My third winter in Dhaka begins

I've been told a few times that my blogs are very different from my photographs. My photographs have sometimes been described as unjudgmental, intimate, located. On the other hand, my writing appears to have very little to with physical geography, despite purporting to be part of a travel blog. I'm not sure why that is, other than my obsession with the geography of personality which perhaps comes out more readily in my writing than in my photography.

Despite what I told the Fulbright committee in my personal statement, I think I'm not writing about place at all. I'm more interested in emotion, in feeling. Because I gypsy about so, I may not even know anything about place at all. I think I may know how to write about it, but I want to talk about other things. Like sex. Like touching. Like feeling.

Someone told me recently that life wasn't about love. It was about justice. I was crushed at the thought. Was my entire creative energy funneling into a place that didn't matter? Would I be known as that writer who wrote about the surface of things, the love bits, lala chick lit? Was I wrong to imagine that justice, power, right, all of it, was swallowed by love, by skin? How I saw life clarified, dissolved, explained in kissing?

See there, I go again.

Ok, some physical geography. I'll tell you about one of my favourite parts of Dhaka: North Badda. There's a stretch of road I have walked once and driven through several times. There are stores selling all the usual conveniences: biscuits, sugar, paan, batteries, phone cards, cigarettes, flowers, fruit, soda, shingaras, sweets, and so on. But most of the stores here stock industrial items. Rubber tires, lengths of reluctantly flexible wire, and my favourite: the longest stretches of bamboo. These are stacked in massive piles, stretching from the road, into the stores, through the roofs, up into the sky, metres and metres of jointed wood, and at sunset when the light comes down in a slow flame, the bamboo transforms into molten spires.

It's cooling in Dhaka. Outside, the air is lighter, drier. Winter vegetables are coming into season in all their tremendous varieties and tastes. People are rebuilding their lives after the cyclone. Many here I've spoken to have relatives devastated by the recent storm. Altaf Bhai, Sayeef Uncle's driver, is struggling to raise 60,000 taka to rebuild his family home and purchase the chickens and goats that were killed. Jahangir Bhai is Babu Mama's driver, who I mentioned in this blog post about language. On a recent drive to Shantinagar, he told me his house in the village sat down. I thought perhaps I was not understanding his Bangla. He repeated, our house lay down on the ground. I imagined a shaggy straw house sleeping on its side. So it didn't break, I asked still confused. No, but we have to make it stand up again. Of course.

I have $1100 that my friends have given me to distribute. Part of it will go to Shajada Bhai whose house was destroyed and grandmother killed. Part to Altaf Bhai. Part to Jahangir Bhai. Part to Miron Bhai whose house was more inland and so just their roof and crops were damaged. I have to keep talking, asking questions, taking photographs, finding out more. There is so much to know.

This summer, I finished a first draft of my second book, the Lovers and the Leavers. I've given it to a few readers and am awaiting feedback so I can start a rewrite. I have 3 months more in Bangladesh. In that time, I want to finish a second draft of L&L. I want to hire a Bangla tutor to tutor me regularly so I can feel like I've internalised the Bangla I've relearned this past year and half. I want to have my second exhibition at Alliance Francaise Dhaka go off like a bang this coming January. And I want to teach a short creative writing workshop to encourage English writing in Bangladesh.

Then I think I am leaving. Even though when I'm outside, I cannot stop looking, taking photographs, thinking of stories. Even though when I'm inside, I'm overwhelmed by love from my cousins, my aunts and uncles, my nieces and nephews, my extended grandparents. I have been given the gift of understanding why I came here while I'm still here. We don't always have that luxury. Sometimes the realisation comes long after we're gone. I know why I came to Bangladesh. It was so I'd come to know my family, so I'd start to undermine my disbelief about blood being thicker than water.

So why am I leaving? A lack of a dating scene (read: my relentless libido on the prowl); a lack of a writing community (read: my literary learning foiled); a lack of (platonic) social network (read: I have no friends here, save a couple, despite more than a year); chafing at the constriction (read: I want to be able to walk alone at midnight); missing my friends and immediate family (read: I need my old relationships); wishing to publicise my writing and photography (read: I am most likely moving to NYC by 2009 or earlier); wanderlust (read: Costa Rica and Argentina, vengo).

But until then, I'm here. Sourcing delight from every exotic, erotic, elegant, eleventh hour angle of Bangladesh.