Sick in Srimangal

After a many houred train ride on a narrow seat, next to a sick man, I, writhing with headache and body aches, tried to sleep to Srimangal where the tea plantations are in Bangladesh; the countryside is brilliantly lush and green, and the small city is a smaller bustled version of Dhaka. I got to my hotel though and begged just to sleep, which is did until the next morning, when my guide picked me up at 8:3o to go trekking in the forest. This leech is just a precursor of things to come; I am still riddled with several black leech marks on my legs - a highly exotic and attractive asset, I might add. The photo of this tumble-down bridge didn't bring confidence to my already sick body, but we trudged along, and I was so happy to be outside and walking that I keep up a good clip until we heard these high pitched whoop in the woods. My guide said it was the Gibbons setting up their territorial boundaries and was I ready to go off trail. Sure, I was game; after all, I'd borrowed a pair of Saad's black socks to wear with my red sandals. When we went "off trail," we really went into the densest tropical forest I've ever experienced with hills, gullies and spiders the size of my fist; however, I can show no more photos because the blogger isn't working. Sigh

I am trying to upload a photo of one of the Gibbons monkeys, which probably won't impress, but they have no tails and yet swing with more physical prowess than I could imagine, flying through the tops of the trees with such acrobatic ease that my heart thudded into my sandals when one went swooping at such speeds and heights. None of my photos actually catches the spirit of the things, so I shall skip it and do more later.

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tops

Where were we?

The blogger was down ALL day yesterday, and I'm not sure what I have and have not shared, but a few nights ago I went on a walk around the National Assembly (Parliament building) and the sidewalks were full of people, chatting, walking, playing and hawking. It was the night version in a low key way of the daily hubbub, a word I've always wanted to use legitimately, and THIS is the city that smacks of "hubbub"!

When we had dinner, Saad's sister, a lawyer, and her husband came, and even later, maybe after 9 or 9:30, his brother arrived. Here is Saad's mom, Shamim, as we were chatting after dinner

In the morning when we leave the house, these women are sitting on the sidewalk, chatting, making baskets or other things, and they stay until school is over because the traffic is so bad that going back home after dropping their children off for school would take such a long time that they just stay!

Because I'm doing some investigation into the use of the Bangla language - Bangladesh means land of Bangla, which is their language - I am photographing signs that give me pause, and I noticed this No Parking sign at the end of a driveway. The sign has no Bangla on it, which assumes that the drivers will know English, but the bizarre thing is that the "drivers" in this household are Bengalis who do not speak English! The man who has been driving me all over the place speaks a little English, but we mostly nod and laugh, thinking we understand each other; one day recently he asked it I would like to see where his mother-in-law lived, and I was totally game. We went into a teeny, short door in the side of a fence, walked through a "courtyard" the size of a bathroom, down a line of rooms, all with flip flops outside the doors, and into one room to say hello to his brother-in-law who seemed just to be arising from bed, which took up most of the room, giving maybe three feet of floor space on one side, the other jammed against the wall. This is the family house. Note that things are stacked and folded neatly, there is a television, things are hung up, but this is the family home. When we went back out into the courtyard, the woman who had been squatting in a dark room, peeling and cutting a vegetable asked if we would like tea. They brought one chair and a small table, urged me to sit, brought the sticky, sweet conconction, and one woman began to fan me. I yearned to get her to stop, but I knew that it would be miscontrued; this is what they do for a guest. I took photos, we laughed when I struggled to find a Bangla word for "delicious," and they all finally just said, "very good," which settled the whole matter, and we all tumbled into laughter.

When we returned to the house, the ladies were still sitting in wait for their children, and when they invited me to sit down, I did, discovering then that each of them had wares to sell; I bought some junky earrings in the interest of international relations, and we became friends.

One day late...

I am behind a day in my blogging so will have to try to piece together again where and what from yesterday. This is Doiub, the deaf Imam who drives everywhere with me and argues with the driver about where to turn and which way to go. We left by 8:00 to get down to Old Dhaka, and the traffic was unusually clear; I took this rickshaw driver's picture from inside the backseat of the car, and he gave me a rather pleasing grin!

We first went to the Sadarghat Boat Terminal on the Buriganga River in Old Dhaka, passing, as we walked along, some late risers like this gentleman, and some stalls that looked ready for anything plastic. Once we paid our dues, we walked out onto the long docks over the grubby, trash infested river, which I shall leave for the imagination, and looked at the big boats that people use as commuter boats and some of the smaller boats in the harbor. The docks were crowded with people, selling and begging as usual, but more bustling to catch a boat than anything; there was purpose here on the docks. A woman in a sari scootched along on her bottom for lack of two legs, but she maintained a pretty decent speed.

From the docks we went to walk around Old Dhaka where everything imaginable was for sale, mostly foods, books and plastics, the staples of a good life. We even stopped to buy some fabric and drank some overly sweet tea, laden with sticky carnation milk AND sugar, just in case. I was rather fond of it. People approached me, asking where I was from or just stared unflinchingly at the stranger. I smiled my goofy American smile and shook hands whenever I could, taking photos that the people always wanted to see and then said, "thank you," as though I'd given them some kind of gift or honor by taking home their photographs! No worries here about souls being stolen by the camera, thank goodness! We had the knife sharpener, the fruit hawker, the books salesmen, and the juice makers, all vying for space on my camera, but I tried to be fair and catch everyman at his best; my favorite was the man biking a huge haul behind him who said loud and clear after I captured him on film, "thank you!" Just recognizing his efforts seemed to make him grateful; it's the least I could do!

The juice man crafted a special concoction that seemed to feature flies in amongst the fruits, and I confess that I passed up this delicacy but thought a photo might suffice.

I'll write more tomorrow, but it's late and I'm ready for bed.

Dhaka Day Two - finish

A little bit of coke goes a long way.

Before visiting the Kahn Parliament in the pouring rain, I wanted to walk around and went out to the red-haired guard who then passed me off onto a man walking by the house, who was going to a client's. We walked around until he found his client, we met with a man, then we were seated in a small conference room, given tea and biscuits, and then I said I had to get back, so we got up and left - very bizarre! I did get this lovely photo of the tea container and the shadows on the doors.

Some of the texture as we scraped through the traffic...

Once I returned to the house, I ate some heavenly breakfast - eggs, breads, fruits, etc... and then off in the car with Hussein, who drove, and Doiub, a red-haired imam. They drove me to the Parliament, and I was disappointed not to be permitted to walk around inside, but they were very accommodating and tried to get me as close as possible so that I could take decent photos; I was initially so moved to see it from this perspective that I stood, awed, tears in my eyes.

After the parliament, we drove to the National museum, which was in many ways a joke, and then in the afternoon, I went to the bazaar around the corner with Hussein.

Bangladesh!

I arrived yesterday, obtained a visa on arrival, was met by Saad's friends and then driven home by his driver, Hakim. The vehicles on the right caught my eye, little enclosed steel meshed three wheelers that we locally call CNGs. I was struck by the paint job on the busses - at least some of them looked as though they'd been through the wars, and traffic came to dead standstills much of the time. Horrid.

The house is luxurious with a staff of servants that far exceeds the number of family members living here. I have a wonderfully cushy room with a bathroom, ac and a ceiling fan, so I was happy as a clam. We stayed up late to chat, but I crashed around 10 because the time change made it really midnight for me; I was up at the crack of dawn, about which I shall write tomorrow as I'm headed to Old Dhaka early in the morning with loads of other stops along the way - Liberation Museum, Dhaka University, the Lalbagh Fort, etc...

I gave a peek into what I did today at the top of the blogs; more photos will come tomorrow. Now, bed.

Penang to KL

We began the morning in Little India in Penang so that Pearl could finally introduce me to Apum Taluk or some such thing, which turned out to be coconut milk and rice flour with scrambled eggs in the center - TDF! BUT, we had to have this at Amina's stand because she makes the best, and I can tell you how hot it is behind her burners where she stands, wearing her little cap, gesticulating and smiling and chatting all the while because I went back there and almost died from the heat of the burners. The egg pancake is eaten with the hands and dipped in a rich curry sauce on the side. While I ate TWO of these things that I've been hearing about since I arrived, Pearl and Chandra talked to the couple at our table, another dark man and lighter woman. They spoke in Bahasa Malay, which I could understand only a limited amount of, but after the other couple left, Pearl told me they were a Malay couple and the four of them had been bemoaning the fact that the younger generation did not socialize together anymore - Chinese sticking with other Chinese, Malays sticking with other Malays, Indians sticking together as well. They remembered a more forgiving, more open social system.

The night before Pearl and I had decided to mend the quilt I had given her from Laos, and after much discussion, brain storming, arguing even, we came up with a plan; however, because I had given her the quilt, I insisted that I do the sewing. When I saw the simple Singer she had been working on with no light and a foot pedal that she had to pump, I relinquished my offer and let her sew. Not surprisingly, like most things she does, Pearl sews like an angel, and she had that thing practically finished by the time we went to bed. I should have known that young Chinese girls had to learn to cook AND do all the sewing; she used to sew all her daughters clothes AND do smocking on her dresses. What can't this woman do?

Yesterday she had made a lovely pinapple "rojak," which is really a salad, but cutting the pineapple was such an art with lines cut all around the fruit before cutting it up into pieces. These are some of the ingredients for the rojak sauce, and of course it had ground peanuts sprinkled on top. I think I will have gained 15 pounds by the time I get home!

The bus to KL took almost 6 hours - only meant to take 4 - and by the time I got here, I felt confused; the station had been redone from a 3rd world grunge to sparkling chrome and windows. It totally threw me off balance in an area that I otherwise felt confident I knew. Once I got myself out of the station, I instinctively found the old route to Bukit Bintang where I found The Green Lodge and got the usual room with one bed and a chair for 65 ringet because it is a "double" bed instead of single, which would have been 55 ringet. Life is getting pretty fancy when I'm paying more than $20 for a room! In the interest of frugality, I did get dinner for under $10 and that did include one small Tiger beer, a luxury I doubt I shall enjoy for the next 10 days as I will be spending time with a muslim family in Dhaka. KL was quite a scene this evening, as kids were setting up for Saturday night; the bars were filling up, restaurants were bustling, and a band was getting ready to play. I moseyed around until it began getting dark and headed back to my generic room. I don't like moving around crowded cities alone when it's dark, especially when it's dark and Saturday night...

Tomorrow I leave for Bangladesh, no visa in hand, but faith in my heart, a smile on my face and cash in my wallet so that when the immigration officer talks to me, I am ready to do whatever I need to do to get a visa on arrival, which my former student assures me American tourists can obtain. Crossing fingers, sending good karma....

Finally, even if it isn't the most staggering I've seen, at least I'm happy to report that there IS graffiti in Kuala Lumpur! It's the plastic bags that kill me; supermarkets do not give them out in Penang, and I think the hawkers shouldn't be permitted to either.

Last Conference Day...

Of course we began our day at the market this morning: shopping for the ingredients for Pearl's cooking course and then ordering and eating our breakfast - BIG responsibilities. We ate Kueh Kak, a stir fry of chopped rice flour pieces that were like fried potatoes and also eggs and sprouts, not leaving out our kopi o - coffee, black. As we ate at the rattly, tin table, we watched a man get ready to drive off on his motorcycle with his dog.

On our way out to the Park Royal Hotel, we passed this house, which I understand is the only house left in Penang with this kind of fancy tile work on the front.

I got to the conference in time to hear my Iranian friend give her paper on Emerson and Romanticism, after which there was a heated discussion among the Muslim Romantic "scholars," trying to determine what the Romantics meant by "God." This man claimed that God as creator is above those of us who are "creatures." There seemed to be some question about the God of the Romantics and the God of Islam - clearly not the same God, argued by the Muslims. I did ask what the difference was, but there was a certain amount of hedging when I asked why the God of Islam was hierarchical as opposed to a God that functions as the essence of a divinity, the spirit within all of us, including the natural world. The conversation got sort of stuck, but we tried to deal with the issue, and I think we did establish that without the formal obfuscation of religion, our "Gods" could be the same with respect to our ideas of a higher power. We were friends, after all.

After that session, I didn't see any that looked thrilling, most being given in Bahasa Malay, so I suggested to my Calcutta friend, Afroja, that we take a bus to the Spice Garden for a little relief. We took the tour, tasted the leaves and spices, and then saw these froggies on the lily pad. They made me feel better than the netted frogs in the market. Sigh.

When we got back and had lunch, Afroja said she had to go to her room for something, and I was left at the table with my friend who had been in the discussion about Romanticism this morning; he had gotten himself a big bowl of several kinds of ice creams with berries and chocolate sauce over the top. He was enjoying it so much that I had to take his picture, which I did, and he reminded me that everyone had returned to the rooms for prayer, the facet of Islam I had completely forgotten. Of course, that's where all my pals had gone!

I went off to the lounge to read and then took off my shoes and went out to the narrow beach to put my feet in the water. Ah... When I returned, I went to hear a man talk about Sharia law and employment and was rather astonished to learn that people who had more need were meant to be rewarded more than those who did not; for instance, a man with 5 children needs more money than a single man, no matter what the competence of each employee. Hmmm, food for thought.

After a really deadly final plenary session with a man who had gone to Temple University (!) who talked about his fear about the marginalization of the Humanities in academia. I mean, he used words like "scary" and "fear." Then he talked about the REAL troubles in Malaysia: Hell Riders, baby dumping and free sex. Mercy! This was all too much to me, and the man sitting next to me had fallen asleep, so I skipped out after trying to make it through for over an hour. Afroja and I got some tea and returned for the group photo.

Then, I left and while I was waiting at the bus stop, the man who had fallen asleep next to me walked over to the bus stop and said to me, "Oh, we were looking for you to get you some tea." I learned that he had been hired by the University from Bonn, and he was coming to live in Malaysia with his family this year. We took the bus together, and I learned that he'd spent 10 years at Yale. I never learned his name!

The Only American

Having spent two days at the International Humanities Conference at the Park

Royal Hotel in Penang, I am reeling over my role as spokeswoman for America! I am one of the few non-Muslim presenters at the conference, and I definitely am the only woman wearing a short skirt! My presentation was the first day, so I got to swim through the next day and watch my friends squirm through their pre-presentation angst. When I first arrived, I noticed a woman who had no jacket on and realized she, like me, would be freezing cold in the overly air conditioned auditorium for the welcoming ceremonies. We began to chat, and I learned that she taught Bengali in Calcutta - lucky for me as I could pick her brain about Bengali writers.

After an enormous buffet lunch and more presentations in the afternoon, we dispersed at 5:30 to reconvene at 8:30 for a dinner at which "traditional dress" was encouraged; I borrowed Pearl's cheongsam that I'd posed in several years ago, and off I went on the bus, following Pearl's warning that I must not hold up my long dress as I walked because the slit would reveal my underpants. Oh, horrors! I tried to behave, but when I saw the culinary spread before us, I wallowed in the desserts especially: sago pudding with browned cane sugar and coconut cream was to DIE for! Pearly and Chandra rolled me home, tossed me in bed, and I was up at the crack of dawn to get to Bengali friend, Afroja's, paper at 8:30.

She didn't walk into the room until 8:45, oblivious that the presenters had already begun without her. After the first talk she quietly reminded the facilitator that she had arrived. Her paper and powerpoint were excellent, ordered, sophisticated and thoroughly substantiated - her 6 Bengali authors writing about Muslim women's rebellion. Talag, a term I was not familiar with, was in the titles of two of the stories; it means divorce, and Afroja and I talked about the different laws governing talag in Bangladesh (state law) and India (family law).

The two Iranian women at the right teach English Literature and their subjects are Emerson and O'Neill. I kept asking them what they thought about Persepolis but neither seemed to know of it. I told them that another Iranian had presented on the novel's use of images of the veil, but they missed it. Finally, by the end of the second day I got them together with the fellow who had written about it, and it turned out that they had been at school with his professor; this called for another photo, which seems to be all we do at this conference - the flash bulbs popping at every turn!

I had a long conversation with Malaysian novelist Chuah Guat Eng, who writes in English and has gotten flak from the Malaysian academic community for not writing in Bahasa Malay. One of her novels is a detective tale, and I'm going to track both of them down when I'm in KL this weekend. She asked about my writing, and I had to confess that I'd not finished anything of substance; she admitted that all writers feel that way, which, of course, makes me feel like a coward. Sigh.

I took the bus back to Pearly and Chandra's house in the gloomy afternoon drizzle after standing at the bus stop for what seemed like an age, but I watched as maybe 10 monkeys frolicked in the trees across the street, flying from branch to branch, leaping across to other trees, skittering up and down the branches, goading each other to do it again. Just as I took this picture of the view from the bus, we stopped at a large crowd of people blocked the road; a car had gone over the edge and smashed down on the rocks and sand.

The Conference

I thought you might get a kick out of the program for the conference I will be presenting my paper at tomorrow; the following link should get you there: http://incoh.usm.my/INCoH2011_Parallel_&_Poster_Sessions.pdf Please note the list of names, none of which I can pronounce, and the dinner which is "traditional." There ARE those days when I yearn for that pleated tartan kilt with the big pin, a round collared white blouse and perhaps my old saddle shoes.... Instead, yesterday I painted my toes and urged Pearly to do the same, but when she saw the way I slopped on the polish, she declined.

This morning I took the bus out to the Park Royal Hotel where the conference is being held, just so I knew I wouldn't get lost, and on my way back, I realized that I am relieved that I did not buy that wee house in Penang.

There are an endless number of spokes sticking up into the sky, all ungodly apartment or condos with balconies, views, you name it, and the traffic is ghastly; there are simply too many people on this island, which is a sin, BUT where I am is much more civilized (or not) and we can go to the food stalls and get a to-die-for dish for 3-4 ringgit, a little over a dollar. Feeling ethnic today, I found a lovely hot Chinese "bao," a round roll with sweet bean paste inside, and then bought a nasi lamak, rice shaped in a 3-d triangle (what IS that shape called?) with some spicy sauce on it, some salted fish (or, what I feared, meat) and a half a hard boiled egg on top, all wrapped inside a beautifully folded banana leaf. Now I feel like a stuffed piggie, so loaded up with carbohydrates that I will probably wilt in an hour.

IF I can upload one more photo, I shall show my landmark for getting back to this house; it is a

corner house that looks to me like the chrome on the front of a car; I have restrained myself and not said anything about "the look," but it does remind me of one other tidbit I learned from my Chinese Malaysian friend who shall remain nameless. I understand that the hotels in Penang have to engage full time a staff doctor for the holiday months of August through October when the Arabs come for vacation. Why? I am told that the vaginal injuries are profound during those months in the hotels. The thought is so horrifying to me that today as I sat on the bus, watching a little family of three very small children, a nice looking dad in jeans and t-shirt and a teeny mom, covered completely but for the slit for her eyes, I wondered. That's all. I just wondered. And I worried for all the women who are covering up for somebody and something else that torments or paralyzes them in ways that keep them quiet, restricted but trapped. I know. Who am I to say or even question others' beliefs and lives?