Excerpt: Lorenzo arrives in Bangladesh
The story of the extraordinary experiences of an ordinary man, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life is an immersive and compelling study of both the majesty and the banality of the spiritual path.
The following is excerpted from the chapter, ‘Into a Far Country’ and is an introduction to Lorenzo’s experience when he first arrives in Bangladesh.
Lorenzo’s first impression of his new country of residence, as he and Luca walk across the tarmac from the plane to the terminal building, is that its atmosphere is composed not of air but of some sort of vaporised polythene. After taking a few steps in the unimaginably sticky heat of September, he finds himself sweating and panting gently rather than breathing. He also has a confused sense of having landed in some kind of open field rather than an airport because he spots trees and huts and people a hundred metres or so away; they rather than a formal wall seem to indicate the boundary of the airfield.
And his Bangladeshi fellow-travellers having arrived where they belong, have come into their own. Chuckling and guffawing and slapping one another on the back, they are now different personalities; their briefest of farewell chats with Luca are exchanges almost between equals.
The air within the terminal building is thicker and stinkier. It seems to Lorenzo, groggy after a long voyage and a night of little sleep, that he has never in his life seen so many people wearing clothes of such a bewildering variety of colours. Most of them are behind railings that separate visitors to the airport from dazed arrivals from the wider world. All over the sub-continent, Lorenzo is yet to learn, before hijacking and terrorism put a stop to the fun, visiting the airport to receive a near and dear one with garlands and fanfare was akin to a picnic in the park.
The confusion, though, is not entirely in his head. Each distracting announcement in Bangla over the public address system makes him jerk his head up, hopeful (in his new avatar of polyglot) of following the stray phrase. Passengers from their flight dart about everywhere, yelling at one another the latest that they have learnt on where they are likely to find their luggage. Everyone behind the railings seems to be screaming and shouting and waving and many a passenger, on spotting a familiar face, stops dead in his tracks to squeak with joy. Lorenzo bangs into two of them. And often, unable to breathe, he is drawn to one of the larger pedestal fans only to find that they whirr so loudly as to be drilling their way into his head, and the air they emit is that of a gigantic hair dryer.
It is a relief that Immigration is a breeze. ‘Tourism, Mr Bonifacio?’ The passport is open at the visa with its Employment Prohibited frightfully prominent at the top of the page, so ‘No, never,’ responds Lorenzo vigorously. That apparently is precisely what the official has been waiting to hear, for he smiles and nods and stamps the passport with a force that makes the box of paper clips on his desk jump.
The city seems to begin at the doors of the terminal building, for the airport does not give the appearance of being separated from the encroaching metropolis by any gate or boundary wall. The road leading away from the building, hemmed in on both sides by makeshift (but permanent) stalls selling clothes, food and unrecognisable merchandise is chock-a-block with stalled traffic, stranded passengers surrounded by their atolls of luggage, with the most extravagantly painted cycle rickshaws and raucous hawkers peddling locks, chains, bags and lethal snacks. Lorenzo twice loses sight of Luca’s green shirt, once because a peddler insists that he taste some ghastly puffed rice-fried onion thing and the second time because he bends to tie his shoelace.
‘Nomoskar, Luca Babu. Nomoskar, Lorenzo Babu.’
‘Nomoskar, Michel Babu.’
Lorenzo has had some elementary lessons in Bengali etiquette. They sounded like warnings. Babu is more or less signore, sir. Mikhail is to be treated with as much—in fact, more—respect than Luca. Be very very careful, he must never be talked down to. Use aapni—lei—while addressing him, not tumi. Tumi is tu. And no touching people in greeting, Lorenzo, no kissing on the cheek and that whole European thing, never. Maintain your distance. In a country this crowded, distance is decorum.
He is a little shorter than Luca, Mikhail, but as wiry, dark, with a head of unmanageable black hair that at a distance could pass off as a sloppily-tied turban. The features behind the spectacles are demurely attractive. He is exactly Lorenzo’s age but looks younger. He is in dark blue trousers and an off-white shirt; he moves carefully in them as one would in the clothes that one dons for special occasions. He has ordered a taxi for the day and waits beside it; the vehicle is an Indian product. It is shaped like a bus but is no larger than a medium-sized car; whether one refers to it as mini-van or micro-bus would depend entirely on which side of the frontier one is positioned geographically.
They get in, Mikhail in front with the driver; it is even more stifling inside than out. They begin to move, they join the jam. Their driver too presses his thumb down on the car horn and keeps it there even when they are absolutely motionless. Luca hasn’t seen Mikhail in over six weeks and there are clearly lots of things that he wants to hear about. In turn, he describes the contents of their check-in baggage to Mikhail, all the marvellous switches, compressor guns and monkey wrenches that they’ve brought, at each of which the other nods vigorously and emits tiny—unfamiliar but not unpleasant—expressions of ecstasy.
Lorenzo, exhausted but relieved, is quite content to sweat profusely, pant gently, look out of the window and take in his new world. He has for instance never seen a cycle rickshaw before and at that moment is surrounded—he counts—by fourteen of them, of which six bear hillocks of luggage, criss-crossed with rope, that rise higher than the head of the driver. In the one closest to them, not further than a metre from his nose, sits a young mother feeding rice out of a tin bowl to a boy—little more than a toddler—standing next to her. The boy catches sight of Lorenzo looking and smiling at them and, even while periodically opening his mouth to receive the approaching spoon, does not take his eye off the witness to his breakfast.
The colours, framed in the window of the micro-bus, arouse the dormant painter in the somnolent Lorenzo. The mother’s salwaar is as red as fresh blood, and her kameez a deep green. The scarf untidily wrapped about her head is sunflower-yellow, the rice-and-milk in the bowl spotlessly white. Her skin is the shade of dark chocolate (60% cocoa), darker than her son’s but lighter than that of the rickshaw-wala (85%). Alongside her, the hood of the vehicle, half down to allow whatever breeze there is to reach the passengers, itself portrays some sort of vernal paradise, green vines clambering up suntanned boughs and shedding from on high the largest and pinkest of roses.
‘Wake up, my dear Lorenzo. We’ve arrived at the Mission House.’
Feeling even more befuddled after his short snooze, Lorenzo dismounts, takes down his bag and waits for Mikhail to end amicably his haggling with the driver. Mikhail, so he understands from the spirited back-and-forth, is inclined to be less generous than Luca on the occasions when his fellow priest is expected to play the Magnanimous White Man. They are in a nondescript narrow lane between rows of houses in a residential area in the centre of town. The few cars, seemingly more abandoned than parked, as though each had suddenly gasped and collapsed and then mulishly refused to budge an inch—make the lane even more unnavigable. The neighbourhood, Manipuripara—the locality of Manipur—one of several with the same name to be found elsewhere in the country, notably in Sylhet, Habibganj and Maulvi Bazaar, alludes to Manipur in India, some six hundred kilometres north-east of Dhaka. Those frontiers really have no meaning.
Its headquarters being Khulna, the presence of the Mission House in Dhaka is rather modest; it occupies the bottom two floors of a brown-and-green four-storey building. Priests and nuns of various denominations spend a night or two there on their way out or in, or when they have business to conduct in Dhaka, renew a visa, meet a donor agency, scout around for a spare part for a made-in-Europe electronic typewriter.
The new arrivals get a room on the first floor. The check-in suitcases remain downstairs, for Mikhail is keen to leave immediately for Khulna, fortunately lugging with him all that household equipment. A cup of tea and he will go. He is apparently not the big-city type. After the initial greeting, he has not looked Lorenzo in the eye even once. A sort of shyness, presumes the monk from Trieste, because with Luca, his face is animated, he is voluble.
The room appropriately is as nondescript as the building. It has the essentials and no more. Two clean beds, a table, a cupboard, a ceiling—and a pedestal—fan, both of which work. The heat and humidity have begun to bother Lorenzo less. He is still sweating but can now breathe a little more easily. The legs of each item of furniture, he notices, stand in earthen bowls that are filled to the brim with water. It is not God’s ways alone, says he to himself, that are mysterious.
Tea is downstairs, in the featureless dining room. At an adjacent table sit two Bangladeshi women that Luca seems to know. They are both in white blouses and blue saris. Lorenzo is introduced. The polite conversation however continues in their language because he guesses that they are not more fluent in English than he in Bengali. He gathers from the key English phrases that they let drop—‘waiting,’ ‘Mother Superior,’ ‘Luigine Sisterhood’—that they are nuns.
It is Lorenzo’s first encounter with the cha of the subcontinent, black tea dust boiled forever in a pan with water, milk and sugar till it becomes a syrup the colour of almonds. One sip and he is hooked by the rich, thick, polyphenol-caffeine-sugar fix. The future now begins to look a little bright.
‘Do you want to rest for a bit?’ asks Luca. ‘I was otherwise planning to go and shop for some essentials.’
Mikhail disappears for a few minutes to organise one cycle rickshaw and a baby taxi—which is a three-wheeler auto-rickshaw—that will take him and the suitcases to Gaptoli, where he will board a bus for Khulna. The cycle rickshaw is to ferry the Italians to New Market.
After the cha, another first but the rickshaw is considerably less of a pleasure. The seat is extremely uncomfortable—Lorenzo keeps slipping forward—and the ride terribly bumpy but more disagreeable than both is the sensation of being ferried around by human horsepower, of using another living mortal as a kind of draught animal. ‘One apparently gets used to it,’ says Luca, whose knack of divining another’s thoughts is quite uncanny, ‘after several trips. In thirteen years, I still haven’t. I avoid using them as much as I can but it is the best mode of transport in Dhaka.’ Lorenzo watches the back of the rickshaw-wala who—without slowing down an inch or stopping ringing his bicycle bell—wipes his face and neck with the long tail of his red scarf. That is what I should be doing, says Lorenzo to himself. It seems a marvellously practical sartorial accessory, in that weather, to have about your shoulders a huge handkerchief, ready to use, at all times. ‘There are apparently some seventy thousand cycle rickshaws registered with the Dhaka municipal authorities but the actual number in use should exceed two hundred thousand. Look around you.’
They are on Mirpur Road and the number of cycle rickshaws do rival the cars and baby taxis. The congestion increases dramatically as they approach the market; suddenly, as they turn a corner, the road is a sea of stalled traffic. ‘We’d be better off on foot,’ decides Luca. They wade in.
The original shops of New Market have been overwhelmed by the hillocks of goods—buckets, brooms, saris, bed sheets, pots and pans—on the carts of the hawkers and pedlars lining the road. ‘Watch your pockets.’
‘Sure. But whoever shoves his hand in will find that they are as empty as they were in Praglia.’
Clamorous are the invitations from each vendor whom they pass. ‘Come sir come best Hawaii choti imported Hawaii slippers sir special price come.’ The route through the bedlam is tortuous and they have to pause more than once for the occasional urchin to rush up, touch some white forearm skin and scamper away giggling with achievement. ‘What are we looking for, exactly?’
‘Batik lungis. For both of us.’
Shrugging off with skill each importunate touch and every insistent invitation, Luca threads his way through the maze of narrow alley and crowded corridor. As in life, so in shopping for lungis; he is certain of where he wants to go. They finally stop at a hole in the wall at the centre of which sits a large man of the colour of good-quality toffee. Surrounded by lungis, towels and bed sheets on shelves, and saris and salwaars on hangers, he is as serene as a Hindu idol. In contrast, his two assistants, young unsmiling boys continually snapping at each other, flit about like anxiety-ridden devotees. Upon seeing Luca, the idol’s features decongeal for a moment. ‘All well, Father Babu?’
The colours, Lorenzo suddenly realises, are so startling everywhere in part because of the universal drabness of the background. There in New Market as in Manipuripara, and most of all in the slums that seem to enjoy an organic growth everywhere, the walls all—even when painted bright pink and white and green—appear a dull and dispirited grey. The weather is in some measure to blame; for the radiant sun, lending its luminousness to colour, can make even a gunmetal-grey surface look happy. By the same token, under an overcast sky or in pouring rain, everything looks funereal, cheerless. And in Bangladesh, from June right through till October, the heat and humidity never let up. The damp seeps into cement and encourages mould and fungus on brick and concrete, it aids and abets the jute sacking and cardboard of a slum wall to rot and disintegrate, it stains black the walls all along the water-and-drainage pipes of a building and helps large parasitic saplings to emerge triumphant out of that dark ooze. Against such a backdrop, the range, the sheer diversity, of colour, of sari and scarf and kameez—of red on marigold, and vermilion touching aquamarine—is gladdening and uplifting, a thumbs up to defiant human creativity.
‘No colour preferences?’
Lorenzo finally chooses one lungi of lemon yellow and beige checks and another of green and sky-blue stripes. Luca selects an austere off-white with a beguiling crimson-and-gold border. Both the monks turn down the batiks for being too expensive. Their rejection stirs the Hindu idol out of his torpor; he begins dramatically to slash his prices and extol the artistry of the batiks on display. He has however not encountered the resolve of the Benedictine monk. No, when it doesn’t mean no, means never. Luca pays and, lungis tucked under the arm, they turn to walk away. For a few steps, they hear the vendor’s diminuendo bleating, diminishing volume keeping pace with decreasing price.
‘Good. That is that. Now. Considering that you have a lifetime ahead of you, perhaps the sightseeing can wait. However, as reward for our labours, I could perhaps introduce you to two dear favourites of mine, kucho nimki and chanachur. And then maybe some more cha at the Mission House?’
The snacks turn out to be irresistible in a ghastly sort of way. Lorenzo and Luca munch without pause in the rickshaw back to Manipuripara. They offer the packets to the rickshaw-wala who, delighted at the unexpected magnanimity, swivels more than once to delve into them without, however, letting up on the pedalling. The baker in Lorenzo recognises fairly quickly the major ingredients in both the buys. Kucho nimkis are tiny, diamond-shaped flour wafers made heavenly by the nigella and the lightness of the frying. Chanachur is a lethal mix of diverse, unhealthily-fried stuff. He identifies peanuts, rice-flour noodles broken into bits—and then suddenly he can’t pick out anything anymore because his mouth has begun to burn and his nose run on account of the liberal doses of red chilli powder in both.
He has a couple of more lessons to learn before a late lunch at the Mission House.
‘Think of knotting a bed sheet around your waist and tucking the ends in. That’s what the lungi is, a single rectangular piece of unstitched cloth. There are stitched versions too, in which the two shorter sides are sewn together to form a sort of sack open at both ends. Those you simply slip over your head. These you just tie about your waist. There exists no dress in the world more comfortable, more appropriate, for the tropics. Its principle is the same as that of the sari, its colours just as lively—the sari is more elegant because the female form is more comely. And marvellously versatile and practical the lungi is, you can do things with it that you wouldn’t, couldn’t, with a sari. You could, for instance, when it gets too warm or too muddy or when you’re riding a motorcycle, simply fold it in half, lift the bottom of the lungi up above your knees and do a double tuck at the waist.’
Luca notices that Lorenzo has left the packets of kucho nimki and chanachur on the cane bedside table that, being small, light and portable, is moved around and used wherever it is most needed in the room. ‘I shall just go down,’ he says, ‘and see what we can get for lunch even at this late hour. Then a nap for both of us that will probably last till tomorrow morning. By the time I return—five minutes at the most—it’s highly likely that the first ants would have discovered the food. They don’t like spices, they infinitely prefer sweets but on most days, they aren’t fussy.’ He gestures towards the bowls of water beneath each leg of furniture. ‘That is the only thing that protects us from them. Water floods them out and water keeps them at bay.’ His voice loses its amused tone. ‘And be careful. These are the aggressive tropical fire ants. When they bite, they mean business.’
Luca is right as usual. Long before he gets back with news of lunch, the first red ant clambers up from between the wall and the bedside table. Lorenzo is curious to see which it would prefer, the kucho nimki or the chanachur. ‘Hello there. I would personally recommend that you try both.’ Even while it is in two minds, it is joined by three others. Lorenzo picks up the snacks, blows on the vanguard and transfers the packets to the table. The ants are immune to gale winds, one of them bites Lorenzo. The man of God curses at the viciousness of the nip. It is okay to say mannaggia when there’s no one around save the One above; he in any case is always listening in.
A third lesson post-lunch and pre-nap. ‘Mosha is mosquito, moshari mosquito net.’ Luca locates two in the bottom shelf of the cupboard. They are pink but stained yellow, musty and seem far too small for the beds. ‘Malaria, encephalitis, dengue, we have them all.’ They open them out and, after turning them over and over and inside out, several times, finally locate their four corners which they then tie to the aluminium frames above the beds. ‘I know of several Fathers who carry their own mosquito nets wherever they go.’ Lorenzo gets into bed, tucks the edges of the net on all four sides under the mattress, sighs, lies down and discovers how much more stifling it is with the net itself cutting off the air of the fans. He is about to say something amusing on the subject when a moan of a snore from the other side of the room tells him that, as in the plane, he once more lacks an audience for his wit.
He sleeps for twelve straight hours and could have done with a couple more but is wrenched out of a strange, not unpleasant, dream, at 5.30 in the morning by the angels chanting and calling and selling bananas and fish just outside the window. Shouldn’t they be speaking Latin, the angels, is his first thought, as, at the same time, from the five thousand mosques spread all over the city, the muezzin begin to urge the faithful (and the unfaithful) to wake up and come to prayer. Allahu Akbar. It is a concert, a choir of five thousand voices spread over three hundred square kilometres, singing acapella and in perfect orchestrated canon; when two voices move to the second phrase of the adhan, three others, mellowed by distance begin the first phrase, and when they reach the second, another four, simultaneously it seems, launch into the first. The voices fortunately can keep a tune but the loudspeakers could din through the eardrums of the deaf.
The muezzin of the city are unable to drown out utterly the reedier, considerably less musical, wailing from the street below. The vicinal voices are all bloodcurdling in different pitches. Shrieks a tenor: ‘Duitakaaleeeeee!’ and a baritone: ‘Murgeeeeee!’, then a counter tenor: ‘Chhaiiieeeee!’ They wail in counterpoint, one waits for another’s voice to start dying away before beginning his screeching, and their volumes diminish or rise as they wander away or—seeming to change their minds—whirl around and approach. Those two extra hours of sleep go out of the window. ‘Duitakaaleeeeee!’ ‘That’s two taka for an ali. An ali is a bunch of four bananas.’ Luca seems to be translating in his sleep, for his eyes are still shut and his voice a near-comatose growl. He must not lose any chance, even in his slumber, of making the stranger feel at home. ‘Chhaiiieeeee is ash. Yes, he sells ash because it is a first-rate detergent for scouring pots and pans. And from the murgeeeeee fellow, one can buy a live chicken the neck of which he will wring in front of you. Then he will cut its throat to drain its blood, right there in the lane, before beginning to pluck its feathers. A most agreeable experience at six in the morning.’
The featured image is a detail from the front cover of the book.
