Saying Goodbye

At 2 pm I glanced down the hall to the room they call the new big, in which I taught the teenagers of an evening. The language centre in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, was always growing, with a plan to convert the cellar into classrooms. The continual renovation made the term: new big. The room was decorated, with serviettes waiting to be cake-smeared and lollies for unwrapping. It was my last day.

Thinking of my camera, two blocks away at home, I slipped into hat and coat. All eyes were upon me as I exited the cloak room. I wasn’t supposed to know about the party. “I’ll be back for my lesson at 6 pm,” I said casually. Mouths dropped – I would miss my party – Marina realised first, of course, that I was joking.

But it was Lena who donated her weekend to my first days in Donetsk almost a year earlier. In the cupboard of the Soviet apartment they’d chosen for me she’d left a jar of homemade plum jam with fruit from her mother’s village garden. She pointed it out when we arrived on the first evening but didn’t say she’d made it – by the smile in her eye I understood. It’s a nice thing to have done for a total stranger. Meanwhile the institute had stocked the fridge with groceries and the receptionist Tanya had the jug boiled as I walked in the door.

I remember Lena at the airport – she had a 1960s hairdo and behind-the-iron-curtain clothes – feminine, becoming and quite different to western styles. I remember as we’d driven past the White House, the seat of city government, how Peter the driver said, “That’s where the thieves live.”

At lunch on the following afternoon, in a café by the Karlmeus, when I asked what Lena’s ex-husband did, she replied, embarrassed, in her suave, winter-coat-thick accent, “We don’t ask what people do in Ukraine.” It was my first lesson. “There are many Ukrainians,” she said, “who have money but are technically unemployed.”

She’s a mother of two but can never remember their ages. She started to explain how it was, life in and after the Soviet Union. “People should only create and not destroy,” she said, “This is our history.” She was worried about her children’s futures in an uncertain, capitalist Ukraine.

Lena was most insistent I phoned Australia to tell my family I was alright. She almost came all the way from her house to drag me to the institute to do that, in the first days. “You are always so calm about everything!” she said, with frustration. But it’s easy to be calm there.

Marina, meanwhile, was quiet until I discovered her sense of humour. We took to criticizing each other, for fun, as a sport. She used to say the most horrible things at meetings, about me, in front of the Director. And I loved it. Nor did she mind when I suggested she must’ve grown up in a circus and probably had circus elephants still living on her apartment’s veranda.

One day she came to work in a cardigan that fashionably featured a single button, where there might normally be two or three. I pulled her aside and said, straight-faced, “Don’t worry. I know teachers’ salaries aren’t much. I will ask the other teachers to donate a few kopeks and we’ll buy you a couple of extra buttons.” She was outraged! I was laughing.

She coined my nickname: the difficult Australian. When we returned from summer holidays Lena said to Marina that I’d missed her. “Yeah,” Marina replied, “Like a headache.” It was the cue to start up again.

Yet sometimes we’d sneak away to eat flatbread-rolled kebab-like zapykankas in the park or deluxe hot dogs, Donetsk-style. Such hours were precious.

Classes would end late evening but if I found energy it was a simple matter to phone Svetlana. “Shall I stop by?” I’d ask. “Sure,” she said, most often, “and why not bring a bottle of red?” We used to talk into the wee hours, and dance and sing. It’s a good thing Ukrainian neighbours don’t bother about noise.

Svetlana explained how living in Ukraine meant always having to consider how to earn money, with seemingly endless problems – a state of affairs Bangladeshis can perhaps relate to. “But in Ukraine,” she said, “people are still nice to each other. Nobody cares if their neighbour is having a nice life.” And I saw that.

Once I was buying a bottle of wine at a kiosk by the marshrutka taxi stand, and the woman behind the counter asked in Russian, “Sweet or dry?” I asked for dry and the woman looked me up and down before saying, “Is it for a girl?” On the way to Svetlana’s there was only one response: “Da”. “You’ll need a nice bottle then,” she said, before scouring her selection to find the best. She checked the chocolate situation too.

On the weekends Svetlana and I would sometimes find a café to watch the afternoon pass, by tradition first meeting at our regular place: beside the left shoe of the Lenin statue in Lenin Square.

When it comes to Val – well, her kitchen is where I learnt much of what I came to know about Ukraine. She made sure I was well familiar with the cuisine.

It was through her I picked up additional classes with the three-year-old Senya. His mother wanted him to be bilingual. His classes were not stressful or rigid. The instruction was, “just play in English.” And we did. Senya was obsessed with Spiderman.

At the end he had tears in his eyes. “When are you leaving?” he asked. “After eight days,” I said, accurately.

“No,” he replied firmly, “After three days!” He had the concept of bargaining but lost the concept of numbers at crucial moments. He hoped to lengthen my stay.

I mention Senya because he discovered a new term I came to embrace. From confusing English pronouns with his country, he once told Val he lived in “Mykraine.” And that’s the thing of it – it became Mykraine.

The language connected: they enjoyed when I invented words, in the way that happens in any living language, what you can’t get in books. There was the Soviet washing machine I had, plastic, semi-manual, the size of a television set. You had to load the water by bucket before plugging it in. Lena chuckled when I called it the “electric bucket.” And in the park after rain, when I pointed to a small flow into a drain and called it a waterfall, and was rebuked because it wasn’t a waterfall, well, the English teachers took amusement when I said it was at least “waterfallish.”

With grammar: they knew the rules and I knew the answers. Team work: they could explain the former, which native speakers are not taught; while I helped apply the rules correctly.

The decoration and food in the new big: I’m not sure I wanted it. It represented such an enormous loss, about to come. On the other hand, as an Australian had once described my moving there as “throwing myself into a transcontinental abyss”, well it hadn’t been at all bad.  Surely I could do it again?

I’d been dreading that there might be cake restrictions, as there were on Teacher’s Day when each teacher had a single slice ration. I remembered those cucumber and parsley sandwiches with the bread cut so thinly they must’ve split grains of wheat in the process. The institute liked to save. But these things did not recur.

Instead both Lena and Marina gave speeches so full of praise I was convinced they were talking about somebody else; and Marina, in describing me, didn’t use a single bad Russian word.

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This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Saying Goodbye

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

Russian Intelligence in Bengal

Mughal Painting, a Girl with a Parrot, from around 1580 (image from wikipedia)

‘How do they do it?’ I’d often wondered, back in the village in Hatiya, when villagers regularly seemed to know exactly what I felt whether I wished it or not. In the days when the heat was strong, without the benefit of even a fan to temper it, when homesick or down, annoyed or happy; when I’d try to do the Australian thing and push emotions deep inside so that, well I thought, there was not the smallest ripple left on the surface of my face, they knew. ‘They can see straight into your soul,’ I used to say, and it was true the day my aunt died in Australia and I’d wanted to ride for many kilometres on a rickshaw without purpose. On reaching the main town, the driver, who is my friend, took me to a restaurant instead, and though in those days, 1999, we could barely talk to each other, he ordered mango juice and muglai paratha, a fried egg dish, and things seemed a little better after that, as he rode home again instead of continuing to the ghat as I’d wanted and he’d refused!

I’d seen it with other people too. In those days when a boro lok, an important person, would wander into the tea shop the locals used to, out of politeness, get out of their seats and move to the back so the important person could sit front and centre. Often the local politician or businessman or whoever it was, even someone they’d never met before, would address the whole shop, and as long as what they said was sensible, more importantly caring, there was no problem. But, as sometimes happened, if they spoke nonsense or spent the time big-noting themselves, then while the locals would listen patiently, when the person left and was out of earshot, they’d say what they actually thought. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was pretty accurate.

The villagers, whether or not they’d been to school, had read widely, could read at all, had something. ‘Is there a loss when our lives are removed from the natural world around us?’ I used to wonder; and I don’t suppose I could say, but when they said someone was a ‘boro moner manush’ a big hearted person, one who was honest, good to spend time with, generous and compassionate, someone who would help the poor and disadvantaged, it was quite likely the biggest compliment they could give. It’s what was valued. There’s a kind of highly-developed Bangladeshi village intelligence and at its centre is the heart.

Wall painting of Nefertari (image from wikipedia)

Perhaps the Ancient Egyptians, something I learnt at university, would have fit in, in the village: they believed the seat of human intelligence was not in the brain but the heart. After death, in preparation for burial, Egyptian embalmers chiselled through the nose bone and using long, iron hooks and spoons, scooped out the brain, to be discarded as waste. Organs considered important were preserved and stored in Canopic jars for burial with the mummy; the most important organ, usually left inside the corpse, was the heart.

The emotional intelligence of the village, not to the exclusion of other intelligence but so well-developed, is striking. It’s not something I’d seen before.

Soon enough I’d be back on the plane; soon enough I’d be facing the yawn of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the impressive sheen of the Opera House in a land dominated by cerebral intelligence. Were people in modern Australia embalmed after death, there can be little doubt those iron hooks and spoons would be turned on the heart, with all reverence reserved for the brain.

According to the concept of Australian intelligence, what matters most when valuing thoughts are position in life and the completion of formal education, for such things are simplified to equate to cerebral intelligence. Thoughts and ideas need a pedigree; they hold employment positions and graduate from tertiary educational institutions together with their thinkers. In educated circles, the weight of a person’s words and belief are measured almost exclusively along the logic lines of rationality. Words like ‘logical’ and ‘reasonable’ become synonyms for ‘good’, though they have no such meaning.

Emotions are easy to hide in Australia, everyone does it, and it’s quite liberating to be able to show, most of the time, just the image you want. Emotions are private, and a weakness; so supposing someone breaks down at a party, for whatever reason, they will certainly be led away to another room where their emotions can run in the company of no more than a few closest friends, while the party continues unaffected. Emotions are embarrassing gatecrashers at a public occasion; what in the Bangladeshi village is collectively embraced.

My Harvest Home, by Australian artist John Glover, 1835 (image from wikipedia)

The problem of ignoring the heart is that the ability to understand the human condition is altogether less; psychology is so underdeveloped it offers no meaningful substitute. With the simple lines of logic unrestricted, it’s easy to justify the unconscionable, such as Australia’s infamous treatment of asylum seekers over the years, or the massive loss of civil liberties that hangs from September 11. Australians who object to such things are easily dismissed as ‘bleeding heart liberals’, for the heart has no relevance.

Intellectual cerebral intelligence is compact and neat; it’s a straightforward system: add a few brush strokes of logic and all is fine, because there is no morality, no values and no vision; being free from these things is considered its virtue. It is after all a matter of simple science, and who could argue with that?

In educated Sydney circles, the biggest compliment might be ‘he or she is brilliant!’ which means they have a responsible job and the airs of someone with a few qualifications to their name.

And for me that would be about the extent of things but for a simple kitchen in a small Soviet-built apartment in eastern Ukraine, in the city where I was lucky enough to live in 2002. We used to sit there in that kitchen, my Ukrainian friend and I, with the constant companionship of delicious Ukrainian food and discussions, often heated, that could stretch from early evening until morning. My Ukrainian friend was as eager to know what someone from the other side of the world thought of well, everything, as I was.

One day she said she was having trouble with the English concept of intelligence, asking if it was solely cerebral. It took me by surprise, even after the Bangladeshi village, having never before properly questioned it.

She explained that in Russian, the language of that city, the noun ‘intelligent’, also to be found in Ukrainian as ‘inteligent’, meant someone who was not only good with their brain, but also possessed a certain refinement, a certain decency in their behaviour towards others; a respect towards not only other people, but all creatures. A type of intelligence with incorporated moral values is what she described.

According to the internet, the Russian intelligent is an educated person who comes from any class or background, with the term itself stressing democratic principles, thus making no distinction on the bases of class, gender or race. The term includes an ability to be flexible and self-sufficient, with a consciousness to the needs of others and a willingness to meet those needs; and a penchant to be truthful to one’s opinions and moral principles in meeting everyday life challenges. As a result of these qualities, the Russian intelligent often finds him or herself in opposition to autocratic government, and undertakes activities to help achieve enlightenment, education and the protection of human rights. In other words, compared to Australian norms, the Russian version of intelligence is an altogether bigger thing.

It is from the Russian indeed that English has adopted the term intelligentsia, but in English it is not really engendered with the full range of qualities outlined above.

In the House of Artistic Creation of Old Ladoga, by Russian artist Vsevolod Bazhenov, 1977  (wikimedia image)

So is it a matter of Russian intelligence in Bengal? Well, yes and no; Bengali intelligence is undoubtedly a unique creature, and a multifaceted one. In Dhaka in particular the intellectual cerebral intelligence has its sway, where formal education counts for a lot, where it’s well-documented how much emphasis parents place on the academic schooling achievements of their children.

But like the Russian version there is behaviour in it too; think of the bhadralok or gentlemen, a word that in Bengali combines a high education with gentility in behaviour, unlike the English translation with its greater emphasis on etiquette than education. Or is Bengali intelligence of the village, including the emotional intelligence that could easily be dismissed as something less in Sydney, as instinct or intuition, because there it is something less?

It may be that Bengal intelligence, uniquely, has a spiritual component. It’s not the ‘he does namaz or prayer five times a day so he is a good person, intelligent etc.’ Rather, perhaps something deeper, stemming from prayer or religious practice, regardless of the religion.

I don’t have a definitive answer, but in considering what ‘intelligence’ means in Bengali culture, one thing is clear. It cannot be wholly cerebral; else there would be no respect for Lalon Shah, and Nazrul Islam as national poet would be unlikely, given his lack of a formal ‘cerebral’ education; indeed in Australia there are no such icons attracting that kind of adoration. In Bengal there is something more.

The brain alone can delude as well as enlighten. In denying the contradictions and complexities of emotion and human tradition, well it’s not even that the answers are wrong; it’s that sometimes the questions are not even the ones worth asking.

Chimpanzee brain image (from wikipedia)

It's also worth considering if life isn't about a salt lake in Cyprus, a pretty river in China, or even an over-sized wheel.  Just saying.


This article is also published by Star Magazine, here: Russian Intelligence in Bengal










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