I got a nice surprise for my 23rd birthday when I heard that my parentals were getting me a Bengali-English dictionary. Not that my parentals don’t get me nice things for my birthday – far from it – but more because, well, have you tried finding a Bengali-English dictionary in Australia? Yeah. Didn’t think so.

It turns out that it’s not drastically unreasonable to go straight to the source and purchase straight from Bangladesh. I think the book itself cost about Tk 300, which is less than AU$10, which is not bad when you consider that bilingual dictionaries for more mainstream languages would cost much more than that. The big setback is the postage times. You can’t really blame the Bangladesh Post Office – much of their infrastructure was destroyed in the 1970s during the Independence War, and since then, it hasn’t enjoyed monopoly over the postal system, so it’s no wonder if it’s struggling a bit.

Still, the dictionary made it here inside of two months, so that isn’t too bad.

Here’s what the package looked like when Ma and Pa Atwood gave it to me:

Does that wrapping look funny to you? If so, that would be because it’s cloth. And how might you keep a book bound up in cloth securely wrapped for international shipping? The simple answer is: stitching. Stiching sealed with wax.

I love the Bangladesh Post Office. The cloth smells just like the bazar in Savar, and while I would have liked to have stood there in the kitchen, smelling a bit of cloth which has just travelled halfway round the world, I was keen to get the parcel open. So, armed with scissors, I delicately de-sutured the package enough to peel the cloth off and get at the book inside (which was wrapped in brown paper…like the books I bought from the bazar).

I don’t know what these stamps are for (I was thinking they might have been the post stamps), but they look cool:

And here it is, direct from the Bangla Academy in Dhaka:

A Bangla-English dictionary is sorted by Bangla letters and words. The idea is that I’ll be able to read Bangla text and look up words that are unfamiliar. When I was in Bangladesh earlier this year, I scored myself an English-Bangla dictionary, which is helpful for translating English into Bangla, but this will assist in reading and understanding Bangla. So, it’s no surprise when the introduction looked a bit like this:

The first line says something like: Bangla Academy English-Bengali Dictionary prokasher por pathok shomajer bapok shara amaderke gobhirbhar anondito o utoshahito kore. I’m not really sure what that means, but I’ll probably be able to tell you in a couple of months. Watch this space.

I love books from that part of the world. They appear tacky and low-quality compared to the glossy (or, even better, matte) covers and silky paper pages of Western books, but even though their paper is thin and kind of damp, and the printing is smudged, and the covers are plain, they have a certain appeal.