First two days in Dhaka

View from my balcony on the first morning

 There is a twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness which I have been inhabiting for the past six hours or so, since I woke up at 12:17 am Dhaka time. This zone will be where I hang out until I assume a normal sleep schedule here, ten hours ahead of where I left the US, in Maine. 

There is another twilight zone I'm inhabiting, that between physically arriving in a place, and having any sense of awareness of that place- any bearings, any real acquaintances, any landmarks. 

Yesterday I twilighted through various experiences - working with Lota to get my computer connected to wifi. Meeting Shaon from the embassy and walking around the marketplace as all the shopkeepers set up mats and cardboard boxes to kneel on for the Friday noon prayer. "We've come at an awkward time," he admitted. "We'll just have to wait." We then went to a western coffee shop called North End where he explained to me aspects of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh's past. 

On the walk to Brac University

There is an absolute thrill, even when twilighting, to learning about a new part of the world. And there is a way in which fiction prepares me for the real thing - I read A Golden Age by Tahmimi Anam this summer, and its portrayal of the 1971 war with Pakistan helped frame Shaon's comments very helpfully. 

I floated through UniMart, the large grocery packed with western comforts, edible and decorative, with Bridget, a Ugandan woman studying at Brac whom I met in the dining room at breakfast yesterday. 

I like meeting the women who are living here. I like knowing that I have a dining room where I see other women and chat with them three times a day. That knowledge prevents this twilight zone from being at all lonesome. 

Cars and drivers on the left.

It's funny how quickly a cultural experience which seemed forever so remote can quickly become something one has done, and does. Taking a rickshaw, for example. The storied transport of South Asia, depicted in photos, films, fiction, was summoned without fanfare by first Shaon, then Bridget, for our travel needs. Like the bota-botas in Kenya, you see it and it seems so foreign, then you get on one and you think, ah, here we are. 

Rickshaws

Toward the end of my ride with Bridget, I got a bloody nose (second of the day - I think 20 hours of dry plane air was the culprit) and luckily  - so luckily! - she had a paper towel in her hand and I snatched it to stem the flow. She pointed out a hotel across the way where four very obliging workers thanked us for coming, bloody, into the lobby and using the washroom. 

This neighborhood, Gulshan, is where diplomats and what Shaon referred to as the "international middle class" reside, so most of the locals are service people of one kind or another. That said I can see a slum across the little river from my balcony. Today I'm looking forward to venturing outside of Gulshan. One of my decisions over the next few weeks will be whether to continue living here or find somewhere else. 

This was down one of the sidestreets in Gulshan, the posh neighborhood.

I twilighted through to dinner at 8:00 by watching the 1995 Pride and Prejudice (the proposal/argument episode) then sat with four women who are studying at Brac, two Bangladeshi, two Afghan, and heard about their weekend day and their activities at Brac. 

I wanted to get a picture of this woman
in the pink sari without being obvious.

The antidotes to both twilight zones - the sleeplessness and the placelessness - are oddly the same (and I mean the antidotes beyond actual daily floaty living): tea, and fiction. I started listening around 2 a.m. a stupendous audio performance of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Something that Shaon said stuck with me. He said he is loyal to his hometown, but beyond that sees himself as a citizen of the broader subcontinent of India, not to individual nations. That struck me as quite a beautiful thought, and made me more willing to see Indian and other South Asian lit as indicative of a broader experience and culture beyond its borders.