Halloween Baking

So after our cat Durga got better, things plummeted. Maybe it was eating the kitty litter, maybe it was lack of nutrition, maybe a loss of motivation to live. She quickly fell into a state of such profound weakness that standing was an impossibility and keeping her head upright at all was a challenge. The vet seemed to think this was caused by not having access to a mother’s milk. Even with steady attention and sugar water/milk as often as she had the strength to eat, within a day and a half she was thinner and weaker than I had ever seen.

The day after her weakness set in, I had been accepted into Commissary (a grocery store for US embassy members) membership. Eager to see what all was there, I made a run and picked up some foods that people had been craving. That evening, over wine, cheese, beef jerky, Bluebell ice cream, and saltines, Laule’a, Keith, and I happily chatted away in our living room. By our reminiscing about food from home, the heaviness of Durga’s condition swiftly lifted. After an hour or so, Laule’a had stepped over to Durga’s box to say goodnight. She calmly told Keith and I (sitting on the couch) that she didn’t think she was breathing anymore. Keith went over and lifted her up; her head hung backward and her mouth stiffly gaped open slightly. We called the other Fulbrighters to let them know of Durga’s death. Even within two weeks, we all had enjoyed Durga’s company, and one of us even made a movie of her with footage from a video-camera. We all felt sorry for Keith the most; he had become the closest to the tiny alleycat. Even for such a short-lived amount of time, the comfortable life that we were able to provide her for 2 weeks must have included some of her most enjoyable moments. We could at least feel good about that. The contrast between the grungy crowded old-city alley street we found her in and her wide-open, air-conditioned, fed-everyday lifestyle here in the nicest part of the city is actually pretty comical. Such a tiny cat, and such a brief amount of time. Yet her presence here has strengthened the Fulbrighter’s relationships, given Keith the powerful experience of nurturing a creature in need and feeling the purrs of thankfulness in return, and lastly forced us all to ask ourselves deep and important questions such as What is life? How do we assess quality of life? Who do we chose to help, and who do we ignore in our lives? Does it make a difference to invest so much time in such a small animal, when many of us don’t even give money to beggars on the street? What does life mean in the dirt of a city street versus in the attention of a caregiver in a comfortable environment? What difference does it make, for us to save a cat like that? What does it mean for us? And what does it mean for Durga herself? A few days later, I was surprised to hear our door open and a kitten’s ‘meow’ drift into my room. The absence of a cat in our Fulbright group was short-lived. Christy had found a cat on the street next to a tea shop.

Throughout Durga’s last day the scratching feeling in my left eye grew. I had first noticed it that afternoon at the end of class. Although it felt as if there were a foreign object in there, I tried whatever I could do to get it out but to no avail. Mucus started leaking from the eye’s tear duct and accumulating. Before bed, Keith diagnosed me with pink eye and happily recounted his experience with pink eye while driving his auto-rickshaw to Calcutta. “It spread to both eyes, I could barely see out of them! Basically I just kept my eyes pried open and bit the bullet though, I mean I had to get to Dhaka somehow, there was no time to sit and rest. It must have looked so strange, seeing this foreigner driving around in an auto, with puffy, red, mucus-leaking eyes. Here, I got these gentamicin eye drops from a pharmacy. It cleared it all right up.” Even after having put in drops before bed, I woke up the next morning with my eye completely swelled shut. Having to pry it open not just because of swelling but also because of dried mucus gluing my eyelashes together, I could barely get in some more drops. The eye underneath looked alien and appalling. Deep redness stained everything except for the harshly-contrasting blue iris, left fortunately intact. Brown, wrinkled tissue surrounded the iris, as if the eye were decaying. Alarmed, I consulted John (war veteran and military nurse, we all go to John for health-related questions) to see what his recommendations would be. Skipping out on class, I headed down the street to the hospital, box of tissues in hand in case seepage got out of control. At the hospital I scheduled an appointment during the eye-doctor’s office hours. My classmates were afraid of my contagiousness and recommended I stay out of class the rest of the day. No problem, I always can use more sleep. At lunch I was so conscious of making sure I didn’t put anyone else at risk that I had Laule’a serve me. A fascinating feeling of being handicapped, coupled with a lack of confidence, fell over me (especially because I didn’t want to horrify people by making eye-contact). That afternoon the doctor checked for foreign objects (none) and loaded me up on a regiment of antibiotic eye drops, an anti-inflammatory medicine, antibiotic hand wash, and eye ointment. Yes ointment. Before bed I needed to spread it over the eyeball. I guess you got to do what you got to do. After the first day of treatment I could already tell that things were getting much better, although the next day I woke up with the infection in both eyes. Within 5 days or do I was back to normal, but fortunately not too soon; I kept my red devil eyes for our Halloween party.

I was psyched to celebrate Halloween, and we had been planning on the party for weeks. Keith was in charge of inviting everyone he could think of, as well as procuring alcohol. I was much more interested in the food and decoration. As you could guess, Halloween-specific decorations are hard to find here in Dhaka. Not hard to find, nonexistent. Fortunately my Commissary membership came through a few days before the party, and I was able to pick up a truckload of food supplies. I don’t know how the store clerk and I got all that food to fit in two boxes, but if we hadn’t been able to, I have no idea how I would have gotten it all back. Not only did I get lots of candy, but also foods for the other Fulbrighters and baking supplies. My German friend, Jan, lives two doors down and has an oven. It was an outlandish prospect, but I was hoping on baking pumpkin pie and apple dumplings. Many of the ingredients could be found in the market, but a few items were exclusively available at the Commissary, and a few of the spices I needed were available at neither. This is one reason why I was so joyful when my Mom’s package arrived. We had schemed up some things that would be good for a Halloween party, my Mom and I, and she sent a package filled with decorations and spices. As the days wore on closer and closer to the party, I was pretty sure that I’d have to cope with the disappointment of receiving the festive package after the show was over. When I saw Keith walk into our apartment TWO days before the party with a package addressed to me (having picked it up at the American Center – public affairs section of the embassy), well, overjoyed is an understatement. As I went through decoration after decoration, my room smelling of spices, I was overtaken with past Halloween memories and became filled with energy to make our apartment as spooky as possible. I don’t know, Halloween is a big deal to me. It’s about the feelings of sinking into another school year, of the seasons changing, of excitement for colored leaves and frosts, of fall foods like pumpkin and apple, of the thrill of being frightened, of allowing yourself the space to experience a range of emotions that are completely absent in the celebratory holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. And now—armed with decorations and the actual possibility of baking foods that I so fondly crave—I felt as if my distance to such Halloween-associated excitement and memories had been lifted. Granted, much of my alone thoughts have been qualified by nostalgia for a time that has passed in my life, be it high school, college, or home life with all the friends present. Now, it wasn’t only about remembering past times fondly, but living them as well. Buzzing, I haunted our apartment with decorations, shuffled furniture around with Keith, and assembled a playlist of music we could play.

I spent most of Friday, the day of the party, at Jan’s baking. Combining the ingredients I remembered to get at the Commissary, those that I had scraped together from the market and from our apartment kitchen, and lastly a few items filling in the gaps that Jan had, we went to town rolling out dough, mixing ingredients, wrapping apples, washing dishes, and baking for hours on end. The pumpkin ‘pie’ we made was in the shape of a large square tray, made to be cut into bars. We had to bake the crust before adding the pumpkin. We burned the crust. I feared that a flame oven without temperature settings would render the operation impossible, let alone getting the ingredient balance correct without measuring cups and measuring spoons. No worries, we started over and ate the burned crust anyway, which tasted like toasted cookies. With watchful eyes, we basically simply took it out whenever we ‘thought’ it was done. Despite how sure I was that things would be underdone or burnt, the pumpkin and nearly 40 apple dumplings turned out simply beautifully. As the first people came for the party, I was just about finished setting all the food up.

I guess the 2 day preparation period was just enough. At one end of our apartment we had a few chairs and a couch facing a television playing Saw (I had intended on showing The Ring, but the DVD actually inside the case that I bought was Bob the Builder; no problem, it was only about 50 cents anyway), in the middle of the apartment was a good deal of open space for people to stand, near both the food table and the music speakers. In the other corner of the apartment we arranged the drink table and several couches for people to sit. Along with several bottles of alcohol (which I bet was an exciting sight for our Bangladeshi guests), my contribution was a pot of spiced warm apple cider. The food table was basically the size of a single bed and was completely filled, orange plastic spiders occupying any open black space. We had bowls of chocolate bars, pretzels, Skittles, Reese’s pieces, Oreos, Starbursts, and Twizzlers. I also covered lollipops with tissue and drew on ghost faces with marker; the stem of the lollipop was a plastic skeleton limb. My language partner was eating one while introducing himself to my friend; I wondered if he looked at all crazy with a small skeleton hand creeping out slightly from between his lips (along with a cigarette) as he ate the lollipop. We had a heaping bowl of Oreo dirt pudding. We had cups, plates, and silverware. We had the entire pumpkin custard tray out, and one of two pots of apple dumplings. Lastly, several Bangladeshis that came added ice cream and other sweets to the mix. Above the table we hung a shredded cloth/net. Next to the table we taped up a Frankenstein wall figure. On the inside of the front door we taped up a paper skeleton balancing himself with one foot on the lock and one hand gripping the top of the door. Cob webs garnished an entire cabinet built into the wall, along with our wall lights outfitted to hold candles. All cobwebs were complete with black plastic spiders. Candles lit the entire apartment. Orange and black streamers, orange and black balloons, the list continues. The food and candy was well-received by everyone, including our Bangladeshi class teachers and language partners who hadn’t tried such baked goods before. Keith fashioned the remaining cobwebs into a white beard; he dressed up as a celebrated Bangali poet and writer, Rabindranath Tagore.

Conversation, music, good food, laughs, new and old faces, the party went like this until about 4 am. And who says Dhaka has no night life? Well, actually, yes, Dhaka has no night life. Before going to bed, Keith and I needed to move back all the furniture we had borrowed from the upstairs apartment before the cook came at 7 am to start breakfast. Somehow I bet our cook, Suranjan, would notice two couches, 4 chairs, and the entire dining room table missing. The apartment remained in its aftermath-party-destruction-yet-still-festively-decorated state for about 3 weeks. Finally, this morning Rasel (a housekeeper) and I dusted the floors and chipped off the solidified candlewax from the floors and shelves. And mopped and beat the rugs and washed the dishes etc etc. It put a smile on my face to see Rasel brush the corner where the ceiling meets the wall to get rid of spider webs, the light just underneath decked out with blatant thick artificial cobwebs. It must seem strange to decorate a home with what you actually clean out of it.

Last weekend BLI sponsored a trip for the students. We went to Srimangal, destination in the east of Bangladesh famous for its tea gardens. Keith decided to stay in Dhaka because he had come down with a cold the day before and wanted to celebrate Kali Puja in the city over the weekend anyway; Christy decided to stay because she had already been there and had work to do; Biz was concerned about carsickness; the group that was left was me, Laule’a, Olinda, John, Razima (BLI director), and Atif (a Bangla teacher). We left very early on Friday morning to beat traffic, and it was a good idea too because on the way back in traffic the journey took twice as long. I sat in the front of our van, eager to soak in the more nature-related sights that one misses in the thick of urban Dhaka. After two CNG fuel refills, one stop for lunch, and 5 hours of napping, conversation, and music listening, we had arrived at our ‘resort’, a compound of family-sized bungalows. Don’t ask me to define bungalow. It was like being in a small house. ‘Bungalow’ and ‘resort’ make the place sound a bit more enchanting than it was; don’t get me wrong though, the brick roads weaved around green wooded areas, rolling tea gardens could be seen in the distance, and there were tennis courts, a pool, and a ping pong table.

During our time there we visited tea gardens, a tea research institute, a small village (although I was rather disenchanted, our experience somehow flavored for visitors), and a guided tour through a thick state forest. We walked through the dense green foliage by following narrow soft sandy beds that run with water during rain. Massive spiders rested on webs that were strung between whole trees. Many times such webs would be weaved directly in our path. I kept a vigilant eye out for the critters, my height certainly increasing my likelihood of running into one of them, which happened once or twice. I dropped to the ground so quick and flung around so fast though that soon enough all the web would be off of me. The forest is known for a type of monkey but we didn’t see any. Olinda was terrified of the spiders and critter wildlife. As we existed the forest an hour later she turned to me with a crooked look on her face and asked what was on her ankle. She asked me again, with urgency and anxiety. As I looked down to where her shoe ended, I spotted blood and mentioned it was a leach. She started flipping out. Laule’a tried to calm her and removed the leach, bandaging her up after. It was evident Olinda was traumatized; tears could be seen on her face. We all though it strange, or rather comical, that she was the one to get a leach. Laule’a was also slightly jealous, she had wanted the experience to happen to her, maybe as a rite of passage or something; everyone who had visited the forest before had said that we’d get leaches.

Before leaving Srimongal, we were sure to stop at the famous tea stand in the area that brewed 7-layer tea. Somehow it was made with 7 different teas or flavors, each with a different density so it would separate into layers with visibly different colors. On the car ride home Laule’a realized she was struck with sicknes; I also wasn’t feeling too great. The car ride for Laule’a must have been excruciating, we needed to make 3 vomit stops. I was grateful I wasn’t feeling nauseous, but was having strong stomach pain, extreme bloating, and excessive nasty-tasting burps. Never quite had an illness like that before. And, by the next morning, I was fine, ready to face the next week.

In recent news, the political situation has started to heat up as we’re half way through the current prime minister’s term (year 3 of 5). As the opposing party (BNP, Bangladesh National Party) seeks to gain political momentum against the party in power (Awami League), it wouldn’t be surprising to receive word that they will declare a nationwide strike, or hartal, soon. I’m not sure with what frequency they occur, but we have had one already and there’s another tomorrow. Basically for us in Baridhara a hartal means that there’s no school and we don’t go in the city, mostly because transportation is offline and shops are closed. There is a concern for safety too, but at the same time my teachers have talked about how they loved hartals even as kids because they not only get off from school, but also get to watch exciting protests in the streets. You have a sense if the scene gets too heated and you need to leave. It’s an element of curiosity what the newspapers report the next day. What happened? Did the protests get out of control? Is there another strike tomorrow? Our first hartal was catalyzed by the BNP leader (also female) being ‘forced’ from her home because of legal land ownership reasons. Some articles say she was forced out without time to gather her things and her guards were slapped and she was treated so poorly. Other articles claim she was asked to leave after warnings from several days prior and then took hours packing her things and putting on makeup, yelling at the police when they asked her several hours later to hurry up. In any case, the opposing party was outraged and immediately declared the hartal the next day, sparking protests that rendered dozens of cars vandalized in the city as well as a few government-owned city buses set aflame. Not to worry, they get everyone off the bus before setting it on fire, it’s the government property they’re concerned about destroying, not people.

Perhaps I’ll give a brief overview of what happens during an average day. You’ll be happy to know that generally I don’t come across busses engulfed in flames. At about 8 I lazily wake up and shower, making it to class by 9 hopefully. My showerhead is at eye-level, it’s too hard for me to use being so tall. I bucket shower like I did in India, which I like better anyway. Since the weather has been getting colder, the cups of night-chilled water I pour over myself are quite shocking. Sometimes I wake up early and run for exercise on the path by the nearby small lake, maybe once a week. We have 4 classes in a day, being introduced to vocab, having conversations, translating readings, translating audio and video clips, things like that. We have small breaks in between classes and sometimes I’ll sneak downstairs to the girl’s apartment where Suranjan would be preparing lunch and make myself a piece or two of toast with honey. Laundryman comes on Wednesdays and Sundays and returns the clothes folded and packages a few days later, usually. At 1 we have lunch, I still love Suranjan’s cooking. More often than not, I have a ton of food at lunch and nothing the rest of the day. Sometimes our conversations (well, mostly just Keith and I) will last for some time after lunch, but on Mondays and Wednesdays we’re off into the city. On Mondays Keith and I go to the American Center, the public affairs section of the US embassy, to talk with prospective Bangladeshi college applicants seeking education in the US about our experience at our US undergraduate institutions. I find myself championing the small-school liberal arts background that I received, and Keith does too. Most of the Bangladeshi students we come across seem to be interested in big name schools, although one who I was revising a personal statement for was applying to Lafayette College in Easton, PA; she’s also interested in Neuroscience. On Wednesdays Keith and I go to a private university about an hour away by walking to help conduct an introductory English class. My first day, the professor had a meeting, so the class was mine to run (Keith has a different class). Hey, my first teaching experience, unqualified, and I’m thrown into an undergraduate classroom unprepared. No worries, we just had conversation about random things. That’s what they need really, just to develop and ear for American English and for me to help re-phrase their speech if their communication doesn’t come across. The rest of the evenings I will do different things. I spend a lot of time on my bed writing, listening to music, reading, studying, or reviewing vocab. I spend little time on the internet, partly because I’m busy doing other things and partly because there are periods of time when the internet is completely off, sometimes for a whole week. Also it’s off when the power goes out. The power goes out for hour long periods sever times in the evening hours; the city simply doesn’t have enough power to function. Our apartment has a diesel-powered generator in the first level garage that kicks in, powering our fluorescent lights and fans (although not the microwave!). Sometimes I just use candlelight though. Usually I don’t eat dinner because I’m still full from lunch and the days just fly by anyway. My water comes from one of those 5 gallon jug dispenser things that is replaced whenever needed. A few times a week my BLI-arranged language partner, Minhaj, a 26 year old business student, and I will meet up to have conversations and practice Bangla. He’s incredibly patient with me and loves to practice his English as well. Communicating in Bangla is usually stimulating, trying to mold your thoughts in a different way than usual. Minhaj lives close to my apartment so usually I’ll go over to his place to get out of the house. Plus his roommates and cook are fun people. Sometimes I walk to the nearby bazaar for sweets or just to explore; sometimes I go to Gulshan-2, the closest city hubbub nearby, a massive intersection at its center reminding me of a Time’s Square analogy; there’s even a massive display screen with TV advertisements and stuff like that. Around that area there are tea stands and places that sometimes I’ll meet Bangladeshi’s to chat with. Fridays are great to travel into the city, there is much less traffic then because that’s the weeks holiday. I just about never get into a mode of transport during any part of the work week. Anywhere you go the traffic is so severe that you might as well walk, no matter how far. If I’ve been out on the streets, I will usually irrigate my sinuses through my nostrils with a plastic ketchup bottle I bought (it’ll have to double as a netty pot); it’s refreshing to blow out blackened mucus afterward. John’s been having trouble with his sinuses lately, I wonder if pollution is why. So, the days go like this mostly, always more people to chat with, always more Bangla to learn, and always making the effort to relax amongst it all. Hopefully I’m asleep by 12 or 1. During the nights, on my half-inch thick bed cushion on the floor, I sleep beautifully.