Like clockwork, the rain is beginning to make its daily afternoon rounds in Chittagong. Seated at my desk, I notice the blue morning sky has turned to a pale grey. Around lunchtime, I step out of the office to descend the stairs to where a young boy waits in front of the building with two bags of our little cardboard box orders of rice, dal, and curries from a local food stand. Out of the air-conditioned office, I notcie the air has become heavier, and significantly warmer. The thought of taking the stairs back up to the fifth floor, rather than the elevator, never seems like a viable option in this heat. No sooner have I stepped back into the cool office, than I am aware of the meditative resounding of sheets of rain drenching the windows, balconies, and the streets below. I wonder whether the sudden downpour has caught the delivery boy unawares, and I picture him sprinting back to his twenty-cent-an-hour job. If he is anything like my brothers and I were at his age, he's welcoming the warm rain with arms stretched out like a wide grin. Back at my desk, I hear joyful shrieks of kids on the street below. They're standing under the steady streams of water tumbling from our building's rain pipes. Like waterfalls. And into my mind the memories come flooding back...
Ahead is a long exerpt of an old college essay about the Bangladeshi origins of my obsession with water (feel free to bail out, as it gets quite off the topic of monsoons)...
Water
Throughout my childhood, the monsoon rains of Bangladesh drenched a third of my memories each year. My brothers and I loved the rains. Far from sending us indoors, hands gripping the windows' metal bars, the rain was a friend beckoning us to play. The weather was not merely an arbitrary addition to our normal games. Instead, we focused the entire afternoon's play around our wet guests -- the "waterfalls" created by the roof's draining pipes, the deep puddle in the indentation between the football goal stones, the seemingly bottomless wells of the rain-filled oil barrels -- we named them all, and remembered their names even after their several month hiatus during the dry season.
Perhaps the arrival of the fresh clean rain puddles seemed so right and necessary because of what covered the streets in between the cleansings. During the Islamic festival of Eid, following the holy month of Ramadan, my brothers competed with their friends Chris and Jonathan Adkins to compare the depth of puddles on the grounds outside our houses. These pools, however, depended not on rain clouds as their source, but drew from the hanging carcasses of sacrificial goats and cows slaughtered outside every gate in Mohammadpur. Looking into the opaque scarlet blood puddles on my walks to school in the morning, I could not see the reflection of a smiling freckled face. It did not occur to me then that dead animals and blood pools, or crippled beggars and street kids, would not have been images included in my childhood had I spent its entirety in Maine.
When I was seven, I once stumbled upon a dead baby next to the dumpster across from Suzie Adkin's house. It was a "hartal" day -- the frequent occurence of a nation-wide strike in Bangladesh, when the roads are cleared of motor vehicles. On these days, David, Benjamin, and I were allowed to roller-skate freely on the streets. This particular afternoon, Benjamin was crouching incomspicuously behind the rear rubber tires of a rickshaw, holding onto the painted portrait of a Bollywood star. My brother's trick was to catch a free, exhilerating pull on his skates when the rickshawallah began peddling off in search of passengers. Upon noticing that his apparently empty carriage had resisted him by thirty extra kilograms, the man would begin a cruel (but probably justified) game of peddling fast with shart twists, turns, and jolts, attempting to disengage the non-paying parasite from his rickshaw. I was admittedly not as brave nor quite as mischievous as my elder brother, so on this day, I skated away from his dangerous game.
I noticed that the crows had dragged something from the trash pile to the street. I saw the small doll-like form and curiously came to it, scattering the black crows back to their telephone wires to watch greedily over Iqbal Road. She was a very small brown baby, face-down, with tiny fingers. I remember standing over her, unstable on my red skates, frozen and staring for a short while. Later, at home, I told my mother. Mom said the baby was probably still-born, and I guessed she had belonged to the family in the make-shift dwelling across from Suzie's house. I was sad, but I couldn't cry. I went home and washed my hands and face for dinner.
In the next rainy season, my reflection in the monsoon puddle between the football goal stones showed a different child from the year before. Grow a little, and both a little more aware, and more unsure. Increasingly, the images of the suffering afround me came to hold distinct frames in my memories. In the back of my mind developed a fear that I would become calloused and indifferent. I looked back on the images hoping for a glint of meaning, and I was faced with opaqueness, like the street blood, which never returned a satisfying reflection of the clouds, trees, or faces looming above.In June of 1995, my brothers and I peered excitedly out of a small ovular window at the shadow of our jet moving over Maine's Casco Bay in the final minutes of our journey back to a home we hardly remembered. We gawked at the fascinating foreign land below, with the dark blue water, tiny sailboats, and funny pointed-roof houses.
I was about to re-meet my grandparents, and was a little ashamed of the band-aid still stuck on the bridge of my nose. I touched the little plaster reminder of the first of many memorable swimming accidents I would experience in my life (though non managing to dissuade me from that fantastic sport). Only hours before leaving Dhaka, my family had taken our last trip to the American Club pool. Who knew how long it would be before we returned to Bangladesh? So I had made up my mind -- this was my last chance to attempt the brilliant swimming trick that I had seem performed by an especially cool teenage girl at the pool on numerous occasions. Not until joining swim team my last year of high school would I learn that this swimming skill was called a "flip-turn." After three years of studying my anonymous role model in the act, I believed the moment had come for me to imitate. So, as a farewell to the pool where I had learned to swim, I kicked my legs and moved my arms as Dad had taught me, approaching the pool's edge, and attempted my first flip-turn. I over-rotated and my nose met the metal ladder.
I'm sure it looked worse than it was. I remember crying at my own blood dripping onto my hands. A man ran to me, extending his clean white handkerchief. Seeing how, without hesitation he had sacrified it to be stained by a stranger made me cry all the more. I didn't try another flip turn for almost ten years.I did keep swimming though. That summer of 1995 I began my love affair with Maine and her waters. Almost every day between Memorial Day and Labor Day, my dad piled us into the blue Plymouth Voyager to drive to the Mills, as everyone called the favorite Damariscotta Lake swimming spot. While Mom read under the crab apple tree, Dad would swim out to the small island a half mile into the lake. Year after year, one of the most anticipated summer activities for Damariscotta kids was jumping off the green bridge into the fresh sun-warmed water.
One time at the Mills, I jumped off the bridge and hit a boat.
It could have been avoided. I should have hear the horn warning sounded by the young couple taking their joy ride in a white motor boat. The image of the boat below me has seared my memory because of its shocking effect. Every other time that I've jumped off that bridge, I have been aware of my own relfection coming toward me from below. Usually, my falling body and the joyfully waving arms and legs of my reflection meet in the ecstatic explosion of water displaced by our union. On that day though, my reflection was not below me, and this unexpected turn of events threw me into a frantic confusion. I tried to fly. I moved my arms, as if in water, but physics had already determined that my mass was no match for the air compared to the control I'm given in water. So, rather than into my reflection, I found myself staring for a split second into the petrified faces of a young man and woman who were just as panicked as I. My foot, then my thigh, hit against the pointed bow of the white boat and I bounced off into the water, where I scrambled fast toward shore.
All was fine. I was only bruised, and the boat-owner has probably since suffered more stress around bridges than I ever will. I always knew that it could have turned out much worse, and as it went, it made better story than had it all been avoided.....My relationship with water has evolved as all romances do. I finally learned how to perform flip-turns, how to teach various physics-informed swimming strokes to kids at summer camp, and how to rescue a drowning victim in deep or shallow water. I have learned that the surface tension property of water is responsible for capillary action, moving nutrients through our tiny blood vessels. I habitually drink the recommended two liters of water per day. I swim to the island with my father in our Maine summers. David skillfully rigs the Eleanore in the harbor; Benjamin and I marvel at our younger brother's navigation around the ledges of John's Bay as he controls the angle of the sail against the wind. I have learned more about rain shadows, marine biology, coastal contamination, and tidal patterns than ever crossed my mind in those early years of becoming enamored by puddles and seas.
Still, there's much to be learned, and today I am compelled to continue reaching and listening, not always confident of which way to look or move. God in nature seems less knowable but more enticing than ever before. Images of suffering and memories of dead babies often leave me staring into a pictureless pool. The ancient voice of the ocean is sometimes silent also.In the summer of '07, I leaned backward off a small motor-dingy at a diving site near the Perhentian Islands off the coast of Malaysia. With a regulator in my mouth attached to an oxygen tank so I could breath, a mask sealed around my face so I could see, and fins on my feet so I could move, I dropped back and broke the surface of the water. I relaxed my body and, taking a few deep breaths, bobbed upright for a moment contemplating the marvelous task ahead of me. I would leave this realm of gravity's inescapable pull, and take my own supply of air, defying nature to sink twenty meters beneath the surface of the South China Sea. I began to descend, deeper and deeper until the time came to neutralize my position in the water. The pressure had compressed the air in the flotation attached to my wetsuit and I began to sink faster. With my left index finger, I pressed a button to release air from my tank into the floatation and my sinking came gently to a stop. I rolled forward, face-down, and stretched so my body was parallel to the flat sandy substrate. And in that quiet blace, I breathed slowly, completely suspended by the water, not rising, not sinking, just resting, and waiting.
