Dr. Dhaka’s Lonely Hearts Club

Within two weeks of arriving in Bangladesh, I found myself kitted out with a brother and a husband. Never having either before, it took some getting used to, especially since my brother and my husband are one and the same man. This doesn’t mean I’ve gone and done the things that usually happen when you find yourself isolated in a foreign country — get a hideous haircut, wear local dress back to front, fall in with strange cults — it just means I’ve mistakenly, but inevitably, fallen prey to Dr. Dhaka’s labyrinthine rules of friendship, dating and lurve.

My story goes like this: three friends, two female and one male, are searching for a place to live in Dhanmondi. Before meeting their stately, educated, and religious landlord, they follow the advice of a Bangladeshi friend and pretend for the sake of cultural sensitivity that one of the females (me) and the male (the poor, long-suffering only-man-for-miles Rich) are married and will not be living in sin. A week later and the situation changes: Shanti, the other female in the equation, is living with Rich and I am sharing another flat, also on the fifth floor, with another friend.

For the sake of cultural sensitivity, our door guard, who time has shown to be a fatherly gossip, is told that Rich and Shanti are married. But after another week or so, the guard, who has obviously been talking to our landlord and has watched us come and go while scratching his head, asks outright who Rich’s wife is. Definitely Shanti, we say, but to explain why we are so often found idling in each other’s apartments, which are just across the foyer from each other, we also say that Rich is my brother. So it has gone on: I believe by now Rich has been demoted to a shady distant cousin of mine, but I’ll have to check. To the rest of the men working in our building, Rich is The Man and the object of great respect, with two wives and scads other girlfriends (visiting mates) flitting in and out.

The longer I live here, the more I see complications like these are nothing extraordinary and have nothing to do with good intentions or even differences in culture. Family is sacred in Bangladesh. Everything seems to be geared toward it; from the religious perspective that marriage is a gift from Allah, to Dhallywood romances that always feature proper matrimonial unions over hot affairs. Extended families cram into flats here, which is why spaces are always designed with multiple bed- and bathrooms. They are also quite fond of cramming into one rickshaw or CNG (autorickshaw), with children safely wedged in between the adults. Because of their importance, families are carefully built up, deliberated over, and protected in Bangladesh, so the rituals of meeting, dating and marrying are even more complicated than Rich’s multi-faceted harem.

Finding a mate in Bangladesh can simply be linked to how well you’re connected telephonically. Here, the mobile phone is not only a status symbol but also serves as a personal match-making machine via the phenomenon of the ‘missed call’. The rite of miss calling consists of a young man punching in random phone numbers until he connects with a girl. If he finds out the girl is single, then the calls continue until she becomes so embarrassed she calls back to tell him to leave her alone, signifying the start of their relationship. If this seems strange, consider this: in the parallel universe of miss calling, an angry response is usually a positive thing, the same way the discomfort caused by a boy’s phone calls is also a flattering turn-on. For a bideshi (foreigner) like me, miss calling a girl is on par with harassing her into submission; but as the old sexual predator’s credo goes, it’s not harassment if the girl is into it, is it? And into it some girls definitely seem to be:

“My friend talks to a friend of hers everyday. But she does not know who that person is. They got introduced to each other through missed calls. They have discussions with each other everyday. They have a very good relationship. They solve all their problems by discussing with each other. My friend had to go through many serious consequences in her family for talking to this friend yet their relationship continues…” (See “The case of mobile phones in Sitakund, Bangladesh” ICTPR.nic.in)

I’m either too old or haven’t been here long enough yet, but I don’t personally know any young couples who’ve met through a missed call. I have been privy, however, to what happens if a boy lights on the phone number belonging to a female bideshi, and keeps ringing it with all the persistence of his burning passion. He might have the honour of having his number saved in her phone as ‘Stalker 1’, ‘Stalker 2’ and so on. Or if he is of the poetical turn of mind, he might have his SMS homage read aloud for the amusement of her friends: “Ull always b myn 4 now & 4eva. Ull always b myn 4 u r my treasure. Ull always b myn pls tell me its tru. B myn 4eva ill always luv u.”

Since in Australia, America, or the UK, family rarely prevents young people from seeking the object of their desire, bideshi girls can’t really appreciate how much freedom Bangladeshi girls find in missed calls, where the humble mobile can sometimes be the only medium through which to meet a great guy. Even Bangla men don’t always get the luxury of casually meeting a woman through the ways and means Westerners take for granted: a local friend, in his 30s and under pressure from his family to get married, got to know three women by the ‘missed calls’ process. After a series of phone calls, he narrowed his choice down to one woman and asked to meet her in person, but by then she was interested in someone else. Fortunately he’s found another girl on the phone and the relationship has advanced to the important stage of meeting face-to-face. Soon he’ll be going to visit her in her village, where she’ll be safely nestled in the bosom of her family, and in the meantime is shopping for presents from the big city to lay at her feet.

Official dating in Bangladesh, then, involves a complicated series of appointments, complete with chaperones. I’m more accustomed to the unofficial scene; mainly because I live in the university district of Dhaka, where it’s not unusual to see young couples sitting in the local park. Discreetly placed a few feet away from each other, some of the pairs hold hands, either delicately linking their fingers at the tips, or (and these are the bolder kids) going for the full-on squeeze. Most talk to each other in low murmurs and look up as I approach, not in alarm at being caught, but with the beneficent serenity that all people in love have. Last week I glanced down from my bedroom window into next door’s garden and saw a couple drinking together from a tap. As she straightened up, the girl tenderly threaded her wet fingers through her boyfriend’s hair, all under the sympathetic cover of a huge tree spilling over with orange blossoms.

Despite glimpses like these, love is kept rather quiet in Dhaka. One solution is to take the love out of the city, which is the practice of at least one young couple I met at Sonargaon, the old capital of Bangladesh. How exactly I came to be ‘picked up’ by them I don’t know; I was wandering around the ruins by myself when the boy began to talk to me. Once I’d exhausted my Bangla and he his English, they seemed reluctant to let me go. Perhaps they wanted the glamour of a bideshi escort, or felt sorry for me because I didn’t have a husband, or wanted to propose a threesome but couldn’t find the words.

During the afternoon the three of us sauntered around the souvenir shops, stopped to buy a snack of salted raw carrot, and sat down by the banks of the river to get out of the heat. The burning sun, which simply made me drowsy and forget my verbs, must have had a liberating effect on the girl, since after a brief discussion with her date she whipped off her borkah (head cover), revealing a school uniform (white, with a modesty vest crossed over the bosom) underneath. My first reaction should have been to tell them both off for wagging school, but being a romantic, I imagined them having to sneak around behind the backs of disapproving parents and being repeatedly rent asunder in true Romeo and Juliet fashion.

One will see couples holding hands in the crowded streets of Dhaka. There are pairs who’ll fling their arms around each other, caress forearms, and pat each other’s knees affectionately. But these are all same sex couples, meaning they’re friends: not even married people would behave so openly with one another in public and homosexuality in Bangladesh only “exists” deep in the back of the closet. It’s only the bideshi who throw their necks out with double-takes when they see the perfectly ordinary sight of two heterosexual men rubbing each other’s thighs, or two heterosexual women stroking each other’s hair, and who are left to wonder about the gap between Dr. Dhaka’s accepted rules of behaviour for friends and lovers.

At first, Islamic marriage seems a straightforward affair. There are two basic requirements, Ijab (proposal from bride or bridegroom) and Qabul (acceptance). Then all you need is for the dowry to be fixed, two witnesses found, and you have yourself a tied knot. Yet this ever so simple process doesn’t account for the ‘criteria’ for a future spouse, set either by the prospective husband or wife, or their families. The criteria I have heard spoken of has demanded that a mate be a doctor or lawyer, have a double Masters degree, be of a compliant and polite personality. We all have ideals for the perfect partner — mine has always been a fast-walking Jewish cellist with a seductive foreign accent — but Bangladeshi criteria are intrinsic to marriage, whereas mine always go out the window whenever love is involved. If criteria re-emphasise the importance of continuing the family pedigree, then I suppose I’m just another Western mongrel.

In reality and in contrast to the Ijab-and-Qabul formula, the lives of married people around me are anything but simple. In my office there are strong, smart women of an older generation who were married young to men they’d never met; there is another woman, younger than the rest but just as smart and strong, who feels her failure to have children just yet as an incalculable sadness; and another workmate, a gentle soul, who married at 16, has one child at home and another in an Indian boarding school, and is about to embark on her second Masters degree – she’s in her late 20s. Outside of the office, I have a dynamic journalist friend, Mahmuda, who has dated the same guy for years and sees little reason to get married, although both families want it. In turn, the newspaper Mahmuda writes for includes reports like the story of a young wife, eight months pregnant, who was doused in kerosene and set alight by her husband because she hassled him about his extramarital affairs.

With all the obstacles of class, education and family to dodge, what’s the reward for hearts finding each other in Dr. Dhaka’s maze? A Bangladeshi wedding, of course (as opposed to a marriage); a celebration full of jewel-like colour, gold and light, music and dance. Amid the festivity it’s easy to forget that sometimes the means to the end were so tough, that a less-than-delightful story often lurks in the background, and that you can’t really ever escape your family.

This last point I am certain of, because ever since he learned I was emphatically not married to Rich, our door guard has subjected me to several grave monologues on the importance of creating a family, starting with a husband. After a couple of these lectures I lost my patience and instead of explaining our cultural differences, simply told him I was ‘promised’ to a man in Australia. Naturally, this started off a round of questions: what was my man’s name, his profession, his qualifications? Quickly I described a man a vague mixture between George Negus and Colin Firth (leaving out the part about the cello).

After my glibness wore off, I realised my new dilemma raised an interesting point: family is an important thing, but so is the truth. So even if I don’t end up going with the flow and get married during my stay here, I’m sure to at least impress Bangladeshis everywhere with my family tree, which includes not only that mob in Australia, but my friends and fellow adventurers — the apas (sisters), bhays (brothers) and the odd sami (husband) — in Dhaka and beyond.