Since when did I start eating achar?
Sep 10th, 2007, 09:47 pm
Last Friday had to have been one of the coolest and most random days I’ve had in my time abroad.
After jummah, I met a young Bangladeshi American couple from New Jersey that was vacationing in Buenos Aires. It’s random enough to meet Bangladeshis, much less Bangladeshi Americans, in this city, as I only know one other bangladeshí yanqui besides me.
My two Muslim American friends that are studying here and I took them out. I felt like I was in some weird Islamoamerican version of Argentina because I’m not exactly accustomed to being around four other Americans that practice my religion down here.
That night, all but one of us ate dinner at a cheap, shabby hotel filled with Bangladeshi men. The hotel, which is located just about ten blocks away from where I live, is probably not the type of hotel you’re thinking of. Basically, it’s a combination of an apartment building and a hotel, where each unit just has one room, and everyone shares a bathroom. A lot of people that can’t afford to live in real apartments live in places like that for extended amounts of time.
While I was there, I saw about five of the who-knows-how-many Bangladeshis that live there, but just two of them did most of the cooking. The food was delicious. They prepared fried rice, chicken, beef, and eggs, all mixed together. There was even achar, or pickled mango. You Bengalis know what I’m talking about! It was great to eat a full Bengali meal made by authentic Bengalis actually from Bangladesh after such a long time away from home. I can’t even begin to describe their hospitality.
The sheikh that gave the khutbah at the masjid that day was at the hotel as well. Because I had seen him dressed in a dishdasha and a kuffiyeh, I was taken aback to see him in “normal” clothes. Plus, he spoke calmly in Spanish and Urdu and didn’t speak Arabic in a loud voice like he had at jummah. He was actually a pretty down to earth guy. Originally from the city of Lucknow in northcentral India, he studied Islam in Saudi Arabia for fifteen years. At some point, the Saudi government, I think, sent him to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay ten years ago to serve the large Muslim community there. He speaks Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese fluently and some English. We talked to each other en castellano because that was the only language we had in common. Yeah, I never thought I would be talking to an Indian sheikh in Spanish.
I’m gonna go off on a tangent for a bit. Ciudad del Este lies on the border with Argentina and Brazil. The region where the three countries meet, the Triple Frontier, has attracted thousands of Muslim immigrants, mostly Lebanese, in the past few decades. Most of them live in Foz do Iguaçu, which lies on the Brazilian side and is home to the sheikh and around 25,000 Arabs. Interestingly, according to him, about fifty Bangladeshis live in Ciudad del Este. Man, Bangladeshis are everywhere. Anyway, the US and Israeli governments are convinced that Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah operate in the Triple Frontier, even though there’s no evidence. It must be true. Those Muslims are just up to no good wherever they are.
What frustrated me the entire time I was with the Bangladeshis was how horrible my Bengali is. I understand it almost perfectly, but I sound like a six month old child when I speak it. Seriously. It was as if I was mute. I basically sat there and just listened. To converse with the guys, I spoke to them in Spengali, a mixture of Spanish, English, and Bengali. I mean, they understood what I was saying, but it’s just not the same when you can’t respond in the same language that’s spoken to you.
Mi castellano es muchísimo mejor que mi bengalí. My Spanish is much, much better than my Bengali. Because of that, I seriously have a better chance at passing as Argentine than Bangladeshi. Sad. And whenever I try to speak Bengali, I keep accidentally mixing it with Spanish. Once I said “apni también,” apni being the formal second person form of “you” in Bengali and también meaning “also” in Spanish. It’s so hard to separate the two languages.
Friday night was quite interesting. I felt like I was in some weird world where the US, Argentina, Bangladesh, and India got together and created a land where the cultures coexisted and mixed. Tell me the last time you had a group conversation where Spanish, Urdu, Bengali, and English was spoken while cumbia was playing somewhere off in the background. Yeah, never. That’s what I thought. It was definitely an experience I’ll never forget.
And I thought I was just gonna study after jummah.