"hanging our shirts" and other weekend rituals

"Coming home after school, flying my bike past the gates of the factories.

My mom doing the laundry, hanging our shirts in the dirty breeze..." - Simon and Garfunkel

One of my favorite weekend rituals, on sunny Saturdays in Chittagong, has been the several-hour long process of doing laundry. We are extremely fortunate to have a washing machine that even spins our clothes at the end of the cycle, significantly aiding the drying process. The machine takes hours to fill with water, and though I can't say my clothes turn out that much cleaner after the long cycle, I know that the results of my attempts at hand-washing would be dismal in comparison. The important thing is how they smell when I pull the freshly spun cloths out of the plastic machine in the kitchen. I love the smell of laundered sheets. Then up to the roof for the best part, during which Simon and Garfunkel's line from "My Little Town" about hanging shirts in dirty breeze always starts humming through my head. The breeze doesn't feel so dirty here, but the thick film of dust on my dresser, after a few days of open windows, often argues otherwise.
Still, sun-dried sheets, with the lingering scent of jasmine detergent, make my whole life feel cleaner. After laundry, I re-hang my clothes, feeling immensely satisfied by my little almira (closet) neatly arranged with colorful salwar kameezes, saris, ornas and one or two Western clothing items.
So far, nearly every weekend here I have been honored to receive an invitation for tea or lunch (often both) in Bangladeshi homes. Usually, these generous invitations come from cleaning staff at the university campus - the few women with whom I can regularly practice my limited (but hopefully expanding!) Bangla vocabulary. The homes are simple but inviting, and I often feel more comfortable in their community-oriented neighborhoods than in my high-rise building of closed apartment doors. While we sipped tea at one home, a "mashi" (auntie), pictured below on the right, asked to adopt me as her daughter, since she only has sons. "Abar ashbe," - "Come again!" they always say as I leave. Of course, I tell them, "Abar ashbo." I will come again because, as I wish I could express to them, they are the women who have made me feel most at home in Chittagong.
In addition to being fed delicious spicy curries in Bangladeshi homes, weekends in my own apartment also revolve around making food to satisfy some craving that hit one of us teachers during a long day at the office the previous week. A couple weeks ago it was hummus and baba ganoush. I fell in love with the recipe from a hummus blog - yes, a website exclusively dedicated to middle eastern chickpea recipes: http://humus101.com/EN/2006/10/14/hummus-recipe/

On the first batch of hummus, the electric blender caught fire, so the second batch was rescued by a nice large mortar and pestal to blend the dark chickpeas, homemade tahini, garlic, cumin, and lemon. This recipe turned out quite wonderfully. Gone are my days of over-priced, store-bought hummus!
Since my weekday meals usually include many delicious Bangladeshi curries and over-cooked vegetables ordered from a cheap place near campus, I feel deprived of raw fruits and vegetables. I love having the luxury of extra time to sit at the table on weekends, chopping and chatting with flatmates. The colors of fresh produce here still blow me away.
Fresh jasmine laundry + sweet tea and talking + smooth-textured tahini + and bright purple cabbage + time to enjoy the sensory explosion = perfect weekend.

Rain

Before leaving Maine, I found a masterful drawing I had created as a four-year-old in Ishurdi. It's a picture of a girl in the Bangladesh rain.... with a nice big smile... and a crown, of course.
Last weekend Alyssa and I found ourselves caught in one of the beautiful, cleansing downpours of the Bangladesh monsoon season. I suppose sometimes they're not so cleansing - namely when they overflow the sewage gutters along the roads' edges. But on this particular Saturday, after a week when the heat had rested heavily on our Chittagong days, everyone seemed to welcome the downpour. Seeing these kids splash joyfully down the street brought a flood of sweet memories from days on Iqbal Road in Dhaka, where my brothers and neighbors and I used to take to the outdoors with the fall of the first fat drop on the cement roof.
The rain certainly hadn't discouraged Alyssa and I from proceeding with the day's plan to find our way to the Chittagong War Cemetery. I had been hearing for weeks that this spot was one of the few neat public "green spaces" in the city, and this fact alone cancelled out the potential morbidity of visiting a graveyard. Still, we found the clouds and thunder appropriate to the occasion. The burial ground honors the memories of a several hundred Bideshi (including Brits, Americans, Nigerians, Japanese, etc) and Bangladeshi World War II soldiers, sailors and engineers.

We walked the rows in the rain, reading the epithets of beloved fathers, sons, brothers, friends, and the Biblical or Quranic verses sending them onward.

Soon the sun came out again, and the neatly planted flora seemed to appear out of nowhere - their colors suddenly vivid under the brightened sky.

How lovely are the rains when they gently summon these coveted colors, but kindly desist from flooding the homes of those on the river banks...