My family and other people

My mother has always been a teacher - intermittently in professional positions but relentlessly in her everyday life. She's the kind of adult that terrifies visiting children with her trick questions and runs after any young person within her purview (fruitlessly in my daughter's case) with a handwriting exercise book to get them to improve their cursive writing. As soon as a school child enters her orbit, she fixes her with a gimlet eye and asks which class she's in. "Class six? hmm. You know veins carry blue blood and arteries carry red blood. Can you tell me which vein carries red blood?" Another of her favorite questions is "What is x to the power zero?" She has a whole collection of these. Any child that is spirited enough to withstand this interrogation wins her approval forever, and, to use a bangla colloquialism, is "forgiven seven murders" (ওর সাত খুন মাপ). When I was a kid, she would cast a benign eye on my unruly, incorrigible cousin...

When we were growing up, forcing food on people was the height of affection. "Don't be shy and eat less!" hosts would say. I can't count the number of times I ate MORE because I was shy....too shy to stop people from dumping another helping of something (that was delicious two helpings ago) on my plate, and too well-trained in not wasting food to leave it there untouched. An aunt of my father's apparently told an over-full guest, who refused another piece of fish, "you don't have to swallow it, just chew it and spit it out." That an otherwise refined lady would make such a gross (in more ways than one) statement just serves to illustrate how deeply ingrained it was, this need to show love through over-feeding. Thankfully, those days are behind us. Most party givers nowadays just put out the food as a buffet and let people serve themselves. And yet, on more than one occasion, I've found myself serving myself more and more helpings, usually to ma...

When we arrived at the precincts (there were two in the same school gym), it was almost 6 am and several people were struggling to assemble the voting booths. The four legs that needed to go into the underside of the flat top were connected by multiple crossbars and the entire assembly appeared to have far more degrees of freedom than one could comfortably deal with. The chairman (who was supposed to be in charge and to be able to competently deal with everything) was hovering uncertainly, offering bits of tentative advice while admitting that he was probably wrong. There were maybe twenty boxes containing booths needing to be assembled. And this was just the first step. There were tabulating and voting machines to be set up, paperwork to be completed and everything was, by law, required to be shipshape and ready to receive voters by 7 am sharp. We were never going to make it...but we did! This pretty much sums up the entire day and my entire experience being a first time poll worker...

He is only ten months old. He cannot yet walk. But his legs are strong enough that if he finds something to grab onto, he can pull himself up suddenly, first startled then triumphant ...with his pudgy face breaking into a huge smile. His mother cleans and cooks for a family that lives in a big house. Mongol lives with his parents and brother in one room. It's a cozy room - except when it rains too hard and the roof in one corner leaks or when it's too hot (their old table fan broke and the asbestos roof traps the heat inside) - the gleaming kitchen pots are lined up in neat rows and the perfectly folded sheets and blankets arrayed in piles on one side of the bed. Since they cook and sleep and live in that one tiny room, there isn't much space for Mongol to crawl around and he's always getting under someone's foot. That's why Mongol likes to go with his mother to the big house. While she is busy in the kitchen, Mongol crawls around on the cool tiled floor, a ...