wife serious come sharp

Often when riding by the Mymensingh Telegraph Office, I've slowed down to admire the old building and wonder what goes on inside these days.  So yesterday, I stopped in to ask.  The officer in charge appeared busy at work but graciously spared me some time.  I asked how many telegrams get sent these days, and he smiled:  few ... very few.  nai bole chole.

But some of the government banks do occasionally still send a telegraph, so the Telegraph Office stays open and ready for their monthly telegraph or two.  (Sent out by fax.)  And they also have the responsibility of distributing the land phone line monthly bills.  So the 8-10 employees keep their chakris and keep drawing their salaries.

It wasn't till I came back to the office and told my colleagues about my visit that I realized how recently this office still played an important role in the country.  As recently as 1994, Bari bhai had received a "wife serious come sharp" telegraph -- the one message from home that was supposed to earn you a immediate leave from work.

Mymensingh's Telegraph Office was built in 1856, and looked like it hadn't had any maintenance since independence.  Of the 8 rooms in the main building, only three are still in use, the others abandoned one by one as new leaks appeared in the roof.  But despite the disrepair, the structure has held up remarkably well.  It could probably survive another decade or two of neglect, but the officer in charge predicted it would soon be knocked down to make way for a large new building.  So the real question is: will the bureaucratic inertia be sufficient to keep the Telegraph service open and the building in place until there is a will to start restoring what little remains of Bangladesh's architectural history?  

ই

The letter ই is my favorite.  It is wonderfully shapely in form and versatile in function.  When emphasis is needed, throw in an ই, and if it's vagueness you want, ইয়ে something will do the trick.  And there's nothing like an ই to give ইংরেজি loanwords an ইspecial Bangla touch.  

salad

Winter is a great time for salad.  This year's favorite new ingredient was mustard flowers (the yellow ones below).

Tanguar Haor

I'm now finally getting to putting up pictures from almost a month ago, when Rana, Khalid, Ben and I took a weekend trip over to Tanguar Haor in Shunamganj.  The haor is a large area of lowland bils, rivers and marsh.  It stays wet all year round, and attracts thousands of migratory birds in the winter.

I've never seen so many ducks in one place.  We weren't able to get too close, but managed to identify a few of them, including the ruddy shelducks below, and then a red-crested pochards next down.

The purple swamphen was our favorite for pictures -- not too shy, and a beautiful iridescent blue-green plumage. 

Despite the beauty of the place and the spectacular display of birds, the area still attracts relatively few tourists ...our trip there showed us why.  After an overnight bus ride to Shunamganj, we took an auto to the ferry ghat, a boat across the river to the Westward road, and then a tempo out towards the Haor.  After over an hour of lurching about in the tempo, we reached Tahirpur, but found out that we were still a long way from the wintertime edge of the haor.  And from there on, the only transport option was motorcycle -- doubling or tripling up behind the young guys who drove their hondas as taxis.  Because the roads are all under water half the year, they are often little more than badly-washed out mud trails.

The trip was more or less organized on the fly, so we were pleased to find these fishermen who allowed us to sleep in their boat.  They also cooked us dinner, and wouldn't accept any payment -- just let us buy one chicken for the curry.  The chicken was good, but couldn't compare to the fish curry they also cooked, using a large boal caught while the cooking was going on.

Thanks to Rana and Ben for most of these pictures.

bissho ijtema

Last weekend, for the first time I joined the millions of Bangladeshis who assemble at the annual Bissho Ijtema, the largest Muslim congregation after the Hajj in Mecca.  I only ended up staying only a few hours, but enough to get a taste for the event.  It was actually easier to appreciate the scale of the Ijtema from outside (the picture below was taken from the Tongi footbridge); inside it was just an endless series of tents.

I had imagined there would be separate areas for prayer and meetings, but of course the tents cover the entire area.  Sleeping, namaaz, meals, and everything else happens in the same place between the long lines of bedrolls.  There is no way of counting the crowds who show up, and estimates vary from 25,000 to 5 million.  With each person getting no more than 1 square meter of ground, I figure at least 600,000 stayed the night in the 160-acre space.  And with even more coming in from Dhaka, I'm sure the total for the final prayer was not far from the 5 million estimate.