Posted by I’m sitting at a cyber cafe in Feni, my dad’s village. We arrived here a few days ago to celebrate the second of Islam’s two major holidays, Eid ul-Adha, the ‘festival of sacrifice.’ Well, Feni isn’t just your stereotypical image of a village… sure it’s got all that but it’s a pretty major province with a good-sized city. I’m at a cyber cafe aren’t I.
There are ducks here. They waddle and quack as is their business to do so. It reminds me of a passage from the Maher version of the Bible (the one with the fwd by Vin Diesel), “And the Ducks ordered the Lord to create waddling and quacking, that they may do as they pleased. So the Lord created waddling and quacking. And the ducks looked up at the Lord and smiled for it was good. And there was a night and there was a day.”
Monday morning here was Sunday night in the US and just as I was sitting down to breakfast, my mom called my cellphone to inform us of the results of the Pgh-Cincy playoff game. That’s right – my mom’s die-hard!! She knew that we (my dad & I) would want to hear news of the game so she called to let us know (before I could make my way to the cyber cafe)!!! Ahh the gloriousness and don’t any of you haters try to ruin it for me – I don’t care if Palmer went down on the second play of the game. We battled and scrapped and b*tch is your team in? (be quiet Shondhy).
I always say that visiting the village is an important thing to me… it feels like the ‘real’ Bangladesh in a way that Dhaka can’t ever be. After all, Dhaka’s population of 12mil can only be as representative of Bangladesh’s 130mil as NYC’s 15mil is of the USA’s 300mil. Bangladesh is so densely populated and only as big as Wisconsin yet the countryside looks almost uninhabited in places. There are green rice paddies as far as the eye can see and on the road, goats and cows being taken to market to be bought and eaten… of course the ducks roam where they will as they must.
I spent part of yesterday playing with my li’l nieces. It was a simple game where each person picks from three pieces of paper. There’s a jailor, a ‘people’ and a killer. Whomever gets the jailor card has to pick which of the other two is the killer and points are assigned if you get it right. If you know anything about me, you’ll know how easily amused I can be (ducks, d*mnit!) so I was quite content to play that with them for a while.
Later in the day, I bantered about with my cousin’s wives (bhabi’s) who are all pretty d*mn sharp. I showed them pictures of my sister Simi’s (un)wedding reception on my laptop. The universal opinion about Ezra is that he’s ‘bheshi shukna’ – ‘too skinny’. Then they asked, “shada manush’ra dekte chai!” – “we want to see white people!”. So I showed them pics from my friend Pete’s wedding – they seemed to approve of that. I also showed them pics of when I lived in KC and to my surprise, they approved of one of my Indian friends, “abbu’ke bolen ja amrar raje hoise” – “tell your dad that we approve of her”. haha, yeahhh, ummm… yeah. They kept asking which girl in the pictures was my girlfriend… yup no.
By the way – no, I don’t mean the Maher version of the Qur’an. The Bible will do just fine.
