Do Horses Bite?

Tupiza, Bolivia

Shhh! Do you hear it? Barely audible? Wait… Yes, the thurram-thurram-thurram, that terrible sound, is growing, coming, gaining ground. Onto the horses! The thunder of hooves is ricocheting off the canyon walls. Lightning speed: they’re coming to catch us; no time to lose!

Did you ever imagine how it would be, in the American Wild West, in the movies? I did. Robbing a bank or a stage coach, flying away on horseback in a hail of bullets, red-check handkerchief over the mouth, disappearing in a cloud of desert dust? And if the trail ever became too hot, if the sheriff was too close or the Pinkerton Detective Agency too diligent in their hunt for the stolen loot, for the thieves and the bounty for capture, one could always do as the infamous bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did in 1901, and escape to South America.

What better way to experience Tupiza, where Butch and Sundance finally met their ends, than to hire a horse and gallop like a train, fly like the wind, through a desert canyon, past a cactus or two? Thurram-thurram-thurram: that was the idea.

Helpful hint: of course it would be better to know beforehand how to ride a horse.

Nong Khai, Thailand

It was just yesterday, several years later, I was remembering that afternoon on horseback, how it had been. It was a world away from Bolivia, with the steamy, monsoon Mekong idling by, beyond the cabana. Tourists gathered to chat and sip on drinks, to take the edge off the Thai afternoon humidity. Across the river were the distant houses and tiny motor cars of Laos; on the river were long canoe-like fishing boats. It’s strange I happened to chat with Annie; that Annie was there: she was exactly the person to resolve the riddle of Sanchez, from that long ago day.

Tupiza, Bolivia

Come to think of it, Tupiza, my first full day in Bolivia, never quite fit with the image of a faraway land. You don’t imagine, for example, finding lunch in a small restaurant by the main square, having to knock on the door to wake up the staff from their afternoon siesta, only to sit at a red and blue vinyl bench eating pizza to the sound of Boney M’s By the Rivers of Babylon. It’s a little off-putting.

Still, I clambered boulders at the edge of town, followed a goat trail past the Stations of the Cross to a hilltop. The mountains are thousand-pleated like the inside of lung, ironic given the altitude’s shortness of breath. To the south, three red rock houses with little stone goat yards clung to a canyon wall; to the east, a cemetery of white crosses, artificial flowers and tinsel. To the west, traffic uninterested in Tupiza’s bridge drove instead along the dry riverbed.

I followed a veinlike gully that zigzagged into the hills, in parts so narrow you could touch both walls at once. The rocks were pebble-filled, the olive green willows lit by the shard of late afternoon sky contrasted with rock red. Shadows climbed canyon walls. The air was still.

There was a stand-off in that canyon, but it wasn’t a pistol-toting Pinkerton detective that found me; rather a Doberman that suddenly appeared from around a bend, barking ferociously and running wildly in my direction. The canyon walls too steep to climb, I tried to recall all I knew of dogs and did the only thing worth doing. I stood still.

Fortunately, seconds short of my leg entering its mouth and needing several rabies shots, the dog baulked. My bluff worked. Soon its human arrived, yelling, managing to ward it off. Did they have wild Dobermans in the Wild Wild West?

Like me, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid started their South American adventures in Argentina. Unlike me, they would appear to have staged their biggest bank robbery of all, in Rio Gallegos in 1905, making off to the north and eventually hiding out in Bolivia. Witnesses recalled two English speaking bandits.

At San Vicente outside Tupiza in 1908 came the showdown. Trapped in a house, three soldiers of the Abaroa Regiment of the Bolivian Army’s cavalry, the police chief and local officials sought to arrest the fugitives. The bandits opened fire. There was a gunfight until, at 2 a.m., from inside the house two shots were heard, minutes apart. Two dead, bullet-ridden bodies were later found. It appeared that one had shot the other, who was probably already mortally wounded, before turning the gun on himself.

Tupiza: there should at least be a bit of galloping.

Like Butch and Sundance we were two: there was another Australian tourist, Richard. The hostel offered a lazy triathlon: a first leg by bicycle, all downhill, the second on horseback and the third by jeep, along a dirt road far up into the mountains.

I had only one question. ‘Do they have a really docile, placid horse available?’ I’d barely ridden before. They said they did: a dirty-white horse with a kindly disposition and his name was Sanchez.

We were led into empty country, from a stretch by the railway into just the kind of dry, rocky terrain where an American movie about the Wild West could be filmed. It was picture perfect for galloping, flying off in a trail of dust. But of course, there’s a difference between how things are imagined and reality.

Thurram-thurram-thurram, imagined, is not always how it turns out.

Sanchez was quite good but it wasn’t without trepidation that I sat up there on his back. I was pretty strong on the reins, thinking he should know I was in charge, and far short of galloping, if Sanchez even attempted a light trot, much less a canter, I became nervous and pulled him back. In the country of Butch and Sundance, there was a lot of slow walking that went on. On that day, Sanchez may as well have been a donkey.

Yet there was something more worrisome about his behaviour. He kept trying to twist his head around towards my leg. I didn’t mind if he only wanted to sniff it but I couldn’t be sure of his intentions so I pulled his head back to the front with the reins, just in case. If Sanchez is the placid horse, I’d hate to try the other ones.

‘Do horses bite?’ I wondered.

Nong Khai, Thailand

It’s not often that one needs to consult a horse expert. They’re not like doctors or hairdressers that everyday people visit time to time. Even the tom-tom owning Dhakaiyas probably know enough about horses not to spend much time consulting experts. Indeed, should I require a horse expert I wouldn’t know how to go about finding one.

So it was odd that as I was re-considering Sanchez and the day in Tupiza, Annie sat beside me. She was a British horse-riding instructor living in Hong Kong, where she taught at a riding school. She was on holidays in Thailand. It was the perfect circumstance to clear up that Sanchez issue. ‘Excuse me, but do horses bite?’

She was polite enough not to laugh when I explained the afternoon I spent onboard Sanchez. ‘Horses do sometimes bite,’ she said, ‘but it’s usually when you’re standing in front. It’s very hard for a horse to twist its neck to bite when you’re sitting on it. Maybe you were pulling on the reins too hard?’

Tupiza, Bolivia

Of course there are rumours about Butch and Sundance. It’s said they didn’t actually die in San Vicente. There are people who said they met them, years later, living discreetly back in the United States. It’s said they lived full lives and knew old age, and maybe it’s true: perhaps a final showdown, imagined, is not always how it works out in reality.

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This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Do Horses Bite?

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














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The Buffalo Matter

Buffaloes ought surely to be remembered

 

Travel grants time for introspection, valuable opportunity to learn new things about oneself.  For example, it was on my first trip to Thailand I learnt that I’d once been a buffalo farmer.  The revelation surfaced on the day I’d gone with Pa to Suphanburi and it was curious because, to be frank, I have no recollection of ever having partaken in buffalo husbandry, not in any manner, not at any time.

And of all agricultural endeavours one might assume that an activity involving heavy beasts like the buffalo would be one of the more difficult to forget.  I mean, while it might be understandable were one to overlook a strawberry-growing past or even a short stint tending potatoes, buffaloes ought surely to be remembered.

I was twenty and everything was new.  Thailand was the first sojourn in the ‘third world’, although these years later I’m no more enlightened as to what that term really means.  Back then it seemed mildly frightening.  There’d been the advice of Australians of the non-travelling variety, who equated stepping off a plane in Bangkok with contracting an unpronounceable tropical disease, probably spread by mosquitoes.  There were warnings of people hiding drugs in your luggage which would inevitably lead to the death penalty.  ‘But millions of people live in Thailand,’ I’d reasoned, ‘and such events don’t befall all of them, surely, at least not all the time.’  Nonetheless, with a resolution not to be bitten by a single mosquito during my stay, I was cautious.

15 metre Buddha in Suphanburi

I was fortunate enough to have not only a Pa but also a Maa waiting in Thailand, and I should mention that transcribing these titles into western script as they are actually pronounced in Thai is no easy feat.  Maa and Pa actually belonged to my Thai friend Gaew who’d lived in the same Norwegian town as I had for a year, and the three of them were waiting at the Don Muang terminal on the evening I arrived.

I didn’t know how to greet them.  I’d read about the Thai greeting system, the wai and how it was that Thais don’t favour physical contact such as shaking hands in greetings.  Perhaps it was best to just say hello?

Crouched alongside Gaew in the boot of their wagon we rumbled home along bumpy, massive freeways of up to three levels, while from Thai into Norwegian Gaew translated the conversation concerning my western bulkiness in relation to the potential for my head to meet the vehicle roof in response to the bumps of the road.  Gaew and I always spoke in Norwegian.  It was the language that had settled in as standard between us; and it was before she spent about a million years in the States becoming the world’s most educated person, or something similar.  Her English was less fluent then.

The first stop when we reached the home town, Ayutthaya, was a night market beside the river for some food.  Unfortunately the scattering of mosquitoes there didn’t agree to my not being bitten, so within hours my health plan was foiled.  Fortunately, sometimes mosquitoes keep their unpronounceable tropical diseases to themselves.

Suphanburi temple building

The Thai house was modest in those days.  A downstairs portion of a larger house, the singular main room had green vinyl flooring with piles of books populating the corners and a whiteboard and a chart of the periodic table on the wall, primary exhibits that Maa and Pa were schoolteachers.  The bedrooms had floor mats to sleep on and the bathroom plumbing consisted of a large earthen pot and a hand bucket in pink plastic shaped vaguely like a frying pan.  It was all new to me.

Gaew's place, back then!

 The first days covered the sites of Ayutthaya, an ancient capital of Thailand, and of Bangkok, and a little shopping.  In Australia everybody said Thailand was full of bargains.  With a few clothes in hand and a fake Tag Heuyer watch that my sister had ordered, Gaew asked if there was anything else to buy.  I was about to say no but out of my mouth came instead, ‘oh, there is one more thing, I really need a new kjøleskap.’  ‘A kjøleskap?’ she said, surprised, and she knew that in Norwegian it means refrigerator, and what a nightmare that’d be to take home on the plane!  As Norwegian was a first language for neither of us, in such circumstances, when I repeated the word while giving my most sincere face, it was only natural that instead of doubting me she began scouring her brain to see if kjøleskap really meant fridge, or if it had some other meaning she’d forgotten.  After some moments, still puzzled, she attacked the problem head on.  ‘But kjøleskap means refrigerator,’ she challenged, using English for the final word.  I started to laugh!

Meanwhile Maa and Pa had been facing their own communication hurdles.  Sometimes Maa started teaching Thai.  ‘Tang moh’ is watermelon and ‘nam’ means ‘water.’  Sometimes there were scribbles on the whiteboard.  Still, at times when Gaew was at university class we’d sit around the table staring blankly at each other, Maa, Pa and I.  It was an activity that was sufficiently ridiculous that on one occasion several minutes of silence were broken by Maa bursting into sudden laughter, followed by Pa and then me.  It was hysterical, side-splitting, falling-of-the-chair laughter at the utter futility of our communication predicament.  And when Gaew was there, they’d still be frustrated.  ‘Speak English!’ they were always telling us, on the off-chance they’d catch a word.  But after a few minutes, instinctively, there’d be a switch back to Norwegian.

Suphanburi streets, back in the day...

Suphanburi is a typical regional town, hardly a tourism magnet, but with all the nearer sites seen and Gaew in class… Pa had some business to do in Suphanburi and the night before our trip there’d been a bit of jest and wonder at how the two of us might communicate on our own.  If I spoke English really, really slowly, was the advice…

Suphanburi streets

The drive was completed in silence, unsurprisingly, and we seemed to get around the few sites: a fifteen metre Buddha in a temple and a tower from where you could survey the entire town, without adding anything to the sounds of traffic and life in Suphanburi.  Then it was time for Pa’s lunch meeting, not that I knew it.  I just followed him into the restaurant where he’d parked the car.

It turned out he was meeting someone from the army, although in Thailand teachers seemed to sometimes wear military-style uniforms so it might’ve been someone from the education department.  Wherever his associate was from they talked for a very long time.  Lunch came and went and I sat at the table with nothing to do but sip water from the glass in front of me.  And with the conversation in Thai there was no telling if it was wrapping up or just getting started. 

Even the water drinking became a strange and foreign experience.  Pa’s associate had an associate who stood beside the table and whenever I took a mouthful of ‘nam’, from the ‘nam’ jug he’d promptly re-fill the glass.  I thought to leave the glass empty.  I wanted to be polite. So after he’d refill I’d drink a bit more. It was refill, drink, refill, drink.  Pa’s associate’s associate was very efficient and I was too slow in trying to tell him not to refill it again, plus I had no words for it.  In Australia I’d never seen a water glass refilling guy.  It became a challenge.  I kept drinking and by the time Pa finally indicated it was time to leave, I felt rather like a fish.  My stomach ached and I’d wager that when we left the restaurant that glass remained full.

Pa at temple gate

It was on the way home to Ayutthaya the matter of the buffaloes came up.  We’d stopped at a ring of large wooden poles called the elephant kraal, where Thai kings presumably once hosted elephant tournaments.  Still thinking to make conversation rather than complete the whole day in silence, and with nothing particular to say about the kraal, my attention turned to a buffalo in a nearby field.  ‘That’s the first buffalo I’ve ever seen,’ I said to Pa, slowly, very, very slowly.  It was true, for while Australia has buffalo in its north, I’d never been there.

Pa was smiling and nodding and he might’ve attempted a reply, and I arrived home with the satisfaction that we’d made at least one small linguistic connection.  It was after Gaew came home that she said to me, slightly puzzled, ‘Pa says you used to have a buffalo farm?’

But as nice as the buffalo is, a life cannot only be about livestock, surely.  There also should be an ink black sea, wild lemon trees and a bit of Chinese.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Buffalo Matter

Maa, ironing and smiling and wishing I wasn't taking this photo

Temple bell

With Gaew, Maa and Pa