Chittagong, IV
I stuff into a bag three or four cotton salwaar kameez, a book of poetry, and a toothbrush: I’ll need little else for a few days back in Chittagong. I feel guilty for leaving Dhaka so soon: but running down the stairs and into the waiting car, the tightness in my chest begins to loosen. The windshield wipers continue their heavy back and forth when the rain stops, the roads clear, and the rickshaws pick up again their pace. Through the cleared glass I see a young, lean man in pleather pants and an unbuttoned blue shirt stoop down to pick up a white object that he brings to his nose: a flower, I realize, that he tucks behind one ear, stands, runs a hand through his long, slicked-back hair before he continues on his way, his collarbones jutting through the wet fabric of his shirt.
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From my red plastic seat in the terminal, I watch a young girl clad in a glittering gold dress twirl, her long dark hair flaring out. Something twists sharply in me: in just a few years, her bare knees, as well as the rest of her legs, won’t see the light of day. For now, she begs her mother for a cup of “coffee” runs to beat her brother to the small food stand serving, among other things, some of the best shondesh in town. As she blows into the small, waxy cup, I can already taste the thick, milky sweetness. The call to evening prayer washes through the terminal, and the women all pull the scarves that hang loosely around their necks over their heads with one smooth, seamless motion. It’s beautiful to watch. The men lay out, in one corner, tasseled, velvet mats, and begin to pray.
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The plane touches down in Chittagong, and the rain slides down the plastic window in long veins. I adjust my scarf around my shoulders as I try to slip unnoticed through the crowd of thin, dark men waiting directly outside the exit. Still, I feel their eyes on me, following me to where Kurshid stands, holding open the car door. I want to ask them what they are waiting for. I want to tell them to stop looking at me. I want to know what they see. Is it lust? Is it resentment? Anger? Curiosity? I want to know what they dream about, what they long for. I don’t want to know what they dream about, what they long for. I want to not clutch my scarf tighter when they look at me. I want to stop thinking of them as “they.” I don’t know how to begin.
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Kurshid. Who has worked for my grandparents and our family for years: since he was a little boy. “Salaam alaikum, Tarfia Apu,” he says. I can hear the smile in his voice, though the car is dark. I squint through the window to see the many wiry bodies hurrying through the rain, rickshaws bearing passengers with plastic blankets tucked around their legs. “Kemon acho—how are you—Kurshid Bhaiya?” I ask. “Chole jaach —it’s moving along,” he replies with a typically Bangladeshi response. I am newly stunned by how familiar his voice is, though entire years go by without us speaking. I remember Kurshid at my uncle’s wedding, when I was five and he was nine: sloe-eyed, serious, though he ran and laughed with us as we threw brightly colored powder at each other, screaming with delight. He is fixed always in my mind this way: a child, his dark skin stark against the kind of white collared shirt he still favors, stained with red, orange, violet.
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Kurshid. Who is now a driver, after years of working for our family. Who is smart and kind. Who asks after my mother, father, brother, husband. Who calls my aunt to tell her that we are on our way home. Who pedals each day from his house 6 kilometers away to my family’s home to work all day. The class structure in Bangladesh that affords me the privilege of sitting in the back seat of the car while he drives is the same one that fills me with peculiar feelings: the usual Western guilt. Bangladesh is predominantly Islamic, a faith that, at its core, demands egalitarianism. How, then, can there be this hierarchy so akin to the Hindu caste system? Why am I sitting in this back seat? Why aren’t I sitting in the front? The words for these two separate classes—kajer manoosh (working people) and boro lok (big folks)—hang in the air between us like the mosquito netting over my bed.
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I ask Kurshid what it means to be Bangladeshi, and he gestures towards the cars honking and trying to maneuver around each other in the rain-thick traffic. “There is no system here,” he says. “People get to wherever they’re going however way they can . . . this country is filled with lazy people and thieves, people who constantly break their wadha.” Wadha? “Promises.” We’re going faster now. We pass ships, docked in the port, their once-white bodies dark with rust. I’ve passed these ships as a child, gritty-eyed with jet lag, leaning against my mother’s shoulder, as an adolescent, sullenly listening to my Walkman, and now, as an adult—these hulking metal bodies the first things that remind me I am here, truly here—anchored, however unwillingly, to this country.
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The cars remain at a standstill on the main road, where men still crouch at canteens barely shielded by plastic sheets, the light from candles flickering over cups of tea they pour into saucers to cool. Women dressed head to toe in black burkas hurry over to a stall bright with pyramids of oranges, dangling bunches of bananas. A man and a woman drift over to a waiting rickshaw, oblivious to the rain, their hands brushing against each other as they walk. The lights of the neon sign outside a restaurant boasting the best “broast” in town casts strange, flickering colors on a young man running past, his wet t-shirt gigantic with Michael Jackson’s face from the “Thriller” years. Kurshid and I have been talking for an hour, though the drive from the airport is usually half that.
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He tells me that Bangladesh is all about family. That the worst sin is to devalue family: a son marrying a woman he privileges over his parents, a father marrying off a daughter only for financial gain. He tells me that only he, out of his three brothers, has taken responsibility for his parents, though they have never cared for him. He tells me that after he drops me off to Mehedibagh, my mother’s homestead, he will sit beside his father, sick in a hospital. He tells me that the rickshawallahs slogging through the flooded streets are doing so for a grandfather, a daughter, a sister-in-law. He tells me about his children, his, wife, the land my grandparents have helped him buy. He tells me how he helped my grandfather through his daily bathing once he started deteriorating. I think of Kurshid offering his upright young back to my grandfather’s hunched, shuffling last days. He knew, I realize, my grandparents more intimately than any of us actually related by blood could.
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Though he has been dead for over a decade, I startle at the clarity with which my grandfather’s dying comes back to me: in the room he shared with my grandmother, the windows bright with light as my uncles and aunts wept, as my mother went wild with grief. “Baba . . . oh Baba,” she cried. It seemed as though his body was still moving, but it was swaying from so many of us holding on to his arms, his legs, his hands—his skin, dry like my own, still warm. I don’t remember, strangely, where my grandmother was. What rise up instead are nights I slept as a child in that room with her and my grandfather, safe between them. The longing to see her, to ask her everything fills my throat. Tomorrow, after Friday prayer, it will be Kurshid, not me, who will stand and read dua—blessings—over my grandparents’ graves. He will notice that the trunk of the tree he planted, because of all of this rain, is beginning to thicken, the leaves beginning to bloom.
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We move quicker now through the mass of cars, rickshaws, and CNGs. I think of the rickshawallahs and CNG drivers: how they view the people they pick up as handfuls of takah they will earn not for themselves nor their families, but for their households—shongshar, in Bangla. Shongshar is not just the space within which one family resides, but many . . . aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, wives, husbands all living in the same plot of land for more than one generation. Bangladesh, I realize, is an intricate network of these households, not just individuals. The traffic Kurshid now navigates his way deftly through is a mere microcosm of that network. The Westerner in me sags with fatigue at the thought of all that extrafamilial obligation. “Kurshid Bhaiya,” I ask, “How does anything get done here? How does this world keep going?” I swear I can hear him again smiling, though he doesn’t answer. We turn towards the entrance to Mehedibagh, where the walls, I know, are dark with dense vine. “We’re here, Tarfia Apu,” he says, and the iron gate swings open.
Dhaka, VII
The weekend of Durga Puja Keith finds a small, sick kitten whimpering through the rivers of human waste that tunnel through Dhaka. When he brings her back to the flat he shares with the other Fulbrighters, we coo over her, make exclamations of wonder at how tiny she is, how soft. But there is also guilt—which we voice one night sitting on the rooftop, the Dhaka sky shawling us in its starless darkness. How can one justify saving a kitten and not one of the many beggar children winnowing the streets, imploring at every car window?
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I begin to notice how many words in Bangla there are for love. Maya, a word suggesting some combination of tenderness and affection. I begin to see maya in the stream of phone calls from aunts, uncles, cousins who ask how I’m doing. The way my aunt fills the long table with as much food as it can hold, just because I’ve stopped to visit. The way my cousin’s wife, who I have met exactly twice, runs a hand over the top of my head when she passes me on her way to the kitchen. The way the tailor insists on bringing me a rich, steaming cup of milk tea as I unfold another square of fabric, as we both gesture the shape of a body over it. The way Marufa stops to help me with my Bangla homework. Bhalobasha, she says, pointing to the black-finned letters for romantic love. Shundor, she spells out patiently as I clumsily shape the letters for the word beautiful.
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Durga, the kitten, begins to gain strength. She is so small that we take turns cupping her in our hands, but tenacious enough that she crawls her way out, limps clumsily across the floor. I stroke Durga’s small, silky head as she passes, rubs a cheek against my knee. When she turns to look at me with large, ink-blue eyes, I fall in love immediately and irrevocably.
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What’s obhiman? my new friend Mekhola repeats in response to my question. We’re sitting on the sun-drenched wooden floorboards of a cottage that looks out to the Padma river, an hour and a half drive outside Dhaka. I’m amazed at how willingly, in a few short weeks, this successful Bangladeshi thirtysomething has welcomed me into her life, her circle of friends. She invites me to accompany them to the Padma resort for an afternoon of snacking and chatting beside open windows, the breeze lifting from the river fresh on our faces. Obhiman, she muses, happens when you are deeply hurt by someone you love. She ignores my protests and urges a freshly fried, spiced potato filled shingara into my hands. But the thing about obhiman is that only someone you love can hurt you that way, she continues, gazing past me to breeze-bent stalks of wheat silvering the sky.
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The cat died, Biz tells me in the car on the way to the Liberation War Museum. I watch a young, seam-thin man leap into the bus stubbornly honking its way across the road. The driver yells at him, gestures angrily to the bus clambering already with so many bodies. An elderly woman looks out one of the bus’s wide, glassless windows, then leans her scarf-draped head back against the seat’s faded headrest, closes her eyes. A young girl in torn dress stops, taps the car window with her small fingers, presses her face to the glass. When? I ask, averting my eyes, turning instead to Biz. Last night, she says, and we both fall silent until the young girl passes.
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Later that night, I’m in bed early, wiped out after a day of sitting in standstill traffic for hours, only to get to the museum 5 minutes before closing time. How can I be so exhausted from doing nothing? I complain to my mother. Dorjo, she says. Patience. Before I can retort sharply or roll my eyes, she says, Your grandmother had such patience. Can you imagine? Raising ten children? I miss her so much, she says suddenly, and begins to cry. I’m too ashamed to speak for the long, few moments my mother’s sobs hang between us.
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I know. I miss her too, I finally say. I think of Grandmother’s room, its whitewashed walls, bare now of the many pictures of her grandchildren that once hung there, of the small, still coil of Durga’s body. I hang up the phone, resume reading Lynda Hull’s “Street of Crocodiles.” The glittering lights trellising down the side of the building across the street flicker through the window, scattering blue and green dots across the page. A sky foaming jade, cobalt. Yellow fabric/of a dress run through the hands, the full sweet taste//of cream, I underline carefully. Pages waiting for their ink, for/everything damned, for everything human & lovely.
Dhaka, X
Renowned Bangladeshi singer Ferdausi Rahman, who I’ve been interviewing about her memories of the Liberation War, invites me to her music academy where children come twice a week to learn classical Bangla songs. I follow her car through dusty, pot-hole ridden alleys, past men standing off to the side, their hands behind their backs, their eyes squinting through my car’s tinted windows, and then we are driving through gates a guard hurries to slide open, through a high archway into a courtyard framed by buildings the color of butter and cream. I want, more than anything, to go press my face against all that cool, yellow stone, but Ferdausi Apa’s door opens, and the black and red fabric of her sari swings sideways, one sandaled foot emerging from the crisp pleats to plant firmly on the ground.
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What is it, exactly, that you’re here to do? people always ask me. My answer, more and more, no longer fits into the neat white boxes of the online Fulbright application. War heroines . . . liberation . . . the identity of the Bangladeshi woman in the 21st century . . . sexual violence . . . poetry, I no longer parrot dutifully. There’s so much I don’t understand about what it is to be a woman in Bangladesh. There’s so much I don’t know.
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Come, Tarfia, Ferdausi Apa says with a generous smile, and I’m struck again by the incredible poise of this woman whose sari delicately rustles the path past a high table set with a harmonium and a set of tabla into a room crowded with people gazing at her with naked admiration. Please, sit, she says, and gestures to the seat beside her, the dark wings of her pulled-back hair catching midday light sluicing through the latticed stone fretwork. When she firmly presses the black teep into her forehead and the bangles on her wrist tinkle, I’m a child again, navigating through a landscape of my mother’s and aunts’ swishing saris, the bright sounds of gold clinking against gold all around me.
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Women talking about other women. She’s so fast, they say. Wears sleeveless blouses, dances with boys. She’s such a good girl, we say. Wears a hijab, prays five times a day. She’s so tacky, she says, wears full party makeup everywhere she goes, spends all her husband’s money. She’s so she’s so she’s so.
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Ferdausi Apa rests her hands on the arms of the chair, lifts herself to her feet, and glides elegantly to the waiting harmonium, where a young man is already standing, the palms of his hands waiting on the taut surfaces of the tablas. The children stand in rows before her, hands clasped before them. She unhooks the bellows with one hand, raises the other to the small keyboard, and begins to play, nodding at the children to join her. They do, and their voices fill the courtyard, the late afternoon sunlight settling behind them, the familiar thwack-thwack-thump of the tablas layering the rich, reedy sounds of the harmonium that Ferdausi Apa continues to play expertly, smiling encouragingly at the children, at me. Amar shonar Bangla, ami tomai bhaalo bashi, we sing. My golden Bangladesh, it’s you I love.
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Women covering their heads in the streets with the hems of their saris, with scarves. Women flinging their hair behind their shoulders, hurrying past in salwaar kameez or jeans, their hands raised to beckon rickshaws or CNGs. Sliding into the backseats of private cars, the signature bright red soles of their Laboutins untouched by the feathers plucked from chickens then thrown into the streets, flattened by footsteps or tires into a smudged gray landscape. Pressing their gaunt faces and fingers into car windows, arms heavy with undernourished babies.
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Some of the children begin to fidget, especially a curly-haired chubby girl twisting her fingers anxiously, looking everywhere but at Ferdausi Apa. Those summers spent in Chittagong as a child come back to me: sitting cross-legged on a bed with my other female cousins, learning from the music sir to sit prettily behind the harmonium, my hand clumsily pushing air in and out of the bellows against a backdrop of sunlit palm trees divided by grated windows. I want to gather that young self and this chubby girl in my arms, bathe them in all that green light. The children fill their lungs with deep breaths, and Ferdausi Apa’s slender fingers press again and again into the yellow and black keys, the familiar notes pouring forth from the carved, polished wood.
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Young girls tossing their hair, jutting out their hipbones in front of a TV flickering with the bright sashay of Bollywood film songs. Girls with only their faces showing through tightly wrapped hijabs, pulled out of school to be married or employed as servants. Batting eyelashes heavy with mascara, screaming insults at their nannies or maids or mothers. Giggling at other young girls in sequined dresses, twirling and twirling and twirling the light across and out of every room.
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Ultimately, Ferdausi Apa mused when I interviewed her, what is our goal? What will your daughter, for example, be? I think of my cousins, rain-heavy days we pretended to be housewives inviting our sisters-in-law over for dinner. More rice, Bhabbi? we’d ask, insisting on spooning invisible curry onto empty stainless steel plates. What a beautiful sari, Bhabbi! we’d exclaim, fingering invisible fabric. I think of the anger in my mother’s eyes the day she discovered I had been secretly buying miniskirts to change into at school. How she closes her eyes now to lift her face to me, patient and still, when I offer to do her eye makeup. Ferdausi Apa stops playing, and the children fall silent. Go now, she says, to your lessons, and they turn to each other, laughing and talking, hooking arms as they walk away. Ferdausi Apa latches the bellows back into place, and the buildings around us soon swell with their voices raised again in song. Come, Tarfia, she smiles again, the long aachol of her sari swaying as she turns to offer me her hand. 
Tarfia Faizullah’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Ploughshares Cohen Award.
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