Busy in Bangladesh_world

Busy in Bangladesh

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Today I\'m thinking back to when I\'d just left Thailand, to my first days in Bangladesh, way before I\'d taken an Indian prison train to the floating graveyards in Varanasi, before I became sick at the Untouchable village, before I picked through seashells in the sands of the Jordan Valley and before I took pictures of orange fur-clad, ecstasy-popping girls at the Vienna Love Parade. I was sweaty and tired. I\'d stayed up all night at the airport in Bangkok, waiting at 11pm for a 6am flight to Dhaka.

Customs was quick and I was out of the airport in just a few minutes. I wandered to a highway rotary and asked in broken Bengali directions to Old Town. I shook hands with the curious and offered smiles to the shy, then wedged myself into a black diesel fume-coughing tin can. From the window of this bus was where I first saw the beggar. A few days later, from the tattered foam seat of a rickshaw was where I saw him again. He was a muscular man with skin as black as olives and patience like a stone. He lay face down in the sidewalk of the busiest section Dhaka, a city of 14 million people, the densest population in the world outside of Hong Kong. A filthy white bandage sheathed his left foot, a green rag covered his head, a brown tin alms bowl lay flung beyond his stiff outstretched fingers. The heat from a billion directions made him greasy with sweat. It came east from Burma, west from India, south from the Sundarbans and the Bay of Bengal, and in every direction from the thousands of passers-by. This is what I saw, trapped in smoggy traffic under the roof of an egg-shaped mýn?cab: old women hobbled, young boys leaped, girls in black burqa shuffled while children and old men crouched in the shade of an overpass. The beggar was dead, or seemed dead. Playing dead. Dead, warmed, and melting into vapor, his molecules mixing with the creeping smog that hovered like scheming hands clutching a pillow over the face of the exhausted city. The hundreds of thousands of us stepped nimbly over and around him. No one had a single taka to throw in this starving man\'s bowl.

No country on earth is prouder of more tragic origins. It took the blood of 2 million murdered intellectuals to flush out Pakistan. Tanks were aimed at the universities in Dhaka and Hindu minorities were dragged out of their homes and shot. Today the country survives through seasons of famine and flooding. Every neighborhood is a slum. Every village is sick with arsenic, jaundice, or hunger.

But it is also a very beautiful place to go on holiday. ---------

Rommel was the one who answered when I banged at his door. Through my father and friends of my father, I\'d gotten an invitation to meet a family in Dhaka. Their address and telephone number were written in faded blue ink on a tattered envelope that I clutched in my sweaty hand. I mistook him for his father, someone much older, and he laughed when I tried to call him sir. "Come in! Have a coke. You want to have some samosas?" I nodded. "Cook! Make some samosas! Get chai!" Turning back to me he asked "So, do you want to live here?" That was my introduction to the Hussein family. They wanted to put me up in one of the air-conditioned rooms, pay for everything, introduce me to their hundred relatives and treat me as much as they could like family, though I was a stranger to them.

Himel, the youngest of the three brothers, was fond of telling me that you could get anything in Bangladesh if you had money. His father was head of the police department for a neighboring province and his mother managed the family\'s real estate investments and a beauty salon. They were absurdly wealthy by Bangladeshi standards and could keep more servants in their home than you and I would ever dream of employing. Still I had to disagree with him. There were many things you couldn\'t get in Bangladesh. Even with my 30 pounds of clothes and possessions, I had things they had never seen before. Yusuf , the 13 year-old servant, marvelled at my minidisc player and toyed with the buttons until he\'d erased half my music. The first time he saw me taking off contact lenses, he panicked and went to Kala, Auntie, screaming, "Why does he have an extra set of eyes!"

Robin was the oldest son, a heavyset 24 year-old with an savant\'s facility for foreign language. Frustrated by the pace of his English class, he\'d snatched an English dictionary and memorized it in 45 days. He used such complex and archaic vocabulary that conversations left me more confused than I would admit. He was half a semester away from getting his degree in Queer Studies and promised me, "Yes, we\'re going to be having some really wonderful, bombastic colluquys!"

Kala, the mother who made me call her Auntie, was a radiantly happy woman full of love for God and for her family. Her generosity humbled me and there was nothing I could do to fall from her favor, though my host brothers tried hard to arrange it. Of all things Bengladeshi which Rommel thought I should learn, profanity was first priority. Carefully he led me through strings of syllables that summed a vile lexicon of trash. Usually I had no idea. Chut ma-re nar pula? "No, chut ma-re NIR pula." Chut ma-re nir pula. "Good! Now say it to Kala. She won\'t mind! It\'s good." Chut ma-re nir pula. I\'ve never seen anyone\'s mouth drop so quickly, anyone\'s eyes turn so fast to ice. "Great!" Rommel shouted. "Now say the other one." Kan kir pula? "NAAAAAA!" Kala screamed, and looked at Rommel as if to ask: How could you teach him these things? I had only an inkling of an idea of what I\'d said to her, something like "Whore\'s son, I sleep with your sister!" But not so nice.

It took only a few days to master Bangladeshi profanity. Once I was proficient, I started getting phone calls from Rommel\'s friend Bepul. Hello? "Bastaaaaard!" Bastard? Come on over here, you mother. I kick your scrawny ass! (Shala? Materchote! Sisdem koydeh demo!)

It was hard not to feel like I belonged here. I saw horrible things in Dhaka, but these were countered with introductions to people who turned my perspective upside down. I saw a man with sores and scars like melting icicles on his face. "Someone threw acid at him," Robin explained in a hushed voice. I saw uniformed police tackle a man in a train station and beat him half-conscious with bamboo staffs. Standing at a bus stop in Mymensingh I tried hard not to trip over the feet of hundreds of families asleep on the black tar sidewalk. Men, women and their children together under tattered blankets with nothing else to their names. There were children here who could never grow to their full height because they would never have enough to eat. The children were pests who might resort to any ploy for money or candy. In the daytime I\'d push them out of the way and curse them out as they fixed their eyes on the lump my wallet made in my pocket. At night they lay sandwiched between their mothers and fathers, asleep on hard pavement. I thought, that kid is only 10. He begs and makes a nuisance of himself to get whatever he can, but he\'s still only 10. What can I give to help them? 2 taka, enough money to buy a cup of chai or a roll

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