Overdue Update Number One: Qurbani Eid in Cox's Bazaar

In the past month, many of the (mis)adventures of these Bideshis have gone underreported. I’ll try to give a few overdue updates over the next few days.

Qurbani Eid fell this year on the 21st of December, just before Christmas – and it happily coincided with our trip to Cox’ Bazaar, Bangladesh’s southeastern beach province (which contains “the longest sea beach in the world,” according to proud Bangladeshis). The trip was our friend Karen’s idea. She is also a Fulbrighter, here doing PhD fieldwork on medical anthropology. She used to live in Cox’s Bazaar as a Peace Corps volunteer, and she wanted to take a trip to her old stomping grounds and visit her old friends. Ben and I were looking for some way to get out of Dhaka during the Eid holidays – we weren’t relishing the thought of witnessing the slaughter of thousands of animals in our neighborhood. The streets are narrow and drainage is poor, and a friend had told us that the blood literally flows inches deep through this area! So we jumped at the opportunity to vacate the premises.

On the 20th we boarded a very plush overnight bus from Dhaka. Tickets were outrageous – 700 taka (over $10) per seat – but we got what we paid for: blankets! and headphones! and comfy reclining seats with adjustable reading lights! And after a 12 hour bus ride, we reached Cox’s Bazaar at about 5:30 am. The air was cool, the streets were deserted, and you could smell a little bit of salt in the air. Karen led us to our hotel, a little place called “Sun Moon.” It wouldn’t have passed sanitation muster in the US – dirty sheets (we asked to have them changed); a toilet that didn’t flush; a filthy trash can – but we decided we could live with it for a few days. Exhausted after our bus ride, we slept soundly for a couple of hours and woke to the strange sound of a screaming animal and loud applause and cheers. We went out to our balcony and had a look to see what the ruckus was – turns out we hadn’t completely missed out on the Qurbani experience, after all. The hotel owner’s family conducted their sacrifice directly beneath our balcony, cutting the cow’s throat and letting it bleed into the street (that part we didn’t see), then tidily butchering it into pieces using the hide as a tarp to keep the meat clean. The work was done so neatly, so efficiently, and nothing went to waste. All the organs, all the meat, even the hide – everything was accounted for.

According to a friend of mine, just before the slaughter of a cow, the names of seven individuals are read out and a blessing is given. The seven names are those who will receive the benefits of the blessing. (In the case of a goat, one person receives the blessing.) When the slaughter is complete, the meat is equally divided among those seven people. Then each of them is responsible for dividing their portion equally into thirds: one part for themselves, one for their friends, and one for the poor. She said that the strict application of this rule would mean that every single part of the cow is ultimately divided into twenty-one pieces. This seems like a very intricate method of accounting; the family whose butchering we watched didn’t seem to be following those rules quite as closely as my friend might have expected. They gave whole pieces away at a time – we watched them give the stomach/intestines to a poor woman, who piled the whole mess into a big basket, hefted it up onto her head, and walked away down the street, swaying under what must have been at least fifty pounds’ worth of innards.

The finer butchering was going on upstairs on the roof. We went up to have a look. Here the women were at work: the men would carry big chunks up in baskets (little drops of blood on the stairs marked their trail); the women sat together on the concrete floor and divided the meat into usable sizes. Their primary tools were boti – knives that curve upward like a sickle blade, with the sharpened edge along the outside of the curve. They rest on the floor on tripod legs, which are held with the feet while you sit or squat on the floor. The floor is to Bangladesh what the countertop is for us Americans: the prep space. It’s a fine system as long as the floor is kept clean… but given my experience with dust and dirt and grime in my own home, I’d just as soon keep my food off the floor.

Anyway, we watched the butchering process until the only thing left was the scraped hide, which the men folded up and dumped in a bucket with the tail flopped over the top. We watched them wash the blood from the street and rinse out the gutter, and pretty soon there was no evidence of a cow ever having been there at all – except for the bucket of hide, that is. Leaning on our elbows on the balcony railing, Ben and I pondered what we’d seen. It made me feel sad: all those animals, all that blood. Millions of them, all over Bangladesh, dying in the streets. All over the world, in fact. So much death. But Ben’s take was different: these people know where meat comes from, he said. They are connected to their food in a way that we’re not. We go to the supermarket and buy a steak and pull off the plastic and toss it on the grill and it’s dinner. We don’t have to think about the fact that it was ever alive, or where it came from, or whether it died a good death. But here you invoke Allah and you spill the blood with your own hands - I think it’s a really humane thing, actually.

We spent the rest of our first day on the beach, which was miraculously empty – turns out that even though Cox’s is the number one tourist destination for Bangladeshis and honeymooners, and even though winter is its peak season, Eid is the one day when people are guaranteed to be home with their families. So we had much of the beach to ourselves that day, and rolled up our pant legs and waded out into the water and looked for shells, and drank cokes at a little snack stand and ate puffed rice with mustard oil and chilies and tomatoes and onions and watched the sun start to set. Toward evening more people started coming down the beach, and we decided to call it a day – walked back toward our hotel through an eerie pine forest planted in the sand. It’s supposed to be a buffer for big storms, protecting the town behind it from cyclones and tidal surges and other Bay of Bengal maladies.

On our second day we paid a visit to the lively harbor, the departure and landing point for fishing expeditions on the Bay. Bangladeshis don't eat much seafood, but in this area they do a lot of exporting - everything from little sharks (hammerhead and otherwise) to squid and octopus and sole. Ben got some great pictures of the boats; the smaller ones will go out for three or four days at a time and the bigger ones can spend up to a month at sea. As frequently happens, we were 'adopted' by a prestigious male in the community who took it upon himself to point out interesting sights and answer our questions. Turns out he has a few boats of his own; this is a picture of him with Karen and me next to one of them. He also took us on a tour of the ice-making facility, a government-operated ice-cube tray that produces thousands of kilos of ice at a time. The ice is frozen in huge bricks, maybe three cubic feet or so, and then they're pulverized under picks and hammers wielded by skinny young men with superhuman strength. Our presence at the harbor was something of a spectacle: we drew a crowd wherever we went and people seemed to be almost in competition to be the first to answer our questions, point something out, pose for a picture. It was a crazy, noisy, smelly place. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The rest of our stay was mostly uneventful: some shopping at the Burmese market in town, some pacing on the beach. Bangladeshi beach behavior is quite different from American and European customs. We sit on the beach. Build sandcastles. Stretch out on beach towels, bake in the sun. Read. Wear sunglasses and bathing suits. Bangladeshis pace. They don’t stake out spots on the sand; they walk in groups along the water’s edge. The kids might take a dip; sometimes the men in their lungis go out for a swim. And the women might wade, up to waist depth if they’re very daring. But swimming in a salwaar-kameez is a recipe for disaster: between the baggy salwaar pants and the enormous carpet of an orna, there’s too much fabric to make staying afloat very easy. So mostly everybody sticks to the shore. Ben and I decided that we’d like to sit on the beach, though, and so we bought an overpriced starched cotton bedsheet at one of the shops in town and spread it out on the sand and lay down with our books. We made quite a scene. At one point there was a whole group of kids standing around the perimeter of our blanket, gawking wide-eyed. I grouched at them to go away. They retreated a few steps, watched us read for about fifteen minutes more, and finally lost interest. As we were leaving the beach that day, we were mobbed by the same group of children – this time they wanted boksheesh – alms. Madam, boksheesh, saar, boksheesh, they chanted. Ben and I have gotten very used to this phrase; we hear it everywhere we go. We tried the “ignore and outpace” tactic, which tends to be generally effective. But one little guy wouldn’t be outrun; he trotted up alongside Ben and held out his hand. Boksheesh, saar, boksheesh. One hundred taka? A hundred taka. About a dollar fifty – an obscene sum for anyone to request here. Utterly outrageous. Ben and I looked at each other and started to laugh. We laughed almost all the way back to our hotel.

On our last day, I received a call from my friends the Barois (aka the Sidr Family). The eldest sister asked where we were staying in Cox’s and was delighted to hear that we were at the Sun Moon. They are my dear friends! she said. Please tell them I said hello. So I did as she asked, told the owner that Irene’s family from Nodda Bazaar in Dhaka said to send greetings. Next thing I knew, we were invited to the owner’s upstairs apartment for tea and a meal – which turned out to consist of the very cow that had been slaughtered two days before. A fitting end to our stay, we thought, and thanked them profusely for their hospitality.

The ride back to Dhaka was as miserable as the trip out had been comfortable. We got tickets on another bus line; the bus was late in departing, the seats were tiny and very uncomfortable; no lights for reading/knitting; no apparent shock absorbers on the bus chassis. We lurched into the night. The road seemed to have worsened terribly in the three days since we’d arrived; we clattered and bounced over all kinds of strange obstacles and bumps. Despite the grimy curtains hung in front of the windows for insulation and the blankets and shawls I’d heaped over myself, I was cold. My window wouldn’t close and there was a constant whistle-blast of chilly air on my face. We tried to sleep. At some point the bus stopped and a whole lot of shouting began. I gradually figured out that the driver of the bus was completely lost, and the passengers were giving him hell for it. He’d been driving through backroads from one little village to the next – that was why the road was so bumpy! It took us two hours longer than it should have just to get to the halfway point.

By the time we reached Dhaka at 6:30, we were grouchy and out of sorts. We found a ridiculously overpriced rickshaw to take us to our house, where we went directly to bed (so nice to be able to stretch out! To lie flat! Not to lurch and bump!). At 8:00 Rashida, our part-time "house help", came up and pounded on our door, asking for us to give her our trash can. I stumbled to the door and tried to explain, in very bad half-asleep Bangla, that we’d been gone for three days, we didn’t have any trash to give her, we’d been on the bus the entire night with very little sleep, could she please just let us sleep and not bother us this morning. I closed the door, scuffled back to bed. Fell asleep again. At 9:00, more pounding on the door. We stirred. I sleepwalked to the door. Tajul, the doorman, wanted to use our faucet to fill his washing bucket to wash the building’s stairs. I groaned. Told him please, not now, please ask someone else, please please please let us sleep. Closed the door in his face. Sleepwalked back to bed. Ben turned to me and started to laugh. “Merry Christmas,” he said. And I cracked up, too, and we laughed until we fell asleep again.