Season of Green Mangoes

In phalgun- the time of new life and flowers and growth- the war came and it changed our life here in Bangladesh. Even our good friends found it an embarrassment to have an American friend and the Bangladeshis who work for the American school suffered even more by their association. Every day in the paper the headlines would say," Americans kill 27 babies and children in Baghdad," or "Americans bomb another hospital." Day after day that's the way it was. There were large demonstrations every weekend and we were restricted from traveling out of our "golden triangle"- the diplomatic zone consisting of three neighborhoods. What, in the best of times, is a restricted life because of the culture and the foreignness of things became more restricted. In a way we live in a box here and the box became smaller. My interest has been in expanding the boundaries of the box through relationships with Bangladeshi people and through studying the language. I was making progress until the war. Then I got very sick and I felt that my illness was a metaphor for the war. I was attacked and there was a lot of destruction and then I entered the reconstruction phase.
When I was sick, lying in a pool of sweat and fever, my cook, Bhanu, would come in to check on me and put his hand on my head to judge the fever. My buddies from the art school- the ones I paint with on Fridays-came over and cheered me up and because I had no taste for food and no interest in it, they took a rickshaw to the market to buy special fruits-pomegranates and leche fruit to bring my taste buds back to life. One of them, Liton by name, said, "Sir, this will be so tasty to your mouth."
Before long we were painting again out in the villages or in Shavaar where American friends live in a big, five-story house on the edge of endless rice paddies and vegetable plantations stretching out to the Turog River. In Borshakal-monsoon- the river overflows its banks and the water expands several miles all the way to their back yard. And where there is rice now, there will be fish and fishing boats.
Now is the harvest time for "Bhat"- rice. From the upper floors of their house, from the roofs, one looks out in all directions on a never-ending variety of landscape and people and animals. It is a huge stage set against green growing rice and the golden stacks of rice stalks piled there after the kernels have been threshed out.
Bangladesh is the most fertile place on earth. It is a huge flat delta of clay so rich in minerals it may never be exhausted. When it gets tired the floods renew it with their endless moving of material and the addition of organics coming all the way from the Himalayas down to the Bay of Bengal. It is an exotic, sexy place where the heat is intense like a steam bath and it builds and builds. Then the sky darkens. Black clouds roll across the horizon. Lightning flashes. Thunder crashes, and the winds spin to a hundred miles an hour out of nowhere. In the aftermath, coolness and relief, but just for a short while until once again the heat builds again to that dramatic climax.
Everything grows here and even the most simple people have a reverence for plants and birds and flowers. They know the names of all these and their habits and their cycles. Every free space has a few vegetables growing, tended lovingly by unseen hands. In the villages or in the suburbs nobody cuts a tree. After a cyclone branches pruned by the storm are carried away at first light the next day. It is a bonanza for a poor person to have that firewood either to sell or to use. Nothing goes to waste. Every bit of garbage is sifted for anything of value and everything seems to have value. The dogs and the crows get the last of it.
The national fruit of Bangladesh is kahtal-jackfruit- and it is the perfect symbol for this fertile nation of 130,000,000 people in a landmass the size of Wisconsin. Jackfruit grows off the trunk of a large tree with brown bark. Jackfruits are like the testicles of a mastodon- the size of a basketball except elongated. And they are all horny and hard on the outside. Crack them open and there are dark brown seeds the size of duck eggs and covering these seeds is a blanket of sweet something. That's what one eats. But the odor and the texture are very different and disturbing somehow. Bhanu tells me most foreigners don't like jackfruit.
Leche or mango are a different matter altogether. Like jackfruit they grow everywhere in the neighborhood. A tree-ripened mango has more different good flavors than any single food I have ever tasted. Each piece is a different experience. Leche's are like candy. It's fun to split the seed case and eat one after another of the sweet coverings of the seeds themselves. Across from my apartment I notice that someone has climbed a big mango tree and put a scarecrow at the very top to protect the fruit from the crows.
Like the land the people are fertile and keep making babies. They love their children. Bangladeshi people in many ways are like one big family. Strangers talk to each other as if they had known each other all their lives and, in a deep way, they have. They call each other "Bhai" and "Bone"- brother and sister. To all the caddies and ball boys I am "Borro Bhai"- older brother. And they love me for some reason. When the war was raging and we were not even supposed to go to where the golf course is I, naturally, went anyway. And sometimes it was a little tense-mostly self-induced but slightly uncomfortable with the older men who work there-devout Muslims. One day when I had finished practicing and went to my car a group of ball boys and caddies stood around me- maybe fifteen of them or more-, and one of them said in very clear Bangla, "Borro Bhai. We want you to know, Borro Bhai, that we love you." I said "Amar Bondhura- my friends" and touched my heart. When you shake hands here you shake and touch your heart. It was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me.
Those boys are supporting many people. Everybody supports everybody else-parents, sisters, cousins. Nobody among the poor hangs onto much for himself. And those ball boys have a million tricks to lose your ball and find it again for 10 taka, to take balls out of your bag, to exchange your good ball for their not-so-good ball-a million tricks.
They call it "hunky monkey" and they know that "Borro Bhai" knows most of the tricks and won't tolerate "hunkey monkey" and they also know that if "Borro Bhai"were one of them he would have some great "hunkey monkey" tricks no doubt!

Ricker Winsor
Dhaka, Bangladesh
September13, 2003.