Holy Jackfruit!
A friend at work lent me the somewhat-tackily-named Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure to read while supervising visits. I remember saying to her, “Am I going to hate this book because it bashes India?” when she handed it to me. She laughed at me and said, “Maybe.” Now, I am halfway through, and it seems like Sarah Macdonald is maybe not bashing India so much as trying to entertain through highlighting India’s differences to Western countries. It is more like having a playful poke at an endearing-yet-indelibly-strange cousin.
And, to my surprise, I am inspired. Reading about Ms Macdonald’s escapades makes me want to write about my own (albeit brief) experiences in the subcontinent. I certainly didn’t attend marijuana-soaked Holi parties, lose my hair from a bout of double pneumonia, or become a ‘chameleon of karma’ (still not sure what that means), but the genre of autobiographical-travel writing still beckons.
So, what follows is a hasty fragment of what very well be my debut into the world of almost-non-fiction: Holy Jackfruit! A Bangladeshi Adventure.
I can’t remember much about the flight from Bangkok which took us over the Himalayas and into Bangladesh – after the torturous nine-hour leg from Sydney to Thailand (via Insomnia, Air Sickness, Irritating My Father-In-Law By Needing To Get To The Aisle While He Was Sleeping, and Melbourne), it felt wonderfully brief. We ate prepackaged Thai curries and played with desserts which were, allegedly chocolate mousse. On the plane, I noted men with shaggy black beards, women wearing headscarves, and a woman sitting opposite me working on a business plan. I wondered if she was possibly resentful about descending into this, one of the poorest placees on Earth.
The thick grey monsoon obscures how close the ground really is. One minute, we are seemingly high above the city; the next, the landing gear drops, and we touch terra firma with an almighty heave. Through the window, we see great fountains of water rising up from the runway. Lorien grips my hand, and perhaps I let out a quite swear word beneath the roar of tyres on the tarmac and the pounding grey rain. And then we slow, slowly, and we have successfully arrived in Dhaka. We disembark up a leaking corridor and emerge into the undercrowded terminal of Zia International Airport. As we walk towards Immigration, my father-in-law regales us cheerfully about how he read an English-language newspaper saying that a plane had only just recently crashed in nearby Chittagong while trying to land in the monsoon rains.
We are now foreigners. Women wearing long black abayas which cover everything but their eyes, or elegant printed saris, corral their chidren and wait patiently while their husbands deal with the paperwork. A loudspeaker overhead announces various things in Bangla (the only word I recognise is dhonnobad, which is an equivalent of ‘thankyou’ and is apparently not used very much by native Bangla speakers) and strangulated English. We join the queue marked with the sign ‘Foreign Passports’ and stagnate. Meanwhile, I notice the line for people from South Asian countries runs considerably faster than ours. It takes nearly an hour before we reach the desk.
A man with an outrageous moustache checks my passport, glancing back and forth from me to my photo (two years old and twenty-five kilos heavier). I hand him my immigration form, in which I have described my ‘suitcase, cartorn, trank, bag, and cabin bag’ and denied possession of any silver bullin, rectified sprits, cartoons of cigarettes, gas ovens, or candelabra. He stamps my passport and welcomes me to his country – I have been psyching myself up to try some of this foreign-language bizzo and thank him in his own language, but I disappoint myself when I chicken out and use the English words.
Our group splits in two – half proceed to the baggage collection hall, where armed guards patrol like olive ghosts with machine guns, and half, myself included, go to try their luck with currency exchange. We avail ourselves of the nearest booth and hand over our Australian bills to a paunchy man wearing a bright yellow polo shirt. He tells us, by way of his calculator, that one of our dollars will buy forty-three of theirs. This seems to be a bit less than expected, but we shrug and ask for a receipt. Yellow Polo Shirt scratches his jaw and smiles vacantly at us before pointing again at the calculator screen. I start riffling through my Lonely Planet phrasebook for anything useful, but to no avail – it seems unfortunate that we can’t reply in calculator-speak and ask for him to give a receipt, so we move onto the next booth and end up getting a better rate (and a receipt) anyway. We return to the rest of our group, triumphant and flush with foreign notes bearing foreign faces, only to be told that our luggage has still not arrived.
Were we back in Australia, this would mean forming an orderly queue to see an airport customer service person and lodge a request for our luggage to be forwarded on, but we are no longer in Australia. This is Bangladesh, and it seems that, here, queues are about as fashionable as OH&S regulations. My father-in-law has, I understand, already joined the scrum surrounding the ‘Lost and Found’ desk and managed to leave our address. Lorien’s brother guesses that our bags are winging their way to Tokyo; Lorien says Bahrain; I say Turkey. We decide to cut our losses and leave the airport empty-handed.
Sliding doors part, and suddenly, I feel like I am drowning in the moist air. It is drunk, rather than breathed, and soon my glasses are fogging up and I cannot see who is shaking my hand and welcoming me to Bangladesh, or who is trying to take my bags or offer me assistance. I glimpse the land beyond the concrete pathways of the airport – palm trees, grass, and pretty flowers growing in a nearby roundabout. Perhaps my visions of burning heaps of rubbish will not come to fruition just yet.
As I am putting a trolley back near the main doors, I am approached by a Bangladeshi man who proceeds to inform me that this is not my country.
“Excuse me,” he says. “This is not England.”
My brain is tired, and I think I may be getting drunk on the pollution and the monsoon, because I actually think he’s being serious and alerting me to the fact that I’ve landed in Dhaka and not Dartmouth. “I know,” I tell him. “This is Bangladesh.”
“Yes, but this is not England. This is not your place.”
I feel suddenly shamed by the directness of this man’s remark. Instead of answering him, I busy myself with returning the trolley to its family and then finding a place near the ute, near my group, near other white people, and away from his hawkish statements. I spend the next forty-five minutes quietly puzzling over what that means, and after a while, I realise that I am still feeling vaguely offended. Of course this is not my place. Why would he feel the need to point that out? The very whiteness of my skin makes that obvious – so does my weird accent and my inability to communicate, my Western clothes (especially since, in a moment of foresight, I chose to wear a t-shirt with ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’ printed on it the day I fly into a Muslim country). Does he think I am English? Does he think I am colonialist? Does he think I am filthy rich? Does he think I am guilty?
Brown faces stare at our car as we drive through villages. The words of the man at the airport ring in my ears. Dark eyes look in the windows with an expression that could be irritation, or could be stoicism, or could be disgust. I want to apologise to them all.
Word nerd
Unofficially, I am reading a funny bit of fantasy called The One Tree, by Stephen Donaldson (who I keep wanting to call Donald Stephenson). I have missed the previous four books in the Thomas Covenant saga, as well as the following seven, so I am a little adrift when it comes to understanding it, but most of the narrative hangs together. My biggest complaint is probably the silliness of many of the interpersonal interactions going on – it reads a little like a teen movie, a little like a Mills & Boon book, a little like Lord of the Rings. That aside, though, Donaldson’s impressive vocabulary is driving me back to a dictionary every time I read, which hasn’t happened, like, ever.
Consider the following extract from Chapter 7:
Suddenly, power seemed to flash around her as if she had been dropped like a coal into a tinderbox. Bells clanged in her head – chimes ringing in cotillion on all sides. Bubbles of glauconite and carbuncle burst in her blood; the air burned like a thurible; the world reeled.
Stunned and gaping, she panted for breath. She had been translated by water and travertine to another place altogether – a place of eldritch astonsihment. An opalescent sky stretched over her, with the suggestive evanescence of night and the specificity of day. And under its magic, wonders thronged in corybantic succession. Nearby grew a silver sapling. Like flakes of precious metal, the leaves formed a chiaroscuro around the tree, casting glints and spangles as they whirled. A furry shape like a jarcol went gambolling past, and appeared to trip. Sprawling, it became a profuse scatter of flowers. Blooms that resembled peony and amaryllis sprayed open across the glistening greensward. Birds flew overhead, warbling incrnate. Cavorting in circles, they swept against each other, merged to form an abrupt pillar of fire in the air. A moment later, the fire leapt into sparks, and the sparks became gems – ruby and morganite, sapphire and porphyry, like a trail of stars.
And these were only the nearest entrancements. Other sights abounded; grand statues of water; a pool with its surface woven like an arras; shrubs which flowed through a myriad elegant forms; catenulate sequences of marble, draped from nowhere to nowhere; animals that leaped into the air as birds and drfted down again as snow; swept-wing shapes of malachite flying in gracile curves; sunflowers the size of Giants, with imbricated ophite petals.
And everywhere rang the music of bells – cymbals in carillon, chimes wefted into tapestries of tinkling, tones scattered on all sides – the metal-and-crystal language of Elemesnedene.
Words to learn and use (though perhaps not in everyday conversation) include: eldritch (supernatural, unearthly), imbricate (to regularly overlap), ophite (mottled green), porphyry (rock with large, conspicuous crystals), arras (a wall hanging or tapestry), catenulate (chain-like), exigency (a quality of requiring much effort or urgency), anadem (a wreath or garland for the head), and copasetic (satisfactory).
Across the oily river where the road had been
The rain came down yesterday.
Driving to uni was fun, though a little scary. I enjoy driving in the rain – windscreen wipers provide soothing rhythms, back and forth, back and forth, sometimes in time to the radio’s artificial beats. I can feel the tyres slipping to and fro on the oil-slicked road, and there’s puddles lying just out of reach. Street lights and headlamps cast hot argent pools across footpaths and grass which sparkles with tiny pinpricks of fire. As the hidden sun sets, I notice how green the grass is.
The dash from the Macquarie Centre to campus is made somehow longer by the pounding rain, and by the time I reach the pedestrian crossing which bridges the shops to the university, I am already soaking. A river of umbrellas, bristling with spikes which threaten to take an eye out, makes its way in exile towards the bus stands. I had forgotten my umbrella. I half-run, half-walk against the horizontal rain, but I stop at the bridge over the dry creek bed when I notice, in the half-light, that it’s no longer a dry creek bed. The river runs again, with actual water, churning from the northern end of the campus towards the lake. It’s worth getting wet to watch it for a while. Then, shaking my head dog-like, I run for the labs.
In other news, I have discovered Skype, a free Internet telephony client that lets me call other Skype users from my computer, for nix! If you are in contact with me by phone (or want to be), I highly recommend you save yourself the expensive phone calls and download this nifty piece of software (requires a microphone).