Anger with Access to Megaphones

1.
Twenty-four hours ago, my neighbourhood was noisy. The 14-party opposition alliance held a protest a few blocks away, and the speeches were broadcast all over Mohammadpur via broke-down megaphone. Bangladeshis are angry about many things right now, but lack of power is a big issue; the electricity still goes off for several hours a day. This also affects people’s access to water, especially in slums. In the villages it’s worse, up to eight hours without power. I’ve seen newspaper pictures of these rural protests: women with sabre-like kitchen knives, men with clenched fists. Several people have been killed recently over these protests.

“The country situation,” as they call it, is not good. I don’t think it’s been “good” in anyone’s recent memory, although sometimes it dips down to “really bad.” Alana remembers several consecutive hartals (city-wide strikes) back in June 2004 when she was house-bound for several days. People say that recently things are “bad” because there’s an election coming up. If one reads and internalizes the bulletins sent out by the American embassy, one lives in this constant fever-pitch fear of “really bad.” But this posited neurotic patriot doesn’t really exist in Dhaka; these bulletins (“use the buddy system!” “always be on high alert!”) are circulated as amusing forwards.

Last night during the protest three of us were sitting around Alana’s table eating M&Ms and puzzling over a copy of McSweeney’s that generous Karen had mailed to me three months ago. Karen had also sent me a package of Cadbury mini eggs, but a Bangladeshi postman had burrowed a jagged hole through three layers of plastic and had extracted every one. Happy Easter, unknown Muslim man.

***

I spent last week in Mymensingh, doing more editing and field interviews. Kohima my boss (who I love more every day) decided that while I was in Mymensingh, I would stay with her niece Mila. Bangladeshis always worry about visitors feeling lonely, and often when you go to the village, they will loan out a same-gender sibling to share a bed with you (“Here’s Shumi, my 16-year-old sister, she’ll be your bed buddy tonight.”) Thankfully Kohima put Mila across the hall from me in the CRWRC guesthouse.

I first found Mila intimidating. She’s only five feet tall, but she stands ramrod straight, as if leading an invisible army of similarly poised women. I have these associations because Mila belongs to Bangladesh’s indigenous Garo community, one of the only matrilineal societies in the world. This seems even more incredible within Bangladesh’s macho patriarchal society, and Mila seems strong enough to hold the two in contrast. She has a long black braid that whips away from men’s street stares. And she never throws me a bone in conversations; she lets me struggle my foreign way through timid country comparisons and observations about development. I end up rambling, while Mila watches me coolly from across the table. She is 23, my age, and studying philosophy.

We loosen up a bit over the course of a few days. The turning point, actually, is when I see her listening to Bangladeshi folk songs on a sleek little MP3 player; at that point I can confess my deepest Bideshi pride/shame—that I own and enjoy an iPod.

The day after this, we head out on a mission to find flowers for a dinner party. Mila hails us a rickshaw and we bump our way over railway tracks and into a busy part of town. We are conspicuous: I am one of three white girls in Mymensingh, and Garos, obvious from their high cheekbones and slanted eyes, get almost as much staring as Bideshis do. This is endurable, especially when we find a little narrow flower shop to hide in. It is full of gardenias and roses, so we fill our hands full—they’re only six cents each.

As we pick flowers, an angry broadcast begins from the mosque. It is not the time for the call to prayer, and I can tell, even with my rudimentary Bangla, that this is something political.

“What’s it saying?” I ask Mila. I hear these speeches sometimes in Dhaka, and I always feel uncomfortable. The delivery is always a kind of bark.

“It’s a Muslim political party,” she says after listening for a few seconds “they are saying that they will respond to any occurrence.”

“What does ‘occurrence’ mean?” I ask. “Like a threat?”

“Yes, like a threat, I suppose” says Mila cautiously, “this group is known as an extremist group.” We wait for a few minutes, flowers in our hands, and then we hear the chanting come closer. Through the store’s narrow door we see a procession, dozens of men in white caps and punjabis, marching and shouting in unison. They are repeating the line about the “occurrence.” It takes only a few minutes for them to pass.

We fill our arms with bouquets and strings of blossoms, and we leave the store. Soon we’re back on a rickshaw, hidden in the dark, although I sometimes feel that my skin glows at night. After a few minutes, I admit to Mila that those marches scare me. These are the same people who don’t want NGOs in the country. They don’t want Christians in the country.

“I feel scared too,” says Mila. “They know that Garos are also Christian. So I’m a target too.”

“Most of the time I feel okay about it,” I continue, “I don’t feel threatened by mainstream Islam, and I know that the extremist groups are unlikely to hurt me because of the consequences. They would have to deal with the Canadian embassy. It would be big international news. Whereas other groups of people are much more vulnerable.”

“Like my people,” says Mila, after a pause.

“Oh, Mila, I didn’t mean…”

“But it’s true. Extremists have come to our churches and threatened our pastors. They beat them up, break their legs. Or they kill them.”

This is true. I read about deaths (inter-party, family feuds, religious strife) every day in The Daily Star. They get a small column, and they are not mentioned the next day.

I had thought we were narrowing the gap, Mila and I.


2.

I now know that I will be working in Toronto as of this August. I got the news last week, in a Mymensingh cybercafé with Mila. It is exciting stuff, but how strange to be looking forward to the abundance of Toronto (Friends! Gluten-free bread! Concerts!) while typing out the stories of poor villagers (“I used to eat a handful of rice once a day, but that now that I have a cow, I can eat three times. And sometimes I drink fresh milk”). The two worlds don’t mesh. Where does one go after life change? Within commuting distance of downtown Toronto? Ahem. Roommate available. Promises to have all cross-cultural adjustment issues (i.e. disparity between rich and poor) resolved ahead of time. Will not pompously start sentences with, “well, in Bangladesh, we…”