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.