Country Roads, Take me Home

One crosses four stages when s/he comes to a new country, said the facilitator at the orientation for the Fulbright FLTAs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The four Hs. First it is the Honeymoon stage where everything about the new country seems great and fun. Everyone seems so friendly and the place appears to teem with excitement. Then comes the Hostility stage when the dreams are deceived and you are faced with all the shocks and hazards of a foreign territory. The Humor stage comes after that where you laugh at all your naiveties – “ha ha ha! I didn’t know how to use the vending machine” or “hi hi hi! I was lost at the New York Penn station for 2 hours until my friend came and rescued me”—and so on. The last stage is the Home stage where you come full circle and feel confident and comfortable and at home in the new country. With all its pros and cons you love to stay in the country which was once so foreign to you. She sincerely hoped that we all would experience the Home stage in the US at least by the end of our 10 months stay, if not before.

Laws and rules never work smoothly with me. If there is a law book that stands high in my estimation, it will be the Murphy’s Law. For me, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. Things have been going wrong from the very first day I arrived here, or even before that. I almost missed the flight from Dubai to London. I was sitting in the airport lounge and reading an all time favorite book of mine (Chobirr Deshe Kobitar Deshe by Sunil) when I heard they were announcing someone’s name and telling it was the last call to board. It was some poor Mash-kat Khassen and I genuinely felt bad about him/her and went back to my book. It was almost time for my flight so I sluggishly went to the airline counter and they told me to run to the aircraft because the gate was closing. They were actually announcing for me! Things that went wrong after coming to the states would require me to write the length of two novels. I plan to write about them sometime later.

I don’t have much work to do here. I live in a fairly nice apartment with two other people. I go to class, come back, cook, eat, read, write or listen to music. It sounds like the perfect little life that any Bangladeshi girl would want. But if you ask me, I wanna go home.

Let me share with you what happened today when I was waiting for my shuttle to go my university. I was standing in the corner of the street and I heard some noise and shouts in the apartment right by the road. Then suddenly the window glass from the first floor broke and fell on the road in thousand of pieces. I don’t know what happened there. But I could be severely injured in a matter of minutes. I was standing right there half a minute ago! That was scary.

I had one of my best experiences in that particular corner of the road as well. Some weeks back I was standing there waiting for the shuttle. It was raining quite heavily. I didn’t have an umbrella so I was trying to cover my head with my jacket. A car stopped in front of me and a man gave me his umbrella. He saw that I was hesitant, but he insisted that I took it. He later gave me a ride to my university. I figured out he owns a bar at the corner of the street where I lived. He told me giving me the umbrella was his good deed of the day.

(To be continued)

photo courtesy: flickr.com/photos/ilovethecolts/2673760915/

All That Glitters

The book that i am reading now is called 'A Golden Age'; a very aptly named novel that deals withthe 1971 war of independence of Bangladesh. I bought this book about a year back.i had also leafed through it. but as i am reading it closely, i am pretty disappointed. I understand that the war of Bangladesh -- a struggle of epic grandeur-- has somehow been blurred, exoticised and/or sometimes melodramatized in this book. I won't even talk about the culture specific errors.i have so far figured out 33 of them... and i have about hundred more pages to go to finish it.who knows i might just score half a century! I will jot everything down for an academic article that i am planning to write soon.

I was talking to an American professor some weeks back and he told me how his students found this book overwhelming. i said that the book wanted to cater to your taste, so i am not surprised. He didn't understand why i was being so hard on that poor book, especially after it had won this country a reasonable share of international recognition. "You are really being emotional", Said T.S, "after all it is a novel and you cannot deny the creative liberty that the author might take."

Well, Mr. T.S. .. i understand that you and others alike in the US are great advocates of creative freedom even though the artists there still feel huge pressure from the state authorities, censor boards and so on. Don't get me wrong here. I am all for the freedom the artist too. But taking liberty does not mean presenting you with something full of historical errors and trying to pass it off as authentic.

It doesnt matter you said.. well.. what if somebody writes that the American civil war was fought between 11 southern states and one Mister chinese-american... or that during the hot summer afternoon of 911, 2001, two planes attacked the empire states building in New York city and it changed the history of the world? Do you think America will accpet it because one Ms. Whatsoever has to exercise her creative freedom?i don't think so. IF you are writing a historical novel, you better get the history straight. Surely, I wouldn't minda new kind of reality had you been using magic-realism to tell the tale. That was not the case here, right?

For the sake of arguing, you could still say that these distorted facts won't matter to you. But If facts about my country is distorted, It will matter to me. 1971 is not merely a year for me- for us- it is golden past, a time etched into our conscience as the symbol of love, protest and passion. It matters to me when the glitzy western publishers go all ooh-aah about a novel that is so poorly wirtten and more importantly one which deals with an event like the 1971 war of independence with such commercialized yet amaturish manner.

You will not understand it... and it doesnt matterto me.

You can go to hell, because you don't matter at all.

To Celebrate You, My Love

Fear not, my love
I will make such arrangements that the army
Will march past us with roses on their shoulders
And salute you
Only you, sweetheart.

Fear not, My love
I will make such planning that
Crossing the wilderness, breaking all the wire-fences
And loaded with all the memories of the warfronts
The armed cars will come to play sonata
Only at your door steps, my sweetheart.

Don’t panic, my love.
I will play such tricks that
The B-52s and the MIG-21s will only groan overhead.
I will make them pour chocolates, toffees and candies
Like paratroopers into your backyard, my sweetheart.

Don’t worry, don’t worry
I will maneuver things in such a way that
A poet will give command
And all the fleets in the Bay of Bengal
And all the voters in the next general election
Will unanimously support the lover, my sweetheart.

All possibilities of war, be sure my love, will evaporate
I will engineer the election and the singer
Will become the leader of the opposition.
A group of red-blue-golden fishes
Will look after the trenches in the borders
Smuggling anything but love will be prohibited. My sweetheart.

Don’t agonize now, my love
I will make it possible where
Devaluation of money will stop
And there will be a boom in the number of soulful poetry.
I will make the dagger fall from the assassin’s hands
Not for the fear of public hatred, but for the dread of public kissing.

Don’t be afraid, my love.
Like the sudden attack of spring on the wintry park
I will have all the revolutionaries’ line into the city
To play accordions, only for you.

Don’t be afraid, my love
I will ensure that you will get
At least four lakh taka as soon as you deposit
One rose or one Chandramallika in the State Bank.
Or four cardigans in exchange of a Jasmine.

Fear not, fear not, fear not, my love
I will ascertain that the navy, the air-force and the military
Will keep you safe day and night

And celebrate you… only you
My love.

[This is my translation of Shahid Kadri's "Tomake Ovibadon, Priyotoma"]

Ah Calcutta!

“You are going to my hometown! Kolkata is great” said Sahana when she heard that I was taking a flight to Kolkata in less than some two hours. Her eyes brightened. Kolkata is home to her, though she now lives in Dhaka. We were not sure of this trip even before 24 hours. One of our group members was rejected the visa making everything uncertain for everyone else. She got it the night before and the tour was on again. Others started by road the next morning; while I was held to witness the historical presence of one of my favorite (and one of the most outstanding) writers writing in English as he lectured at IUB on February the 22 nd . He is originally from the place I was going to. He is from Kolkata.

Amitav Ghosh has the capacity to detonate a grenade inside your mind. I admit that I was absolutely swept off my feet when I first came across The Shadow Lines. The narrative is so intricate yet powerful that for a very long time everything I read seemed utterly bland. For a very long time I was in a trance. I would only think of May who witnessed how the riotous mob cut open her lover’s throat; or, the anonymous narrator who hopelessly loved the girl he could never have. What tormented me most, however, was the longing of the narrator’s grandmother for Dhaka—her home—which had been callously cut off her life by the shadow lines of partition.

Every time I went to India after that, I could not help thinking of the invisible shadow lines of separation and of connection. I thought of it this time too. As I moved around Kolkata, I came across many people with a peculiar sense of longing for Bangladesh. One salesperson started calling me Boin instead of Didi and also started talking in a broken Barisal dialect when she realized that we are from the other side of the border. A friend of my brother kept talking about how much his father misses that part of Bengal and how he himslef doesn’t care a shit about that being born in Kolkata. I met my mother’s brother who has been living in India since 1964 and only has faint memories of Rajshahi. May be he has forgotten how his mother, my grandmother, looked 44 years back. She, now 84 years old and paralyzed from waist down, sometimes sobs “Debu, Debu” but soon her physical ailments overpower her sense of loss and she is pulled back to the reality. My grandma’s brother, a retired government officer, has a longing for Balihar, a remote village in Naogaon and his birthplace. He, nevertheless, understands that the Balihar of his imagination will not match with what he might see. Therefore, he doesn’t also want to puncture his mental picture.

We stayed in Kolkata for 3 days. It was fun for us girls; we did crazy shopping. The guys, however, had to remain satisfied with carrying our bags to the hotel. The steamy street food, the tana-rickshaws, the glitzy shopping malls, the mushrooming cineplexes and the tourists make Kolkata the olla podrida of colors and cultures. The flavor of internationalism is not altogether absent. But yet Kolkata remains different; different than all the other places that we might go to. It is a place with which we all share a love-hate relationship. We get angry why the hell we need visas to go there… it is not REALLY bidesh. . It is dirty like Dhaka yet it is lovable. After all, we share the same language if not the same nationality. There are so many shadow lines to connect us. Let’s not think for a while about the lines that separate. Ah Calcutta!

Leave Taking: Some Thoughts

It has been really interesting to observe how the decision of leaving can tie you up to that paticular place more strongly. As long as you live there, you really do not belong there. It's only when you leave you begin to relive the traces of the left behind zone. It is like childhood; you dont love it when you are a child. You learn to recognize the innocence after the innocence is lost. Or, It is like Youth-- one can only fully appreciate the beauty and the joys of it when s/he is past it-- a friend of mine told me once. It is, i guess, the eternal condition of human mind....a starange voyeurism towards the lost connections... an uneasy yearning for the irrecoverable past.

I'm being almost boringly nostalgic today because i'm taking a leave for good-- from two places that have played crucial parts in my process of growing up. We are shifting to a new house and im giving up my UIU job.

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter, anyhow
An' it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don't know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm trav'lin' on
Don't think twice, it's all right

It ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An' it ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
I'm on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin' anyway
So don't think twice, it's all right

It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
I can't hear you any more
I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right

I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right