Five Rolls of Toilet Paper, a Haircut, and a Shave

I got my first haircut in Bangladesh today. Today is Victory Day, a national holiday commemorating Bangladesh’s victory over Pakistan back in 1971, and a popular day for haircuts by all appearances. The first barber shop I went to had all three chairs full and a line of people waiting. When I came looking for a trim they waived me on down the street to the next shop. There, there were also three chairs full and some people waiting, but they told me to go ahead and take a seat to wait my turn. That gave me a chance to take in the scene a little.

In the first chair was a teenage boy. Next to him was an older man getting a haircut and beard trim. In the last chair was another kid. The older man was the first to finish up and I watched carefully to see what he paid. One of the chief concerns anytime I do something new is the question of what to pay? I know a hair cut here should be fairly inexpensive. But what does that mean? Our friend Donny recently went for a haircut and received a haircut + shave + facial. The process took a painstaking 2 hours to complete -way more than he had anticipated. Afterwords the hairstylist declined to state a price. He just asked Donny to pay what he thought it was worth. That’s always the worst. Donny gave 200 Taka. He later checked with Sujit, the cook, about the price. Sujit said it was a little high, but not ridiculous. That was in upscale Baridhara. Here in Rajabajar I was expecting to pay 100-150. The old man gave 30 Taka. Hmmm, glad I saw that.

Next to draw my attention was the teenage boy in the first chair. When the stylist was just about finished - at the point where they ask, “is everything okay?” – he didn’t ask the boy, he asked the boy’s friend (brother? cousin?). The cut looked fine but the friend found something to be critical over. So the stylist took a few more inconsequential snips at the boy’s head before pronouncing him finished and waiving me to take his seat.

As I was sitting there getting the towel wrapped around my neck and water splashed on my head, I continued to watch in the mirror as the two boys finished their transaction. I couldn’t follow most what was being said, but I did understand the numbers. The boy who’d received the cut was silent while his friend did the talking. He kept saying, “something something 20 something something.” To which the guy running the shop replied, “no something 30 something something something.” Apparently they were disputing the price of the other kid’s haircut. The argument gained volume. The man pushed the kid into a chair. The kid stood up. The argument continued. They took it out into the street. More shouting. Is this going to come to blows? They moved out of my line of sight. Quieter now…eventually the shop manager came back in - incident apparently over. Okay, I definitely have to pay more than 20.

Apparently unfazed by the drama, the stylist went to work on my hair giving it a nice trim. Then he splashed water on my face and put some yellow face cream all over it. Then he put some lotion over my stubble, then some shaving cream, and out came the straight razor – Yikes! It was my first experience being shaved by a tool that could cut my nose clean off (or slit my throat) if put to the task. The thought was somewhat disconcerting. I also have a bit of a cold, which made the process even less comfortable. My main concern was trying not to cough anytime the blade was in contact with my face. Thankfully, the stylist was a skilled man and apparently harbored me no ill will. I survived both rounds (he shaved me twice) unscathed.

When the time came, I asked the price. “Sixty,” he said in English. Apparently the facial and extra shave is worth the price of a haircut. Or it’s just another example of the “bideshi dam.” Either way, the price (less than a dollar) was fine with me. I, somewhat guiltily explained that I only had a 500 Taka note to pay with, and could he make change? Yes, of course. He passed the bill down to the shop manager who asked how much? Someone else said “ponchash” or “fifty” and the manager set to digging up enough change. Another customer said, “pach-sho diYe” (500 he has given you!) and rolled his eyes in disgust. The manager, unfazed, handed me 450 Taka in change. I could have made out like a bandit with the extra 10 Taka and everyone would have been happy enough (for all I know the stylist meant 50 but got his English confused), but I went ahead and handed back 10 Taka to assuage my guilt at having paid with a 500. It was received without comment.

One the way home I stopped at one of the local convenience shops – there are about 3 on every block – for some toilet paper. I said to the clerk (in Bangla) that I would take 5 rolls of toilet paper. He looked at me rather blankly and with a delayed reaction said (also in Bangla) “five?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Now?” he said, “you will take five rolls of toilet paper?”
There was a pause. I’m waiting for him to hand me the toilet paper. But he’s just standing there staring at me. Hmm, maybe his statement was a statement not a question. Maybe he just told me to take five rolls of toilet paper out of that sack hanging on the wall. I take the sack down off the wall, pulling the nail it was hanging from out with it (oops), and start fumbling with the knot to get at the toilet paper. The man sticks out his hand. I hand him the sack. He opens it and pulls out five rolls, stacking them in plain view.
“Five?” he says, pointing to the rolls.
“Yes.” I say. Why is this hard? Surely language is not this issue this time. I guess no one ever buys five rolls of toilet paper at one time.
“What’s the price?”
“sixty-five”

Five rolls of toilet paper cost more that a haircut and a shave… I pay and walk away.

A Christmas Wish: A Cow for a Sidr-Struck Family

December in Bangladesh doesn’t feel much like the holiday season at all – especially since the news here is still full of tragic stories about Cyclone Sidr. My friend and research assistant Shakil was telling me about a conversation he had with a rickshawallah the other day. He asked the rickshawallah where he was from, and he said "Borisal" (one of the provinces hit especially hard). Shakil asked whether his family was okay, and the guy said that of his immediate family, eleven people were killed – and they were all men. Sons, brothers, uncles. They were all out on a fishing boat miles from shore - even if they'd had a motorboat, it would have taken them 12 hours to get back after hearing the warnings. But they didn't have a motorboat - just a rowboat. And now it is a family of widows and orphans. The rickshawallah said his youngest son called him from their village and said, "Baba, we have no rice. We're catching shrimp and throwing them into a fire and eating them - it's all we have. Baba, please send money." So the rickshawallah sold one of his two rickshaws for 5000 taka - about 80 dollars, much less than it was worth. And later that day he was planning to sell the second one. That means no income in the future, but it will at least buy his family some rice.

Also affected, though to a less traumatic degree, is a family who adopted me during my first summer in Bangladesh. This family has been so kind to me in the year and a half since I met them; they have been my best Bangla teachers and my first glimpse of real Bangladeshi life. And they have done all this despite their many problems: lack of a job for the two men in the house, lack of husbands for two of the daughters, lack of money generally. They, like so many others, are trying to make ends meet in Dhaka – but they’re barely scraping by. Two summers ago I visited their village home with them for several days, and it was the best experience I’ve had so far in Bangladesh, sharing their food and their entertainment and their talk. They were so proud of their village compound, with its main house built of sturdy brick and its bamboo outbuildings. In one of the bamboo and tin sheds lived the family’s prized possessions – a dairy cow and her calf. The cow produced over 4 liters of milk a day, which provided the village family members with an ongoing source of income – meager (at about $0.50 per liter, or $2 per day) but dependable. In addition, they could sell her calves. She was a very valuable member of their family.

Like so much of the livestock in rural Bangladesh, she was killed in the cyclone last month.

Ben and I talked about how we might be able to help this family. We knew that it wouldn’t be feasible to purchase a cow for them – our budget is comfortable enough, but it doesn’t cover sudden relatively large expenses, such as the $200 - $350 it would cost to buy a cow at this time of year. (Prices are especially high because the second Eid is coming, a festival that commemorates Abraham’s sacrifice with ritual livestock slaughter.) But we thought it might be a worthy cause to bring to our friends and family – if those of you who are able could make small donations to our Christmas Cow Fund (even just $5 or $10), it shouldn’t take too long to come up with enough cash to fund a dairy cow. On a large scale, it doesn’t even make a dent, of course – Sidr left so many dead, injured, homeless… but on a very small scale, for this one particular family, it could mean some income again and a return to a basic level of security. And it’s a way for people to connect in a personal way in the face of an otherwise anonymous disaster on the other side of the world.

If you’re interested in contributing a small amount to this little grassroots holiday project, we’ve asked the McFadden parents to handle processing of checks (made out to Jennifer McFadden or Ben Lamm, or both) or cash. They should be sent c/o Sheri McFadden, 19795 2325 Rd., Cedaredge, CO 81413. My mom will keep a running tally of the funds, and I can post updates on the running total as we hear back from people (and please let us know if you’d be willing to let us thank you by name on this blog!). If we can manage to collect more than the amount needed for a single cow, we think we can find other ways to use the money to help Sidr victims. We have been in touch with Habitat for Humanity Bangladesh about helping reconstruct housing later in the spring, and there are lots of other fund drives happening in various places throughout Dhaka. We’ll find a way to put it to good use – and of course we’ll keep you updated with pictures and blog posts throughout the process. We hope to hear from some of you! (Email us at jenniferlamm at gmail.com or ben_lamm at hotmail.com if you have questions, comments or suggestions - about this or anything else!)

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!

Tales from the Rickshaw Part 3

The other day Bideshi 1 and I were out grocery shopping at one of the few “supermarkets” that is comparable to an American supermarket at a local mall called Riffles Square. We loaded up on expensive convenience foods and approximation western goods for when we don’t feel like trying to make real food out of exotic (or at least unfamiliar) ingredients. We left the supermarket with a couple of sacks of groceries and hired a rickshaw to drive us home. We are new to the neighborhood and don’t really know all the variations on how to get from point A to point B, and we’re also not super competent Bangla speakers, which makes asking directions a little difficult. (I’m sure those readers who have traveled in foreign lands are familiar with the experience of asking a perfectly clear question and understanding absolutely nothing of the answer…) Usually we’re able to tell the rickshaw walla where we want to go and he will either say he can take us there or he can’t. So far, we have always ended up where we wanted to go…eventually.

We told this particular rickshaw walla to take us to West Rajabajar, Indira Road, which is where we live. He tilts his head to the side with the subtle gesture that indicates he can get us there. The journey is complicated by the fact that between Riffles Square and West Rajabajar is Mirpor Road. Mirpor Road is one of the biggest roads in Dhaka and rickshaws are typically not allowed to cross – although maybe sometimes in some places they are able to. When those times are, I doubt anyone could accurately describe. Anyway, we board the rickshaw and get under way. I glance at my watch in order to be able to pay our standard fare of 1 Taka per minute. If we take a reasonably direct route, I know it should take 15-20 minutes.

The journey is tortuous, the buildings are tall and box us in, and the sky is a uniform smog grey. After about ten minutes I don’t know what direction we’re headed, only that I have never been here before and that by this point we should be near Mirpur Road, which is nowhere to be seen. We get to a big road, Green Road, take a left, travel a ways, reach another big intersection, and stop to wait for the traffic light to change (a rare occurrence – the stopping and waiting that is). I ask the rickshaw walla where Indira Road is. He points straight across the intersection. Can rickshaws go on Indira Road, I ask. This is a somewhat stupid question, because I see rickshaws on Indira Road outside our house all the time. No, he says. The light changes and we proceed through the intersection and take a left. Where are we going, I ask. He doesn’t answer. Jen asks the question. West Rajabajar, he replies somewhat annoyed. He’s obviously thinking, “just where you told me to go dumbass.” Jen says, our house is on Indira Road. Indira Road? You want to go to Indira Road? Yes we say. House eighty-eight-by-one Indira Road, Jen says in English (meaning that our house is number 88/1 on Indira Road). He turns around.

Now we’re heading the wrong way on a divided street. Yeehaw! We get back to the big intersection and turn left (which would have been straight across from where we were previously stopped) go a little way and then break off into the narrow side streets. We take some rights, some lefts, and get good and turned around. At this point it’s pretty clear that the rickshaw walla doesn’t have the faintest idea where we are relative to house 88/1 Indira Road. He stops and asks for directions, “basha eight-by-one Indira Road kothay?” No, eighty-eight-by-one kothay, Jen corrects. The men across the street point up the road. Okay, good, we must be on the right track. We go to the next intersection. The rickshaw walla stops again to ask directions, “basha eight-by-one Indira Road kothay?” No, eighty-eight-by-one kothay, Jen corrects. The men across the street point left. We go left. This scenario repeats four or five times – not incredibly confidence inspiring. The rickshaw walla keeps telling us “no stress, no stress.” Finally Jen recognizes a sign (hurray for reading in Bangla!). We are just a few blocks from home, and getting the rest of the way there is no problem.

We get off the rickshaw in our driveway. I look at the watch. Shoot. In all the fuss I’ve forgotten what time we got on, but I think probably 30 minutes ago, maybe 40. I give him 30 Taka. He’s not happy. He wants 100 Taka. This is ridiculous. A rickshaw fare is never 100 Taka. Jen tells him so. He sticks to his guns. 100 Taka! No way, we start to walk away. He follows us into the gated garage. He and Jen are now arguing at high volume. I take the groceries upstairs figuring he’ll leave soon enough. Four floors up I can still hear them arguing. I go back down. The rickshaw walla is pleading his case to the doorman and his family. I don’t understand a word of what he’s saying, but I imagine that it goes something like these stupid foreigners hired me to bring them to West Rajabajar then changed their mind when I was half way there. They didn’t know where they were going and made me drive all over kingdom come. Now they won’t even pay me a decent fare for my trouble. Meanwhile, Jen is saying we’re foreigners, we’re new to this area, we don’t always know the shortest way to go. That’s your job. Don’t think we’ll give you 100 Taka just because you took us the long way round.

Finally Jen says, if I give you another 10 Taka will you leave? The rickshaw walla says 20. Jen pushes a ten Taka note into his hand. At this point I’m just tired of the scene we’ve created. So I take the rickshaw walla by the shoulders. He’s surprised. His eyes pop open like a deer in the headlights and he shuts up for a second. I turn him gently around, push him out the door, and close the gate. He gets on his rickshaw and rolls down the driveway, stopping at the end to talk to the man standing there. I wonder if he is asking directions or deriding the cheating, cheap-ass bideshis that live in house number 88/1 - both probably.

Inside the garage Rashida, the doorman’s wife, is asking what we paid the rickshaw walla. Too much Jen says. Where did you come from she says? Riffles Square we tell her. Should be 15 Taka she says. We gave 40, Jen says. Oooh, bideshi dam (price), she says.

Fifteen minutes later Jen is in tears. She’s replaying the events in her head. One-hundred Taka he wanted. That’s one dollar and forty-three cents. For us that is next to nothing. Why didn’t we just give it to him? She feels terrible. But at the time, money was not the issue. The fact is, a rickshaw fare is never 100 Taka. He was trying to take advantage of us. Asking for 100 Taka is an insult. That’s why Jen was mad.

In retrospect it seems so trivial, so petty. How could it matter to us when the price is so low either way? But it does matter. He was out of line. It is not his place in the world to follow a customer into the garage and ask for more money. From our perspective as Americans to perpetuate that sort of class division seems wrong and unjust, but here to allow a rickshaw walla to charge you 100 Taka, to actually pay him that much, is to display your social incompetence. Not that we retained much dignity in the end. As it turned out, I’m sure we put our social incompetence on broad display by having a shouting match with him. Sometimes it’s just hard to get it right.

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…

A Real Live Snake Charmer

A few days before Thanksgiving, a traveling snake charmer was passing through our neighborhood in Baridhara, calling out to the apartment buildings as he went along. Lucky me, I just happened to be making my way home from a day in the markets as he was walking past. I didn't know what he was selling at first - he carried a bamboo pole across his shoulders with a cloth bundle tied to each end. But as he walked and called, he stopped and played a few notes on a strange-sounding bulbous flute. It reminded me of a clarinet with a head cold. One of the security guards on duty told me he was a "Shapkhela" - which literally means "snake player." And so I decided that this was something Ben and I had to see. After the usual price negotiations, we invited him into the cool shade of the garage, where he unpacked his bundles: three lidded baskets. In one were two cobras, in another some kind of viper, and in the third a skinny green milk snake. Of course the batteries in our video camera hadn't been charged, but Ben managed to get a few minutes of video using our little Sony camera. See for yourselves! (But folks living in godforsaken parts of the country where high speed internet is still unavailable might want to try their local libraries or educational institutions - the video might not play well on a dial-up connection...)

Thanksgiving in Dhaka

We spent Thanksgiving here much as we would have in the states, cooking food, socializing, eating food, socializing, eating more food, etc. The party was held at our new friend Kristin's apartment in Gulshan. Kristin is a former Fulbrighter who has stayed on in order build an "eco-resort" tourist destination in southern Bangladesh that she hopes will draw ex-pats out of Dhaka and give them a chance to experience the country away from the city. Kristin likes to entertain (note how the flowers match the table cloth which matches the chairs) but doesn't really cook much. So she envited her friends over to help with the preparations. We baked some pumpkin pies and supervised the roasting of the turkey. Tuni and Clay made mashed potatoes and "orange fluff." Kristin put together a green bean casserole and Jen whipped up some stuffing out of a box. The chief difficulty in preparing the meal was the fact that the numbers on the temperature dial on Kristin's oven bear no correlation to the actual temperature in the oven. So we were forced to use the somewhat low tech stick-your-arm-in-and-see-if-its-hot method of temperature monitoring. Consequently, the turkey took about 2 hours longer to cook than expected. Gee, that's never happened before...

The food was all yummy. The Americans ate plenty. The Deshies ate less. Watching the six-year-old daughter of one of Kristin's friends pick gingerly at the food on her plate we realized, "oh yeah, kids don't like weird food, and this food is weird to them." We had cooked for twenty Americans and so had lots of left-overs. That's all right with me, though, 'cause I love pumpkin pie.