I called my mother using my cellphone. When I travelled to Saudi Arabia in 2002, I discovered that Voicestream had a wonderful feature: they rented out phones for people to use internationally. They were stylish phones and they worked beautifully, allowing my brother a way to contact us while we moved around the country, and it was an easy way for us to call him, without dealing with buying phone cards and standing on lines for hours. Ever since then, I've always rented out a set from them (eventually they became T-Mobile). I still used local phones with local calling cards because they were cheaper, but the cell phones were quite handy for emergencies.
This time around, however, I didn't need to rent. I was now a T-Mobile customer (after a year of being a miserable Cingular customer, but that's another story) and I possessed a tri-mode phone. (Even the very classy Motorola V600 is tri-mode with T-mobile, because they disable the fourth band) Before I left, I signed up for international roaming, and they assured me that once I landed in Bangladesh, my phone would automatically hook up with an existing carrier and I would have full service - at 1.99 a minute.
So I called my mother and found her frantic because she knew we'd landed and couldn't understand why she hadn't heard from us earlier. I calmed her down and chatted with her a few minutes. We made arrangments for me to keep my phone on between 8am to 10am in the mornings so that she could call me (9pm to 11pm) if she needed to. I also reminded her to not leave me a message since the act of leaving me a message *and* retrieval would both cost me.
After chatting a few minutes, we were called to breakfast.
We were staying with my eldest maternal uncle in his house in the Mirpur section of Dhaka. It's an old commercial district, with the national stadium nearby. My uncle owns half of a four-story building, with the other half owned by one of my maternal aunts. There are two apartments on each floor - one for each owner. (Interesting way of splitting the building, I thought)
The ground floor of the building was the store - a seed store that my grandfather founded in the late 70s. My uncle ran the second branch here in Dhaka. In the mid-90s, he had expanded this branch in to an import/export business, bringing in various different strains and establishing nurseries to support the store. He helped introduce the various kinds of rice grown in the country, as well as partnering with labs and researchers to develop new kinds of seeds. The import/export business had offices on the first floor (using their convention, where the first floor is not the ground floor), behind the store in one of the apartments.
The grandmother that came with us lived on the second floor in my aunt's half. My uncle and aunt slept in the apartment on the same floor, with the rest of that apartment converted for office use by my uncle and his youngest son in running the business.
We stayed on the third floor in the main apartment. My uncle had taken the two apartments and combined the two into one large one. My cousin Rajon and his wife, Munne, and my other cousin Ashiki lived in this apartment. My uncle and aunt just slept in the second floor apartment - they ate, entertained, and lived on the third floor as well.
Upon entering the apartment, there is a long hallway with rooms branching off on both sides. immediately on entering is the large kitchen, with the dining room to the right. A storage room was across the hall from the dining room - that also doubled as the computer room. Rajon had his room with his own bathroom at the head of the hallway, next to the storage area, and my father slept in the guest room and had his own bathroom across from him.
Down the hall away from the kitchen, there was a room where the servants slept and a large living room. Next to the living room was another guest room that we got for our use with our own bathroom. Across from our room was Ashiki's room, which she was currently sharing with my grandmother, and there was a common bathroom next to Ashiki's room. Ashiki also had her own bathroom attached to her room. It was, all in all, a very luxurious and comfortable space.
When we arrived at 5:30 or so, my aunt and Munne were busy cooking in the kitchen with two of their servants. When we entered, however, they stopped what they were doing to put flower leis around John and my necks, and to give us a bouquet of flowers. Rajon snapped a couple pictures using his cellphone - I wish we'd thought to take one ourselves. They went back to cooking, and we took off the flowers. They were the traditional leis that the bride and groom wear on their wedding day.
Anyway when we sat down to breakfast at about 8:30, the table was groaning. There were several types of pithas - how does one describe them? They aren't crepes, although there are some that look like them - there were a couple on the table. They can be cakes, several of which was on the table, too, as well as other types...all in all, I think there were about four kinds. Then there was rice pudding and shemai, which is vermicelli cooked like rice pudding. And then of course, there was some paratha, a soft kind of bread that I like, some roti, roast chicken, beef curry, a vegetable dish, some halwa - eggs, I think, and heavens, I don't even recall the rest of it. I am just mentioning the ones I ate! John ate more - I will have to ask if he remembers what he ate.
After breakfast, we went to a different part of Dhaka, called Dhanmondi, to see my second maternal uncle and his family. His son and his second daughter actually reside in the United States, but ever since his marriage, his son has taken to living 9 months in Bangladesh, 3 months in the US, and his daughter was in Bangladesh for an extended visit, so they were all at home, except the first one - who was married and living with her in-laws. My maternal uncle at Mirpur had taken his car so Rajon accomopanied us to Dhanmondi in a cab. I was actually surprised to see cabs - they didn't have them when I was there last - they even had meters and everything.
So we are led into their home, and I am a touched surprised. It's all dark and gloomy. But my aunt is there, as well as Tanea, Faria, Nadia, and her son Sameer. I was thrilled to see Tanea, and I think she was happy to see me, too. She at least chatted with John a bit - he was looking a bit wild around the eyes after his first car trip in Dhaka. After a few minutes of chatting, and snacks of more pithes (two kinds), tea, and roshogollas and swandesh (another dry sweet), we leave.
I'd made arrangements to give a family friend of ours US currency and he would convert it into Bangladesh currency for me. This avoided the hassle of our having to go to the bank, gave us a better rate (since banks charge a fee), and took care of our visit to see them, all in nice one move. The uncle sent a car from his home in Baridhara, the currently posh section of Dhaka (most of the foreign embassies are here) to Dhanmondi.
At Uncle's home, we chatted with his nephews and their wives (his children live in NYC) for a few minutes. He also cooked us an elaborate lunch - no servants in his home to do the cooking, no siree! - let's see, I recall noodles with vegetables, roast chicken, roast lamb, I think, beef curry of course, some kind of stir fried vegetables, with rice...why do I feel like there is something I am forgetting?
After that, we exchanged the money, and uncle's driver took us back to Mirpur, where Munne was waiting with lunch. She'd invited all the kids from Dhanmondi, and the elder daughter, Jinia, also came over with her husband. I don't even want to remember what we had for lunch, but I think we were hurting by this time, and it was only 3pm.
Everyone left around 4pm, and we just stayed in the house for a bit until my uncle returned with the car. My father, John and I then went with the car to the old section of Dhaka called Ganderia - I think this old section was first built in the mid-1800s - where my father's cousin's family lived. My uncle had passed away when I was young, but his widow, two daughters, one son and one daughter-in-law still lived there. They are some of my favorite people. My other cousins, two daughters and a son, no longer lived there.
My father and the driver had already visited them the previous week, but they couldn't remember where the house was, so we went up and down twisty little passages and dark alleys, looking for the house. I fell asleep, and I think John did, too. We finally arrived when it was pitch dark, and we sat around chatting with my family for a bit.
We of course had dinner. I don't remember much of it except the biryani and chicken, because that's all I had. John ate more, because he felt guilty saying no, and the family wanted to show him their welcome and hospitality.
We got home to Mirpur late - it was either after 10pm or midnight, I believe. John and I just stumbled into bed under the mosquito netting (they are ferocious all times of the year) and fell asleep.
I woke up early - it was still dark out, and lay there a bit just thinking. I was still in a bit of shock that we were actually in Bangladesh. I still wake up every morning in a bit of shock that John and I are actually married, so you can imagine the state of mind I was in, at the thought that John was in my uncle's home in Bangladesh with me. I thought of all the places we'd been to for the first day, and wondered how he felt. I already knew he was terrified about being in the car, and that he was feeling stuffed full of food, but I had no idea how he felt about being there at all.
I know it doesn't matter to John what a person's social class (Bangladesh is very class-conscious) is, or how wealthy, or how prominent the family is. But I wondered if John noticed it at all. In one day, we'd seen the way the upper-middle-class lived, the way the middle-class lived, how the prominent ones lived (usually the powerful ones, but not always so wealthy), as well as how the not so rich lived. I wondered if he realized how entertaining us thinned the purses of some of the houses we visited yesterday, but that they would never have considered not showing us hospitality by offering us food. I wondered whether he realized that food was the combining factor of all classes. Taking food out of your own plate and giving it to a guest is ingrained into each Bengali.
An aside, there is a story of when Professor Yunus (of Grameen Bank) visited a poor woman in a village with the Clintons, the woman insisted on providing something to eat, and sent her son to the market to buy some coconut water and a mango. The good professor commented later on how he tried to discourage her, knowing she was barely eking out an existance for herself and her son, but understanding that the woman would be seriously hurt if he and his guests refused to eat while visiting with her.
I lay in bed that morning, and just wondered how John was going to survive the hospitality for two weeks.
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