Potato and Toothpaste Travel

Amber is fossilised tree resin, a yellowish, pellucid gem washed ashore by the waves of the eastern Baltic Sea. Sometimes there are ancient insects within it, or parts of leaves to decorate it. Amber is a souvenir-laden Cretaceous traveller, and precious. Amber is said to be protective, happy-go-lucky and helpful in making the right choices. In Latvian, amber is called dzintars, from which the name Dzintra comes.

I’d nearly not stayed there but fate granted a second chance. As I’d walked away north on that day I’d randomly met Dzintra at the doors of the Science Academy in the Latvian capital, I thought to kick myself for turning down her offer to stay at her home and worse, for not getting any contact details. I knew enough to know I should know more.

It was in the days before mobile phones. My only hope might be to try to re-find her at the Academy, but I didn’t like the chances of dealing successfully with the German-speaking Russian receptionist. It was a very big building and we hadn’t even exchanged surnames.

Yet there was a sliver of hope: I was due to meet her daughter Antra on the following morning. Dzintra had said there was a castle not too far from Riga, that it was worth seeing and I could take the train there. Without any alternative plan it certainly sounded like a plan. She had to work, she said, but if her daughter was not busy with university she could meet me at the entrance to Riga station at 9 a.m. because her daughter would enjoy the trip too. Maybe.

‘How will she recognise me?’ I asked. It wasn’t as if I stood out in the Latvian crowd.

‘She can find you,’ Dzintra assured.

It wasn’t a meeting arrangement to inspire any confidence but there was only to wait and see. What did my intuition say? Unfortunately, it said nothing.

Anyway, there was a more immediate and pressing concern: would I really find the private apartment I’d left that morning, without really taking in properly where it was?

Eventually I did happen to happen upon the right street.

At 9 a.m. on the following day, at the busy Riga station, I thought it quite impossible anybody could find me in the crowd. But sure enough, as I stood waiting, a young woman approached, saying cautiously, ‘Excuse me, you are Andrew?’ It was Antra.

‘How did you recognise me?’ I asked, quite shocked.

‘You look like a foreigner,’ she said, ‘a bit lost.’

The day at the castle was like a meandering flute melody, made easier by Antra’s English skills. The offer to stay was repeated by the daughter. This time I accepted. I fetched my luggage from somewhere North Riga and returned the house keys to the apartment’s owner. By evening I’d been whisked over the Daugava River and up that flight of stairs in the middle block of three.

Events in the Stalin-era apartment were amusing. There was quite a bit of fussing that went on, unexpectedly, over Dzintra’s dinner.

‘Did you eat?’ I heard her school-going younger daughter Anta, ask.

‘I had my dinner,’ Dzintra replied.

‘What did you eat?’ the daughter pressed.

‘Oh, you know…’ the mother said.

‘What about your dinner?’ her older daughter Antra also asked, upon coming home again later.

‘Yes, I ate.’

‘It wasn’t only potatoes, was it?’

‘No,’ Dzintra said, calling me as a witness.

It brought a smile to see the two daughters questioning their mother in the way a mother might normally question a busy daughter. It wasn’t that Dzintra suffered any horrible malady; hers was rather a wonderful disorder: she was a nomad at heart, a jajabor and it was this affliction that encouraged her to save.

About the potatoes: they were cheap and plentiful, a ready match for the generally modest public salaries of Latvia. Well back into the Soviet era potatoes had allowed Dzintra to put a few roubles aside, as she could, as a travel fund. And what did it matter if dinner meant potatoes, now and then, if one could dream of a pending destination? That was the pay-off.

I agreed to help Dzintra with her English: she was nervous although she shouldn’t have been. With the world’s most delightful accent she could have, frankly, gotten away with anything. And she did.

‘Latvians eat much potatoes,’ she told me once.

‘Many,’ I corrected. ‘Many potatoes. Potatoes are countable.’

‘Not in Latvia!’ she said.

If I’d been more observant I could have seen that jajabor sparkle in her eyes when we’d first met, but it was the potato-talk that confirmed her status. Travel hadn’t been easy in the Soviet era but she’d managed to join tours to various places across the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc. Later, she’d visited a relative in Melbourne and her apartment featured Australian souvenirs as evidence. The extended trip was also there in Anta’s English accent: it seemed so out of place in Riga to be hearing the Australian sounding English she’d been young enough to absorb.

‘Most Australians had never heard of Latvia,’ she said, ‘So I would explain where it was.’

But it was her tour to Poland that took my fancy. ‘Toothpaste was always more expensive in Poland,’ Dzintra said, so she’d stocked up and seen Warsaw and Krakow on a finance of Soviet toothpaste, stopping off at a Polish market between sites to pay for the trip.

Passion for anything is rare in this world and I admired hers. It was clear we were predestined to get along. It’s perhaps the reason why every minute we’d spent together felt as a month.

She spoke of her daughters, Antra and Anta, explaining that the elder Antra was supposed to be Anta except that Antra’s grandmother was fond of the letter ‘r’ and changed her name; so Anta was born later. 

She spoke of the other family member, the cat called Puncis which in Latvian means stomach; an accurate name for the robust feline that lounged about. 

We spoke of Australia and many other things besides, as the hours meant years.

And of course more than anything we spoke of travel. It’s a well-known fact that the next best thing for any traveller is to receive another traveller in their home city. It brings with it as close as can be the feeling of travelling, without going anywhere.

‘You can’t leave Latvia without seeing a Latvian forest,’ Dzintra said and I could hardly disagree.  I had no experience with Latvian forests.

‘I have a small car,’ she said, ‘It has some mechanical problems, so if I take a day off work, and it might not get us all the way there and back again without breaking down, but would you like to take the chance?’

We left in the little grey Ford that whistled along to every gear change for the length of the chat and laughter that was the way to the Latvian forest and back again.  I’d say the whistling Ford enjoyed the day out too; it didn’t break down.  And there was another trip to Jurmala and the Baltic Sea, so I could see a Latvian beach.

The days of my planned week in Latvia passed quickly in the way only enjoyable days can. Everything went well, more than well and without complaint until... Well I wasn’t to know how it would be, taking myself off for a day, independently, on that fateful tour to Bauska… It seemed such a simple idea.

But the amber wasn’t with me then.

The story continues here: Was There Any Chance of Wolves?


The first part of the Latvian story is here: The Latvian National Academy of Science.


Follow the Baltic Way, along the sea on a trail of amber...




Or something different? Head for Bangladesh!

This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Potato and Toothpaste Travel

Desert Grapes

Jojo had everything going for her. With a teaching career back home and a mortgage down on a house in “Freo”, what Westralians call Fremantle, the funky port town appendage to Perth, what could hold her back?

“There’s something wrong with my throat,” she said, clutching at her neck, her voice raspy.

Jojo and her backpack rocked in from somewhere south of Santiago while I’d grabbed a bus down from up north. Chile is an endless Pacific sliver of a land: it can only increase the chances of a north-going, south-going running-into-each-other. There’s hardly room to step to the side in a country as thin as Chile. A step to the west, shoes will be ocean wet; a stride to the east, footprints will be Argentine.

Besides, it was only natural I should stop somewhere en-route from Iquique to Santiago, to avoid being entombed in a metallic express coach mega-journey for what would’ve felt like days. Jojo wanted to see La Serena. I wanted a bit of non-AC oxygen on the way.

It was the taxi driver in from the bus station who dropped me at the guest house door: he said he knew a place and I didn’t argue. It was a handful of rooms along an enclosed courtyard in an old grey house, colonial and quaint, run by an old grey woman, short and jolly. She dropped by my room, in turn, to tempt me with a tour for the following day. She had a brochure of the Elqui Valley, a winding sliver of green running off into the mountainous hinterland towards Argentina. It came with a price list and coffee presented as a cup of hot water with small packets of Nescafe, sweetener and powdered milk lined up on the saucer. With all the on-selling going on, Chileans had no deficit of entrepreneurial skill.

In the wealthiest country in South America, where the poor could be seen living in flimsy shanties along the vast stretches of otherwise empty rocky-sandy coastline, for the tourist all was ready.

Jojo wasn’t only a teacher. She’d had the experience of running a school in a remote aboriginal community in Western Australia, far enough into the desert that non-aboriginals needed a formal invitation from the tribal elders to drop by. She used to pack up the kids and take them into the bush in the school’s government supplied four-wheel drive for classes, as she could. They were at home in the outdoors. They learnt better there.

But Jojo didn’t get in until after dinner. I’d wandered, found La Serena historical, colonial, quiet and clean. The food was good, the servings judiciously small, as it is in Chile. Nick, the guy at the next table, struck up a conversation on the basis that because I put my chips in the bread and ate it like a sandwich I must be, as he was, British.

But like Jojo and the Chileans I was of colonial stock and not a European. It didn’t mean I couldn’t eat chips on bread.

It was Nick’s first time outside Europe but as a tour guide he’d visited all the countries of Europe apart from Russia, except for three. He asked me to guess. I chose at first Armenia and Georgia, which are technically Europe, but Nick didn’t consider them so. “Okay, it’d be Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus.” He was shocked. I was right. “People always choose Albania,” he said, “but I’ve been to Albania.”

Nick enjoyed being a guide, especially for the Americans who were so nervous and naïve while on the wrong side of the Atlantic. He wanted to demonstrate they didn’t need to be fearful of France.

Jojo turned up as words, after that, from an old grey woman’s mouth. “There’s another tourist,” she said elatedly, “who is interested in the tour. You could split the cost?” Her on-selling had found new merit.

Jojo dropped by my room and we chatted. I heard how she was returning to Chile after a decade, that she’d once spent a year there as an exchange student. She kept touching her throat.

“What are Chileans really like?”

In her slightly rattly voice she narrated how she felt. “Maybe I didn’t notice before,” she said. She’d been shocked by how many Chileans seemed to blame poverty on the poor and how proud they’d been in her Chilean town of the wondrous new mega mall, of the sort that had multiplied across the country.

It seemed a shame if it were true, a country trading its soul for a mega mall.

Jojo said there were exceptions: not everyone was such.

“Did you catch a cold?” She looked nervous, stressed.

“I’m sure I have throat cancer,” she said, her words making her more worried.

“How do you know?”

“I feel it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s tonsillitis at worst!”

I agreed to the tour. At worst, it would be agreeable to spend a day with Jojo.

It might be that a tour guide should look intellectual, maybe with glasses. But there’s no exact model and when Jose arrived with his minivan, he certainly wasn’t it. He was muscular, moustached and about seven feet tall. His voice was so deep I wouldn’t want to take him up a mountain for fear its rumble might set off an avalanche. He could have been a member of the Chilean military’s elite whatever special something forces.

As we got into the minivan, one old grey woman waving us off, Jojo was busy fondling her throat.

“Stop it! It’s not cancer!”

The landscape of the Elqui Valley was unique. Some might marvel at the engineering in the irrigation that let the grape vines grow; for me it was enough to enjoy the contrast of the vineyard green with the dusty, barren hills.

But the Elqui was a distraction, like a suave French film going on in the background of a dinner party. It was the conversation with Jojo at valley centre: it filled the several Elqui hours, interrupted by the occasional rumbling fact supplied by Jose, delivered at the very lowest end of the human hearing scale.

The aboriginal kids saw a flock of birds, Jojo said. It was a particular type of bird that shot up from the sandy ground. It meant nothing to her, but the kids in unison excitedly shouted the word in their language for “water”. Those birds meant water: what the elders taught them, and in the desert water-finding is more important that mathematics.

Meanwhile there was Jose explaining about the pisco, the vodka-like drink allegedly invented in the Elqui Valley, although Peruvians claim it too. We dropped by a distillery and tried a sample.

The aboriginal kids used to tell Jojo where she’d been on the previous evening, the exact houses she’d visited and when. Expertly they read her tracks in the sand.

“The community was like one family. Things go wrong when the kids get older and have to move to Perth for opportunity. The city is a society they don’t understand.”

Jose took us to Vicuña for lunch: the main Elqui town.

Another non-aboriginal worker in the desert once captured a baby camel, Jojo said. He named it after the then Indonesian President, Megawati Sukarnoputri. He liked that name. And Megawati the camel lived in his backyard, everybody knew.

By evening we were back at the old grey house in La Serena. Luckily Jose’s voice had caused no avalanche.

Jojo decided to head down to Santiago with me. I think she liked my non-medical medical opinion concerning her sore throat. As it turned out, after a few days the throat cancer cleared up. 

I should mention: the rest of the world calls her Jo. It’s in my mind that it’s always been doubled: two letters never seemed enough of a name for Jojo.

Grapes...

             wheat

     rice

                               horticulture

               bamboo

          coffee








This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Desert Grapes

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

A Little Candombe

A oil painting of Pedro Figari depicting Candombe dancers (oil on canvas 75 X 105 cms.) Costantini Collection. Wikipedia sourced image, here.

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Not realising the rolling hills of farmland, the cattle towns and forgotten villages could consume six hours when coming by bus from Montevideo, the capital, I arrived later than expected.  For much of the way it’d been drizzling; perhaps the bus was behind schedule.  It was already Saturday evening when I hiked into Salto, over the railway lines past the shanties where curious eyes watched me and my backpack walk by.  Towards the centre of the town the buildings took on that dilapidated Spanish style that seemed characteristic of Uruguay.

In a side street I found a paint-peeling mansion that had become a hotel staffed by friendly pensioners and with hardly any Spanish I managed to take a room there.  It was large with a high ceiling; the water was cold and the sheets not unequivocally clean.  But I was pleased to have somewhere to store the luggage.

It was in Salto I found gratitude for the South American habit of eating at ungodly hours.  The world over dinner times are a facet of human existence that seems to have defied the forces of global homogenisation.  Norwegians favour a 4.30 p.m. start to their dinners, Australians dine anywhere from 6 – 8 p.m. and when I asked my friend Marina in Ukraine about their custom, I was told that Ukrainians are a strange people who like to eat at anytime they feel hungry.  Bangladeshis eat slightly latish at around 10.30 p.m. but in Argentina and Uruguay dinners can start as late as midnight.  The restaurant was yet to be crowded when I arrived.

The restaurateur was keen to teach Spanish and tried to chat: there had been foreigners in the night before, I understood.  He directed me to a table where I sat alone until another foreigner entered and was shown to my table.  I’m not sure if the restaurateur fancied himself to be a matchmaker; or if he imagined we might have shared, foreign things to speak of; but what harm did it do if she accidentally had dinner with me?

She was a sociology student from Minnesota or Milwaukee or somewhere in the American middle north that started with an ‘M’.  She was at the end of a six-month educational placement in Uruguay.  ‘It’ll prolong my degree and cost more,’ she said, ‘but I wanted to do something different.’

In Uruguay dinner means beef and beef means an enormous slab of steak that overflows the dinner plate on both sides, tender and juicy beyond comprehension, with the potential to clog a human artery in a single sitting.  It’s divine.  It’s nutritional madness.  It’s national cuisine.  And the king of the beef steaks need share his plate with no one: sidelines of salad or fries are ordered separately.

My companion from the American place starting with ‘M’ asked what I thought of Uruguay.  I could tell by the way she asked that she’d grown fond of the country, which I respected since it was much as I would have done, had I stayed there for six months.  I said Uruguay was great but, honestly, seemed a little sad also.  ‘Is it because of the poverty?’ she proposed.  ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen poorer countries that are downright optimistic.  It’s as though Uruguay should be richer; like it’s stuck.’  I added the disclaimer that as my idea was based on less than a week in the country it was most probably incorrect.  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I think what you said is insightful.’  But people from that ‘M’ place aren’t always right either.

Before the meal was done we became three: Benson, another Australian, was joined to us and the meal came to last an additional hour while he ate.  He was travelling around the world and thought to stay in China once he reached there; and it’s interesting that he inevitably did just that.

He was surprised I was going to Bolivia, which I then was.  There’d been political instability with protests, some rock throwing and national shut-downs, what in Bangladesh are called hartals.  ‘All the tourists are leaving,’ he told me, ‘and you are going in?’  ‘Should be no trouble finding a bus seat,’ I joked.  But the situation in Bolivia didn’t worry me much.  There had been no deaths and having been in Bangladesh many times during hartals I knew the worst for the traveller was likely to be the inconvenience of being stranded somewhere and nothing beyond that.  As it turned out the road to La Paz was open and my English teaching job was waiting.  As it turned out Bolivianos are quite considerate when they protest, which is often.  But that’s a later part of it.

It was on the Sunday evening that I got to know Benson slightly more.  Salto was a town where a main street meeting following an afternoon swimming at the hot springs didn’t need to be pre-arranged.  He said he wanted to attend the candombe and not really knowing what that was, I couldn’t argue.  I followed him to the plaza down beside the river port and saw people were gathered there.  It was beyond dusk but not yet Uruguayan dinner time.

Candombe isn’t exactly music, dance or theatre; it’s rather a cultural genre that’s a mix of the three which originated with the arrival of Bantu African slaves in Uruguay.  In its fullest form a candombe performance may feature difficult choreographed dance steps as well as wild improvisation; there can be costumed characters known to the genre such as an old mother, a herb doctor and a sweeper who juggles and performs balancing tricks with his broom; there can be the singing of Spanish or archaic African lyrics; and there is always a troop of drummers.[1] 

We adopted Pablo and his friend who for reasons unclear was called ‘The Duck.’  There was time for chatting as people gradually arrived.  There was a bit of drum tuning, singular beating at first which slowly grew into a low-key rhythm, stopping and re-starting, the talk and the drums. 

Pablo was planning to start a clothing company, he said, and his t-shirt featured an illustration of a giant fork on it.  The Duck was famous among his friends for his trip to Miami, where he’d imprudently arrived on the first anniversary of September 11.  I don’t know if Uruguayan Spanish sounds a little too Middle Eastern but The Duck, he was turned away; and after the solid week of farewell parties that had been in Salto, to the great amusement of his friends within days The Duck was back!

The drums gathered pace, musicians showed considerable skill and soon the crowd was dancing along the street, drums following.  ‘The rhythms are African,’ Pablo said, ‘but there are few Africans left in Uruguay.’ 

With Benson, Pablo and The Duck, I self-consciously and really quite dreadfully danced towards the front, in steps that would’ve shamed any candombe enthusiast.  But I took amusement from being less than a week in South America before finding myself unexpectedly dancing in the street.

It was pleasing to see local residents leaning out windows and clapping in time as the crowd passed; to see the cars and buses waving and jiggling a little from behind their steering wheels as they waited patiently to use the street.  I imagined Sydney: council approval, safety impact statements, noise complaints, insurance issues and ultimately banned.  An event that was so informal and worse, driven by young people, would not last there.  The Duck shared his unoriginal but succinct life philosophy: ‘live for now’ and with that in mind, what could be better than a little candombe? 

It was on the Monday I arrived by small passenger ferry, across the river, back in Argentina.

---

[1]Wikipedia sourced information, here.

Candombe by Pedro Figari (Uruguayan painter, 1861-1938) Image from wikipedia. Here.

Continue your journey, towards  

Bohemian Argentina, 

to Mariachi Nica or, 

on the other side of the world, discover

The Song of Chittagong. Travel safe!

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: A Little Candombe





The Deep South: Article Index for articles about Argentina, Chile or Uruguay

Diabula Did It

It must’ve taken a measure of bravery for the Portuguese to first set out on their voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century.  With the weight of the unknown, the myths of sea monsters and risk of falling off the edge of a flat world they nonetheless set forth.  By the following century they’d made it as far as the Bay of Bengal where ultimately they established a port in Chittagong and a settlement on nearby Sandwip Island.  But did they ever get lost along the way?  From time to time they must have.  And when they got lost, could it be that the Portuguese turned their sails around while at the same time cursing the very devil for having deceived them?

Kashem Bhai of Rahania village in modern-day Hatiya is not Portuguese and he certainly has little in common with Henry the Navigator or Vasco Da Gama.  Unlike any Portuguese explorer indeed, it is with considerable care that Kashem Bhai contemplates his actions, and the actions of others.  He’s someone who finds no delight in risk-taking. 

In the night sky over Hatiya, every few minutes there are the lights of planes, transcontinental, small and very high.  We’ve considered it might be the Hong Kong to Dubai route.  While watching the planes, Kashem Bhai has been known to remark, ‘How risky!  Do people really need to do that?  Why do they take such risks?’  He’s rehearsed a rather nice sound of a plane falling from the sky: durrrumm!  It’s safe to assume he belongs to my grandmother’s school of thought, that if people were meant to fly they’d have grown wings.  And it’s not the only risky behaviour Kashem Bhai has noticed among his fellow humans.

There’s also the important matter of ceiling fans.  Kashem Bhai wonders how it is that people can sleep under them, what should happen if during the night the fan were to fall.  ‘How risky!’ he says, ‘Why do people trust their lives to a single, small screw!’ He means the one holding the fan in place.  ‘Is it really necessary?’  Living in Rahania, Kashem Bhai is lucky not to have to face the threat of ceiling fans often.  On any island electricity is not a straightforward matter and what electricity there is in Hatiya seems to have got lost somewhere along the way to Kashem’s village.

It comes as a surprise, therefore, to hear of the occasion when Kashem Bhai’s careful planning and risk avoidance considerations failed him.  It was on a day that started like any other.  As with many a villager, Kashem’s hours are normally consumed with chores and duties, household this and marketing that.  But on that day Kashem Bhai decided he was in need of rest, and as he lives by the Hatiyan coastline it was little trouble to gather a few friends and propose several hours of adda at the beach.  There’s usually a welcome breeze blowing in from the Bay of Bengal there, he knew, and it’s not a place where the day’s duties could track him down.

Getting there presents few problems.  It’s simple enough to follow path-and-aisle between the rice fields and to negotiate the muddy crossings of the tidal channels in the open land they call ‘The Garden.’ Nor is it overly challenging to zigzag through gaps in the coastal shawl of the mangroves beyond.  There’s usually a patch of dry sand or a grassy clearing nearby; the local fishermen can advise as to the best place for adda on any day, in accordance with the Bay of Bengal’s latest artistry. 

But it’s also a simple scientific fact that adda is not restricted by daylight or tides, and it was well into the afternoon the small party of conversationalists thought to return.  The best way back changes as tides come in and in the darkness it’s not as simple to watch out for cobras; nor are there too many paths to choose from due to the channels and the rice fields.  But as that afternoon wore on there arose an even more pressing problem: society and that peculiar disadvantage of being a respectable member of it.

Unfortunately, on the very day Kashem Bhai determined to go to the beach was also scheduled an important shalish, a public mediation.  Even from the beach Kashem could see the distant bazaar was crowded with onlookers and participants, ready for the event.  Kashem Bhai considered his reputation: what would people think if they saw his little group of friends returning from the beach at a late hour?  Would word of their wasting time on adda reach their wives?  So they waited.

Unfortunately the mediation was a land dispute that had generated a good deal of interest.  There was much to be said and technicalities to be considered.  It’s a simple scientific fact that village mediations are not restricted by daylight or tides.  As the path to the bazaar started fading towards darkness and the water started coming in, it seemed as though the shalish would never end. 

Eventually the group could wait no longer; but if perhaps they walked apart they might yet be able to reach their homes inconspicuously.  At any rate they’d need to try.  One by one they set off: through the mangroves, jumping over muddy channels and weaving a way through The Garden.

The crowd proved to be a blessing, with each of Kashem’s friends able to enter the market from the sea side unhindered and without remark.  It was dark by then.  But unfortunately, just as Kashem Bhai’s feet found the start of the bazaar he was spotted.  ‘Kashem Miah, where have you been?’ Abdullah Member asked.

Kashem Bhai didn’t know what to say.  But fortune favoured him because after a moment a convenient skerrick of local folklore came to mind: the legendary Diabula.

Kashem embarked upon a carefully crafted tale, about how he had been walking home from the bazaar to his house as he usually might, when for some reason he found himself walking and walking, still walking, and still not seeming to cover the short distance to his home.  Finding his situation odd, Kashem Bhai explained, he started to think it was Diabula’s work. 

In Hatiya, Diabula is an invisible spirit but not a jinn or a bhoot of the ordinary sort.  Diabula has the particular trick of snatching people’s sense of direction and leading them astray; and people are at greatest risk of attack when they walk alone.

Kashem Bhai told Abdullah Member that he stopped walking and on suspicions of Diabula thought to turn his lungee upside down.  This action is the commonly understood remedy for Diabula’s handiwork.  And when he did so, just about half an hour earlier, Kashem Bhai continued, he was shocked to find himself, quite inexplicably, at the beach!

Having enjoyed the little tale, Abdullah Member could have no further questions.

It’s strange to think that the Portuguese journeys of several hundred years ago may have assisted Kashem Bhai as he entered the bazaar that day.  It’s just a theory, but is it impossible to imagine that the islanders’ Diabula was long ago derived from the Portuguese diabo, the word for the devil? 

Hatiya Island didn’t exist when the Portuguese came to the Bay of Bengal, it’s a much younger island; but many Hatiyalas have an ancestry from the older Sandwip, far to the east.  And when I mentioned Diabula to a Sandwipian friend he knew what it was immediately; he also knew to turn his lungee upside down in the case of a Diabula attack.  Meanwhile those few people I asked from inland districts of Bangladesh had never heard of Diabula.

Why not stay a while longer on Hatiya Island or in Bangladesh, go west for Paschimbangan mangoes or east for Thai buffaloes, whiteboards and refrigerators?


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Diabula Did It







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Prothom Alo Article: My Bangladesh

English translation below.

Prothom Alo Article... My Bangladesh (link to Prothom Alo) 

English Translation:

My Bangladesh

I’ve been given the world’s most difficult task: to write just one thousand words about our Bangladesh, or my Bangladesh, the one that has been in my life for the past sixteen years.  How to choose which morsels of information to include?  I would not attempt such a task except that the request comes from a newspaper of renown, Prothom Alo, to contribute to their anniversary edition no less, so I have no choice but to try.

‘Why do you live in Bangladesh?’  It’s hardly an uncommon question.  CNG drivers laugh.  ‘Bangladeshis go to Australia,’ they say, ‘and you are coming the other way?’  Hospital staff once admonished my friend, saying, ‘Tell him not to waste his life here!’  If I say that I like living in Bangladesh, local reaction ranges from puzzled bemusement to perplexed wonder.  And that in itself is reason to admire Bangladesh.

I’d like to say it’s different in Australia, but it’s only different in the sense that while Bangladeshi thought stems in general from humility and lack of international experience, Australian reaction stems from prejudice and lack of international experience.  My sister said once, disparagingly, ‘But it’s a developing country.’  Apart from a few hours in Mexico I don’t believe she’s been to a developing country so she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  My oldest brother meanwhile commented that Bangladesh was Hindu: to his mind some version or other of India.  Bangladesh remains a country that is less well-known.

To the CNG drivers I say, ‘Okay, but in Bangladesh the hardest part is work.  If you have a reasonable income then it’s a fantastic place to live.’ 

To my sister there’s nothing to say.  Her views are immutably negative.  It was with bewilderment in her voice that she told me over the phone how much Mum and Dad enjoyed their visit last year, to Dhaka and the village in Hatiya.  Bangladeshis meanwhile were delighted to see the village photos on Facebook, of Mum in a sari and Dad in lungee.  Those clothing items were gifts from my Bengali family, the one who by neither blood nor marriage became my Bengali family over the course of sixteen years, for more or less no reason than because it happened.  There’s a particularly nice photo of all the parents together: Mum, Dad and Amma.  My Abba passed away before I met him.

Bangladesh: how to explain?  I could do worse than start with this afternoon, when I was on the phone to Dinajpur to my Bua’s mother.  After a belated Eid greeting it came: the dawat.  I know it’s a cliché, the tremendous hospitality of Bengalis, but I am forced to mention it because it’s true.  ‘If a Bengali has five taka in their pocket,’ a Dhakaite friend said, ‘they’ll spend ten buying tea for their friends.’  Although I never seem to have the opportunity to take up most of these dawats they arrive almost daily; and while some of it has to do with being a foreigner, I’ve seen how liberal and hospitable Bengalis are to my friends also, fellow Bengalis.  So it isn’t only because I am a westerner, at least not all the time, and in Hatiya it never is, not anymore.

Of course hospitality and thoughtfulness are culturally specific.  I saw that on the day Mum and Dad travelled on Hatiya’s rough dirt roads by motorised tom tom to Rahmat Bazaar on the coast, near the beach where I once played kabbadi with Nashir and his cousins.  It was a slightly brave journey because those roads aren’t in good condition and the tom tom nearly fell through a hole in one of the small concrete bridges. 

Mum and Dad are in their seventies and at Rahmat Bazaar they were tired, although my mother was actually tempted to take up Pankaj’s offer of a haircut in his tin shed saloon.  Instead he cut mine.  But we couldn’t leave because Arif the tom tom driver had to take his children home from their school examination and we had to wait for him.  We took rest at a nearby house on hastily arranged chairs in the shady yard. 

Well, there was a bit of a fuss: the householder tried very hard to make us stay for lunch, although I don’t know him as such, and even though we declined he secretly sent for supplies from the bazaar in order to start cooking.  To him it was unthinkable people could walk into his yard and not be fed more than tea and biscuits.   

Well, there was a bit of a fuss: my mother was greatly concerned because, in her Australian thinking, we’d intruded.  ‘Are you sure they don’t mind us sitting in their yard?’ she kept asking.  It reminded me of how I was when I first came to Bangladesh.  In Australia thoughtfulness sometimes centres on privacy.  When the tom tom returned my mother, in English, warmly thanked our host for letting us sit there, which he had no hope of comprehending, not meaning the language but because thanking a Hatiyala for sitting in their yard is a bit like thanking the air for letting us breathe it.  In any case the householder was still frantically negotiating: if he couldn’t feed all of us then maybe just my friend’s children who were with us?  He should be feeding someone!

‘Do you know him?’ my mother quizzed me later.

‘Anybody would do that.’

Cultures grant us new ways to think.  Just as my mother’s thoughts were totally logical and obvious, so were the Bangladeshi thoughts of hospitality.  It is just one tiny example of how things differ.  Why Bangladesh? It’s because there’s so much to learn here, so many qualities to admire and welcome experiences to have.  It’s because Bengali ways have become as natural and obvious as the Australian ways I was born into. 

And it’s odd that feeling that used to be, when I would visit Bangladesh annually: on leaving Sydney by plane with the predictable ‘going away’ thoughts going on, only for the plane to descend twelve hours later into Dhaka, with an undeniable but technically incorrect ‘coming home’ happiness welling up inside.  Australians would over analyse that last sentence, seeking to rationalise and capture it.  And in this instance the Australians would be wrong: it’s the more poetic and spiritual, easy acceptance of things that Bangladeshis demonstrate which gives the answer here.  Sometimes things just are.

Andrew Eagle is an Australian citizen who has been a regular visitor to Hatiya, Noakhali, for the past sixteen years and considers Hatiya, where his friend Reja Ali Mobarak (Situ) is from, also to be his gramer bari.  For the past four years he has lived continuously in Dhaka and he contributes regular articles to Star Magazine of the Daily Star, Prothom Alo’s English language sister concern.

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