No Thank You

One of the strange things for a bideshi in Bangladesh is the fact that Bengalis almost never say “thank you.” It’s not that they just don’t say “please” or “thank you.” They don’t even have the words. They do sometimes say “dhonnobad” (which translates as “thank you”) if you pay them a compliment or give them money or do some other favor. But it is a stronger word than the “thank you” we use in English. In day-to-day transactions there is no “please” or “thank you” (or “excuse me” for that matter, though occasionally someone will say that in English). Even to a rube like me, the lack of “please” and “thank you” rubs me the wrong way when it catches me off guard. Today, for example, we have some guys installing a hot water heater in a little crawl space above our bathroom. When I got home from class they were working up there with only two sputtering little candles to see by. Having done a fair amount of similar work in the past, I am sympathetic to the need to have good light to work by. So I figured out a way to rig up an incandescent bulb in the crawl space. The workers adjusted their tool bag so that it wasn’t blocking the light and kept right on working without saying a thing. Rude right? No, just the way it’s done around here. Out in the street it’s even more pronounced. People are all the time bumping into each other, pushing each other out of the way, etc. and no one says anything. The fact is though, if you said “excuse me” every time you brushed shoulders with someone, you’d never say anything else. So maybe there is method to the madness…