Zongo

This weekend we went fishing in the Zongo valley. To get there we borrowed Bruce "The Beast," a 1978 Land Cruiser. Bruce is perfect for Bolivia, excepting his unsettling habit of rolling back down hills he is not actively being driven up. It's trouble when he stalls on a hill with a full back. He was fine this time. The valley was spectacular, but mostly foggy. There are lots of hydroelectric plants in the area, and one had closed off the road we were going to take, necessitating a pretty steep climb, which, while short, would have had me sucking wind even if we weren't 14,000 feet up. The lake, possibly manmade, was at the top of a cliff and looked beautiful, when it wasn't shrouded in cloud. The fishing trip ended, like every one I've been on since I was 8, with no strikes and no fish.

People might be cremated in these.  There were no bodies that we saw.  I'm not sure if they are reused; in one there was a very uncremated rib and pair of shoes.

You can see Bruce, if you look hard enough.

Titicaca

       
 

"¿Rendirme? ¡Que se rinda su abuela, carajo!" <Surrender? Your grandmother should surrender, you bastard!>

I forgot to take my camera to the Bandarbans

The plan was to hike up to Keokradang, a place that may be spelled like so, and may be the highest point in the country.  No one knows.

Before starting the hike we had to register at the police station in Ruma Bazaar.  These things never progress sensibly, so I wasn’t too surprised or angry after we filled out the blanks in the book, and were by real standards ‘done,’ we were told to wait for the captain to return from town.  He did, eventually, sat us down in a gazebo, and, after the standard litany of questions, asked me if I wanted to discuss religion.  I assented, with the caveat that I’d probably do better in English.

Captain Islam: “Tell me all about Christianity.”

IS: “Well, uh we believe that Je-”

CI: “He is the son of God, yes. We think that Miriam is a <honest woman>.  An honest woman! How can Allah have this?  How can he have a family?

IS: “He-”

CI: “If Allah is a family man! If he has a wife and son than how can he drive the world?  Explain please how this is possible.”

IS: “He-”

CI: “In Islam there is an Economic system.  Does your religion have one?”

IS: “We-”

CI: “There is a complete system for living your life.  An Economic system.  Your religion is incomplete, it has no system!

IS: “Bu-”

CI: “We think Miriam is an honest woman, yes.  There are rituals! We have a system of traditions and ceremony! You do not! Your religion is incomplete!”

IS: “Commu-”

At this point my guide, a young Bawm Christian, and clearly not impressed with my defence, broke in:

Guide: “OF COURSE we have ceremony!”

CI: “There is no ceremony, it is incomplete!”

G: “OF COURSE we have these, it is ridiculous.”

Eventually more police started congregating around the gazebo, and the conversation devolved from our high-minded consideration of differing beliefs back to “Bangladesh kemon lage?”

Guide and I made as if to leave, but Captain Islam was entertaining other thoughts, and stopped us.   He wanted us to take an escort of four policemen along, which complicated matters in a number of ways, most annoyingly in that they wanted to take a jeep up rather than hike, and needed to eat lunch and get changed into their uniforms before they left, putting us well behind nightfall for arrival. 

Bengal’s history with the hill tracts is a nasty one.  A peace treaty was signed way back in 1997 or so with a big chunk of separatists/malcontents, but various splinter revolutions continue.  It gets more complicated as the hill tracts border Burma, and being a generally wild area, harbour plenty of Burmese revolutionaries as well.  They have been known to rob, and, very occasionally, (once or twice, about a decade ago) kidnap folks who were probably being divs anyway.  According to Captain Islam they had busted an arms cache just a week ago. 

There haven’t actually been a great deal of incidents, and of course, if the GOB really cared about my safety, they would provide a police escort in Dhaka, where one can get mugged with considerably less effort than hiking up a hill, or do something about enforcing traffic laws so we don’t all meet our ends smacked into a poorly driven bus.

While our escort was, incredibly slowly, getting ready, Guide and I tried to argue our way out of them.  My “if/then” constructions got a work out: “If they cannot walk up a hill, how can they defend me?”  While all were impressed with my command of Bangla insults, they turned out to not be the most effective argumentative tool.  We couldn’t shake the company, but did eventually talk them into trying to hike up.

Neglected in all the argument was that it would probably be way more pleasant hanging out with a bunch of tribal kidnappers than a bunch of lazy Bengal policemen brimful of questions like “Do they have freesex in America?” (Answer I thought of later: “Nothing’s free, buddy!”)

Eventually our entourage started the trek.  While the cops were even with us, there seemed to be no arrangement of myself that did not involve some cop’s awkwardly slung gun being pointed at something vital on me.  Guide was peeved though, so we took hard paths fast, and quickly left them out of sight.  It got dark while we waited for the police to catch up at the foot of hill covered in ankle-deep, slippery dust.  They then took a jeep the rest of the way.

The hill-folk are, agriculturally speaking, into the whole slash and burn thing.  They call it “Jhoom,” and were in the middle of the burn bit.  After it got dark we walked around a hill on fire.  You could feel the heat a half mile away, and hear the pops and cracks further.  The flame ran down the ridges like lava down a volcano and the hills opposite were lit a bloody sunset red.  It was freaking spectacular, and I really regretted not having my camera, though I wouldn’t have known much about how to photograph such a thing.

The next morning the police, who had at first seemed to lighten up a bit when out of sight of the Captain, decided they didn’t want to go up to the top, and wouldn’t let me go unescorted either.  I appealed, and they took me to a military camp.  We sat around for a while, and then the senior officer came out.  He noticed a scratch on my knee and sent for the camp medic who washed it with some antiseptic from a dirty seven-up bottle and then gave me a sheet of painkillers, and a sheet of antibiotics, which I gave back.  Then he put a bandage round it, which fell off as soon as we walked away.  The officer said I had to take a cop up.  Fortunately the youngest cop decided to go, and once he figured out that he could actually hike, was pretty good at it. Irritatingly so; he was running circles around us by the end.

A week and a half later a friend hiked up the same hill without an escort.

On Boxing Day the bike* trip finally actually began, after I tried (half-heartedly) to get away from being fed all morning (sticky rice with warm fresh milk and bananas!), getting a lunch packed for me by the lady of the house, getting a list of contacts and a suggested itinerary, and having lackeys pump my tires, and tie my baggage onto the bike.  The Garo’s tended to hilariously underestimate my (admittedly limited) biking stamina.  “This is so far, you are crazy!” “You are doing this on a bicycle, not a motorbike?” “This next leg is 10 km-that might take 2 hours! Are you sure you want to try that today?” etc.

Throughout the trip I mostly stuck to the border road, which is on no map that I have seen.  Heading east, I had the hills of Meghalaya at my left, ranging from a couple of kilometres to a couple hundred yards away.  At its best the road was tightly packed clay.  Around rivers it got sandy, which usually required me to step off my bike.  One unfortunate 2-3 km stretch was bricked over loosely; it was a pain to ride over, and rattled half the screws on my bike loose.  Occasionally the road was paved properly, but the only other traffic was on foot, bicycle, or very occasionally, a motorcycle.

The road and various off paths are unmarked and at times very nearly non-existent.  Fortunately, there was no mysterious crossroads so isolated that I couldn’t wait a couple minutes for someone to show up and direct me.  This did not always make things easier.  Bengalis have their own ideas about directions.  The hand motion for keep on the path you are on, turn left, turn right, turn around is always raising the right hand and jerking it in a small circular fashion over the head.  If I ever, by a series of small miracles, got myself understood and received a clear instruction, it never lasted very long, as around the next bend there would be a fork unmentioned by my previous helper who had said something like “stay on the road you are on.”

The road would be next to impossible during the wet season; a few haors cover parts of it, and the rivers are swollen to their full size.  The rivers I crossed were tiny dry-season drizzles meekly cutting great plains of sand.  Sometimes there were men at a table with a box waiting to charge me for crossing the rickety bamboo slat bridges hastily erected over the small streams.

It was fortunate that I started with a short trip; easy Christmas living had softened me considerably, and not long in I got my first flat.  I quickly discovered that the two spare inner tubes I had brought along were faulty. A fellow at a local bike shop patched one efficiently, sandpapering grip onto my tube and a square bit of another, and super gluing them together.   I proceeded, still fuming about my defective spares, when I felt a familiar twinge in the left pedal, and looked down to see that the nut holding in a securing bolt had come off, and the bolt was slipping.  Peeved, I started walking.  Within minutes a Garo gentleman stopped, acquired a rough homemade hammer from a farmers hut, and pounded the bolt in far enough that I could bike to the next village and get a replacement.

fixing an innertube

Not long after I met a man who had just picked his mother up at the hospital I’d stayed at the first night, and he invited me to his house.  He then proceeded slowly on his motorcycle so I could follow him, despite my many protests to the contrary.  It was just as well that he did; when we pulled up to the mission itineraried for me, the father was not particularly amused, having been awakened from his afternoon nap by helpers who didn’t know what to do with me.  He gave me the sort of look that I dread even while I know I deserve, a look that artfully said:  “What the hell are you doing here?   You’d better not say you want a place to stay, you mooching tourist.”  He warmed up a bit after finding out the specifics of my trip, which he had a very Bangladeshi take on:  “This is a marathon.  I hope you will survive.”  Over coffee (catholic) he drew me what was perhaps the most accurate road map of the north of Bangladesh ever created. 

I still had to take the motorcycle guy up on his offer of a place to crash.  There was a carolling circle that night as well; the drummers who came out to this little village wanted to be paid.  Stopped in on some neighbors for tea (coffee) (catholics) and sticky rice cakes.

In the morning, after an interesting 3-4 household mass held by a priest home for Christmas, I tried to take off right away, but got held up in the courtyard where the men of the village were creating some more of the instant brew rice beer and jawing.  They brought me a pork fat curry.

My bag got tied to my bike for me, and Motorcycle guy insisted on biking along to guide me for the better part of the morning, as he insisted on fixing my rear tire when it went flat.

He left me at some hills of clay being collected for porcelain factories, and I proceeded to Birishiri, where I stayed at a “cultural academy” dedicated to preserving the (dying, mostly) culture of the various indigenous groups, particularly Garo and Hajong.

Searching for the village I was going to stay at the next night, I got distracted by a big gathering, which turned out to be a wedding.  As soon as I came close, they invited me in.  They seated me in the back with the old men.  Two of them kept trading jabs at each other, in English, I assume for my benefit.  “He is old and is just visiting this wedding so he can look after his property in the village!” “He failed his exams when we were in school together,” etc.

Eventually we got called over to the main table rows for food.  There was a whole 5X5 foot table covered with a great mound of rice and young folk went up and down the lines serving.  There were three types of pork curry, one thickened with rice flour, and very spicy.  There was an interesting radish salad, and they brought me a chicken curry, because they weren’t convinced that I liked pork.  This may have been because I just picked at the curry that was all chunks of fat. (The Garos take love of fatty foods to its logical extreme.  The fat can be pretty good, but I could only handle a bit at a time.)  The girl handing out paan after the meal was pretty, so I decided to try it.  This put me in a bit of a fix, because I couldn’t figure out where anyone else was spitting theirs, and had to keep it in for a while.

One of the jab-trading old men volunteered to entertain me while I waited for the father to return to the mission I was supposed to stay at.  He wanted to leave the wedding because they were strict Baptists, and not serving chu.  The Father came in on his bike in the evening after giving 4 masses in remote villages.  It was late, so he forewent the traditional Catholic coffee (a venial sin to some), and put a huge bottle of Indian bagpiper whiskey on the table.

He complained jovially about his situation.  4 masses in one day! Oh my god!  On my bicycle! I need an assistant! This is a fact!  He also gave me a depressing history of the region (punctuated with plenty of “Oh my God”’s and “This is a fact”’s), over a whole fish curry (The Father made bits of the fish head disappear that I could not figure out how to eat):

The Garo have been in the region for a long time.  When partition came around, it created a Hindu Bengal, and a Muslim Bengal, but left the indigenous people in between.  Many of the Garos and most of the Hajong (indigenous Hindus) left for India at partition.  In the early 1960’s there were anti-Hindu/Christian riots stemming from the Indo-Pak war and more left for the hills.  During the liberation war, many were forced (along with many Bengals) to move to refugee camps immediately across the border, and many died.  Shortly after the establishment of Bangladesh, Muslim settlers began to move in, and even more Garo left.

“The Bengalis were very clever: the Garos rarely had papers for their land, and were uneducated about these things.  The Bengalis took their land.  They were very clever.  Now the Garos have nothing! This is a fact.”

The next day was Election Day, and I had a long way to go, so I left after an early breakfast and coffee (catholic!).  No unauthorized motorised transport was to be running.  This cleared the roads of motorbikes, but all day people were walking into the village centres to vote.  Everyone was out, everyone was excited.  Tea and snack vendors lined up in the fields in front of the schools/official buildings used as polls.  People gathered in circles on the lawn, checking ID cards, lists and papers I could not discern.  Young men ran about with flyers for their party pinned to their chest.  All the women were out, some in proper black tents, quite a sight, even out in the country, where things are more egalitarian by necessity.  It was inspiring, even for a cynic like myself, to see old grandmothers with no teeth, in coke bottle glasses and threadbare saris, walking in to vote on the arms of their grandchildren.

Bengals rock, so to speak, the vote.

Got yet another flat, the tools were grabbed out of my hands as passers-by took over the job of changing the tire for me.  I should have paid more attention; they put the frame, rack and kickstand back on backwards.  I also managed to unintentionally acquire two guides, who bicycled with me a good portion of the way.    

I soon got pulled over by some bored BDR men, who asked after my passport, and, not unreasonably, thought I was there for election observation.  “India is right there,” they said, helpfully pointing toward the hills, “Don’t go there.”

Lots of streams were coming down from India now, getting my shoes wet. The road took on the cracks of dried mud that was not so long ago under water. Stopped at a roadside stall for some water, which I assumed came from a tube well, and later came to regret.  Soon after my chain fell off.  Among the people who stopped to help was a mentally disturbed man who kept playing with my hair, grabbing my arm, and asking for money. 

The next stop was a few kilometres down the road from Tekerhat with a Khasi family.  My host was great, he introduced me to his brother Winston Churchill, and then almost immediately was shooing a huge assortment of girls playing badminton away so I could bathe in privacy at the tube well. 

Supper was fantastic, Bengali interpreted through a Khasi lens.  I had long avoided the small, complete fish that sometimes comprise curries, but not tonight, where they went down head and all. Everyone else spit something out, but I could not find it in mine.  Then a family hymn sing, scripture reading, and prayer.  I could manage “This is the day” and even fake some of the Bengali ones, but not the scripture reading.

 
Here sand is washing down from mining/quarrying/deforestation in India, wrecking a villages farmland.

That evening we chatted over the haunting ululations of the Hajong at prayer – like wind blowing outside the door, but with a human quality that made it creepy.  My host was a hunter; he had “3 arms:” two elephant guns,  and a (32? Don’t know if that’s right) rifle, which he used to shoot wild boar wandering into their fields from the hills.  The law forbids shooting the deer, sambar, or elephants that also wander in without special permission. The government had checked in his arms prior to the election. Rounding out the curiously martial theme of the household was a pair of nunchucka draped around a light switch.

The Awami league was well on its way to routing the BNP by the evening, and there were lots of cell phone calls up and down the district joyously reporting the local tallies.  The Garo candidate whose son I’d met won his seat, as did the lady running for the AL alliance in the district I was in. My host was in a great mood, the callers were greeted with a hearty “Joy Nowka! Joy Banghabondu!”  No one was yet allowed to “shout” in celebration, as the government wanted to keep things peaceful.

I had a rough night, sick (the most likely culprit the none-too-intelligent roadside glass of water).  The squat outhouse and moonless darkness served as a remarkable suppressant of diarrhoea and vomiting.  My dreams were near feverish hallucinations: chanting in the distance became disgruntled BNP groups ready to attack the minorities, Awami Leaguers, and by proximity and general attitude, me.  Animals grunting and snuffling outside became wild boars and further kept me confined to the room. 

Woke up properly sick, and was force fed saline solution for hours, whilst my bike was being retuned and oiled by Winston Churchill. The saline solution worked, or perhaps it was the amazing Khasi chicken soup I had for lunch, and I managed to get on my bike by early afternoon.  The girls and wives of the extended family, many of whom I had not met or even seen during my stay all lined up for “Kublai,” <God bless>, or an equivalent, in Khasi.

The late father of the extended family I was staying with was a king of the Khasis in Meghalaya.  After partition, the Indian government had moved in and required abdication of the 25 or so kings, but he had refused, and exiled himself to Bangladesh.  Here he worked as a civil engineer (partly responsible for the quarry mentioned in Tekherhat posts) and never gave up fighting for his former lands, even appearing before the United Nations to plead his case.

There was a portrait of him above the dining room door; he was a forcible looking man, and very much an engineer of his generation, with thick horn-rimmed glasses and pens in the pocket of his light brown blazer.  He appeared more than a little grumpy.  There was a monument to him in the front yard, and here are his inscribed last words, a bit quixotic, and not clearly indicated, but I’ve got some respect in me for tenacious dedication to lost causes:

“His last words, U Wickliffe Syiem Khynnah of Hima Nongstoin will neither comeback to his own and nor will never set foot in any parts of the Indian territories and if he wishes to do so, he will come as a conqueror and not as a captive to surrender under the control of the foreigners.”

I had not been able to phone the person I was staying with next, luckily, he was out in the field and heard from one of the motorcycle taxi-wallahs that a bideshi was biking around, and tracked me down on his way back home.

The night before elections he had missed a midnight boat, and had walked 25 kilometres, crossed two rivers (one with a found boat, and the other by swimming), and then ridden on another boat for 4 hours to get home in time.  His phone had been ruined in the swimming.

That evening we went to congratulate a friend of a friend’s “Aunty” (could mean anything), on her recent election as MP.  There was a big line, it is tradition for local important/not so important people to call and pay their congratulations over tea.  I brushed up on my Bangla on the threshold:

IS:  “Congcon, what does Odoronakon mean?”

CC:  “I think you are trying to say a sentence as a word.”

IS: “Dang it.  How do you say ‘congratulations’?”

CC: “Uh.  Um. I’m not sure. Oh - Obinondon.”

The new MP was holding court in a 70’s style conference room with bulky solid wooden chairs.  She was sitting at the head of about 30 men, with a blue sari top around her head.  The local luminaries were all dressed in sweaters, scarves, and blazers, and I bumbled in unshaven in a T-shirt and flip flops, because it wasn’t actually cold.  I was the centre of attention for a while, standing up in front of everybody; most were probably amazed that I hadn’t yet frozen to death in the bitter chill of a Bengal winter. 

She wasn’t interested in speaking Bangla with me, but my feelings on Bangladesh were soon established yet again, in English, and maybe someone will do something about them now that they are registered with a Member of Parliament.  She quickly lost interest in me, and had supporters to talk to on the telephone while everyone else sat around, as one does here, with tea.  Later, someone was bringing biscuits around on a plate and missed me.  A few of the men noticed and, though I declined, kept calling for the biscuit-man to stop by me again. He ignored them, and proceeded until the MP noticed and yelled “biscuit dao!” <give him the biscuits!> with a wave in  my direction, after which I got the whole plate. **

That’s about it.  A woman on the bus home managed to spit all over me, while trying to go out the window.  I was mostly thankful it wasn’t vomit.

a bit ominous

* Now stolen, dangit.

** MP Momtaz Iqbal passed away about a month ago

This Christmas I biked (after a manner of speaking) across (some of) the north of Bangladesh.

Sorry about the length - part 2 and maybe 3 to come...

I decided to train up to Mymensingh, being weary (and wary) of bus travel.  I jostled in the train ticket scrum, and only got the ticket after yelling at the man behind the counter, which got him to ignore the people shoving their arms over my shoulder and squeezing in beside me.

The next day the driver said the train probably wouldn’t take my bike.  We bumbled around the train station, asking after an official who may not have existed.  One guy offered to tie my bike outside the window, for a price.  I wondered whether anyone would say anything if I just dragged the bike onboard, but the platform was crowded, and I decided to take the driver’s advice and go for a bus, which would have a roof rack for the bike and would go directly to Haluaghat, the town that I was to start from.  The first bus that came by did not have a roof rack, and the next was delayed as a campaigning Sheik Hasina was zipping up airport road with an escort of intimidating looking vehicles.

Got the bike off the bus, with a dented chain guard and missing mudflap.  No sooner had I asked where to buy some twine than someone had some and was tying my pump onto the frame and my bag onto the rack for me.  That put me on a bit of a human nature and enthusiasm-about-the-trip high that was only marginally dampened when the bag started to fall off a few minutes later. 

I called my contact for the first night, interrupting him in the middle of his hospital’s Christmas celebration.  The night before I thought we agreed that I would have a place to stay on the hospital compound, but he seemed much fuzzier on this in the light of day.  I arrived, and he still didn’t know what to think: “What is your program?” Me: “..”  I was invited to join in the Christmas celebration, accidentally sitting at the rear of the women’s section, a bush league mistake I was fortunately able to rectify as more people filed in.  There was a lot of singing, half-hearted from the men’s section.  Then what may have been a sermon and prayers, and then someone asked after Santa Claus, who appeared, an elderly woman in an unconvincing getup consisting of a raw cotton beard and crown festooned on a black FUBU stocking cap, singing Happy Christmas to You, to the tune of Happy Birthday.  She gave a humorous speech about how she, Santa Claus, had learned a bit of Bangla by sitting next to a Bengali on a plane, and gave out gifts to everyone, to varying degrees of applause.  I got a bottle of Fair and Lovely™ body fairness milk, and had to say a few words to everybody. 

In the morning I was granted, accidentally, a tour of the hospital and fish farm on the compound.  The hospital had a huge crowd of people waiting for medicine outside, but wasn’t too busy in.  The men’s ward was depressing: various sickly looking folk laid out on beds with blankets probably brought from home, IVs on decrepit racks, and relatives looking after.  The women’s ward was cheerier, mostly because of all the newborn babies.  They had 50 caesareans the last month.  The former tuberculosis wing is no longer used, but was once a research center of some note.  The big problem now is little problems, said the doctor touring me around; the people don’t know much, and small diseases and injuries tend to expand.

My first morning of biking the water bottle carrier started to rattle off my frame.  The sky was clear, and it was not as cool as I was expecting it to be.  Most of the rice from the latest crop had been harvested, and was spread out over stretches of concrete or clay by barefoot women, then threshed by the road.  The chaff was thick in the air, and made tears stream down my face in some villages.  Some paddies were being harvested; most were grey-gold straw stubble, occasionally offset by the electric green of a freshly planted patty.  This was Garo land, and there were women on bikes or even the occasional motorbike zipping by.

I stopped in the courtyard of a local boro lok whose name I’d been given, but he was out.  I waited, while the folks hanging around, employees, relatives, and friends, had no idea what to do with me, so sat me down and fetched his self-conscious, Dhaka-educated teenage daughter to come talk English to me.   “You can like, talk to these people right?  I have to like, go upstairs.”  Later she felt bad and brought me a stack of books, a little heavy on Mitch Albom, and chocolates.  One of the men brought me tea and cakes, in a manner I found no fault with (Later in the evening his wife mocked him mercilessly for something in the way they were presented).  I went to one of the employees’ house for more tea and cake, and then the headman showed up on a motorcycle, fresh from getting his relatives from India across the border.

He was a good guy.  We kicked a football around and traded penalty shots.  I felt bad about how I compared until I found out he was a former captain of the Dhaka University team.  I ended up staying there for the next three nights. 

That evening, a bunch of men were sitting around the kitchen/dining area of the compound with a big pot full of fermenting rice sludge.  They would pour water in slosh it around for a while, and then filter it into a pitcher through a woven bamboo sheet.  The result was a weak rice beer (chu) that looked a bit like watered down milk, and tasted worse.   My host had received some of the good stuff from his relatives in India.  For the best, sticky rice is used, boiled first, and left to ferment for half to one year with no water added.   The result of this is a clear, amber liquid that tastes like a sweeter, smokier brandy.  The men were eating charred (maybe smoked) eel, formerly hanging from the rafters, but didn’t offer me any, even after my host strongly suggested it.

He exposited interestingly about village life.  “See these guys,” indicating the men gathered around the rice beer, “no one invited them, they just come around and cook and help out and make rice beer when they feel like it.  They’ll do it tomorrow morning too.” He made the Garo sound like a fun Amish, engineering their own rural utopia: if someone needs something done, like a building put up, the whole village comes around and helps.

Earlier in the day the family had sent a pig to relations for a traditional three-month-after-the-funeral wake, to see the spirit off.  The family by tradition was supposed to return one leg of the pig, but returned two by motorcycle that evening, packed with a boroi sprig and a single chilli to ward off the evil eye.

Supper was delicious: eel, chicken and fish curries over sticky rice.  We ate with a local UP member, who I would be able to recognize later because he always wore a blue blazer (with a lungi) or pinstripe suit.

My host spent the evening before Christmas paying his respects at various houses around the village.  One drunken old lady kept calling for more food and rice wine for her son-in-law, which he may or may not have technically been, and forced us to sit down.  We listened to the rants of a few old cheery drunk folk, which no one bothered to translate for me, likely because they were incoherent anyway.  The drunken lady yelled something, and we got the traditional rice wine accompaniment of cold pork liver in sticky rice flour.  It was a bit of trouble leaving politely.

Later that night we attended a phenomenally boring Baptist service at a shamiana down the path.  It was split into men’s and women’s sides by a rope down the middle.  There were lots of ladies and kids, but only four adult men could drag themselves away from the rice wine and fun going on at home. 

Toward midnight most nights we heard political activists getting riled up.  The election was approaching, and people with nothing better to do wandered around, shepherded by loudmouth, stupid young activists in headbands.  For the Awami League, a leader chants and the group gives counterpoint, like so:

Leader: Amra Boka!

Group: NOWKA!

Leader: Sheik Hasina!

Group: NOWKA!

Leader: Mota Chagol!

Group: NOWKA!

This translates to Leader: gibberish, Group: BOAT!  The boat is the symbol of the Awamis, mostly so they can carry oars to their rallies and beat members of the BNP who operate on a similar theme:

Leader: Amra Boka!

Group: DAN JABE!

Leader: Khaleda Zia!

Group: DAN JABE!

Leader: Lash moto dekhe!

Group: DAN JABE!

Which translates to Leader: gibberish, Group: PADDY SHEAF (RICE) WILL GO!  I think they carry spears to rallies. 

The gut feeling of an uninformed outside observer is to pull for Hasina, head of the Leaguers, because she looks like an old lady, not a zombie (Not the cheap shot it may seem, if anything, this is a kindness).

One evening there was a group of young men being entertained in the courtyard.  I joined their conversation, which quickly turned to politics, and put in my two cents: “Sob politicians saradin bok bok bole” <all politicians talk nonsense all day.> A bit ham-fisted, but I will stand by it.  Later I noticed the boat flags on their leader’s motorbike; it turns out he was the son of the local Awami league candidate, out campaigning for Pops. Amar pa amar muke deyechilam!

While idiot politicos and bored villagers were yapping, the Garo youth were more sensibly marching around carolling.  They start about midnight, and visit every Garo house in the village, a trip that takes from about 10 in the night till up to 5 or 6 in the morning.  Many households cook Christmas cakes to give out, along with puffed rice and tea.  The carolling is done in a circle, with a simple cycle of dance steps that I did a lot of tripping learning.  In the center is a lantern, and a few guys with drums and cymbals keeping the beat and leading the songs.  Anyone can yell a rhythmic ha, ha, How! He, He, HEY! now and again, and everyone will join in.  The songs are technically supposed to go slow-fast-slow, but on Christmas Eve they weren’t.  The grumpy old men I was hanging out with complained about the lack of song structure and dancing ability in the youth of today.  “They’re just jumping around!”  I didn’t have the energy to follow them more than a few houses.  One was using a mechanized rice husker rigged as a generator, powering a strand of Christmas lights around an evergreen in their courtyard.

Visited a pilgrimage site near the Indian border in a town called Buramari.  There was a huge sheet metal roof set up in front of an unimpressive statue of Fatemah behind glass.  The Stations of the Cross went up a hill behind it, each marked by a cross covered with pink fake marble tile.  Met the parish Father and had coffee.  He had been serving in Baltimore recently, where he was surprised by the number of funerals he had had to perform.   We discussed American burial/cremation customs and expenditures, which Bangladeshis understandably find crazy.

On Christmas day we went to a mass held under a tent, sitting on straw next to an under-construction chapel.  I went up to receive communion (at insistence, sorry hard-core Mennonites and Catholics), and the sister handed me the wafer, saying “Jisu Niben,” <take Jesus>  She later confessed to having been flustered by my white face such that she offered the Garo man behind me “Body of Christ,” in perfect, but late, English.  After the service we went to the parsonage for coffee (I’m not sure what it is about Bangladesh bishopric Catholics and their consistent service of coffee in a land of tea).

 The next day a relation on a motorcycle took me to visit a tiny cluster of houses right next to a mildewed pillar of the Radcliffe line.  (Later I heard a story about friends lugging one of these a few yards into Indian territory to give Bangladesh some extra land, and wished I had thought of that).  I inquired what the Garo name for the star fruit growing on the trees was, and should have known better, cause they then sent a little kid scrambling to the top to fetch me a couple.

On the way we payed a visit to a tiny seventh day Adventist church that had inexplicably been added to my touring itinerary.  My driver made fun of the caretaker lady for not being able to drink tea.  Their missionaries must have been the most persuasive in the world, as they somehow managed to talk the Garos not only out of tea, but also pork, eel, and rice wine.

Alcohol consumption figured heavily into the spoken history of Garo Christianity I received from my host.  In rough paraphrase: “The Australian Baptists came in 1890, but they told the Garo they couldn’t drink rice wine.  So the Garos went to the Catholics and said they wanted to be Christians, but they wanted to drink and the Catholics said OK.  Soon there were more Catholics than Baptists, so the Baptists decided it was ok if they drank. Now it is 70-30 Catholic-Baptist.”

I also heard about some of the interesting names in the village.  The silliest was Good Morning Drong, but my favourites were the sets of brothers Washington, Livingston and Mornington, and more so: Nixon, Wilson and Hitler.  “These people don’t read much, but they know these are the names of powerful people!”

I was roused Christmas night by the sounds of drums and yelling in the courtyard, and went out to find that the UP member, disappointed with the quality of the previous night’s carolling, had organized another group.  He was in the middle, again in a suit, banging drums and cymbals happily, as the Garo youth swirled about, with none of that new-fangled jumping around.  This time the girls participated; the previous night they had stood in the corner being shy.  The dance steps were easier on me (although the tempo changes were tricky), as were the hooks to the carols.  There was a Bengali tourist following them around.  I had trouble understanding him; at first I assumed it was because I’d been hearing so much garo-accented bangla, but he was just really drunk on rice wine.  He was full of good will:

BG: “I love my people! They are lovely! So much cute, and so lovely!”

Yes, this is the entire reason I bought this particular bike.