First Impressions

I saw on the news the other day that a shantytown in a part of the city that I had just drove through earlier that day was on fire. They had live footage and this was not a small fire. I have not heard reports since and I wonder about all the people who live there. I wonder about many of the people I see. Very young boys run a lot of the shops in the markets and people set up on the street with cigarettes and small snacks for sale or really anything that will sell. There was a line of people working on sewing machines along one of the roads. I saw a man with no legs pushing himself on a board with very small wheels and another without hands and legs laying on the side walk with no apparent way to get around holding a bowl on his stomach, lifting it with his wrists as people passed asking for money. In traffic jams people will walk from car to car tapping on the windows or pressing their faces to the glass begging. I wonder about all these people. Has this been their whole life or were they displaced because of flooding in the south? Do they make enough money to live? Did their home or their friend’s home just burn up in the fire?

Then there is the other group in the city that I wonder about, the men in suits or the designer clothes and the women with drivers and beautiful shalwar kameez (long shirt, matching pants outfit). Are their lives and families like ours? I find myself thinking about the luck of being born into a certain class and how fortunate some are and others are not.

Like the differences in people, the buildings reflect the same extreme differences. Brand new gleaming buildings are mixed in with the old. In every direction you look there is a building under construction. Huge dented buses share the roadways with tiny beat-up rickshaws and comfortable sedans with expert drivers who weave through traffic, narrowly missing everything else. Traffic lights are replaced with men standing in the intersections, in the hope that people will follow the traffic rules. People cross the streets regardless if there is a car coming or not. The same applies to merging. Our driver and my father-in-law are expert drivers and I am amazed each time we go out by their ability to effortlessly maneuver what still seems like chaos to me.  

The trees are amazing. Huge palm trees and banana trees with the most massive leaves I have ever seen. I kind of want to try to make a fort with them. The bananas here are amazing; bananas in Minnesota hardly deserve the name. The grapefruits are huge and delicious. The meals here are nearly feasts; I have to be careful not to stuff myself. The food is so rich and delicious my poor stomach can hardly handle it. I’ve switched to toast, banana, and sometimes a plain old scrambled egg in an attempt to ward off the pregnancy heart burn. As I mentioned, the bananas are fantastic and the bread is homemade and more delicious and moist, even as toast, than any other I have tried back home.  

There are scheduled power outages each day and I am learning to anticipate them (as I was writing anticipate the battery died on the laptop and the power returned 10 seconds later after being out the previous hour). When the power is out in the US (like what happened at the Houston airport and I could not buy something from the shop while we waited for the plane) we immediately call the energy company, we need to know when it is coming back and we all get bored so quickly. Here, two or three times a day the power is out for about an hour and that is just fine. We have a generator in the house so the lights and fans still work, (thank goodness for the fans!) but everything else is out. We hardly even notice. We were in a market the other day when the power went out and the shopkeepers pulled out lights and went on with business.

The sounds here are overwhelming. It is as if the city has its own soundtrack. Honking is constant, birds, dogs, people, all of it mixes into the harmony of the city. The honking makes perfect sense while moving down the road but from my window it sure is a lot! I am starting to tune it out. A man recites the call to prayers (the Azaan) at each mosque and is broadcast for that area adding to the cities soundtrack. Although it sounds quite different, the idea of it reminds me of the bells from the churches near my home in Stillwater MN.

Abu is now going to the office with his dad each day and Sara and her Dadi (paternal grandmother) go to school. Which leaves me here with Begum, our very nice maid who is very eager to talk to and help me. I have always enjoyed time to myself and I am filling the time with my Teach Yourself Bengali book, reading, and writing. I’ll need to work in some yoga or something too. I have decided that I need to schedule my day so I don’t end up wasting the day. I’ll test how it goes this week. I’m sure I will look back at this time and miss it after our new baby arrives.

I am really trying not to live in fear of the unknown and to get out and try new things and sometimes it goes better than other times. Just crossing a street seems like playing a high level of frogger and I was never too good at games like those. Plus, I have a natural tendency to get lost. I am sure that I will get more comfortable venturing out the longer I am here and as I take more trips out with my family.

For those of you who stuck through my two page, single spaced essay, thank you for reading. Stay tuned for the next blog post, which, among other things, will cover Sara’s new school and my experiences with language.