Hyperballad

According to my diary, I’ve got about 5 weeks left in Bangladesh and then it’ll be end of chapter, moving right along folks, please GFC clean up after yourself so when I’m done spending all my cash, I can find gainful employment come March. Pretty please.

This gives me 5 weeks to post about the 5 things I’m going to miss loving, and the things I’m going to love not missing. Oh yes, a list, one of my favourite things. Instead of doing the ole’ bullet point number, though, I thought what better farewell to the ‘desh than a long and drawn out departure, spread out over – yep – 5 weeks. So, taking it away at number 5, I bring you:

Things I’m going to love not missing

1. No, no way, oh no, uh uh, that’s not even…you mean it’s…my dinner?

The first thing that probably comes to mind on reading a sentence like that is a scene out of Survivor, you know that old reality TV show where they stuck a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Australia) and made them do silly things like obstacle courses, jigsaw puzzles, and eat rare and exotic food like bull’s balls, spiders, brains etc. But that’s not the direction I’m headed in here.

What I’m talking about here is B – L – A – N – D. Not a word I associated with food from the sub-continent before coming here, but wow, how things change. At first it seemed like a dream. Lentils, naan bread, mixed curried veggies, tropical fruits, roti for breakfast and sweets for dessert. How can you go wrong?

Wrong, though, is exactly the word for Bengali Cuisine. Actually, I take that back. The word I’m really looking for is yellow. Everything here is yellow. Yellow dal, yellow vegetables, yellow meat, yellow bread, yellow fruit, yellow yellow yellow. And while I have nothing against bananas, and think they’re actually on the tasty (and safe) side of the Bengali food equation, there is just something slightly disturbing about an entire nation’s food relying so wholeheartedly on one colour. Especially when you’re from a country that says something about three colours on your plate at every meal (or a rule to that effect). And colour on my plate is something, as a vegetarian, I normally excel at.

Not here I don’t. It’s all yellow.

A typical meal in a Bengali restaurant goes something like this. Get a big bowl of yellow, oily water which we will hereto refer to as ‘dal’, despite the complete lack of, well, ‘dal’ (which means lentils). Throw in a small side bowl of yellow vegetables, or ‘shobji’ cooked to within an inch of their life then thrown into a big pot full of yellow, oily water and simmer until everything takes on a mush-like consistency. Throw in a plate of white rice (which is destined to become yellow as you ‘moosh’ the dal and vegetables together), a side of cucumber, some salt and a slice of lime and there you have it. A la carte, deshi style.




For the meat eaters, it gets slightly better as you get to add yellow, bony, deep-fried fish or fatty, yellow goat/chicken/beef to your plate, depending on Today’s Special.

As a surprise, you never know how fresh the food is when it reaches the table with worrisome speed, suggesting a whole load of ‘here’s something I prepared early…much earlier…maybe even yesterday, or the day before that…’ which can leave you feeling like you’re just a mouthful away from salmonella. Lip-smacking stuff.


Things I’m going to miss loving
1. ‘Hey, kali!’

Bangladesh is deservedly renowned for it’s cycle rickshaws, and the art that adorns them, which some rickshaw wallahs take very, very seriously. Combine this cycle power with the motorised CNGs, and the buses of all types from the dodgy ‘I-need-to-upgrade-my-travel-insurance’ variety right up to the ‘here’s your water, your biscuits, and a blanket, just nod in my direction and I’ll be up in a jiffy to help’ kind, and you’ve got pretty much the whole country covered.

Transport in general is something Bangladesh does well. In fact, it would be entirely possible to not walk more than about 10 steps in any direction for a week or more. All you have to do is walk out the front door, shout 'hey kali!’ to the nearest empty form of transport, and off you go. It’s cheap. It’s everywhere. Come to think of it, it’s like the McDonalds of the sub continent, and just as likely to contribute to the obesity epidemic overtaking the middle class here. It is scarily easy to say ‘why walk?’ when, for 20 cents, you can pay someone else to do your sweating for you. (…Unless it happens to be one of the ten months of the year here when it’s stinking bloody hot and you’ll be sweating anyway…but I digress).



Now every time I curse and swear at the lack of taxis in the city on a Saturday night, I can reminisce about how, “In Bangladesh, we’d be able to just stick out our arm and…”. Oh, I’m going to be such great company when I come home.

In the flesh

I am a vegetarian. This term is not as straight forward as it should be, and I’m partly to blame because I am the kind of vegetarian that will sometimes eat fish. Ergo, I’m not really a vegetarian. But, for the sake of this post, let’s just be lazy and call me a vegetarian.

Even worse than being a vegetarian, I am the kind of vegetarian who has read, no, gobbled up really, The Ethics of What We Eat. I’m also a vegetarian who recently watched ten minutes of a non earth-shattering documentary on the BBC that showed tuna in the sea somewhere being slowly suffocated to death in one of those nasty fishing nets that can trawl three quarters of the Indian Ocean in one go. Now I can’t eat tuna.

As a child who spent time on farms getting to know dear Milo before she became T-Bone, and collecting eggs from Little Hen before she made the transition from producer to produce, I know what it’s like to watch farm animals live happy lives scratching in the dirt or chewing the cud and I have no problem with the food chain when it flows like this.

When I’m home in Australia, my reasons for not eating meat (or eggs) are twofold*:
1. I believe I am making a more ethical choice by not eating meat given a) the conditions many animals are raised, fed and slaughtered in to keep the supply of flesh flowing, and b) the negative environmental impacts that result.

2. I believe I am making a positive health decision. Since cutting meat out of my diet (for me, a progressive process) my fruit and vegetable intake has gone through the roof, not to mention legumes and all those yummy things which health people assure us are the nutritional equivalent of attaining nirvana.

Add to that the fact that I just don’t miss the stuff, and it all means I’ll be very surprised if I ever go back to chowing down on a juicy (read bloody) rump steak.

But then there’s this other reason, which Paul McCartney has conveniently already articulated for me: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian” which rears it’s head every time I go to a ‘developing country.’

Taking a walk through Karwon Bazaar, a large market in Dhaka, I found myself once again thinking, ‘I am so glad I’m a vegetarian!’

I couldn’t imagine picking out one of these little guys,




Or one of these comfy looking chooks



Or point to a pound of chicken flesh (see baskets above) that’s been sliced and diced on the market floor and think ‘mmm, that’ll be perfect for tonight's main course!’



Every time I see things like this I'm reminded of just how far removed the majority of people I know are from the food chain. In a country like Bangladesh, it's virtually impossible to avoid, and I think it's a good thing. There is no pretending where your goat curry came from.

It also reminds me that McCartney got it wrong. Slaughterhouses do have glass walls here, and I've never met a single Bangladeshi vegetarian. Not one, in over eight months.

*Oh, and there's that small part of me that always wanted to be a hippie but was (un)lucky enough to be born in the wrong decade with an aversion to dreadlocks which make me think of those huge Irish wolfhound dogs that are interesting to look at from afar but up close are kind of smelly and, well, unpettable. So deep.