New Found Sympathy for the Thanksgiving Turkey

Holy smokes...it is an oven in Dhaka.

I'm sure glad I don't understand the Celcius system, otherwise I'd be begging for mercy from this heat. I am confident it was about a hundred degrees F in my apartment last night. Our ceiling fans do nothing but push the scorching air around the flat. I think the birds were singing when I finally made it to sleep last night, and I woke up drenched in sweat this morning. Seriously, it is so hot and humid that when I step outside from an air-conditioned building, my glasses FOG UP. I was teaching my Nari Jibon English class on the fourth floor of a non-A/C building yesterday, and the body heat eminating from the roomful of thirty students was so intense that I nearly passed out while conjugating the verb "to be."

Speaking of English class, I was doing a section on descriptive words (i.e. adjectives) this week and I encountered one of those strange-yet-oh-so-Bengali moments. I put sentences on the board and left blanks for people to fill in with adjectives of their choice. When I put up the sentence "Kazi Nazrul Islam is ______ " (K.N. Islam is Bangladesh's famed political poet), people had a word or two to describe it. Talented, famous. The sentence didn't spur the kind of inspired political debate I had hoped. However, when I wrote "Hilsa fish is ______ " (hilsa fish, or "elish mach" is the tasty national fish), the room suddenly exploded into intense discussions about the virtues of the fish, its taste, smell, texture, ideal preparation, etc. Bengalis: we love our culture, but we love our fish curry even more.

Later in the class, I asked them to describe a person. The easiest way to do this was to use myself as the example and put up "Tanya is _______ " on the board. I was totally embarassed when one well-meaning young woman said "Thaniya is a fat." I hope she meant P-H-A-T, as in cool.


Off to roast in my Old Dhaka English class.

TKPhat