Six Months Grace

I came to Bangladesh in mid December 2009 for several reasons: to lick my agent hunting wounds (round 1 was a bust), to hug my Dhaka peeps, to have a jumping off point for New Year's Eve and Melissa's birthday in Fiji, to visit Sheba in India, and to celebrate Mahmud's first book being published by Penguin India, and my father's fourth and fifth books coming out in Dhaka.

I thought this would all take, oh, a month, maybe two at most, and then I'd return to New York in say, March, with the worst of the winter behind me. Instead, it's July and I'm only halfway back to the land of the free.

In the six months I lived in Bangladesh, I started my first novel and third book, Memory Alone (82 pages, baby), I practiced and taught a tonne of yoga, and I lived with the fabulously beautiful and talented Nadiya, who (and I cannot stop bragging just yet) is bound for University of Iowa's world class fiction writing masters program this fall.

In other news, I learned I could live without air conditioning even in the worst of the swelter (hello April, and May, when the rains are late). My bedroom in Nadiya's sprawling flat had no AC, and worse, when the power went (as it did a million times a day and night), even the fan didn't work, because it wasn't hooked up to the generator or IPS box. I'd wake each time the power cut, drenched in sweat and angst and darkness, and tell myself, You are not a fucking princess, Abeer. You will sleep this one out. And I did. Mostly.

It doesn't help that I sweat profusely as soon as it goes over 80F (26C). I had to carry a little towel with me everywhere I went. Once I got into a CNG, sweating and mopping my usual piggy self, and the CNG wallah turned to me, and said, "Madam, you came from an AC room, didn't you?" I didn't know whether to agree/lie, or admit that this was my natural disgusting state of things.

Half a block down from the number 8 bridge in Dhanmondi is where my favourite jhaal muri wallah sits. For 5 taka (7 cents), he will mix puffed rice, diced onions, ghugni (a chickpea paste), chopped chillis, chanachur, salt, and lime juice, fill up a newspaper cone with this goodness, and give it to you.

It's true, you can get any number of (serious) ailments from eating street food, but I was addicted. I can't tell you the number of times Nadiya and I had jhaal muri as a meal. After a few under and over orders, I think we settled on 60 takas worth of jhaal muri being just right for two hungry lazy writer girls. Tk 50 was not quite enough. Tk 70 left some wasted.

Our other favourite haunt was Hot Hut on Mirpur Road, for its delicious momos (dumplings filled with veggies or chicken) and its even more mouth watering chilli cilantro sauce. In this venture, my greed (I can't, in good faith, call it hunger) surpassed even Nadiya's. I think my record was eight momos in one sitting, though four to six of these babies should suffice any normal person.

Thanks to my favourite Mala Mami who is possibly the best cook in the world, I also had the most wonderful home cooked meals, on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, depending on how often I made it out to Shantinagar.

This feasting included more than my share of bhartas - the winter/spring specialities of Bangladesh. Bhartas are mashes of pretty much anything you can think of. Potato bhartas of course, are common, but then there's eggplant, flat beans, lentil, egg, shrimp, chilli pepper, plantain, tomato, and so on.

My favourite is the oft-hated (and oft-loved) shutki - made of salted/cured fish - and which has many varieties, including the famous and fantastic loitta shutki, a speciality of the port city of Chittagong.

Take a gander at the new drink in town. At least new to me (and to my mother who had never heard of it when she was growing up in Dhaka). It's kacha am'er shorboth (the juice from unripe mangos) - mixed with chilli masala and salt, and served cold and utterly refreshing. I think it might also work quite nicely with a dash of vodka.

There are fruits I ate this year which I had never eaten before, including the crunchy watery taal (date palm fruit) and the sour sweet jaam (which look like long black grapes). And of course, I ate a million mangoes. The fabulous Farah Mehreen's garden in Gulshan boasts nine varieties alone, and each one is different from the last.

As you can tell, eating constitutes one of my consummate pleasures in Bangladesh. To combat my lack of eating self control, I embarked on what I still think is an insane campaign of daily exercise. Last summer, I had to stop running due to a clicky hurty knee. It was a huge blow, not to be able to run, after 4+ years of it. Running is the easiest, fastest, shortest way for me to get and stay in shape. I only have to do it (slowly) for 30 minutes, three times a week. And I'm done. Strong limbs, flat stomach, high energy, no matter what else I do or eat. And I can do it in any country, at any time, in any weather. But no more.

In an attempt to counter my softening body and my endorphin deprived mind, I upped my once/twice a week yoga routine to 5 days a week. This stayed the softening but did nothing to reverse it. For more of an experiment than anything else, I tried a daily yoga routine. To my surprise and trepidation, one hour of hot yoga a day in a hot country in the hot season was the trick.

Every morning, I'd get up from my damp bed, wash my face (in vain), and then do an hour of yoga in the dripping heat. I'd shower (in vain), eat my jhaal muri lunch, and then work on my novel. I'd be at my laptop (which was perched on Nadiya's ironing board) (I write standing) for two to six hours. The goal was a page a day, no matter how shitty.

By May, I finished a very rough draft of part 1 of my novel. Jewel, my young druggie protagonist, is losing his mind, and with it his ability to invent himself, a devastation of perception and genesis. Part 2 shows him as an old man suffering from dementia. He's the same person(ality) from part 1 but he doesn't have the same history.

Because he's someone older, in a different place and time, he's losing something different: webs of interaction, an erasure of history, a disengagement. I'm captivated by this story, though I also have no idea how to tell/finish it the way I imagine.

May was also the month I taught a month long yoga class to the exercise class starved denizens of Dhaka. Between 10 and 25 people showed up to each class, in varying conditions of flexibility and strength, but every last one of them eager. Still, I didn't have high hopes, for my own enjoyment, that is. I have not thrilled to my teaching experiences in the past, which have included classes on computers, information systems, English, GREs, GMATs, essay writing, and creative writing. I wasn't particularly good (or bad) at it, and I always felt like I was missing out on doing my own work.

To my surprise, I loved teaching yoga. I loved watching the progress of different students, learning how different bodies move through different poses, when to encourage, how far to push, when to let it go.

I've been obsessed with bodies ever since I started dancing by myself in my bedroom, the summer after I turned 16. That fall, I joined the swim team - my first conscious non-intellectual endeavour (but certainly not non-mental, as any athlete will tell you). I watched my own body struggle and shift, and then over the years, shift back and struggle again, and again, and again.

That first season of swimming was the hardest thing I had ever done, and possibly is yet still. It was an epiphany, that moment, two months into the season, in the middle of another interminable set, when I lifted my head as usual to take a desperate breath, and my body suddenly propelled through the water with my stroke. A stretch, a straightening, a twist, a turn, and now power, grace in my form.

The trick will be to parlay this love of muscles in motion into a part time paying career so I can keep writing and photographing. Yoga teacher cum corporate editor? Hypocrite much?

It was halfway through my ever extending visit that I realised that I can't live in Bangladesh. Not long term anyway. My libido gives me two maybe three months grace before it starts driving me crazy.

The twenty seven year olds, the even younger, the taken, the philanderers, the dissolute, the uncertain, the adulterers, the immature, the open marriages, the parentally oppressed, the parents. I can't take it.

Bangladesh is yet difficult for single women (and yes, single men, but women have a harder time of it, as with most everything else). It doesn't matter how young I look, how good you feel, how mythical click our connection, I'm done sneaking around.

So I left, just before the rains started, in June. I know I'll be back. For the photographer's dream, the jaundice yellow jhaal muri, the dry cool winter as much as the hot yoga heat, and most of all, for the feast of family and friends and food.