The Hat-Speak of Panama

Storm gathers over Santa Fe, photo courtesy  Paul Sigurdson, Coffee Mountain Inn

Rattan, acorn and pita are the fibres needed: I didn’t know. But there’s no point pretending a short visit will lead to any level of enlightenment: a few days or weeks in any country is barely a starting point for questions.

There’s a little town in Veraguas Province, in Panamá, called Santa Fe. To get there, turn inland from the Panamerican Highway at Santiago de Veraguas and follow the meandering road up into the hills.

The leaves of the chisna plant provide the colour: new to me. It’d seemed so obvious, while in Panamá, to buy one of those famous Panamá hats. Surely owning a Panamá hat could make a life marginally more complete. Santa Fe is a pretty place and tranquil, suitable not least for considering a minor life issue such as the lack of a Panamá hat.

And yet, when it comes to a people, their character, culture and endemic wisdom, it takes a long while to gather any of it. It’s not a simple matter of plucking leaves and stems and working them together, and even if all the fibres were available, there’d be no artisan how-to for the assembling. Nor can you simply buy it. To knowledge there aren’t any short cuts, there’s no voilà!

Which is why when it came to the hat buying, I had no idea.

Street scene in Santa Fe, photo courtesy Marnix van Suylekom, Hotel Anachoreo

And yet, from a short sojourn it might be possible to offer some cursory observations. Weave and weft, the fibres of a few weeks’ experience may be sufficient to make more out of Panamá than the of-course-impressive canal. One of the simplest observations, from the border but especially towards the heartland, was that the Panamanians were indeed a well-hatted public, especially the men in rural towns. It wasn’t unexpected. Hats are practical because of the sun.

It’s from the chisna leaves the dye comes, boiled together with the fibres to make the fashionable designs of dark stripes. It’s an old, well-known recipe, I believe. It’s a trick of the Panamanians, the ones that weave.

Santa Fe is surrounded by the green hillsides of a large national park. There are waterfalls, brightly spotted frogs and tropical looking butterflies in attendance, though it’s cooler in the hills. There are just a few small shops in the casual town centre; it’s not a commercial place, and the worn, modest houses of the town clearly hold for their owners the attachment of a much-loved pair of jeans. The churches in the area are cosy and from the football field the molar-shaped mountaintop, Cerro Tute, bites the sky.

Santa Fe also has a craft market. It was there that I negotiated for said hat, and managed to find one that fit nicely. It had that shitolpati cool feeling of woven fibre, the flexibility that’s always the secret to strength, and a soft brim so useful in shade provision. The mildly amusing thought of coming to Panamá to buy a hat made me smile; but it was a foolish smile.

Unfortunate fact: Panamá hats are not from Panamá. In equal measure, the hat-of-Panamá is not a Panamá hat.

The hills around Santa Fe, Panama, photo courtesy Celestino Montes, Coffee Mountain Inn

Wake up call: Panamá hats are from Ecuador, where their manufacture dates back to the seventeenth century. In the centuries that followed, the Panamanian isthmus grew to be a busy transit point, for both goods and passengers travelling the short distance overland between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, on the way between Asia and Europe, within the Americas too. Even to go from New York to California, a suitable option was to take a ship south to Panama and join a north going ship again on the Pacific side. It was before the construction of the canal.

Meanwhile, Ecuador was a much quieter place, so by tradition the locally produced hats were shipped up to Panamá where sales, with all the transit passengers, were understandably more brisk. They proved to be popular. The only downside to the trade for the Ecuadorians was that their beautiful hats, internationally, adopted the name of Panamá.

So what was it so many Panamanians were wearing? What did I actually buy? I mean, I still like the hat: it’s comfortable and stylish; and I’ve never had a hat patterned with chisna leaf dye before.

Wake up call: the hat-of-Panamá descended long ago from the square-edged, flat-round topped sombreros of Cordoba in Spain, and sombrero is not a reference to anything Mexican-shaped but means not more than “hat”. The hat-of-Panamá is properly called the sombrero pintado, or painted hat, and evolved under the weave of Panamanian culture and the weft of flora species found on the isthmus. The hats are not painted, but woven with design by the darker, chisna-dyed stems. Over the centuries, the sombrero pintado became a veritable cultural symbol of Panamá. So I had managed to collect a little artefact of the spirit of the people of the republic of the isthmus; and there are certainly worse things to do than that.

And yet, I remain greatly unenlightened about that hat. Wake up call: there are many kinds of sombrero pintado. In the central provinces they specialise in white; while Veraguan hats are generally cream; while the ñopito is completely white unless it features a little black design on one side; while the Guatemalan is fashioned by weaving black acorn among the white; while under the brim, there can be a black spotty design known as a mosquito brim. There is even a style endemic to Santa Fe, but whether or not my hat is of the classic Santafeño style I couldn’t say: because understanding cultures is not a simple matter of plucking leaves and stems, even if you knew which ones were worth plucking.

Wake up call: worse than that, the sombrero pintado sends social signals depending on how it’s worn. Should I be embarrassed now, in retrospect – did I wear it foolishly back in Panamá? Because, if you fold the brim up at front and back, it signifies success, masculine charm and skill in fighting; because, if the brim is folded up at the back only, the wearer is an intellectual; because, if the brim is folded only at the front, the wearer is a lady’s man ready for conquest! Tilt it forward on the head and the wearer is upset, disappointed or going through a duel. Meanwhile, if the brim is not turned up at all, the hat is being used to shade from the sun. So how exactly did I fashion it? What signal, what hat-talk did I push out into the Panamanian universe, to whom and when? Was there any chance I was hat-rude?

But perhaps the Panamanians know: the foreigner is hat-foolish, doesn’t have a hat-clue about his hat-speak – he hat-says he’s a fighter but maybe he’s not; he’s hat-telling he’s unhappy, so why is he smiling?

And that’s the warning: while in the weave of a Panamá hat might be a little of the modern engineering marvel of the Panamá Canal, and before that, the convenience to transport of the geography of the isthmus, it’s really all about Ecuador; while in the weave of a hat-of-Panamá is the spirit of the Panamanians, a culture that’s strong and flexible, a foldable-brim-form of expression, and just possibly a little of the verdant landscape of Santa Fe, and that hat can also, as a bonus, protect the humble head from the everyday harshness of a tropical sun.

Here’s the hat-lesson: the act of leaving doesn’t make attachment broken; it doesn’t make the Panamanian learning of one simple foreigner ended.

Church belltower, Santa Fe, Panama, photo courtesy Marnix van Suylekom, Hotel Anachoreo

With special thanks to www.visitpanama.com for enlightening one foreigner on the sombrero pintado, and to the good people of Santa Fe and Panamá for sharing their photos, as this writer’s camera was sadly in its death throes when he was there.

Sombrero Pintado, photo courtesy Charlotte Summers @ Panama Prattle.

Ah, something else to read?

The Central American Trail

Island Hopping in the West Indies

At Home in Bolivia

India Will Decide

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Hat-Speak of Panama

The Fish of Hongdo

It happened fast. Racing over the water, the small boat appeared suddenly, bashing against the minor waves as it crossed them, with the whirring of its motor growing louder as it unexpectedly closed in. The vessel I was on was larger but even if it tried to power away it could hardly have escaped. It was too late for that. What did they want?

I could only take my cue from the other passengers and the crew, because with everything happening in Korean I was at a minor disadvantage. The small boat sidled up to ours, its motor cut as an animated conversation across the gap of water began. The passengers were fussing; they seemed to be negotiating. It happened near the coast of Hongdo, Red Island, in the Yellow Sea.

Winter had come to South Korea. It was cold and the waters about the eight hundred islands can only have been colder.

It’s in Korea’s far southwest where the peninsula crumbles away like cake. Those islands might almost act as stepping stones for giants attempting to cross to China. They must’ve been a worthy challenge for early navigators and cartographers, charting each isle and outcrop, bay and cove. Even on the national map the torn coastline of the southwest looks like a pile of leftover puzzle pieces.

At closer quarters the islands are similarly unwilling to conform to standardised design specifics. A vast range of rock shapes, delicate, unusual and unexpected, document the drop of the island into the sea. Or at least on Hongdo they do. One of the furthest islands from the mainland, Hongdo is famous for the artistry of wind and wave, which is why tourists go there. It’s the reason I was on that boat.

It’s not difficult to reach Hongdo. There are scheduled ferry services to cover the 115 kilometres from Mokpo City on the mainland. It takes two and a half hours. Hongdo is small, about six kilometres long and two and a half kilometres wide. It has two villages, Il-gu and the I-gu, between them home to the 710 islanders; and if it’s winter when the boat docks in Il-gu harbour, there’ll likely be locals waiting on the pier to offer home-stay style accommodation; but in the summer the island is said to be crowded, mostly by Korean mainlanders. It’s a popular destination. 

It’s not difficult to organise the two-hour circumnavigation tour of the island by boat, which is the best way to appreciate the gallery of rock formations, nature’s art.

But before that it’s possible to follow the Il-gu-to-I-gu road, the stone and dirt pathway up the nearer hill that rises to about 200 metres. There, the camellia bushes grow large and create, in places, a tunnel. The views, over the island, over the sea and down to the villages, are deep breaths of oxygen, life-bringing. The island takes its name, Red, from the effect of each sunset on its rocks and cliffs; although in spring there is the red bloom of the camellias to be considered.

It was on the second day, near to the end of the circumnavigation tour, that the smaller boat had suddenly appeared. Aboard I could see three men, in thick jackets, two in baseball caps. They had knives.

The passengers were animated. What’s going on, I thought. It was only a matter of moments before the nature of the trouble became apparent. 

It was about fish. Fresher fish there could not be. The fishermen in the smaller boat had just caught them and wished to sell them. Meanwhile the fish flapped about in a water-filled bucket.

Although I realise it’s nearly criminal activity in Bangladesh, I confess that I don’t often eat fish. A small piece on occasion I will enjoy, especially if it’s fried. But in Hongdo the challenge was greater still.

I watched as fish were sold, the unusual part being in how they were delivered: pre-chopped and salted. With each sale the fishermen took the fish to a wooden board on the deck of their boat, scaled and gutted them on the spot, cutting them into thin strips of boneless meat. Then they were sprinkled with salt, put into a bag and handed across to the larger boat.

The even more unusual part was how they were eaten: directly. There was, I thought, a missing step in the process, in accordance with usual procedure: the cooking part. I watched as Koreans took thin strips of raw fish by hand and pushed them into their mouths.

I was fortunate, arguably, because on our boat was one Ms. Kim from Suwon, near to Seoul. She was on holidays with her family and her sister’s family. Her sister was introduced as ‘aunty’, but in her fluffy leopard-skin patterned jacket she looked too young for the title. Ms. Kim spoke some English and although we’d not said much before that, the enthusiasm of the raw fish snack somehow induced greater conversation and an offer to share.

At the same time from somewhere that rice wine, the Korean version called soju, surfaced, to accompany the fish. So I joined in: a nip of soju, then a few strips of salted raw fish gulped down the throat just as a pelican might do. It wasn’t bad, actually, although it might’ve been better not to know what it was. The mood on the boat became festive as everyone, and I was the only foreigner among them, drank and ate.

I don’t wish to imply it was the first time I’d faced raw fish during that preceding first week in South Korea. It was rather the opposite: as if raw fish sought me out, following me around the country like a hunter stalking deer. At almost every meal, in nearly every restaurant, I had suffered for not being able to make sense of the written Korean on the menu. The only thing to do was to randomly point to a listed item and cross fingers. The first time, when the waiter returned some minutes later with a large plate of raw fish, I thought to try my best at it, thinking on the next occasion there might be something that had seen a bit more of a pot or a pan. It’s a mystery how it came about, but inevitably, time after time, my random choice was a plate of raw fish.

This result was despite my deliberately having tried to increase the chances of variation, by pointing towards the top of one menu at lunch and towards the bottom of another during dinner. Somehow, I was remarkably consistent in my random choices. Yet I was sure Koreans ate other things.

But of all the raw fish that followed, chased and hunted me down, it was the fish of Hongdo that was the most special, and clearly the freshest.

These days in Dhaka it’s usual to consider the freshness of food, especially when eating from a street side stall. Food freshness is an important consideration anywhere. 

It’s just that in countries with a national cuisine that’s something like South Korea’s, a further consideration for the uninitiated might be if the food isn’t actually, on occasion, a little too fresh.

Or, probably, it’s the sort of thing one learns to enjoy.

Let the Boat Sail!

Arctic Ocean

Caribbean Sea

Indian Ocean

Kattegat

Luzon Strait

Mediterranean Sea

Persian Gulf

Red Sea

South Pacific Ocean

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Fish of Hongdo

The Modern Jajabor

The road chooses the jajabor; the jajabor chooses not the road.

A meeting of jajabors while on the road is a surprisingly uncommon event.  Many days may pass without hint of another, and in settled periods the absence of even evidence leads one to wonder if others at all exist.  Yet there are the travel websites, with postings like ‘I left home three years ago on a three-month trip.  I’m never going back.’  The jajabor’s footprints may be light but they step, nonetheless.

When one jajabor does meet another, in my experience it’s a happy event, a meeting without formality and no more constraint to it than the hopping about of a sparrow on a windowsill.  There’s calmness in not needing to explain or greatly elaborate; to without effort pursue simple talk of adventure, with travel tales consumed as readily as rice.  Jajabors don’t ask the questions settled people do.  They don’t need to.

Of course it’s jajabors of the modern variety of which I write, the ones who use passports and planes; but I should explain first about using the Bangla word, jajabor, which is something similar to the English word, nomad.  It came about by accident.

In Dhaka people speak of the Bedey.  I’m not sure if it’s the Bedey who visit Hatiya Island, but in the winter months the nomads come, setting up their n-shaped tents in thatch and plastic sheeting on any patch of empty land. 

I’ve heard the Hatiyalas say the ones who live on boats can drink brackish, delta water; that they barely set foot on land.  I’m not sure how much is true.  Like nomads or semi-nomads in many countries they have a reputation for trickery and fortune telling.  It may well be undeserved.  Still, as in other parts of the country, when the nomads visit Hatiya they camp wherever they find ground and are for the most part left undisturbed.

Yet it wasn’t the presence of the traditional nomads in Hatiya that led me to learn the word surprisingly early.  I don’t suppose ‘jajabor’ is usually considered basic Bangla.  It was because of the Assamese singer Bhupen Hazarika, who sings that famous Bangla tune Ami Ek Jajabor, I am a nomad.  Unlike in the lyrics I didn’t reach the Mississippi, but I did like the idea of the song.

Learning about his thoughts is a way to understand our own.

Modern jajabors face shared problems and chief among them is explaining to non-travellers about travel.  People ask, why travel or why travel there?  The reasons are many and to account for them properly would require a conversation of some length.  It’s not always called for, especially as the result is likely to be disappointing.  Non-travellers usually have other priorities and a differing world view.  They don’t understand.

For example, one jajabor I know, an Italian Mexican-born one currently ‘pausing’ in Bulgaria, said that when asked why he lives in Bulgaria he just says the girls are pretty.  The Bulgarians are content with that and it circumvents the need to elaborate.  A more sophisticated reason might be that since he was young he was fascinated with Eastern Europe and one thing led to another.

It’s funny: I taught him the word ‘jajabor’ and he discovered its opposite, the term for people who prefer a life in one place.  He called them: ‘sedentarians.’

When it comes to explanations, I have similar troubles.  When Australians asked why I was moving to Ukraine some years ago, I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to live in a country that begins with a ‘U’.’  It started people listing: Uruguay, Uganda, Uzbekistan… it was so much easier, it didn’t take hours.

In Hatiya, when I used to visit almost annually from Sydney, the circumstances were even more difficult when a Hatiyala would ask, very occasionally, why.  My Bangla was still very basic and more than that, I simply did not know how to speak of the inspiration of travel.  I could not explain how much there is to learn from other cultures or properly clarify how much enjoyment I took from their company, that in even the basic elements of their daily lives, which they take for granted, I found new wisdom and, often, hope.  How could I say that I wanted to understand their life experiences and way of thinking in order to better comprehend mine?  What is universally human, what is cultural and what is the individual?  I would’ve liked to have explained such ponderings, but I had no ability.

So instead I simply pointed to the tents by the road and said, ‘Ami ek jajabor’.  The answer made Hatiyalas laugh.  It was a simple statement, but it made me start to wonder…

The last modern jajabor I met was probably that British-born one in Kolkata a few years ago.  His name was something plain like Ken or Mike and we met in the queue at the Bangladeshi Consulate while organising visas.  He also didn’t have a pen.  Besides that there was little about him to suggest he was a jajabor.  It was when we started talking that I could imagine it.

The jajabor consumes travel stories like rice.

The first sign was that his travel plans sounded complicated and evolving.  He was down from Korea, had been to Bangladesh, was in India on a detour due to a wedding invitation that had surfaced and wished to return to Bangladesh en route back to Korea.  He taught English, he said, which is not atypical for a jajabor.  I started to consider… maybe, yes maybe…

And the sedentarians wonder what the jajabor is searching for; and it makes the jajabor laugh.

Perhaps because I know Kolkata I did something unusual for a jajabor, I asked Ken or Mike if he wanted to go for a meal when our visa work was done.  I write unusual because jajabors rarely team up.  They follow their own journeys and despite having much in common, say goodbye as easily as hello.

So we chatted more, somewhere up on Park Street. I heard about his circles in the sand, his plan to see South America for at least a year before teaching again and then setting out for African wanderings.  He never wanted to return to the U.K .Naturally I spoke of Bangladesh and the pull of the Meghna River; and he said he had liked Bangladesh. 

Even in the distant sunset the jajabor can find himself

But what I remember most fondly about Ken, or Mike, is when I asked what he would do when all the travelling was done.  I wanted to see if his answer was the same as mine. 

‘I guess I’ll decide which country I like the best,’ he said, ‘and I’ll stay there.’

‘You’re lucky,’ he continued, ‘You’ve found yours.’

More recently I sat in a party in Dhaka, with shondesh and delicious home cooked savoury items on a plate and I confessed to a Bangladeshi who lives in Sydney that I’m actually a bit of a jajabor.  His eyes lit up at the idea and he said eagerly, ‘Well, I moved to Sydney so perhaps I’m a jajabor too?’  And maybe it’s true.  It can be that the scope of jajabor-minded public is far broader than I was used to thinking.  When I consider it, in many Bangladeshis there are certain signs: curiosity, adaptability, a sense of humour and love for going places, even if that means not further than visiting relatives in another district, as far as opportunity allows.

Yet this jajabor may have progressed to being an ex-jajabor.  His jajabor life may be done.  Or could it simply be that from around-the-world-and-back-again he found himself perfectly content within the most jajabor-minded majority culture of all?

In many Bangladeshis are signs: curiosity, adaptability, a love of going places...

Weighing up the options

Which road chooses you?

A. the mountain road, to Bolivia?

B. the camino del sur, to Argentina, Chile & Uruguay?

C. the delta road, to Bangladesh?

D. the spiritual road, to India?

E. none of the above.










This article is also published in the Star, here: The Modern Jajabor

You know Harry?

You know Harry, Sagar and the others?  Of course his actual name might not be Harry but it’s what they call him.  I did too.  Anyway, they were the ones I knew before I knew that I knew them.  It was only after we met, actually, that they were able to explain and I was able to understand that we’d known each other already for a couple of years.

I don’t know, maybe such circumstances are common in Rajasthan, and it’s not a bad thing to discover at a first meeting.  It’s kind of an unexpected head start.  Anyway, it happened in the small desert town of Phalodi where tourists rarely tread.

If I think of the beginning it’s likely a bit tragic, you see, because it is so too often for me that at the beginning comes tea.  Well, I exaggerate.  The tea came in the middle of the start, and the start of the start was more the hired white Ambassador stopping.  It was not due to mechanical fault but rather an idea that brought the vehicle to a halt: the desire to stop somewhere random, away from the tourist towns, to see if we couldn’t find the real, unadulterated Rajasthan.  Phalodi was a fair choice.

Now, I know there’s more to the town than that singular dusty road leading up from the highway, with the usual assortment of desert homes, small shops and light bustle.   But I didn’t know it then so it seemed the only way to proceed.  And not too far along that road, on the left side, was a primary school gate.  It was as we were passing, and my Australian friend Lachlan was there then, that the school kids started calling out to us, making a bit of a fuss.  They were excited to see foreigners and I don’t remember what words they used, but it likely included ‘One pen, one pen?’, the phrase that seemed ubiquitous in Rajasthan.

Of course one of the teachers, Madan, came to the gate to see what the students were getting excited about and I can say now that his curiosity was likely not less than theirs, though he didn’t show it.  He did however ask where we were from and told us to wait, at the gate, while he consulted with the headmaster.  He wished to invite us into the staff room cum headmaster’s office for tea.

Approval came forthwith and we sat in the staff room cum headmaster’s office with the headmaster behind his desk and several teachers finding places to stand or sit about the room.  Well I don’t recall exactly but the conversation must’ve mentioned cricket and there may have been a song or two, while we waited for tea.  Madan struggled with his English but through simple words and understanding communication found its way.

It’s a simple thing, tea, and although it took a while to arrive it came in cups with saucers in much the usual way.  It was only when the drinking commenced that the trouble started.

Well, we couldn’t have anticipated the slurping.  The first one or two loud, unashamed slurps might’ve been overlooked as unfortunate: in Australia slurping tea is not the thing to do.  But when it progressed into a kind of random chorus of slurps from all corners of the room a smile started to work its way onto my face.  I wondered if those slurps could be heard back at the white Ambassador down the street.

I sat there looking down, thinking of Lachlan.  ‘Please don’t slurp, please don’t slurp!’ I was thinking, knowing that if he did I would no longer be able to contain my laughter at the strangeness of things.  Besides, I wanted to compose myself enough to take a loud, unashamed slurp of my own that would set him off instead.

‘Don’t look at him! Don’t look at him!’ I told myself; but sure enough, when I felt composed and strong I made the mistake of giving him a small glance and he was ahead of me, as it were, just then taking the boldest, most unrepentant slurp of his tea.  It sent me into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and it spread to Lachlan too.  And there was nothing to say, you know, when the slurping for them was a way of complimenting the tea, when they asked why we were laughing.  I think we made something up about the white Ambassador but it was embarrassing.

Well Madan, as it were, didn’t quite write us off as mad.  Instead, he introduced us to his class and I saw they used slates to write on, with chalk.  And he took us to his home, a little further up the street, where he showed some nice pictures of traditional Rajasthani puppets and introduced us to his family.  And that was that: we were soon on our way towards Jodhpur as planned.

He’d walked with us back to the highway though, and we’d stopped for a second, farewell tea at a stall there.  Strangely that tea too was remarkable.  It had various spices in it and stood out as the finest cup of tea we found in the whole three months of that Indian adventure.

Months later I wrote to him and I couldn’t help but mention the tastiest tea in India.  Indeed I asked for the recipe; I was missing chai by then.

About a month later I came home to a letter, from Phalodi.  The envelope was large and oddly fattened at the bottom.  Inside was a plastic bag with a greyish, brownish powder in it.  Madan didn’t only send the recipe, but a sample of the spices used in the tastiest tea in India!

To be honest I felt slightly uneasy about getting a strange powdery substance through the post.  I can only be grateful that the sniffer dogs at Sydney Airport would not appear to be trained to detect Rajasthani tea spices in the midst of mail bags.  Anyway, there was nothing to do but boil the milk and try it out.  And I read the letter, thinking his written English was surprisingly good.

It was two years before I reached India again, and in that time Madan and I had exchanged several letters.  From that small first encounter it had become essential to revisit Phalodi.  With a train and bus from Delhi I arrived once more in the small desert town.  Madan didn’t know what day I’d come exactly, because neither did I.  So I wandered up the street wondering if I could recognise his house again.  It was just as well to ask: Phalodi is a small enough town for that.

Whoever it was led me through new alleyways until I was sure I was hopelessly lost and would never find Madan, when eventually we stopped at a small telephone shop.  It was Madan’s family’s business and he was there.

It was just a few days, the second visit; but of course he introduced me to Harry and Sagar and the others.  We rode motorbikes through the surrounding desert countryside visiting various picturesque village temples of older and newer construction.  There were parties, a staged drama featuring the school students, Harry climbed a tree and Sagar was apologising for only being able to take part of the time I was there as leave from his job.  I wondered why he’d think to do that for a complete stranger.

Madan had started losing his hair by then; but the more interesting development was in his spoken English.  It was dramatically improved and I was able to explain about the cultural difference in the tea slurping.  ‘How did you do that?’  I asked, about his English.

‘If you really wish to learn something,’ he said, ‘the best way is to teach it.’ 

He’d become the school’s English teacher.  And he took me back there one day, where I gave the very first English class of my own, only it was cheating since the lesson I taught, his class had learnt the day before.  They knew all the answers to the foreigner’s questions and they gained confidence from that.

It was strange, meanwhile, how much Harry, Sagar and the others seemed to know about me.  Madan must have said a lot, I thought.  It wasn’t long before I left that it made sense, when they thought to explain, a little sheepishly, that every time I’d sent a letter they’d all sat together to read it, discuss it, definitely in Hindi, and gradually draft the English reply!   

‘That’s why Madan’s written script was so good,’ I thought.  Each Phalodi letter might’ve been signed with his name but it was a team effort.  I’d been writing to all of them and through those letters, it wasn’t only Madan I’d come to know, but the entirety of one little social circle in a small desert town.  It was really rather good that the white Ambassador had stopped there, at the start.

India elsewhere? 

              Bangladesh?

                               Iran?







This article also published in Star Magazine, here: You Know Harry?

Welcome to Vilnius

Photos: Ragnar Scheen

You can look, but while you might find seasons in the politics you won’t find politics in the seasons.

Autumn: the tracks appeared to trace a stream below, or several but as the train meandered along hillsides direction was difficult to contemplate.  The morning was reluctant and the wooded valleys were almost drained of colour.  In the yellow of the last leaves and the low grasses was a sense of farewell to the year; and while the white of the birch trunks had momentarily gained prominence and the first snow must’ve fallen by then, winter’s renovation remained awaited.  Primarily it was a landscape descending into brown, into the darkness of pine and wooden Belarusian villages.  It was the story of a border lost somewhere too in the season.

It was rather in the speed of the train, in the slowing, the pausing and the chugging along a little further that the border was at first suggested, as though there might be a schedule to the crossing.  Only when it seemed that the wood and the hillside might stretch beyond the autumn did other evidence appear.  It came in the unlikely form of low concrete posts, set among the trees in pairs, like statues of a long ago out-of-love couple meeting in the forest for old time’s sake, or perhaps to collect wood for the fire of their old age.  In each pair the nearer was painted red and green, for Belarus, while its mate was white with the feature of stripes in yellow, green and red: the stripes of Lithuania.  That old couple came near and withdrew: like the train the border held no steady course.

And it is possible to try to protect the blessings of the past from the uncertainties of the future.  And it is possible to try to safeguard the future from the ravages of the past.

In a pause in the forest the Belarusian guards boarded, to see that the passenger had all he papers they could wish for, including hotel receipts to account for every night in the country.  Beyond the post-couple the Lithuanians boarded, but for them the passport checking felt more as an afterthought, a ‘suppose we should know who is coming into the country.’  Perhaps their preference might more naturally have been to sleep longer, under the blanket away from autumn.

But a passport with a kangaroo on its cover was as the yellow leaves in the woods, it brought a slight energy with it, surprised as they were to see it.  Enquiries were made, assurances came that no visa was required.  Somebody official must’ve checked a nationality list.

The Vilnius station, not an hour from the border, sits upon a hill with the centre of the old town in the cobblestone capital in a small valley below.  There are about 500,000 people in Vilnius, 3 million in Lithuania.

I trailed the other passengers moving down into damp streets.  While for many, they must’ve been coming home; while for others, they must’ve been there a thousand times before: I was busy not knowing where I was going, taking in the charms of history as recorded in the buildings as I followed a random road.  Church spires multiplied as the valley city took over.

Too, I was busy contemplating the need for a scientist, how to, in a new place, locate a pathologist in a diagnostic centre.  It’s not that I’d befallen any illness, fortunately.  I required no tests and indeed it wasn’t just any pathologist that would do.  I needed one called Rita.

Lithuania has a long history.  They say its language is of the Baltic branch and related to Latvian, and that it’s the most conservative language in Europe, the one that’s evolved the least from the Sanskrit roots of the Indo-European language family.  They say there’s a village in Lithuania’s north called Indija, where local linguistic peculiarities have some commonality with languages still spoken in Pakistan’s Baltistan.

Once, at the end of the fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest countries in Europe, with territory stretching to the Black Sea.  And in 1991 the country made its mark on history again, as the first Soviet republic to declare independence, a move that cost the lives of 14 Lithuanians when the Soviet Army attacked the Vilnius TV Tower.  But the movement had history’s blessing.  The Soviet break-up started in Lithuania.

In a way it was that transition that paved the way for my need of a pathologist.  When the borders opened, a Norwegian friend of mine Ragnar was sent to the country on business.  As that business over the years developed so did his passion for Lithuania.  He took the country into his heart or maybe it captured him.  But beyond business he contributed in various ways, to promote modernity and development.  He’d taken an apartment in Vilnius and although he wasn’t arriving until the following day I was lucky, because a pathologist called Rita held for me the keys.

I kept in mind my general luck too in finding new addresses in unknown cities.  I kept my eyes on the works of art that were the buildings of the old town.  I took in the signs of each snaking alleyway just as the signs of autumn had taken in me.  There were Northern European style shops playing American background music.  I saw proper supermarkets with metal poles outside to tie your pet dog to.  There were large bookstores, music stores and cafés. 

Although I missed Ukraine already, where I’d been living that year; although I enjoyed Belarus, memories stirred.  It was as though in Vilnius I’d arrived back into a happy Northern European past.  All the same, should a chimney sweep have passed by on the street it wouldn’t have seemed altogether out of place.

There may have been queries with people on the street but I found the alleyway I needed.  Soon I was sitting opposite Rita-in-a-white-lab-coat and drinking a cup of coffee.  There was a book open on the desk between us with multicoloured microscope pictures on its pages.  I wondered how to diagnose my being there: I doubt there are multicoloured microscope pictures that can do that.  Perhaps it was simply the autumn that had taken me in that direction.  Rita picked up the phone and dialled Norway.

When she was able to, she whisked me across the city by car, to Ragnar’s apartment: open-plan, modern and with that wooden, pine-type smell that can easily remind one of Oslo.  It had a peaked wooden roof with no ceiling and on the table was a note, in Norwegian, to me.  ‘Welcome to Vilnius,’ it read, ‘Try the beer in the fridge.  Lithuanian beer is good.’  In retrospect I’d say it was probably the most modern accommodation I’d had for the best part of a year.

The apartment was an art gallery: a fish swimming from a rafter, wooden angels over there and of course, candles everywhere.  I surveyed the room and found again that smile that had been with me since I’d left Belarus, the re-finding of a different Northern European dimension to life.

Ragnar arrived from Oslo the next day.  It was the first time we’d met in five and a half years.  We spoke English, then Norwegian once again, and the hardest part was the ‘yes’, the rediscovering an automatic Norwegian ‘ja, ja, ja’ to replace the Russian ‘da, da, da’ I’d picked up in East Ukraine, although I was never skilled at Russian.

We found a restaurant some floors below street level, in a ‘mind your head’ type of cellar.  They served sausages by the half-metre and beer in tall glasses, by the metre.  We walked around the castle and up the hill to the historic three white crosses that were destroyed in the Soviet era but were rebuilt when the politics turned.

And in the evening we walked to the end of the street to find a forest overlooking a river.  It was a landscape descending into brown, at that time of the year.

------------------------------------------------

“Look! From the glowing west, forceful and angry winds

Are eastward moving with ferocious, headlong haste,

And bringing biting frosts to our Lithuania dear.

My friends, let’s to the house and build a glowing blaze.”[1]

-         From the poem Metai, or The Seasons, by Kristijonas Donelaitis.  This epic poem from about 1765 is considered the first classical piece of fiction written in the Lithuanian language.  From the third part of the poem, ‘Autumn Boon’.

Stay Happily Baltic, with Latvia or Estonia!

Retire eastwards back to Belarus.

Or go for the tropics in Trinidad!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Welcome to Vilnius

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[1] English translation of the poem is here: http://members.efn.org/~valdas/autumn.html

Norwegian Light

follow the footprints

...continued from the Nitelv and the Oak.

Besides, a journey cannot be a journey without a beginning….

I remember ice. It was a winter’s night we walked across the car park of Oslo’s old Fornebu Airport, when I was eighteen.  Oslo had a light as I’d never seen, of a soft cloudy grey variety delivered in small parcels by the illumination of the lampposts.  It was a light of punctuation rather than words.  The trolley slid and I slipped a bit as I followed my new host father to the space he’d found for the car.  I felt my chin freezing.  Along with the astonishment of being for the first time beyond Australia I held a minor measure of disappointment.  My host father was old.

All the Rotary exchange students from Australia had been met by their families, where we would billet for the first three weeks in an Oslo satellite town, Lillestrøm, in order to attend an introductory Norwegian language course before travelling to our final destinations across the country to spend the year.  I was the last to be met and I wondered if they’d forgotten me, whoever they were.  When he did arrive he was tall and slim, Olav, with cotton thread hair in white and a red glow about his cheeks.  He was the clean cut younger brother of Santa Claus.  Olav wore glasses and must’ve been in his seventies.  I imagined playing bingo in a retirement home. 

He’d brought a jacket I had to put on, doing up the zipper then the outside studs until the collar pushed the underside of my chin.  He’d arranged my scarf and there was a beanie and ski gloves.  I was more clad than at anytime previously for that journey across the car park.  We loaded my belongings into the boot and I walked to the front to get in.  There were barely words in any of this for Olav spoke little English, though he tried.  When I opened the car door he abruptly stopped, eyeing me with surprise, and upon looking in, I realised that by instinct I’d gone to the driver’s side.  They drive on the right here, I scolded myself.  Finding the other side where Norwegian passengers sit I unrobed for the heating.  Off came ski gloves and beanie, jacket studs were unclipped, jacket zipper undone and scarf unwound.

The first glimpses of Oslo were enticing.  There were old buildings of large stone blocks, grey or painted in pastel yellow or light blue and the footpaths were made of bitumen; they needed round blue street signs with walking people outlined in white to direct cars not to go there.  Suburban houses were wooden and starkly painted in red, yellow, blue or black and the road tunnels under the city centre were not neatly tiled like the small number of examples that Sydney had, but rough, cavernous and suitable exactly for the inhabitation of trolls.  The simplicity of train platforms, the ice on the Oslo fjord and the billboards of foreign disposition, especially if they featured the extra letters, with an ‘æ’, ‘ø’ or ‘å’ in them, were marvellous.  There would’ve been a conversation of interest with Olav had there been the means.

But the excitement of the evening scenery was outdone by something unexpected: the driving.  On icy roads it is to be imagined the car would slide a bit but it soon became apparent that the unsteadiness in the weather was more than matched by the unsteadiness in Olav’s steering.  In the forty minutes it took to cross the city we nearly had a few accidents and when Olav changed lanes other cars honked at us, the ones we were set to collide with, causing him to get nervous and swerve jerkily back the other way.  I found myself holding onto the door, no longer embarrassed about having gone without thought to the driver’s side.  It might’ve been the best option. 

I wondered if his lenses were sufficiently thick, not knowing he was an optometrist.

My new home in Rælingen, across the Nitelv River from Lillestrøm proper, sat midway up a small hill at a swing in the road.  It’s not there now. But the house was large, white and wooden with red window frames.  As Olav took a few automobile charges in battlement with the hill, which turned out to be normal for conditions of ice, I held my breath.  He insisted on it: scarf re-wound, jacket zipper closed, studs clicked, beanie and ski gloves on, for the few short steps to the front door.  I found a small area inside with racks and coat hangers and a heated metal stand for shoes, but as I had no knack for tapping boots together to loosen snow, my snow was left to melt inside.  Then all the extra clothes came off again. 

My host mother Gunborg waited.  She had a wrinkly round face and permed brown hair such that she could’ve been Santa Claus’s sister-in-law; and she wore an apron when she cooked.  She spoke no more English than her husband; I suppose it wasn’t the lingua franca of the North Pole.

As usual she’d whipped together some culinary masterpiece in anticipation of our arrival; soon enough I looked forward to every meal.  There were boiled mountain potatoes as a rule, dripped with melted butter.  There was fish or meat, sometimes both, with matching creamy, garlic or gravy sauces.  I liked that the soft drinks were chilled on the veranda to save fridge space.  I liked the taste of deer.

Apart from the white walls, the living room was of deep colours, burgundy leather, heavy cream and browns.  The rich patterns of rugs and the art: the photos, handmade woollen tapestries and prints of classical Norwegian paintings on every wall wherever there was space, gave to the house warmth.  In Australia our living room was painted yellow and had just one painting in it. 

At meal times Gunborg lit a candle in an old candleholder they’d bought in Pompeii, a Roman replica.  In Australia most rooms were lit by just one or a few ceiling bulbs that cast undeniable light across the breadth of space and in Hatiya, I would see later, kerosene lamps and candles held ground from their being no other option.  But in Norway each room had numerous light sources.  There were lamps with metal skeletons that could be bent in strained configurations for reading or sewing, table and free standing lamps in classical or modern design, of ceramic, copper or glass, and candles, regularly lit, on shelves, tables and windowsills.  On the ceilings as often as not were no lights at all.  My Australian father was forever telling us to turn off lights as we left each room, to conserve electricity.  It wasn’t the environment he wished to save but the bill, and candles were out of the question save for blackouts since they would burn the house down when we forgot about them.  In Norway nobody cared about either.  ‘It is dark in winter,’ they said, ‘We need light.’

The Norwegian way of light was initially annoying, absent of the convenience of a single switch, especially when looking for something in luggage for example; and because every lamp seemed to have its switch in a different place.  But after a while I reconsidered.  The grades of shadow from lamp to lamp, the meeting of light arcs and the flickering ceiling patterns of the candles were like people gathering, mimicking the changing shades and arrangements of life.  Light in Norway was a continuous conversation.  Outside, with the night sky turning a soft pink from the reflection of the snow, to such arrangements Norway gave a nod.

Snuggled under the doona on that first evening in Rælingen, on the fold down velvety couch that was my bed, I was ecstatic.  Picturing a globe in my mind I was quite in awe I was now at the top of it.  ‘Norway,’ I repeated to myself, ‘I’m in Norway.’  It was reassurance I really was.

continued...

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Norwegian Light

We need light

▲ North ink black sea ice

              East ►

                                      fire dance water snake

  COMPASS

            the scientific centre

                 ◄ West

                              cloud mountain green life

                                                             drums street rhythm move South ▼

GO!

                            Like a Portuguese explorer

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