people's land

Ei jomi kar?        “Whose land is this?”

Manusher            “People’s”

Our eleven year-old boat paddler on the Padma River replied to my mother’s question very matter-of-factly, with confident authority. But I sensed his answer was a little too simple, perhaps naïve, since it referred to the land on the long-contested Bangladesh-India border.

We had rowed across the shrunken river and were standing on a vast stretch of seemingly desolate wasteland – a sandbar that is completely engulfed by the Padma in the wet season. Hence this temporary land is one of very few wide-open, uninhabited spaces in Bangladesh. It isn’t wasteland, though. As we walked along the so-called sandbar, a man nearby was spraying his lentil crop – dal, said our boy.

Then as the sun began to descend, a long line of human forms began to appear from the far unseen edge of the plain. They carried crops, sacks, children, and all manner of things. Their day’s work was done – what work? I don’t know, but it results from a commute that is only possible half of the year. Their forms grew larger as they approached the river bank to cross back over to the unambiguous land of Bangladesh. Shonar Bangla lit by an orange cheese-ball sun.

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I feel I’m about to cross a river, but still have a month of sandbar. My contract at AUW finishes officially in two days, then a month of traveling with my mom – Mymensingh, Bangladesh, then Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. Other peoples’ lands.

I’ll land in New York on January 28^th and I’m excited to reach the other side and take in the shores of the jubilant sea of Maine again, even if it means joining my countryfolk as we tumble over a fiscal cliff. The world didn’t end on 12-21-12, but maybe a new era has begun.

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For now, I’m blessed to be welcoming the New Year with my parents – two amazing individuals who taught me to seek adventure, to laugh through rough times, and to love people in every land.

proud in the mud (or "the surprising hibiscus")

This afternoon I was surprised by the sudden appearance of this pink hibiscus in my garden.

The flower-bed-lined balcony off the kitchen in my flat in South Khulshi is a sacred space. A sanctuary, especially at sunset and sunrise. I've done my best to keep the effect of my jet lag that allows me to fall soundly asleep by 9:30 or 10pm and be up by 5:30 or 6am, sipping coffee with my BCP on the balcony. I am exceedingly blessed to have this space and I'll be damned if I take it for granted.

That's why--when the green plants of my treasured green space began to wither and die last year--I hired a gardener for a day to doctor it up a bit. Tik koron, shundor koron.  "Fix it, make it beautiful," was my simple plea, "Oh and rong lagbe, I need color!" With these simple directives the gardener disappeared out into Chittagong and returned hours later with pots of young green plants, good soil and a hose, and began operating on the parched beds. At the end of the day he assured me the colors would come. Flowers would come. Phul ashbe.

 And they have. I went to the States for a month of the monsoons and I returned to plants twice the size of when I'd left. Every day a different plant blooms with a surprise blossom. Today it was the pink hibiscus.

This seems to happen on the streets of Chittagong too -- the sudden igniting of a tree that yesterday was green and today bursts with near-supernatural shades of red, orange, yellow, or fushia. Taking photos of the blossoms becomes addictive. A couple months ago I finally bought M.A. Taher's books, Bangladesher Phul and Bangladesher Pakhi, on the flowers and birds of Bangladesh. From the States I brought back a pair of binoculars--a Christmas present from my brothers--and I plan to try a hand at "birding" in the Chittagong hill tracts. For now, I'm using the flower book to identify my balcony surprises. 

I came across this quote by Rabindranath Tagore on the first page of Bangladesher Phul. 

"Phul bole, dhono ami matir pore."

 I called my Bangla tutor, Mira, to ask her for help translating the quote. Her translation was something like, "The flower says, I am proud to be on the mud." With my little knowledge of Tagore, I'm guessing there is probably a much more poetic way to translate that, so I might ask my personal Tagore informant, John Thorpe. But Mira's translation makes me smile. Maybe we should live our lives by a mantra like that.  Honored and sure in our calling, though we're mud-covered and in the thick.
Anyway, I'll update you if I get another translation.

Speaking of mud, while I was watering my pots (which I also sprinkle every morning with my used coffee grounds), I noticed the first sprouts of my sunflowers! The lovely Rebecca Clark sent me off from Maine to Bangladesh with sunflower seeds last summer (2011), and I failed my first growing attempt. That was also the year the whole garden died and the gardener was called in. My job kind of took over my life last year, and I'm committed to not letting that happen again. So I'm watering the sunflower seeds and doing my best to battle against the impetuous seed-eating ants.
I'm also growing basil and parsely -- first basil sprout below!

I could do a whole post devoted to the fragrances and odors of my life in Chittagong, and perhaps I will. A preview to that is the photo below, of the sweetest phul in my humble garden. I couldn't find the name for this one in my book, so I'll ask the gardener to enlighten me when he comes to advise me on the worsening ant crisis. Anyway, you can smell these tiny white blossoms from yards away and they'll take you to happy places in your mind.

I discovered from my book that the flowers below are called in Bangla, kathmaloti, or tagar, or officially, tabernamontana dichotoma of the apocynaceae variety.

And on the opposite side of my apartment, I look out my living room window at kash phul, or thatch grass. In the morning, a few cows and goats feed among these soft white heads of meadow grass that wave gently in the easterly breeze.

 The scientific name for thatch grass is saccharum spontaneum, gramineae. The Latin is fantastic, isn't it? I'm sure one could find a way to live life by mottos based on floral nomenlature.

To end, I'll quote M.A. Taher's thoughts from his "Author's Words" in Bangladesher Phul:

Flowers may not be indispensable in our everyday life but we show our love for them in all our social functions. We welcome our guests and adorn the venue of our festive functions with colourful flowers. During Puja, flowers are essential. We show our love for our beloveds with a present of flowers. And the beauty of flowers satisfy our aesthetic urge. Again, the medicinal qualities of many flowers surprise us. But above everything else it is the beauty of flowers that gives us the greatest joy. Moved by the beauty of flowers poets have written poems, musicians have composed songs, artists have painted pictures. On the first of Falgun when spring arrives the sight of young women clad in yellow dress with garlands of beautiful flowers wound around the coil of their hair delights us.

ramadan sirens

I awoke at 2:45am and lost my bookmark in whatever dream I may have been dreaming. Now it's 3:45 and I've given up on forcing myself back to sleep. I'll most likely regret this decision about twelve hours from now, but my remorse will be nothing that my Aeropress and some freshly ground espresso from North End can't fix.

I am back in Chittagong after a whirlwind five weeks in seven U.S. so this pre-sunrise insomnia can easily be blamed on the eleven-hour time difference and my thoroughly confused inner time-clock.

But the other factor that jolted me out of an apparently forgettable dream was a 2:50am siren, screaming over a load speaker adjacent to my building to wake up fasting families for their pre-dawn meal.

The holy month of Ramadan is drawing to a close in a few days, though I don't think we know for sure which day Eid ul-Fitr (the feast day marking the end of Ramadan) will occur. I believe the moon plays an integral role in this determination. So this week, Saturday, or Sunday, or maybe Monday, the 29 to 30 days of daylight fasting will end, and an epic party will ensue in every household.
(Note: I have no Eid ul-Fitr plans as of yet, so in case any Chittagonians are reading this, I am a huge fan of Shemai--the sweet milky goodness of that cardamom-infused vermicilli dessert traditionally served at this holiday in Bangladesh, and I promise I'm an easy guest.)

Shemai

It's 4:00am and the second siren just called all full-bellied Khulshi-dwellers to wash their hands and prepare for about fifteen hours of fasting. Many will go back to sleep. But some of the men are now fitting their heads with their embroidered taqiyah caps and stepping out into the heavy, but somewhat cooler (85˚F) pre-dawn air to do namaz at the local mosque. An equally loud call to prayer - one of five per day - has followed the second siren.

I admire the visible existence of community during Ramadan. Everyone is waiting. Waiting together for newness. On Eid, devotees will pray before sunrise, then in following the Prophet's instructions, they will brush their teeth with a toothbrush and shower and wear new clothes and perfume. It is obligatory to show happiness on this day. There are many in this world who could use some obligatory genuine happiness. Bangladesh does this well, as I've been reminded several times in my three days back.

But there has also been a difficult side to my first week - this final week of Ramadan. The traffic and shopping are a nightmare -- probably no worse than Black Friday back home, but then again I'm in a city of over 5.5 million, and it seems everyone is shopping. But I can handle that. I can mostly avoid witnessing the American-like vice of chaotic overspending by hiding out in the peaceful safetly of my apartment. Rather, it's a virtue that I confess I have been resenting. The virtue of charity.

One of the main distinquishing features of Eid ul-Fitr is its emphasis on giving to the needy -- "as much charity as possible." As much as possible? Let's be honest -- I have eight more years to pay off college debt, so really, it's possible to pretty much empty my bank account, give away 80% of my earnings, and still eat my fill in this low cost-of-living environment. And it seems that every beggar in Chittagong has heard this little secret of my financial status. Everywhere I go, outstretched hands of skinny children, elderly adults, the blind, and crippled, and of healthy-looking men and women too, reach and grab and condemn me for my selfishness. But I can handle that. I console myself -- I'm a teacher. I donate to an NGO monthly with automatic withdrawal. Free handouts on the street perpetuate the cycle of poverty and unsustainable dependence. Blah blah blah...

What has been hardest is navigating the Eid baksheesh (gift money) for the people I know -- those who serve me daily in Bangladesh, whose faces and names I know. The guards at my office, the cleaners in my building, the cleaners that used to work in my building, the cleaner who works at my friend's building. These are people whom I know and relationships in which I delight, and so I have begun to convince myself that we are equal -- they help me practice Bangla, and I'm somehow involved in their employment -- let's not talk about money, that's uncomfortable for my Western sensibilities. But they're breaking my unwritten rule. They're asking for gifts, and it's making me uncomfortable. In my mind, there exists only one context in the world in which it's completely okay to ask for a gift or money -- and that's little Joey asking Dad for field-trip spending cash or a new gargoyle action figure.
When these non-offspring acquaintances of mine ask for monetary gifts -- or even worse -- inform me that they'll be needing a larger gift than I've given, my instinct is to say -- Well, now I don't want to give it. It's not out of the goodness of my big wonderful heart anymore. If you hadn't asked for it, I would have given it joyfully...
But would I have?
Probably not. I probably would have forgotten about the apu (elder sister) who quietly empties my garbage can each day and hand-mops my apartment block's stairway while I'm at work. She wouldn't have to drop hints about the upcoming holiday if she were working for families of the Bangladeshi religious majority rather than a building full of unaware expats. Although I am bothered by the assumption that my skin color automatically signals wealth, not a day goes by in Chittagong in which I don't feel exceedingly blessed by the comfort of my life.

So maybe today I should decide to appreciate the helpful reminders from those whom I'm sure I have forgotten as carelessly as I forgot the characters of my siren-interrupted dream. Perhaps I should be obligatorily happy in my giving and see if genuine joy arises.

The sun has risen now and this city will soon be hungry. Waiting for the iftar feast, for charitible gifts, and for newness and mandatory happiness. Eid Mubarek!

mangos

I took this photo in May while I was visiting my parents up north in Rajshahi. Rajshahi is mango country, and mango season is just beginning.

Mangos.

I love them. They're appearing everywhere now, piled high in the fruit shops with a fragrance sweet and bold enough to mask even the open sewer's foul punches. Everywhere now, lining the sidewalks where men sit cross-legged with paring knives, ready to open the ripe flesh to prove the quality to any doubting buyer, they're calling out, "Langra aam! Fusli aam!" Aam, mango. Mmm.

As I dreamed about mangos at my desk today, my mind re-encountered a childhood memory. I must have been about seven years old, somewhere in Bangladesh with more trees than buildings. Not Chittagong. Walking along a shaded path one afternoon between monsoon showers, I saw a discarded mango pit lying on brown earth that the rains had patted firm like clay. And from this carelessly tossed mango pit a tiny tree was sprouting. I bent down and examined the tiny roots, pushing their way into the hard earth. A mango tree was growing. Just like that.

When later on I learned the word "fertile," I allowed the memory of that mango pit on Bangladesh's soil to be the image that captured the meaning of that word for me.

You are a fertile country, Bengal. Your monsoon rains are coming, and your mangos are ripening. Bengal, Oh Mother mine, as Tagore sang, the fragrance from your mango groves drives me wild with joy.*


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*From "Amar Shonar Bangla," written by Rabindranath Tagore, eventually adopted as Bangladesh's national anthem.

Nazma

Jodi amar ma mure gelo, amar keu nai...
"If my mother dies, I'll have no one..."

Tears welled up in Nazma's eyes, and this spunky, fiery 18 year-old suddenly looked much smaller, sitting on the other side of my desk. She had sunk into the chair from which my students ask questions about analysis versus evaluation, but for Nazma's questions this morning, I had no "teacher's" answer. "Amar ma beshi oshusto." -- "My mother is very sick," she was explaining. "Yesterday, we went to the doctor. They did many tests. We don't know what's wrong.... Please pray for her. I have no one besides my mother. I'm alone. I have no one besides my mother." She repeated those words as round tears slid down her soft, dark cheeks.... amar keu nai...

Nazma is not a student, as her uniform of black trousers, an oversize red polo shirt, and a black scarf clearly indicate. She sweeps and mops the buildings where girls her age spend the days in classrooms and dorms, weaving big dreams. They'll be the "future leaders of Asia" according to our AUW mission. They dream of starting NGOs, becoming policy writers, lawyers, scientists, activists, presidents.... Nazma sits at my desk hoping that her mother will make it through the year. This dream is now eclipsing her own dreams for education. She wonders why she can't be learning at AUW, rather than washing it's grimy dishes. This question bothers me too...

Nazma's father died when she was three or four. Last year her house burned down, taking with it years and years of dowry savings. She is the youngest of several siblings who are all married now.

Nazma is smart. She was solely responsible for securing high-paying cleaning jobs in AUW professors' apartments for her two sisters and her brother's wife. She is constantly networking and negotiating, usually on behalf of others. She is spirited and generous, but can also be pushy and demanding, which has paid off immensely for her family. But she is still tremendously vulnerable as an unmarried, uneducated woman in Bangladesh. I find myself avoiding that haunting question, "Why was this her fate and not mine?"  Or I spin some pacifying answer such as, "I'm teaching young women of Asia so that they can change the situation of the Nazmas in their communities." But right now I just feel dully speechless.

I move to Nazma's side of the desk, put my arm around her small shoulders and say, "You have us, you're not alone. You have brothers and sisters..."
She answers, Bhaibon, tomra... Mar motto na... "They're not like a mother. No one is like Mother. She is everything."

There's nothing I can say. I tell Nazma I'll pray. I can't even imagine going about today the way she has to, wondering what she will hear from the doctor this afternoon when she collects the results of the tests. She knows they won't be good...  I've met Nazma's mother -- when she was relatively healther. And even then, she looked frail far beyond her years. I remember thinking she was a grandmother.

"Don't you have class today?" Nazma asks me.
"Yes, at 8:30."
"Kaj koro," she tells me to get back to work.
"Korbo. I will."  Before she leaves, I pull out a little book of my students' writings that we compiled last week. I give Nazma a copy and tell her that my students had written about their relatives' love stories. We open up the first page to a sweet little story written by a Vietnamese student about her aunt and uncle. Nazma reads it beautifully, and I translate a few words here and there, but overall am stunned by the ability of this young woman who was forced to quit education before high school.

The story makes us smile, and at least for a moment we have forgotten the fear of death, anger at injustice, and the sadness that silenced us a few minutes ago. Nazma picks up a broom and I pick up a red pen and we reassume our roles.

Eleanore Godfrey Thorpe

Here I am again, sheepishly returning to this blog that I've left abandoned since October for no reason other than my lazy surrender to these eyes that are so tired of computer screens.

However, I daily berate myself for missing the opportunities to pen stories of Bhaktapur's temples in Nepal, of village treks in Bangladesh's hill tracts, scuba diving on Thai islands, or even of the rare luxury of a decadent sushi feast in Dhaka.

Four minutes from midnight, now is not the time to impart those tales. Instead, I've come to share a couple past writings about a woman I have been remembering often this month. My grandmother, Eleanore Thorpe, would have turned ninety-one on the 3rd of Februray this year -- the same day as my brother David's birthday.

The kitchen walls of our Christmas Cove house, painted by Eleanore Thorpe

As a Valentine's Day assignment with my students last week, I asked them to narrate their grandparents' or parents' courtship in a paragraph. The vignettes that poured in from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh were sweet and sappy in all the best ways. Even Eleanore (Bammie as we called her) – who used to call Valentine's and Mother's Day "ploys of the card companies" – even she would have loved the justice my students did to this Hallmark-monopolized holiday.

I, too, responded to the assignment I'd given my students, and the following story of my grandparents' early encounters was the result:

Gardner Public Library

In brown leather heels and a blue cardigan, my youthful grandmother Eleanore Godfrey sat shuffling through Dewey Decimal cards when she first saw him. The sharp man with a distinctive nose was a regular book borrower, but his weekly visits fell outside of Ellie’s normal working hours. So the sly young librarian switched shifts with another in hopes of wooing this man. At a party, they were introduced. When asked whether they’d met before, my grandmother stood tall on her classy leather pumps, smiling, beaming, waiting to hear this John Thorpe speak her thoughts, Why yes, we know each other from the––“No, I don’t believe we've met,” my grandfather’s voice interrupted Ellie’s narration. Hopes crushed. Memories dissolved. All those times she’d stamped his books much too slowly; or how she’d been sure to catch his eyes upon her refrain, “Due in two weeks, unless you renew.” Nevertheless, not long after he learned her name, she’d won his affections. The next year, she stood at his side, with a triumphant smile, in new white heels.

John & Eleanore on the porch of the Christmas Cove house

Eleanore is not pictured in this drawing my my brother, Benjamin, but the tall fellow in the back is our grandfather John Thorpe, Sr. – back in his theatre days.

The Gardner library incident was one of two favourite stories I've cherished of Bammie since childhood. The other was about the time she spent a full day removing seaweed from her beach only to have it wash up again the next day. A few years ago, I included this story in a composition for a creative non-fiction course, when my professor posed the simple, yet infinitely broad question,


What would you change?

...I would recover the house over-looking Sand Cove.

My grandmother Eleanore Godfrey Thorpe used to make “friendship doughnuts” and sell them for eighty cents per dozen to fishermen and local families in Christmas Cove. A nickel of those eighty cents went to my dad, the delivery boy. Hardly school-aged, he could maneuver the dingy through the crowded summer harbor, avoiding precariously hidden ledges marked carefully on every seaman’s chart of John’s Bay. After a few summers of deliveries to loyal customers, my Bammie, called Ellie by all who knew her, had saved enough money to buy a cottage over-looking the small beach that had been given to her as a gift. 

Some years later, Eleanore sold the cottage she had bought with doughnut money. It was the same way with most of my ancestors’ land in Christmas Cove—properties were bought and sold through the years, until finally, the extended Thorpe family today shares just one house. I love the solid, white, unassuming frame of the Thorpe house. It is old enough to tell stories from long before the Civil war, and to contain the secret of my grandfather’s birth, and of how he lived upstairs in the room with a tiny door. It is our family’s house. The doughnut cottage had been Ellie’s. 

If I could go back a couple decades and change Bammie’s mind—tell her that her cottage was worth keeping, I would not hesitate to state my opinion. Ellie, I’m told, never hesitated to withhold hers on any matter, especially politics. I like to think that during my more stubborn moments, I am a living piece of my grandmother. She stomped her small brown high-heeled shoe down when folks put forth unsubstantiated assumptions. Like when they denied the beauty of her beach.

I skip stones at the beach in every season. It’s still in the family, and we will always call it Bammie’s Beach, even though everyone else has been calling it “Smelly Beach” as long as my father can remember. An all-too-natural stench often pervades, as mounds of seaweed wash onto the sand and rocks at high tide, baking in the sun, and refusing to recede with the bowing waves. 

Dad told us how once, Bammie spent the whole day packing the dry, pungent seaweed into garbage bags and loading it onto Pappy’s truck to be taken away from her gem-habitat. The next morning the beach was covered again, as if over the night, arms had reached out from the small cove to recover from the ocean the brown and green shreds of clothing. The rags been stripped off by a small woman who wanted to prove that underneath it all, her beach was beautiful and pure. 

Bammie was probably content to sell the cottage because her real treasures were always the sand, rocks, and water outside of walled houses. As much as she might have enjoyed the rainy day task of bathing the cottage with the sugary warmth of dozens of friendship doughnuts, she was more herself when removing truck-loads of salty seaweed from a misty beach at dawn. 

Still, I wish she had kept the cottage. It would not have changed my life, I suppose, and there are much greater and more urgent things to be addressed, overthrown, reformed in the world. Yet as I walk along Bammie’s beach now, I look up to the east at the cottage and imagine that if I could only escape behind its small windows, make some doughnuts perhaps, or watch for the little boy in the dingy—that maybe it would be a place where I could think quietly about those bigger changes to make, territories to explore, fears to conquer. Other things I could leave the way they are meant to be—like the seaweed on the beach, and the memory of Bammie before the Alzheimer’s. Of my grandmother when she was Ellie.

Skipping stones at Bammie's beach