Our New Digs

After two weeks of Internet problems and another week of post-moving-in chaos, we can finally send an update: we’ve settled into our new home. Various adventures and misadventures have ensued over the course of the last few weeks, which Bideshi 2 has chronicled. (The latest of these is the installation yesterday of our new hot water heater in the bathroom. The guys from the shop came expecting a 20-30 minute process involving installing the 15-gallon heater in its space, connecting some pipes, and plugging the thing in. They ended up staying here for about 7 hours, drilling and chipping and hammering away at the brick walls in which our bathroom plumbing is apparently embedded. They had to put in a new electrical box, extra long pipe fixtures, and who knows what else. But the good news is that the operation was successful, and we can now have a warm shower any time we want!)

Ben and I are very happy with this arrangement. The flat is ridiculously large for a couple, especially in Bangladesh – it would normally house a good-sized extended family with its three large bedrooms and two bathrooms, a sitting room and a dining room. Tuni and Clay had the glass divider removed that separated living and dining spaces, to the main space is open – usually Bangladeshi apartments are arranged in a sequence of boxes with lots of doors, like the mouse-mazes from Psych 101. But this place is comfortable and breezy, with windows on all four sides. The large window in the sitting room looks out onto the tops of three coconut palms, with clusters of green fruits like oversized grapes. From my seat on the sofa (recycled from a retired ship dismantled in the Chittagong wrecking yards, Tuni told me), I can see the balconies of neighboring apartments, where buwas (housemaids) in their mismatching colors hang laundry, sweep, fill and empty buckets. There are very few cars in the narrow winding strets of this neighborhood, but there are lots of rickshaws dinging their bright bells, and feri-wallahs selling fish or chickens or spinach or pots and pans and towels – whatever ware they have, they carry on their heads or in their hands, and with their voices loud and strong and tense they call out to the apartments: oi, murghi! (Hey! Chickens!) We buy our milk from one of them; the sweet doorman Tajul introduced him to us and explained in his Mymensingh dialect (among many other things I didn’t understand) that he will come every day, and we will pay him once a month based on our own reckoning. The milk is delicious, especially after a month of consuming powdered substitute.

I can hear all kinds of snippets of our neighbors’ lives – when they are sweeping or pounding laundry or putting away the dishes, the chink of silverware, the clack of plates stacked. The crows make a great ruckus all day long, and hundreds of other twitters and croaks and caws come in through our open windows. The temperature here now is delightful: December is the start of the “cold” season, which menas something in the neighborhood of 70-75 degrees. (Outside people have started wearing shawls, knit hats – even scarves wrapped around their heads!) It is such a blessed change from summer and the sweltering heavy heat of borsa. Monsoon. We will have two or three months of beautiful weather before the wave of hot dry still air settles in March or so.

This apartment building is a small one, with just five flats. The landlord and his wife, their three-year-old sone, and two younger brothers live on the top floor; we are on the fourth. I haven’t met anyone of the lower floors yet, though I caught a few people staring at us through cracked doors when we moved in. In the garage on the ground floor lives Tajul the doorman (darwan in Bangla) and his wife Rashida, who is the landlords’ buwa and who will help us with sweeping and laundry three times a week. Their youngest son, ten-year-old Shohagh, lives with them and keeps an eye on his little nephew, Shadin, who is three and as adorable as any three-year-old I’ve ever seen. They think we are great fun, and come visit us every day and bang on my tabla drums. They’d like to play with the computer, too, but they do as they’re told - they don’t touch. They just watch, eyes as big as saucers. Rashida is worried about our eating habits; she sends up big plates of rice with little dishes of vegetables every few days, and over the last weekend she asked us to eat dinner with them in their little room in the garage. They live in virtual squalor down there, with hardly any possessions of their own and no money to buy fish or meat, but they are wonderful hosts. Rashida served us rice cakes with bitter mustard, and rice with yellow dal, and we ate until we thought we’d burst. Such is Bengali hospitality – most clearly demonstrated by those who have the least to share!