Part 7: A Day in the Village

February 7, 2022 Choyghoria, Batiaghata, District Khulna, Bangladesh

I am awoken by strange music. A peek around my green curtains reveals the blackness of night becoming the gray of pre-dawn. I check my phone for the time. 5:23 am. The music is coming from one of the mosques down the road. It’s not the call to prayer- not urgent enough. The prayer call is yelled at the top of the lungs and does not, in my opinion, need to be that loud. This singing is quiet and almost beautiful. Not beautiful like a flower in the sunshine, but beautiful like an abandoned house in misty moonlight: cryptic and mysterious. I listen as I drift back to sleep.

Too soon, it is actually time to get up. Half-dead, I stumble down the stairs to the coffee. I grab a biscuit for my dog and set out to find him. Is he sleeping on his rug, or is he sleeping in the corner of the porch? Maybe he’s already up trying his best to be fierce from inside the gate. We hang out for a while until it’s time for breakfast and devotions.

And I do what I came here to do: teach school. Today is the last day I will have 3 students; the last day of Kindergarten for Lauryn. Her brilliant mind will go far. We start school at 9:00, 9:30, or whenever the teeth are brushed and beds are made. Until 12:30, I am the teacher I never thought I’d become. My day is filled with equations and diagrams and periodic tables of elements and weather cycles and who was the first white man buried in Iowa and why does a mouse when it spins?

The children finish early and my checking is all done. We have an invitation for lunch, and Bengalis eat late, so we have several hours to kill. We can hear our neighbors calling for us to come play badminton with them. We gather our rackets and clamber out the door, past the new incense factory to the place where our court is laid out under the palm trees.

On our way home, we are stopped by a sight. In front of our house, the factory manager climbs up a palm tree with his knife in his mouth to get us coconuts to drink. “Dhonnobod” I say to him. He panics and replies with “Thank you.” My favorite thing to do to Bengalis is thank them. They aren’t used to people thanking them and they never know how to reply. Usually they panic and frantically say it back in English, hoping we don’t hear. But the best thing is, we always do.

And the very best part of the day: lunch. Nitay has invited us to his house for lunch. I am especially excited because his 7th grade son is one of my favorite people in the whole world. His name is Aakash, which means “sky” in Bangla. I am also excited because I know the food is going to be very good. Good people always make the best food. Down the path and through the jungle we go, and soon we see Aakash’s big smile waiting for us. His dad is proudly standing there, waiting to set us down and serve us. We ascend the mud steps into their cozy house and take our spot on the bed under the porch. We have a beautiful lunch of curried eggs with potato, fish, chicken, and finally, my personal favorite, tiny crabs in a sour tomato sauce. After we eat,

Aakash walks us to his best friend’s house, just a few hundred yards away. He makes sure I have met all the animals around his place. “Sister, come see this cat. Sister, have you seen the cows? Sister, look up in the tree; Jotno’s pigeons are up there!” (I wonder how he knows I like animals? Who would ever get that idea?) Our day guard, Bishnu, lives in one of the next houses over. He is home eating his lunch of dal bhat (rice and lentils), so we drop in and say hi and watch him eat. Just before, returned home from the pukar with a nice pot full of freshly caught crabs. We chat with his beautiful wife, learn some neighborhood gossip, and parade home.

My best friend’s dog is waiting for us in the middle of the road. I am greeted by an enthusiastic dog hug and a slobbery kiss, much to everyone else’s disdain. No one else likes him as much as I do. I follow the dog named Jontu to my best friend’s. He shows me his birds and I play with the four puppies.I hear a voice from the darkness inside saying “Sister! Come sit for a while!” Today I haven’t the time, for I must be going. Someday, I will take all the time in the world and sit in every house I am invited into. It may take me 6 hours, but I’d be ok with that too.

Rain. Seth, Timmy, Grace, and I drink cha on the balcony and watch it come down, first in tiny droplets, and then the size of small hailstones. Oh, how I will miss them. It hasn’t rained in months, and the land is drinking it in. The ladies scramble to get their cows and goats in, and men hurry home under umbrellas. After the rain stops, we walk to the bazaar for some rice, eggs, carrots, and cabbage. Cousins Shohel and Riyadh are on their way home from school. (“Miss Kalli! Let’s do a handshake. How did you like the rain?”) We chat with promises of playing badminton together soon before they go to their home on the Muslim side of the village and I go to mine on the Hindu side.

I play with Toby in the yard. Now and then, astonished Bengalis stop to gape at me through the fence. They would never get so wild with an animal simply for the fun of it. That animal must be killing her! Oh, just look at that forign girl. How strange that white family is. (My second favorite thing to do to Bengalis is play with dogs in front of them. “Sister, aren’t you scared?” or “Sister, you will get dirty!”)

Supper: loud and overwhelming at times. I wouldn’t have it any other way. :) 2 actors, a scientist, and a blossoming writer share the table with me. There is no shortage of entertainment. Oh, how I will miss them.

After the dishes are done, we read or sing or do whatever we have time for. Tonight, though, supper was late and dishes were up to the ceiling. (We have a pretty good dishwasher for a mission house. Actually, we have 7. Their names are Travis, Cheryl, Seth, Timothy, Grace, Lauryn, and Miss Kalli.) The family goes to their beds and I go upstairs to prepare for another day of school.

Thus is a day in Choyghoria; another page turned in the chapter that has been my favorite thus far. Sorry I’ve been writing so much lately. I’ve nothing better to do. I suppose you wouldn’t need to read them though if you didn’t want to. Hopefully my next letter is more interesting and less soon.

Come see me,

Kalli