Daily life in Bangladesh (3)

Daily life in Bangladesh -3

Fruits are completely different from what we are used to. Some we like, some we don't, and interestingly, we seem to suffer from a "Western" taste, as most of the expats and tourists have the same opinion. Bananas, pineapple, litchis, mangoes, they are all fine with us. But fruits like durian and jackfruit are not popular at all.

In the season, jackfruits are available in Bangladesh in enormous sizes, like 4 kilogram per piece. Sometimes, we are presented with one, and that means we get a huge (unwanted) presented. The fruit has a kind of sweetness which is simply too much for us.

You see a lot of jackfruit trees in Dhaka. Sometimes, they have "parasites", long purple wild orchids (see picture above). You have to be careful not to be hit by a falling jackfruit whilst admiring these flowers!

Garo pineapple field

In Bangladesh, there are also many people from tribal populations, like in the Bandarbans. But also in Dhaka you may find many, and they are mainly from Garo background, coming from the middle of Bangladesh, in the neighborhood of Mymensingh.

They lived once in China, Bhutan and Tibet, but after some internal warfare a group of them moved to the Garo hills (then in Assam and Bengal, India) and that is were they got their name. They are a matrilineal society, which seems to be quite rare nowadays. The daughters are most important, which is obviously completely different for the Muslim Bengali, who have to pay large sums of dowry to get rid of the daughters and therefore prefer sons. In a Garo family, the youngest daughter inherits most, in a Muslim family, often only the boys inherit anything. The fact, that the law prescribes equal distribution, does not bother anyone in Bangladesh in the least.

The Garos used to be nomads from Mongoloid origin, but now have settled themselves and most of them have been converted from animist/Hinduism to Christianity by the missionaries. They are quite serious in their religion, strict church-going gospel singing Christians. But there are differences: some are Catholics, some are Baptists and some are Seventh-day Adventists. A group of Garos once came to our house to sing Christmas songs, but we did not experience the faintest recognition. They have a language of their own, which is taught in schools apart from Bengali. There are a little over 100,000 of them, and they are very popular as house staff among expats.

We have a Garo-driver (coincidentally inherited from the people who lived in our house before us), and he invited us to his village. There was a party, in relation to some marriage and distribution of land. Almost all of the villagers own a part of the land around the village, where millions of pineapples are growing. According to one of the village's elderly, these have been imported from the Indian border in 1942 on a bullock cart. Since there was no such border in 1942, as Bangladesh was still part of a greater India, he was either mistaken about the year, or he was just referring to the place where the border is now. But anyhow, the pineapples are flourishing.

 Garo foodPork stew with blood and ashesDangling pork legs

The diet is interesting. It is said Garos eat all animals, except cats, but I cannot confirm that from my own experience. But they eat, contrary to the fellow Muslim population, pork. From the pork, they make sausage with the blood and they eat all parts, including the ears. As we were the chief guest, there was a little hint towards us and pork ears, but fortunately we got away with eating the liver only.

Furthermore, they eat also snails and eel. They eat lots of fruit and drink rice wine.

The party was a big one, it lasted three days and there were about one and a half thousand guests. There was a lot of bargaining about land that needed to be divided and side-by-side a girl that needed to get married. We, the outside guests, were brought to a house far away from the scene to have our food. We were allowed to take a look at the cooking and the guests, but that was it. We saw one leg dangling from each of the ten pigs, which had been slaughtered for the occasion. We also saw the men sitting around the cooking pots, preparing a stew of pork, pig blood and ashes. But even though that doesn't sound inviting, it looked and smelled good. But we were told, that such food would endanger the health of the weak foreigners, and were not allowed to taste.

 Click for large picture Buying meat is an interesting issue anyway. You can buy it in the supermarket, where it is stored in fridges. Or you can go to a place, which is called "German butcher" even though it is owned by a Hungarian/Thai couple. Bengali buy their meat in the bazaar. Pieces of animal or even entire animals are hanging there, exposed to sunlight and flies. You must have a very strong stomach, I suppose, and therefore we take pictures of this meat but never eat it.