emigrated from Africa to settle as a herd by their fireplace.  And Mr. Montgomery would serve one of his concoctions of soda water and lemon flavouring, with a plastic drink mixer or even one of those little umbrellas in it.  ‘Be careful with the elephants,’ my father used to say.

At a basic level it was the red of Mrs. Val’s hairdo that linked her with Mrs. Montgomery, but more than that it was the ambience of her living room.  Mrs. Val spoke gently with an accent rich in that Russianness which once was East Ukraine.  She spoke about the changes in the classroom: how once teachers had been dedicated enough that if one of the students was absent they’d take it upon themselves to visit the family in person to inquire the reason.  She still had that quality.

When she spoke of that and because of the tapestry on the wall I thought of Iran.  The tapestry seemed like one Iranians might choose to decorate their apartment, and her words about teaching I’d heard from one of her Iranian colleagues, Farhonde.  Mrs. Val was calmer I suppose.  Farhonde always specialised in energy and not a day under sixty she was, when she started the snowball fight on the slopes of Damavand.  Yet how much they had in common: teachers to the bone.

After the Soviet collapse the economics of things were more than tight.  In the larger capital, Kyiv, teaching salaries might barely cover the cost of the transport to get there and home again.  In Donetsk the situation was hardly better.  Mrs. Val used to spend her free time at her small land plot on the city outskirts, digging in and digging out potatoes.  I know she enjoyed that but there were times it’d been a little more necessary than it should have been; and of course the pension system she had spent her whole working life anticipating was more or less gone.  I don’t suppose while westerners were celebrating the Soviet collapse they thought much of Mrs. Val; but on the other hand without political change I couldn’t have met her so freely.

Donetsk is a city of mines: they’re dotted about even inside suburban areas and from Mrs. Val’s balcony you could see a few slag heaps rising up from the horizon.  From my arrival in Donetsk I used to consider myself a bit of a miner, though while others went underground in search of coal the minerals I sought were new experience, new culture and new learning.  Of the other sort of mineral I cannot tell you, but in what I fossicked for Donetsk was incredibly wealthy.  From the balcony Val pointed to the slag heaps.  ‘When I was a kid,’ she said, ‘I used to think those heaps were the mountains of Georgia.’  It was the opposite from me, for I’ve always found distances reduce as we grow.

‘Well…,’ it was the silvery and the sublime, the word Mrs. Val used, drawing it out slightly and peppering it through the conversation.  It was a word she’d crafted to mean anything, dependent on the occasion.  Sometimes it was an acknowledgement we were sharing an imperfect world; sometimes it was like a solitary drum beat to mark time. But mostly that tiny word held an exact and easily comprehensible meaning: nobody brings to it the adaptability she does.

‘Well…’ she said, standing.  It was time to prepare lunch.  I don’t know, just I followed her and in the kitchen we sat making pilmeni, Russian dumplings, together.  We pushed the meat filling into the folded pastry and crafted little scalloped edge packets with our fingers.  Mrs. Val’s pilmeni were neat and exact; mine were inexperienced and shoddy.  And sitting there I was at home.

I remember too the salt.  Val had left the living room during the meal and after some minutes, returned.  ‘What have you done with it?’ she asked her mother, a little demandingly.  ‘I’ve hidden it. You’ll never find it!’ Mrs. Val said, unapologetic, and, turning to me added, ‘she eats too much salt.’  ‘Yes, she does,’ I said without thinking and we laughed.

In the classroom, it’s Mrs. Val I think of: if ever I managed to be half the teacher she is then I did well.  Even without seeing her teach I knew it, that she was the professional high-water mark.  And isn’t it nice to imagine a Mrs. Val world?  There’d be no battlefield in it, only the classroom.  In Australia, the Federal Police would not have recently completed jungle training to prepare to potentially shoot pellets at the Afghan asylum seekers who arrive by boat, many of them children, in order to force them onto a plane to Malaysia.  In a Mrs. Val world there’d be no need to refuse to help people or to expel foreignness.  ‘Well…’

After several hours we left, and walking down the stairs I said, ‘your mother is wonderful.  So I don’t know what happened to you!’  Val stopped in her tracks, shooting an arrow of a glare; but we were well passed the stage where she could not know the meaning was opposite.  With me, she had long since lost her licence to be genuinely offended.  It’s the way of things.

And in Dhaka we’re reduced to the text box.  After chatting away with Val a few months ago, as we were winding up, I typed, ‘and when you see your mother, tell her I love her.’  ‘I know,’ the message came back, ‘and she loves you too.’ ‘Well…’





Mrs. Val may teach, but did she ever face the challenge of the the skull in the classroom, or have to overcome the language barrier to explain about the buffaloes or accidentally end up as a juice-drinking golfer?  Such things can happen, believe you me...


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: About Mrs. Val

Swimming with Osama

Bandar Abbas, Iran (photo:wikipedia)

Does Osama like to swim? Yes he does. If it was more wading and paddling or arms stretched to the front parting the water like morning curtains I can’t recall, but he certainly had no fear of water. There was no hesitation there: that is true, for I swam alongside him some years back, in 1997 by the settled calendar of the west, to be exact, to be precise, in the mountainous wilds of southern Iran.

The water was mineral stained, the blue at its least a mix of cobalt glass, peacock-chest and Swedish-eye. It was other-worldly, a blue that must’ve shamed the sky even in its brightest effort, such that the regular concealment of night would come as an entirely welcome cloak to its failure. The water was warm, Earth-baked and a suitable adversary for the cooling evening air, when we arrived in that furrow of a gully in those rocky and harsh mountainsides.

Marco Polo had been there, so it is said, to the place called Geno outside the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas. It can’t have offered much physical comfort on Polo’s way eastward to China: there were no silkworms there to weave for him some bedding, no emperor’s court on-site to entertain and in all likelihood not a single campfire in wait for the roasting of a meal. Geno is rugged and unsettled, but at the very least it surely brought a certain measure of wonder: the traveller’s treasure. And if it was that, like Osama, in Geno he swam, I couldn’t say.

Fishing the Persian Gulf (photo courtesy Iran)

The stars were sewing their tapestry across the heavens by the time we were drying ourselves in readiness for the drive back to town. The lateness of the hour was Osama’s fault, and Osama’s mother’s: for the Osama family had all the hospitality of that country where the locals say, ‘guest is God.’ The lateness of the return was the lateness of the setting out, after a meal, quite possibly of kebab and that long, delicious flatbread the Iranians also call ‘nan’, quite probably taken while sitting in a circle on a carpet on the floor. There had been so many meals like that so the specific details of that one have become elusive.

To be sure, it wasn’t at all to be considered in Iran, the country of crystal finery and etiquette precision, to be setting out for the springs without the prior satisfaction of food.

1997 by the settled calendar of the west, to be precise, to be exact: it was the days before Bin Laden’s infamy, and this Osama was not him, to be sure, but a young Iranian guy who’d met my school friend Lachlan and I by happenstance on a Bandar Abbas street on our way travelling through Iran. It was the first time I’d heard the name, and I liked it: O-sa-ma. It’s quite pleasant really; in those days when there was no connotation to it, and even now it can hardly be said to be a name of any less fortune than ‘George’, with apologies going to Mr. Harrison, Mr. Washington, Mr. Clooney, Mr. Costanza, Mr. Jetson and the others: sadly, your name has been cooked.

Bandar Abbas has a Portuguese history, with burqa-clad women sporting red or black masks across their noses and around their eyes; a masquerade relic of Portuguese fashion from centuries gone that went native along the Persian Gulf coastline before the colonisers left in their ships. The odd thing was that with the additional facial covering uncustomary in the rest of Iran the local women’s ankles were bare, less covered than in the rest of Iran, so in a sense it evened out.

Persian Gulf fishing trawler (photo courtesy Iran)

And offshore on the island of Hormuz is the shell of a Portuguese fort, rounded and brick, in which a random Kurd from far north-western Iran cooked and shared his lunch with us; partly because his village lay near a remote and ancient Armenian church that we’d visited some moons previously.

Bandar Abbas has an African history: the locals there called Bandaris are of mixed African and Iranian heritage, the complexion darker and culture distinct. In Bangladesh, it need not be said, that the term Bhandari has created its own cartography.

Bandar Abbas is a Russian story, so it was said: such that in the days when the Soviet Union opened and the Russians first ventured beyond they would sometimes stop there on the way to or from the electronics haven of Dubai. So we’d accidentally become Russians too, Lachlan and I, for perhaps half an hour in Bandar Abbas.

For two months or more we’d been in Iran, and our Farsi lessons in Sydney had led us into a little game called ‘trying-to-convince-the-hotel-manager-we-are-locals-at-least-until-the-room-rate-is-fixed.’ It’s not that Iran was expensive; only that the game was fun.

When we’d been wearing local clothes, and with new beards in place (mine rather silly-looking), we could perhaps for a brief moment, with singular short questions and monosyllabic answers, pass as locals. And even my blue eyes were not totally inexplicable, for some Kurds share that blue. We’d try our best to arrive at a price, and then enjoy the hotel manager’s surprise as we handed over Australian passports.

But in Bandar Abbas it was assumed we were Russians, so we were, we were! The little stories, the little lies at the hotel reception: our Farsi was imperfect on account of our Russian-ness and we were engineering students studying in Tehran who needed a good rate since the Russian rouble hardly went far, did it? Why engineering? I don’t know, but we were not like their other guests, the moneyed Muscovites wanting to buy a new TV set and a video recorder in Dubai, that was the main thing.

Lady with Bandari mask (photo courtesy Iran)

We used to encourage each other in such endeavours, Lachlan and I, or lead each other astray. But it was Bandar Abbas and if the local women could mask themselves in red or black, then for just some minutes why couldn’t we do so with words?

They knew it was not so, those reception people, of course, of course; but they enjoyed the little performance, especially hearing us speak Farsi, in much the same way Bangladeshis now take muse from my inventive, original Bangla, if it’s to be described politely, which is what the Iranians would do.

‘So where are you really from?’ the reception people asked at the conclusion of the initial exchange. ‘Okay, Australia, but we really are students with no need for rich-country room rates.’

At dinner, a few hours, we got to know the hotel staff properly; for the hotel was hardly bustling and we were at least interesting guests. We relived the Iranian tour completed and re-listed the route ahead.

Persian Gulf (photo courtesy Iran)

Yes it was then: on the evening of slight Russian-ness before the Kurdish lunch in the relic of the Portuguese fort on the Island of Hormuz, on the day before the meeting with Osama and before the swimming in the pools of cobalt glass and peacock chest and Swedish eye. That’s the way, in accordance with the rules of true adventure, that calendars are written. Marco Polo would understand it: the other-worldliness and the wonder.

The Portuguese Fort on the Island of Hormuz, Iran (photo: wikipedia)

More adventure can be had searching for massive beasts or dealing with a non-English speaking travel agent or even just getting to work.

This article also published by Daily Star, here: Swimming with Osama