A Day Out with the Kids (Bangla style)

Last week there was a special mela – an annual fair – out by the village where our friends and family live. Our adopted daughter, her husband and our grand-daughter came to visit at the same time and so, last Friday, we made a special trip out there to see them.

We missed the mela  itself – a small mercy. We’ve done it before and always end up surrounded by hundreds of village men, women and children who have never seen white people before and are, quite honestly, rude. This isn’t just our bideshiness or our Western ‘standoffishness’ – our Bangladeshi friends hate it too.

Nevertheless, no matter where you go in Bangladesh, there is always culture to observe. I took plenty of photos to show you live as it is in the rural dwellings that are life for more than 70% of the population. I’m sure things are a little different in Chittagong or Sylhet or the Sundarbans and so on – but not vastly so.

To get to the village you can either take the road or the back route along the railway lines. We always prefer the latter though they are rebuilding the bridge and we have to cross a temporary makeshift one. The old one was scary enough but this one is terrifying! Hence, I used our umbrella to keep me steady and was mocked mercilessly by my family for doing so.

The Train

As we walked along, a train came by. Because of the afore-mentioned temporary bridge, a man now leaps out and waves a flag madly to slow the train down. It goes very slowly over the new bridge (I don’t blame it) but this gave me the chance to take good photos. Normally, they come out a blur.

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On the way into the village

As the construction work goes on with the new bridge, the men doing the work live in ramshackle plastic sheet covered huts. I pity their life working under a hot Bengal sun and then going ‘home’ to this with no protection from the mosquitoes.

As we neared the village entrance, we saw a man selling pots and pans from his ‘van-gari’ and then a pig having a sleep in the cooling mud. Pigs are common here as there are lots of Hindus in the area. They are not cute and pink, alas.

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So we came to our family’s village and enjoyed seeing Bina, our daughter and Mishti, our grand-daughter. They invited us for lunch which I suspected might happen and we enjoyed many hours there waiting as the curry bubbled away in preparation.

Time spent with the family

Eric, our young ayah’s son, has really grown over the years and I enjoyed playing with him – cricket, magic tricks (he never knew he had 2 taka stuck behind his ear) and having fun with Mishti.

Mishti, alas, is still scared of her bideshi grandfather – or more accurately, his spectacles. She doesn’t wail an weep when she sees me any longer but she still frowns and doesn’t trust me. She doesn’t see many white-skinned people but gradually she is getting used to the idea that the dark-skinned ones like me and don’t run away terrified!

Bina, her mother, continues to flourish as a wife and mother. I miss her so much even after more than two years being gone. There is a hole in my heart which is her shape and only is ever plugged when she visits us.

It was a lovely day out which ended only as the skies grew black and the wind picked up. We helped bring in clothes hanging on the washing lines before they all blew away and then headed home. We almost made it before the rain came down. Even with a brolly, we all got soaked but, unlike in the UK where rain is just cold and horrible, a good soaking in Bangladesh is a delight and lots of fun.

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On a Train (Literally)

“If you’ve seen the movie Gandhi and remember the scene where his English friend clambers on to the roof of a train, I can tell you that nothing much has changed”

Recently, my family visited Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, as a birthday treat for moi. It was a most enjoyable few days I must say and is as close to a holiday as we normally get – though wandering through the hot, dusty and smelly streets of one of the most overcrowded cities in the world is not everybody’s idea of fun. It is relatively cheap though and as we live on very little , it is the best we can do and it is good enough for me.

There are many sights in Bangladesh that remind you that no matter how poor you may believe yourself to be, you really are not that poor at all. If you can read this and you’re doing so on your own laptop, phone or other electronic device, you are richer than the majority of people here.

When we came to leave Dhaka to return to LAMB one such sight caught my attention despite seeing this hundreds of times before.

We were waiting for our train at Cantonment Station and numerous trains went by, as they do. One, in particular, came past with a number of people sitting on the top of the roof. It was far from unusual and there weren’t as many as you see during the Eid festivals. But it was moving unusually slowly and I decided the number was low enough that I could count just how many were sitting on the roof as well as take photos of interesting faces – especially the children.

I’ve seen children as young as four running across from one end of the train to the other while it moves at speed looking like cartoon characters standing still in the air while the train zips away underneath them. Thankfully, I never saw them really hover in mid-air and plummet to their doom but children do, regularly, fall off the trains and are killed or badly injured.

Occasionally, you see a guard come up and start hitting some of the roof passengers with a stick to throw them off but it is a half-hearted attempt and they all soon get on again.

If you’ve seen the movie Gandhi and remember the scene where his English friend clambers on to the roof of a train, I can tell you that nothing much has changed – except I’ve never known a white guy ever succeed in getting up there without a guard stopping him. Many have tried.

What amazed me with this train is that though there were only a ‘handful’ of people on the roof I counted just over 150 people along the whole stretch. I couldn’t believe there were that many. How many are there when the Eids happen and every square inch of the trains have bodies attached to them – including the engine?!

It also amazed me that underneath – in the carriages themselves – the paying travellers were crammed in to standing room only compartments with little fresh air and no space. Trains here often remind me of Nazi POW trains from WWII. All that is missing is the sound of wailing. How many more were squashed in those carriages from hell, I wondered.

My family and I were sweating away on the platform, waiting for our train which was over an hour late. We would take the journey in an Air-conditioned cabin ‘squashed in’ with four others from a Bangladeshi family sat on the opposite side, served food and tea for the entire ten-hour trip with our feet up on the padded seats.

I thanked God for my blessings.

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The Epic Guitar Project

“I would have, at best, a bad reputation as a teacher and, at worst, a prison sentence.”

Ever since we arrived as a family in Bangladesh, I have been teaching Thing I and Thing II various musical instruments and skills. They suffer learn piano, guitar, recorder, theory, aural skills and a limited amount of music history and composition.

It’s not an easy task for any of us. Children have a habit of not listening to their parents and getting grumpy with them. Had my two been genuine students whose parents were paying for lessons, I would have refused to continue several times over because of their grumps, groans, lack of practice, moods, cheekiness and – occasionally but horribly – tears and storms-out-of-the-room.

To be fair, I also found that professional music teachers (yes, that’s what I was before I came to Bangladesh) with 21 years of experience can behave terribly unprofessionally with their own kids. Had my children been the aforementioned spawn of paying parents, I would have, at best, a bad reputation as a teacher and, at worst, a prison sentence.

I’ve screamed, shouted, punished and – very occasionally and not with pride – shamed my children (“I can’t believe you can’t even find middle C right now after two years of lessons!”) whom I believe have a secret mission to exasperate their old dad so he will lose the few remaining hairs on his head in no time at all.

Despite all the horror of the above, most lessons have been good over the years, both son and daughter have actually made good progress, are now talented musicians and both enjoy making music for themselves (which is actually my main aim for them – I don’t want either of them to become professional musicians if I’m honest…).

Thing I enjoys the piano but tolerates the guitar. Thing II, however, tolerates the piano and loves the guitar. As a result, he wanted to build one as his birthday present last February.

At Christmas we returned to the UK for a short time and took his electric home with us. We returned with his birthday present – a build-your-own-guitar kit – hidden in one of the cases. Both son and father (both of us with ADHD remember) were excited about the idea of the project. I trained as a classical guitarist where you simply buy the instrument and the jobs done. Apart from replacing strings and, very occasionally, the need to replace the machine heads if they break, you don’t mess around with a classical.

So I knew nothing about putting an electric ‘Flying V’ guitar together. It was very exciting.

Alas, I had assumed the kit would come with instructions: It didn’t.

Nevertheless, I’ve been around electrics enough to have a pretty good idea what to do so we set off to do it anyway. The neck and body came unpainted and unvarnished so I left that part of the work up to Wifey to sort – she being an artist in a former life and all that (besides, I hate mess). Then Thing II and I began the men’s work.

The result, stage by stage roughly, you can see in the photos in the slideshow. What you can’t see is the length of time it took to build the bloody thing.

“I still haven’t figured out how the tone pot works”

Everything was fine while it was mechanical. just slotting things in place, screwing, threading, twisting – no problem. But I had no idea how to do the wiring. I spent hours on the internet trying to find guitar wiring diagrams for two humbucker pick-ups, a three-way switch, one volume control and one tone control. What the hell I was supposed to do with the weird green ‘tutti-frutti’ sweet thing on two wire legs I had no clue! I’ve since found out it was the secret ingredient in turning a volume pot into a tone one. So now you know.

I researched maybe 20-30 diagrams and got what I figured would be a gist of guitar wiring basics and decided we could make a start and see what happens as we go along.

But then, having procured a soldering iron from the school science lab, we found we had no solder itself. The dokans, the shop stalls outside, had no idea what it was but eventually I mangled my Bangla well enough for them to understand. I learned it was not available here in the north. Considering the immense amount of electrical work and repairs that go on in and around LAMB I think it was an excuse. Anyway, we couldn’t lay hands on any so: no solder, no finished guitar.

The guitar sat in a corner, half done until we went to Dhaka recently and a friend gave me some. One week later and another attempt on the internet to find a decent wiring diagram (which, this time instantly produced the diagram I needed – damn you Google), we finally soldered the wires and slapped it into Thing II’s amplifier.

It worked!

I really didn’t think it would and, as a science teacher who teaches electrics to O level students, I still haven’t figured out how the tone pot works. As far as I can tell it has no electrical input going in to the thing so how on earth anything is coming out is anyone’s guess. I’m also ashamed to admit that I forgot to earth the bridge and once it was set in the body it wasn’t going to come out again – so I had to do a bit of a secret ‘bodge-job’ there. Yet, once plugged in, work it does.

So, yesterday, I had Thing II practising on his new electric Flying V all day. Of course, he tried to tell me he’d done hours of music practice so he couldn’t possibly do his piano work now after all – there just wasn’t time.

I told him nice try and to think again.

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Brief Thoughts on Sad News

I’ve just received news of Facebook that a former student of mine from the UK has died after a long struggle with a congenital heart defect. Out of respect for her and her family I will not give her name but those who need to will know who I mean. I’m not about to ride on the back of her family’s grief and, to my knowledge, none of them are ever likely to read this so hopefully I won’t step on private grief.

Yet, I couldn’t finish my day (I was just about to go to bed) without writing something about this girl and the great sadness I feel right now. I’m grateful that over 21 years of teaching I have only endured a handful of deaths of students or ex-students. I can’t think of any pain worse for a teacher. It is horrible; utterly wretched.

I didn’t know this girl very well – she was always quiet and unassuming around school. I know she was unfailingly pleasant and charming. I can’t remember whether she invited me to be a friend on Facebook or the other way around after I left the UK but I know there would have been no shadow of doubt in my mind about having her as a friend. She wasn’t one of the ones who ‘hogged the limelight’ or made their presence felt all the time. She was just, quite simply, nice. Really nice. There was no ego there, no need to be all important. She was just happy in herself.

I wanted to make some grand philosophical point here – I wrote one too but I’ve deleted it; twice. Somehow, it just didn’t seem right. I can’t make something ‘right’ about a 19-year-old dying after a long struggle with her heart, I just can’t. She should mourn my death in years to come, not the other way around right now.

I hope that in the passing days, weeks and months, her family will be finding that something, that special something that gives them meaning to what has happened – something to carry on for. Right now, I can’t think what that might be.

I do know that tomorrow, when I wake up, the world will seem a little greyer than before and Facebook will be a sad place to visit.

I also know that I will renew my efforts to make sure that those who are important to me know it. Life is too short and too precious to waste – sometimes we need wake-up calls to remind us of that.

Writing Catch-up (7 Reasons to be excited)

You may have noticed I’ve not posted anything for several days on this blog. There are reasons. I didn’t die and I haven’t given up (though, at times, I wish I would).

One reason is that last Saturday, when I try to get all my main blog posts for the week written up, we were travelling back from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, after spending several days there for my birthday.

But there have been other things on the go too – mostly to do with my work as a writer.

So here is a quick catch-up on what has been going on the writing side of things:

1) The last few weeks have been busy, busy with articles and reviews for several editors. I’m still way behind on work though not so far behind that I’ve missed deadlines. I’ve cut it pretty close at times though…

Encouragements and disappointments come in equal measure in this game. I had one article pitch accepted by an American magazine which was going to pay pretty darned well but an editorial cock-up on their side meant they had already assigned one of their editors to write a piece on exactly my subject and hadn’t realised. I hadn’t sent the article in at that point so I couldn’t get a kill-fee for it which I’m kicking myself for.

Note to self: Get articles written earlier.

Other things are published now (or are going to) but some have been postponed or ‘might be used in the future’ which feels like a kick in the teeth. I have to remember this is all making me a better writer and try to get excited about that. Hmm…

Yet, it has not all been depressing…

2) Exams at the school are almost over and my O level students have completed all of theirs so I am truly counting down the days now to going full-time as a freelance writer. I think I’m itching to have that freedom though I have enjoyed a reduced timetable of recent so it has given me a taste of what’s to come. I am excited about this.

3) I’m on to my last three essays for the Master’s Degree. Then I just have the dissertation to do which will largely be written back in the UK next year. It will be a weight off my mind to get these all done and I hope to have them cleared out-of-the-way by the end of June. We’ll see if that really happens of course, but I’ll be excited if it does…

4) Despite the difficulty of pinning down my publisher to get contracts signed (he lives between three countries), I managed to get a flurry of emails out of him to put some of my fears to rest. A lot of you have been asking me details about my novel and other books – when will they be published etc – and I can reveal some details now.

• All being well, my Young Adult novel - The Pukur – will be published somewhere around October this year.
• I’m free to continue as a freelance author and publish books with other publishers so I can begin sending out proposals to agents and publishers from now on.
• I can also self-publish – for Kindle and so on – though my publisher has expressed a wish to have the choice to print publish anything I publish online. I’m not going to complain about that!

I can’t describe to you just how excited I am about all this.

5) So, on the book(s) front it is the green light to go. As soon as the school work stops I will get started on several book projects in earnest. The first will be to finally get out onto Kindle my first self-published book – currently called Blogged Down in Bangladesh. This project has been on the go for two years now and was held up while the publisher considered it for print publishing. He chose to do the novel first and released this book back to me. The plan, right now, is to get it out before the novel comes out.

Yes, I’ll be excited about this but, more than that, I’ll be relieved to finally get it done.

6) I will begin  – first of all though – by taking part with Thing II again in this year’s JulNoWriMo. Last year we wrote our own individual 50,000 word novels (separate books but had our planning and writing sessions together to encourage and challenge each other). This year we intend to do this again and write a novel together too.

The novel is based on the true story of our family over the last 100 years based in India and Bangladesh and we plan (so far) to write the story as a series of letters between fathers and daughters spanning three generations. We’re both excited about the idea but it is an ambitious project – I’ll let you know how we get on next month…

7) There is one more special something going on that has been taking much of time of recent; but I’m not going to tell you what it is yet! All will be revealed in a few weeks time but I can tell you that (for me, at least) it is very exciting and I’m looking forward to the next step in this new career for me. You’ll just have to keep reading this blog if you want to know what it is though.

And you’ll never guess just how I feel about it…

Catch you all next time

Ken