Dhaka Week One

I can’t believe I’ve been back in Dhaka for a week! It feels like much longer, sometimes, because so much has happened. My Bangla is coming back quickly. I really love hearing it spoken on the street again. I’m not quite to the speaking level I had when I left last August, but I’m sure that will come soon. We’re living in new dorms this year, in Bashundhara, a new residential area in northeast Dhaka. I was disappointed when I heard about this, but now I’m happy to live here. It is not the diplomatic zone like Baridhara, so there are less bideshis living here. There is a small bazaar right behind our house – it’s even closer than Noddabajar was last year. I wandered back into it on the first day, and found a lot of vegetable sellers and tailors. Our house is about a 10-minute walk from the university campus. The class schedule has changed since last year. Last year, we had class from 9:30-2 five days a week, with a couple breaks in which we could get some cha from the university canteen or something. This year, we have class 9:30-12:30, a break where we go back to our dorm for lunch, then more class 1:30-3:00. Dinner is not provided, but we get a really good lunch at home every day. On Thursdays, we get out of class by 12:30 so we have time to go to different parts of the city. On Friday I took the public bus to Newmarket for the first time. There wasn’t much traffic because it was the weekend, so it only took about 45 minutes to get there. Five of us went: Katie, Avram, Daniel, Kim, and I. It was fun to be back in the bazaar, bargaining in Bangla. I was the most advanced student in the group, so I became the de facto translator when necessary. The others did well, though; Daniel, who is a beginning student and only knew a few phrases and words, managed to have a bit of a conversation with some men in the market. I bought some clothes, but my best purchase was a pot with a lid and a frying pan for 300 taka each. We can now boil water and fry vegetables in our apartment! Friday night, Daniel and I went to a wedding reception with Moumita and her family. I had planned to wear my jamdani sari, but since it was not finished being dry cleaned I had to borrow one from Moumita. The wedding was close, and her brother drove us. The location of a Bangladeshi wedding is indicated by decorating the entire outside of the building with colored lights. Inside the building, more lights decorate the room where the reception is held. The bride and groom sit on a stage with chairs, and all the guests take pictures with them. The rest is very much like an American wedding reception, where everyone sits around, talks to their friends, and eats food. They served goat biriyani and a few other wedding foods. There was also a drink that was made with yogurt and kind of tasted like spicy mustard (at least, this was my impression). For dessert, they served a mishti (sweet) that tasted a lot like rice pudding, but did not have any liquid; it looked like orange-red rice grains. Moumita’s brother spent the whole meal trying to get Daniel to eat with his hands, even though everyone else at the table (including Moumita and her mother) were using silverware. On Saturday, the advanced classes went on the first field trip. We visited two monuments: the Mirpur Intellectual Martyrs’ Memorial and the Rayerbazar Killing Field Memorial. Both mark locations where massacres occurred during the Bangladesh Liberation War. In Mirpur, Bengali intellectuals were specifically targeted and buried in a mass grave. When we visited the Mirpur monument, there were some very cute kids trying to play cricket on the grounds. It was very hot and the sun was very bright, so they decided it would be more fun to follow us around and talk to us. I had a good conversation with them in Bangla. We visited one other place on this field trip, and that was the Mirpur Benaroshi Polli. At Benaroshi Polli, weavers make a special kind of sari that is not made anywhere else in Bangladesh, and then shopkeepers sell them right around the corner. We first visited a shop, where the teachers asked the shopkeeper to show us different kinds of sari. There was a wedding sari, where the gold thread of the design was so thick that it overpowered the base color. There was a helud sari (for the betrothal ceremony), which was red and yellow. There was another wedding sari, with hand stitched embroidery and sequins that took an artist two months to create. And finally, there was a sari for Pohela Boishakh, the Bangla New Year, which had a white body and red border. After the demonstration, a few of us bought Benaroshi saris. Mine is a pearlescent purple-blue color. Leaving the store, we walked around the corner and found the weaving establishments. Inside, there were six looms set up along either wall. They were pit looms, so the weaver sits in a hole and the thread is stretched in front of the loom along the ground. Each of the looms had a series of thin boards with holes in them running into a mechanism at the top. It looked kind of like the roll of a player piano. When we asked what they were, the weavers told us that they were the pattern for the saris. On Sunday after class we had a field trip to meet the founder and manager of University Press Limited, the academic publisher in Dhaka. It was a very interesting visit, in which we learned about the history of the press and more about the language policies right after the Liberation War. University Press Limited was founded in response to the need for English-language textbooks for English medium schools, which were controversial in the newly independent Bangladesh. It also filled in a gap left by Oxford University Press when that publisher closed its Dhaka office. The owner offered us the opportunity to help with the publishing process while we’re in Dhaka this summer, so I may do some copy-editing for them in my spare time.