i spent most of my morning with the communist manifesto. "a spectre is haunting europe..." we are reading marx in my political philosophy class. it is my first time teaching this material, so i'm spending a lot of time preparing for lectures and discussions. but its really a delight and a privilege to spend a day reading marx. he is such an interesting thinker - so sophisticated conceptually, and also so full of energy for change and for practical good. its an exceedingly rare combination, and there might be no other political thinker who combines such philosophical acuity with moral passion in the way that marx does. plus, in spite of the jargon, he can write a damn fine sentence when he wants to. for example: "communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution."
i spent much of the afternoon talking about kant, duty, and moral worth. the students in my ethics class have their papers due tomorrow, and most of them are writing about kant's groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. so many of them came by my office for last minute discussions of the difference between acting from duty and acting merely in accordance with duty, and why only the former has moral worth.
after my office hours, i rode the bike machine and ran on the treadmill in the auw gym, which is on the floor above my office. at the gym, and on walks around chittagong, i am listening to
this pulitzer-prize winning history of the vietnam war (which is also a history of the vietnam region going back to the colonial era). since coming to bangladesh, i have become an avid listener of audio books, mostly in history. i've finished two books on
the first world war, a book on
eastern europe during the 1930s and 1940s, a book on
baseball and economics, and a book on the
cia-backed coup in iran in the 1950s. i've enjoyed all of these. i find that fiction does not work as well for me in this format, and that narrative-driven history is ideal for audio.
this evening a group of auw students presented selections from eve ensler's play "t
he vagina monologues," along with some origin material and a video presentation on "comfort women" enslaved by the japanese during the second world war. a lot of students and faculty showed up, and the presentations went well. i think i can safely say that i have never heard the word "vagina" so many times in the span of one hour. the presentations were always earnest, and at times very sad, especially when dealing with issues of harassment and rape and shame.
after the presentation, i ran into several of my students from pakistan standing outside. as i approached them, they told me that they had just been talking about me. which i guess is good luck, since one of them informed me: "sir, you will live a long life," as if this followed from the timing of my greeting. we spoke for a while in the cool evening air. we talked about classes, about learning english, about the languages they understand (urdu, english, arabic, persian), and about religion. they are all ismailis, a minority branch of islam. i know a little about ismailism from
a book on islam i read last summer. they spoke with pride about being ismaili. it is a more "liberal" kind of islam, one of them said - not interpreting the quran too literally. they spoke with affection about the aga khan, and they explained how ismailis everywhere will welcome other ismailis. they told me that there are two ismaili families in chittagong, and more in dhaka. i explained to them the english idiom "close knit", and how it is a textile metaphor.
talking with these students was wonderful. like most of our students at auw, these three students are thoughtful, respectful, and warm. they like to laugh. they are self-aware, but not too guarded or cynical. as we talked, i wished that i spent more time with my students outside of class. i would like to get to know them better. i would like to spend more time having them teach me about their cultures and their view of the world.
leaving auw around 8, i took a cng to agrabad. a cng is a vehicle run on (c)ompressed (n)atural (g)as. they are essentially motorcycles with a back-bench attached, surrounded by a metal cage. agrabad is a center of commerce, a few miles south of the university. it is also home to the only place known to me - or to anyone whom i know - that sells alcohol in chittagong. the agrabad liquor store is at the end of a narrow alley. the "store" is actually a man, or a couple of men, standing behind a metal grate. they sell one kind of beer, one kind of vodka, one kind of whiskey, and one kind of rum. all of the this is made in bangladesh. the beer is barely drinkable, and the liquor tastes like medicine. but these are our limited options.
arriving in agrabad, i told my cng driver where to stop and paid him 100 taka ($1.30). after looking around a bit, i finally found the right alley, next to a store selling car batteries. i bought some whiskey for myself, and vodka for a friend's birthday this thursday.
the person who sells the bangladeshi brew is this man:
i got my change, took the alcohol, walked down the alley, and turned right on the main road. about twenty yards down i passed a mosque with men praying. about ten yards after that, there were two water buffalo on the sidewalk, tied with rope and eating hay that someone had set out for them. walking another ten yards, i had to leave the sidewalk and walk in the street, to avoid a crowd of men and boys standing outside an electronics store, watching cricket on the tvs on the window.
i hailed another cng and headed home. the traffic was bad on the way back. we sat for a while on a bridge jammed with cars, rickshaws, and cngs. the bridge passes over railway tracks, and looking out i could see the shacks of people who live along the tracks. i could see their oil lamps burning in the dark. i opened the whiskey and took a few drinks from the bottle. i wondered if my driver could smell it, and i thought probably not. just a few feet to my left, a number of motorcycles were driving on the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians out of their way. good sidewalks are not common in chittagong, so it struck me as especially significant that even this sidewalk - nicer than most - was being claimed by traffic, at the expense of pedestrians.
the cng let me off in front of my apartment, and i paid him 200 taka. this is more than a bangladeshi would pay, but less than 3 dollars, which isn't bad for a 30 minute cab ride. and i hate to bargain, so i prefer to just give a bit more than is standard and leave it at that. the driver was happy with the 200. he raised his hand in thanks as i walked away, carrying my leather bag holding my laptop, and a cloth bag holding the booze.
for dinner i ate rice and cauliflower and fish, prepared earlier in the week and left in the fridge by my housekeeper, kokhon. along with dinner, i enjoyed some more of the bangladeshi whiskey.
yesterday i bought a bike from one of my auw colleagues who is returning to the states in the fall. after dinner, i took the bike downstairs and went searching for a place to inflate its flat tires. the bike is painted black, with front and rear tire guards and a rack on the back. it has lots of chinese characters written on the frame. written in english are the words "the forever." i believe it. this is the tank of bicycles. its twice as heavy as my bike in chicago, which was a steal frame japanese bike from the 1980s.
leaving my apartment with the bike, i turned left, and i didn't have to walk more than 100 yards before i found a small mechanic's shop that could inflate the tires. the shop had no front door - just a front open to the muddy and broken road. three men were inside. the place was illuminated by a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. i couldn't tell them what i wanted in bangla, but it was pretty obvious what i was after. one of them filled up my tires with air. "bhalo" i said - "good." i think he asked for 20 taka, but i'm not sure. i gave him 100, and he seemed happy.
in the cool night air, in shorts and a white t-shirt, without a helmut but with a bit of whiskey running through my bloodstream, i rode the streets of chittagong. i turned right at the end of my street, and road past the police station. i rode past a tailor and a mosque and a dry-cleaner. i rode past the barber shop where i got my haircut two weeks ago. i sang loudly songs from "the sunset tree." i went through a roundabout which is home to numerous shops, including "valencia's secret" - a shop for women. i rode north past agora, an upscale shopping market (comparable to a dilapidated jewel or kroger). i turned left on a familiar side-street, went through neighborhoods, past construction workers digging a giant hole for a new building, past a hotel and popcorn vendors and a hindu temple and several pharmacies. i made two lefts and was heading back toward my apartment. up a small hill, then down a long slope. passing rickshaws and pedestrians and cngs. "in the weak last gasp of the evenings dying light, in the way those eyes i've always loved, illuminate this place..."
i turned right onto another side road. i went past a building where, a couple months ago, i was snooping through a window and startled to see a monkey in a cage just a few inches from my face. i road past a park described on google maps as "united nations park." i made another turn and headed home, the road now scarred with potholes and ruts and filled with water. "thirty six hudson, in the garage, all sorts of junk, in the unattached spare room..."
i turned again onto my street. i passed the shop where the men had filled my tires. they saw me, and we waved. they seemed pleased. i'm sure i was something of a spectacle to them - a white person on a bicycle. in my four months in chittagong, i have not seen another.
my apartment is on the twelfth floor. to get the bicycle into the elevator i had to pull it upright onto its back tire. inside my apartment, i put on a recording of bach's partita II in d minor and washed my feet.
