New expanded edition of a classic anthropology title that examines ethnicity as a dynamic and shifting aspect of social relations. Katy Gardner is professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and is the author of several books including Discordant Development and Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh . Songs at the River's Edge Stories from a Bangladeshi Village By Katy Gardner Pluto Press Copyright © 1997 Katy Gardner All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-7453-1095-4 Contents Preface, 1. September – Arrival, 2. The Lives that Allah Gives, 3. Hushnia gets Married, 4. A Woman's Place, 5. The Lives that Allah Takes, 6. Roukea Buys a New Sari, 7. Stories of the Spirits, 8. Storms, 9. Abdullah Seeks a Cure, 10. Alim Ullah goes to Saudi, 11. Ambia's Story, 12. November – Departure, Glossary, CHAPTER 1 SEPTEMBER – ARRIVAL I arrived in Talukpur one September night, as crickets chanted and jackals screeched to each other across the fields. The moon had already risen high and bright over the still water, and the lanterns had been lit for hours: we had been expected before sunset, but we were late. We had left Sylhet Town, in the north-east of Bangladesh, early that afternoon. We were a curious party – a middle-aged man with smart town trousers and an officious-looking briefcase with nothing in it but a newspaper; an elderly lady with a missing front tooth and kindly eyes, buttoned up in her all-concealing burqua (long cape with veil) and clutching a small packet of betal nut and pan leaves for the journey; and one over-tall, over-shabbily dressed foreigner with a sweaty face and strange Western jewellery. This stranger obviously had no idea of how to carry on: she did not even have the grace to shield herself from the astounded stares of passers-by with her mud-splattered brolly. I had met Mustak, my escort, through a local development organisation, and it was to his village that we were going. He was a liberal, who had read widely and educated himself far beyond the usual boundaries of the village. Now he worked and lived in the town, with his young wife and children. Because of this, perhaps, he had hardly batted an eyelid at my professed desire to 'live in a village for a year', and with great efficiency he arranged somewhere for me to stay. The old woman was his distantly related aunt. She clutched my hand and blinked at me in a friendly way as we jolted through the chaos of Sylhet traffic, hunched up together under the rickety canopy of the rickshaw. I understood that she was a close relative of the family with whom I was to live, that her name was Kudi Bibi, and that was about all. It was the first rural night I had seen. The journey from Sylhet Town to Talukpur, the village where we were going, took about five hours, and by the time the road ran out, and Mustak had found a boatman to punt us across the flooded fields, the day was already fading. We drifted all afternoon through the flat green Bangladeshi countryside which spreads out endlessly until it meets the enormous sky with its vast blueness and billowing clouds. The river pulled us for hours through the scattered villages which lined its bank; past endless homesteads, with their scattered buildings and yards and their hayricks spilling into the water; past women washing pots, and listless cattle which chewed their suppers and looked stupidly across at us. Rows of waddling ducks quacked uproariously at the sight of the boat. On and on we went, until the water turned inky and the sky was suddenly filled with swooping bats and the flicker of glow-moths. Bangladesh is never still, and nights are never quiet. Instead, the countryside roars with life: a million insects singing in the dark, and a million human voices calling and muttering and yawning and praying as the lamps are lit. As the boat splashed and creaked through the water we passed others, sometimes containing solitary silent women with their veils down and their faces turned away, but more often workmen in their bamboo hats singing at the tops of their voices about lost love or the greatness of their saints, as they disappeared almost completely into the dark. All along the horizon were continual flashes of electricity and the distant rumble of thunder, even though the sky was clear. After seemingly endless turns in the river, our decrepit wooden boat glided round a corner, and then at last I was told: 'That's it! We're here ...' The boat turned towards a clump of trees. Within them was what would be my home for the next fifteen months. We slowly approached the land of the bari (homestead), which in this, the wet season, had become an island in the monsoon waters. I could glimpse buildings through the greenery; there was no sign of light or, for that matter, life. But then with a crash a door swung open, and a lantern appeared. I could hear excited voices shouting out to each other, and