I am travelling from Berkeley, California to Cincinnati, Ohio.
While I've been living in Dhaka, I had left my car with a friend. You can't leave a car parked on the road for long. The police will tow it away. She happily kept my car in her off-road parking space, even starting it up on occasion. But she was moving.
The new plan was to park it at a brother's driveway in Ohio. The simplest route would have been to drive east taking Interstate 80. But it was now March and snowstorms still stalked the continent. I chose a southern route. Though somewhat longer, it would allow me to see friends and family in Los Angeles, Oklahoma, and Texas.
It was a familiar road. I drove it just a year ago, in the other direction. Altogether there would be six days of driving, eight to nine hours each day. That I didn't mind -- I'm at ease on the open road.

Leaving Groom behind me, I nose into a rest stop. I stretch my legs and guzzle down some water. I call my brother in Oklahoma, letting him know I'll be arriving mid-afternoon.
The rest stop is clean. I'm thankful the states provide for travellers. Two days earlier when I had begun to doze at the wheel, a rest stop emerged at just the right moment. Closing my tired eyes for ten minutes, I was ready to go again.
The interstate highway system in the U.S. is a marvel of efficiency in moving people and goods. For the most part, the government keeps the roads in good shape, though in heavily travelled segments, bridges and supports are breaking down. The health of this network is threatened by budget priorities that ignore pressing needs at home in favour of a trillion-dollar war abroad.
The roadways are clean. Sometimes you come across prisoners in orange suits clearing debris, but increasingly the state is handing over portions of cleanup to private groups. "Adopt a highway," it's called. Near Concord, California I marvelled that one stretch of I-696 had been adopted by "Atheists and Freethinkers."
Private enterprise takes care of the three vital needs of road travel: Gas, Food, and Lodging. But there is another trinity that seems almost as crucial on America's roads. You could call it Faith, Sin, and the Weird.
There's plenty of displays of Faith. I had just passed a giant cross. I am about to overtake a truck with a rebuke on its back that God should not be called "the man upstairs." When I end my trip in Ohio, I will go past a giant Jesus with outstretched hands.
Sin however gives Faith tough competition. Yesterday I'd gassed up near a huge casino near Albuquerque. By the late 20th century, gambling had long left its isolated outposts such as Nevada. The Mississippi River is dotted with riverboats hosting casinos. When Native American communities realized they could use their limited autonomy to host casinos, gambling became a coast to coast business.
And where there's lonely travellers, sex for sale is bound to be ubiquitous. It's universal. The largest red-light district in Bangladesh is at Doulotdia Ghat, right next to the ferry crossing on the Padma. In the U.S., billboards with giant letters advertise Adult Superstores, purveyors of porn and sex toys. Now and then, you come across massage parlours -- the kind promising a happy ending. There's always old-fashioned pickups available at truck stops.
As for the Weird, I'm just about to see an example on my right. As I zip through Amarillo, I drive past a row of old Cadillacs with their noses buried in the ground, the cars on a slant. This one's meant to be Art, but there's other oddities that would be a stretch to consider in the same light. The boredom of a long flat highway between Kansas City and Denver is broken by sign after sign advertising a coming attraction: Prairie Dog Town. See the Live 5-legged cow! See the live rattlesnakes! Pet the baby pigs. In the confusion of all those signs, I hope no one gets mixed up and tries to pet the snakes instead of the pigs.
The Weird must have struck root along roadways when people realized that if they didn't have a natural tourist attraction in their locality, they could create one. I have just driven through states rich with attractions: the Grand Canyon and petrified forests in Arizona, a meteor crater in New Mexico. For the rest, there's concoction. In Louisiana a gas station entices people with the sign, "See the live tiger!" Perhaps when the tiger dies, they'll stuff it and bury it with its ass in the ground.
I understand Sin and the Weird. In most cases, they're related to that mighty engine called Commerce. Where you have highways carrying millions of people, enterprising people will always figure out how to con some dollars out of all those wallets. Faith is not immune from that imperative either.

Though I drove alongside the Pacific Ocean on the California coast and climbed snow-capped mountains in Arizona, the longest stretches of my trip have cut through desert.
The first time I visited the desert was in 1994. A friend living in Los Cruces in southern New Mexico invited me to visit. When she picked me up, she took me to a spot in the shadow of the Organ Mountains. We trudged through dirt, sand, and sagebrush to a patch of land. She hoped to build an adobe house there.
"So what do you think?" she asked.
We were in the glare of a burning hot afternoon, in terrain entirely new to me. I replied honestly. "I feel intimidated. Here in the shadow of those mountains and standing here like a speck in the middle of the vast desert, under that even vaster sky, I feel totally insignificant. I know that in the larger order of the cosmos I do not have any significance, but do I want the land around me to remind me of that? I'm missing greenery, and the sounds of nature. Near the ocean I also feel overwhelmed, but the ocean at least speaks to me. Here geography seems to be sitting in silent judgment of me and my life."
I've been to other deserts since, and I've opened my eyes and perked up my ears. It's no longer as intimidating. And I have changed my mind: it is not a bad idea for the universe to cut through our pride and remind us humans that we are dust in the cosmos.
It is in the open spaces of desert and mountain where I now most enjoy my road trips. Perhaps it is an antidote to the rest of my life. In crowded cities where I prefer to live, there's endless stimulation, but the thickness can sometimes be too much so. There's a part of me that periodically likes emptying my mind out. Just me on the road. With other people passing by, them in their own cages, me in mine. Around me, beyond the asphalt and gravel, just rock, sand, and scraggly vegetation. At the most, in the distance, trains passing by. And these days, a cell phone tower or two.
The colours too are different. The earth brown, reddish in places, shades of grey deepening into black. If there's life, it sports straw turning into a dull green, washed in dust. Too early in the spring I only catch small patches of yellow and purple wildflowers. Meanwhile there's the sky above, an expansive blue laced with a few wisps of white cloud.

"Don't you get bored," friends ask, "when you drive across these empty landscapes?"
I don't. If I crave another voice, I can reach for the cell phone. Most places I can connect. Then there's always the radio.
No matter where you are, you're bound to get two kinds of stations. Country music. And Christian broadcasters.
I check out Christian radio.
The voice on the first station sounds quiet, reasonable. He sports the title Doctor of Theology. But reasonableness does not extend beyond tone. He decries a snippet from another Christian network where a woman claimed to have communicated with a dead loved one, hearing vivid descriptions of Heaven. The good Doctor will have none of this. He slams the door on her: such descriptions contravene the word laid down in the Bible. He ridicules those who claim to have conversations with God.
Miles later, on another station, the voice, at first calm and composed, later shifting over into heat, comments on the crisis in New York. The Governor had just resigned after it came out that he had been visiting a $1000 an hour escort. When the Lieutenant Governor took his place, he immediately confessed that he had extramarital affairs during a difficult time in his marriage. Where have we come to, the voice on the radio asks, when a public leader admits to infidelity and stays on in office? If he had any morality, he would resign. If the people had any morality, they would demand he resign.

When this leg of the road trip is complete, I settle in at my brother's living room in Norman, Oklahoma. As images from Bangladesh appear on NTV, I muse about parallels and universality.
Go out on the roadways of Bangladesh and what do you see? Catchwords adorn the backs, sides, and fronts of CNGs, trucks and buses, sometimes cars too, proclaiming Allah as all powerful. There are Koranic injunctions, orders to pray. In today's Bangladesh there seem to be more public displays of Faith than when we were the eastern wing of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Religion is more of a badge, sometimes verging on challenge.
I wonder about the impoverished sense of aesthetics among believers today. The Groom cross in Texas is described by one website as "an awesome sight." But it seems that its principal quality is not beauty but sheer size. There was a time when devotion did guide artists to create works of magnificence. Michelangelo. Raphael. Sometimes size can be part of beauty, but size alone?
If size is what they're after in Texas, numbers are what we go for in Bangladesh. Can we scrawl signs on more vehicles? Can we erect more mosques and madrasas? At one time Muslim devotees concerned themselves with the beauty of their calligraphy or grandeur of their architecture. I see little of that around Dhaka.
Beauty and taste aside, can we say we are more moral as a result of all these displays of religiosity? The owners who put religious slogans on their vehicles, do they show more respect for passengers, staff, or pedestrians? If they did, would we have as many horrendous road accidents? And in the U.S., despite the profusion of words invoking God, from the White House on down, can you say there's much evidence of morality when Iraq's been savaged to pieces and urban ghettoes are bogged down in despair?
With clamorous displays of religiosity devoid of taste or a sense of justice, it's not morality, not even devotion, but something else at work. On the surface it's pride. But could that simply mask deep-seated insecurity? Perhaps it is the fragility of existence in Bangladesh, or the uncertainties of an imperial power in decline in the U.S., that lead people to symbols.

There have been times when I have driven with companions. On this trip, I drive solo. But that's not strictly true. Crouched in my passenger seat is Celia. Sometimes she sits perched on the dashboard, but braking usually drops her back into the seat.
Before I set off on my move to California from Rhode Island eleven years ago, my workmates gifted me money for gas, a cooler with some snacks, rain proofing for my windshield. They also felt I needed a travelling companion. They handed me a stuffed chimpanzee.
Last year when a friend in California saw the chimpanzee again, she referred to her as 'he.' I corrected her, reminding her that many years earlier she had helped nickname her Celia. She said, "Oh, let me make sure no one's going to make that mistake again." Taking off her dangling earrings, she stuck them to Celia's ears.
Someone could say, isn't Celia too part of what you call the Weird on the road? There's no denying it. Travelling brings forth the offbeat. Though Celia is no talisman, she personifies love and friendship and their enduring place in my life.

(A slightly shorter version of this essay appeared in the Daily Star Literature page on May 17, 2008)

Under the blistering sun, we arrived outside a multi-storied building. Andrew said it had originally been an old people's home. Next door there was a hospital. The neighborhood is occupied by other institutional buildings. A small store near the entrance sold the usual range of items: cigarettes, biscuits, snacks, toiletries. The road outside was wide, but traffic was sparse.
Entering the building, we found refuge from the heat. We were greeted by a counselor and a former staff member who now volunteers there. Seating us in the conference room on the first floor, they gave us an overview of the place. Then we walked upstairs for a short tour. The stairway walls were lined with bright-colored posters.
Who lives here? Many are victims of trafficking. When a large group of boys were repatriated from the Persian Gulf where they had been abducted to work as camel jockeys, their first stop home was this shelter. The BNWLA reconnected them with their families. They have yet to find one boy's home. Some residents are survivors of rape. Many are missing children turned over from police stations. Some are survivors of attempted murder. About seventy percent of the children are entangled in legal cases. Their stay here can range from a few days to years. Where possible, the shelter tries to reunite children with their families. Otherwise they keep them until they can find decent places for long term placement. While the children are here, the staff provide them with counseling, a safe space, education, and opportunities for play and recreation.
On the second floor, we visited a classroom for little children. About ten children were playing with legos and jigsaw puzzles, looked after by a teenage girl who's also a resident at the shelter. A girl with short hair missing her front teeth smiled at us and declared that she was going to build a staircase. A boy with an eager smile jumped up and proudly showed us the jigsaw puzzle he had completed.
On the same floor we saw a room they called a free space. Here they organize cultural programs and lawyers prepare residents for the realities of the courtroom. On the other side of the floor was a library. Three young girls were reading books. The next room housed a professional training center where residents learned how to operate sewing machines.
We climbed the stairs to one more floor. Here we visited the medical examination room and day care center. The open space on this floor was occupied by over a dozen children watching television. This floor also houses some bedrooms. Each room was neat, laid out with four single beds. The upper floors serve as dormitories.
As we returned downstairs, our guide pointed out a box called 'Things you can't talk about.' It's a box for residents to drop letters on confidential issues. They write with complaints about other residents or staff, or they bring up emotional problems they have so far felt unable to voice.

We returned to the conference room. Hana had asked to interview some of the children and a group joined us in the room for snacks and conversation.
The shelter is run by a staff of 40. They include house mothers, counselors, teachers, social workers, doctors, nurses and administrative staff. The house mothers are there 24 hours. Some older residents of the shelter work as aides, cooks, and caretakers. The majority of the staff are women.
I asked the counselor to describe a typical day. One day they received a call to accept sixteen teenage girls picked up from a hotel. The girls did not want to be in the shelter. When she went in to talk to them, they were sullen. What do you want with us, they demanded to know. If one among them wanted to talk, others would pull her away. They refused breakfast. Two counselors went among them, trying to earn their confidence. They received both curses and the silent treatment. The girls finally agreed to have lunch. It took the entire day for them to feel comfortable.

Though there were about 120 residents there when we visited, sometimes they have had to accommodate 200. They do not have enough room for their needs. The residents miss having an open area outdoors. The BNWLA has acquired land in Gazipur, a northern suburb of Dhaka. Here residents would have more room, more facilities, and open space.
We should have a society that does not require shelters. Even the best of shelters, no matter what humane services are provided, is confining. It is a reminder of society's failure. But as long as society fails, places of refuge are necessary and where they go up, they should have open space, sufficient room, and facilities to prepare people for returning to society. I felt confident after this visit that the BNWLA effort deserves wide support.

Visit the fund raising campaign website at http://www.bnwlahostel.org

Read:
"Missing" -- Hana Shams Ahmed's article from the visit. http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2007/05/02/rights.htm

Andrew Morris's articles in series:
"Lost childhood" about Madhabi
http://www.morristhepen.net/home/blog.php?id=61
"Out of darkness" -- visiting Madhabi at the shelter
http://www.morristhepen.net/home/blog.php?id=84
"Starting over" -- about the BNWLA shelter
http://www.morristhepen.net/home/blog.php?id=93
"Brick by brick" -- on the campaign for a new building
http://www.morristhepen.net/home/blog.php?id=111

Jolaboddhota. Waterlogging is today a word linked to the city as inextricably as janjot, chintaikari, and oggan party. There is no mystery behind Dhaka's flooding. When rain pours down, it must drain. The city's drainage sewers are often blocked. Box culverts compound the problem. Perhaps the biggest culprit is the filling up of the city's canal system.
Nature creates integrated ecosystems with rivers and wetlands washing out to sea. In times past, we built khals for navigation and drainage. That balance, always a delicate act in this region, is now gone.
I grew up in a house, now history, in Bangla Motors. Like much of the city, it was on low lying land. Even to raise it above the original level, my father cut a pond right in back. In the monsoon, the pond rose and flowed into the doba behind the house. The water found its way through other channels and crossed under Mymensingh Road into the Begunbari canal that lies behind today's Sonargaon Hotel. I remember catching fish in water that sometimes came nearly to the verandah.
The canals and wetlands were the city's natural drainage system. In the old town, Dholai Khal was vital. In the newer parts of the city, the Begunbari, Mohakhali, and Rampura khals played a similar role.
Today water is locked into a few so-called lakes. Instead of an intricate network of water, we have an extensive mesh of money: the outcome of the market, greasy palms, and goondafied politics. As land prices skyrocket, people with ability buy up or grab wetlands, developers rush in, and government colludes. Landowners amass fortunes, developers make millions selling apartments and commercial property, bureaucrats stuff their pockets, and even workers at the bottom fill their sunken stomachs with one more day of kamlagiri.
Left to themselves, humans focus on today -- many on today's survival, others on today's get rich opportunity. What will happen tomorrow? When the next big flood strikes? When global warming raises the ocean level and the lower delta goes under? Where will the water in Dhaka go? By filling the canals, we have killed the future of the city. Unless we can take drastic action -- and soon - there may be no future for Dhaka.

Last year on a road trip across North America I stopped in New Orleans. Located in the lower Mississippi delta, this city sits below sea level. Levees were built to protect populated areas, and canals provided drainage. Unfortunately the levees were not built to withstand a serious hurricane-provoked flood, and to make matters worse, the government built a canal straight down to the Gulf of Mexico to assist business. This canal, the MRGO, allows heavier ships direct access to the Port of New Orleans.
Along came Katrina, the worst hurricane to hit the city since Camile in 1969. The levees collapsed at vital points. Water came rushing up the MRGO, possibly helping to explode one of the levees. Large parts of the city went under water. Neighborhoods where poor and working class people lived -- mostly black in New Orleans and white in St Bernard Parish -- were flooded.
On my visit just before the one-year anniversary of Katrina, the writer Kalamu Ya Salaam who grew up in the Ninth Ward drove me around. While much of the debris had been removed, hundreds of houses lay wrecked. Thousands more stood abandoned. Though intact on the outside, the flood had destroyed the insides. We saw some people trying to rebuild. A heroic effort, mostly relying on their own resources. Those without such resources, without the ability to rebuild and make a living at the same time, now lived elsewhere. Kalamu pointed to houses where he and his relatives lived decades ago. Such areas would soon be reclaimed by nature. At the edge of the neighborhood we walked up an embankment to view what remains of wetlands that were once pervasive. He remembered fishing there as a kid. Now they were waterlogged pools of stagnant water.

It has happened before, right here in Bengal, to another capital city.
The city of Gaur, across the border today, was the capital of Bengal from around 1450 to 1565 AD. It is reported to have been one of the largest medieval cities in the Indian subcontinent, a densely populated, prosperous settlement. Today its remains have long been strangled by vegetation.
When Gaur died, upper Bengal was in the cross hairs of the Mughal-Pathan rivalry and gripped by predatory incursions from Sher Shah, Orissa, and the Portuguese. But war only triggered the collapse. According to Banglapedia:
"Such continuous anarchy resulted in the neglect of the maintenance of the overcrowded city. The canals linking the lagoon and the Ganges and serving as the lifeline of the city had to be properly maintained. In 1575, Vincent Le Blanc saw waterlogging in parts of the city, which would suggest that the canals were not properly maintained. This resulted in the outbreak of a severe plague, which carried away three hundred persons per day.... It is possible that the connection between the Mahananda and the Ganges through the canals of the city had snapped due to lack of maintenance as much as due to the beginning of the westward movement of the Ganges."
When Dhaka goes under water, the poor living on low lying land are hit the hardest. The better off mostly live higher. But even if the water does not rise high enough to damage raised homes, waterlogging breeds disease. An epidemic can devastate an entire city. The wealthy may have better access to medical care and greater immunity from well-fed bodies. But when catastrophe strikes, it will not be sufficient.

(This article appeared in the Star Weekend Magazine on Friday, June 15, 2007)

After years in the U.S., I'm home again, trudging the footpaths of Dhaka. One day on Mirpur Road, a lightning strike from the past jolts me. I come across a stack of Rana books. And I find that while many things have changed in Dhaka, Masud Rana remains in perfect health. Still fighting on. And while my hair's going grey, Rana has not aged a single year.
I pick up a few recent titles.
In the first, Mrittuban (Rana 359), the action is set in Bangkok, then Port Blair in the Andamans. Our hero saves India and China from being annihilated by Mr. X and his syndicate who have hijacked two nuclear bombs. This one reads like a traditional James Bond novel. It includes a woman named Trishna who's Mr. X's mistress but turns against him. Rana and Trishna inevitably fall in love, and the book ends with both of them in hospital. Beyond 'the end' there may be the promise of sex, but the lovemaking described in the book doesn't go beyond kisses.
In the second, Bedouin Konya (Rana 371), the story begins in London, then moves to Cyprus and an island off the coast of Israel. Here the wicked adversary is the Mossad. Rana has been fighting Mossad on behalf of the Muslim world from the time he was with Pakistan CI. The 'Rana girl' in this novel is Suraiya who falls for Rana and then mysteriously disappears, emerging later in an unexpected twist. One time the two make love, but you get no juicy titbits.
I wonder if the lack of raciness in the writing reflects a more conservative mindset in the author. Of course I'm no longer fourteen, but I was ready to be taken back to that time. In these books, Rana somehow disappoints me. It's not so much that I miss him peeling off a beauty's sari, but despite forty years having gone by, Rana's world seems dated.
I think that what dismays me is that while Rana still flits around the globe, his own country is falling to pieces. Businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats pile up empires of stolen wealth, godfathers terrorize villages and urban wards, yesterday's razakars sit in ministries, and Islamic terrorists set off bombs. I was eager to see Rana smoke out our own homegrown evil. Perhaps like others, Rana had to bide his time under the previous governments. Who knows, maybe now with a different regime in power, Rana will spearhead missions that will uncover something hotter than pilfered relief tin sheets.
That's my preference. Rana fans probably want him to take them to far-flung settings. The exotic has a strong hold on what we expect from our entertainment. But even so, there must be other readers like me who want to read of a tryst in a Dhaka hotel or a car chase through traffic jams between Karwan Bazaar and Uttara.
Then I crack open Masud Rana No. 322, Abar Shorojontro, published in 2002. The plot opens with Iti, the sister of a dead muktijoddha, meeting Rana in a secret rendezvous in a Shegun Bagicha restaurant. She sneaks in wearing a burka. She tells Rana that the company she works for, run by a Maulana Keramatullah, is doing something shady. Keramatullah turns out to be a razakar who became a dacoit, made tons of money, and is now a respectable businessman. Under the cover of an Islamic political party, he's mobilizing the Khadem Bahini, an army of fanatics poised to restore Pakistan. He teams up with Khairul Kabir, a scientist living abroad who has designed an electromagnetic pulse weapon. Masud Rana's job is to foil the plot and save Bangladesh.
Now this is a Rana that stirs me. Never mind that there's not even a hint of steam. There's politics, social commentary, suspense, and location. The story set entirely in Dhaka, there's a car chase between Lalmatia and Motijheel, a break-in at a Banani multi-storey complex, an abduction in Gulshan, and the finale is in a godown in Tongi.
Bravo, Qazi Anwar Husain! Masud Rana isn't as behind the times as I'd feared.
Unlike most Masud Rana titles and other books by Sheba Prokashoni, the copyright page of Abar Shorojontro does not carry the standard line, Bideshi kahinir obolombone. Perhaps that means this one's a truly original story.

"This story follows a foreign plot" -- it's that disclaimer that makes many writers look down on the genre fiction published by Sheba. Besides Masud Rana, Sheba also publishes Westerns, suspense, horror, romance, and teenage adventures. They publish some abridged translations as well, but most of their titles would best be described as 'transplant fiction.'
Back in the 1960s I remember watching a Western film produced in Italy -- much later I came to know these were known as 'spaghetti westerns' -- and I kept thinking, I know this story, but from a different context. Then it hit me: the plot was based on The Count of Monte Cristo. To this day, Bollywood rolls out movies based on stories from the Hollywood. Even an acclaimed movie like Black was based on a novel (and later an American film) about the Helen Keller story.
When I'm in a mood for light or timepass reading, I often choose genre fiction, mostly mysteries. Genre fiction seeks to entertain, and there's nothing shameful about that. Humans are hardwired to soak up drama. But even in that world, many writers aspire to something beyond fast-plot entertainment. Elmore Leonard is a master of dialogue. Walter Mosley's mysteries bring to life the story of the black community in post-WWII Los Angeles. Paco Ignacio Taibo II writes mysteries set in Mexico with a sarcastic voice relentlessly exposing corruption and social insanity.
As for borrowing from other writers, it too is often done. It's common in the world of theatre. Across languages and time, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Brecht have repeatedly been adapted. Even literary writers pay homage to novels they admire. Only last year, Zadie Smith published the delightful novel On Beauty. She acknowledged that the novel followed the shape of Forster's Howard's End. But Zadie Smith's novel was not transplant fiction. You might say a hazy x-ray of the skeleton of Forster's novel was in the back of her mind when she wrote out the words in her literary creation.
Sheba Prokashoni's goal seems to be to provide affordable and entertaining books in Bangla. They have clearly played a role in encouraging young people to read. Their writers show skill.
Now this is my personal bias; I feel that skilled writers should reach with their pens. Most writers find it hard to make a living through writing, and it's no crime against art to do certain kinds of writing for money. Many have written pulp fiction to pay bills while working on more serious writing. I hope that those who write transplant fiction for Sheba have, at some point in their writing lives, devoted themselves to some ambitious writing.
Still, many of those who write transplant fiction are not mere copiers. They don't just take a story from England or the U.S. and loosely translate it, merely changing place and character names. There is expertise involved in adaptation.
Besides Qazi Anwar Husain, Sheba seems to have a small army of adapters. I checked out a romance set in Mymensingh and a suspense set in north Bengal. Sheba's authors only 'follow' a foreign tale. They have to take that borrowed plot and filter it through their Bangali characters. When they transplant the original character from say, London, to a place in Bangladesh, they have to do something quite different than an organ transplant. They have to make sure that the local characters sound believable as Bangali and they're not just English men and women with local names. The act of cultural translation can be tricky. Sometimes it works. When it doesn't, a foreign detail sneaks through and it jars. When there's politics and social complexities involved, they need special care. Dialogue needs reproducing in local flavour, the writer then creating unique idiolects. For example, Masud Rana's old friend Guilty Miah speaks with his own Kolkataiya voice. Finally, while writing the book out, the author has to make sure that all elements come together with the final novel an integral whole, without limbs missing or sticking out.
That said, I would feel better if instead of just saying that this book follows a foreign tale, Sheba provided specific attribution. A writer somewhere worked hard to produce the original story, let that person get due credit. Thankfully, this tradition is strong in theatre.

Over the span of some forty years, Qazi Anwar Husain has written 371 Rana thrillers. Under his own name and the penname Bidyut Mitra, he's also produced dozens of adventure books, self-help books, and the 25 Kuwasha titles that are now out of print.
Counting the Masud Rana series alone, that's a book every six weeks. All together, he must write a book every few weeks. Now that's quite a feat! For me, writing is hard work and it can take weeks, months, to hammer out a single short story.
So who's the real super hero here? Masud Rana, the super spy who's make believe, or his creator, the super writer who's very much flesh and blood?
For me, there isn't much doubt.

After the rain came heat, the temperature rising each day into the mid 30s Celsius. I am not used to the metric system, but I didn't look up the conversion. I knew it was just very hot. I tried to remember how to dress and go about in this sort of heat. Muggy weather is a quick teacher.
Within days came Ramadan.
A few people I came across fasted, others did not. On the streets I found people in a celebratory spirit, as they bought delicacies for the breaking of the fast. In glossy newspaper inserts, fancy restaurants advertised menus loaded with calories and fat. The wealthy gobble them up. In the future they will pay with heart disease and diabetes, the rates of which are both climbing across South Asia.
Meanwhile the Hindu community celebrated Durga Puja. I learned with some sadness how dozens of statues of Durga have been attacked in many villages and small towns. The vast majority of Bangalis have long joined in the celebrations of one another's faiths. But there are coteries of people with hateful agendas who wish to harass minority believers. Perhaps the opposition is right, these hateful people want to signal to minorities, vote right in the coming elections or else.
With the increasing heat came more frequent power outages. Nearly every day the power would go out several times a day. In some areas, power goes out for longer periods. In the countryside, people are lucky to get power for a small part of each day.
Heat and power outages in the midst of Ramadan and Puja -- they would prove to be a lethal combo. Unable to stand it any longer, people in many neighborhoods of the capital and other towns swarmed into the streets, burning tires, setting up blockades, laying siege to power offices, and smashing cars. The police went at them, with sticks, water cannon, rubber bullets. But the rebellion did not calm down. There were calls to get rid of this government. People sang songs to parody the Prime Minister and her son (the head of the ruling party) who people have nicknamed the Crown Prince.
The Prime Minister travels around the country speechifying that she has brought massive development to the country and that her party is certain to return to power.
The politicians make me feel like I have entered a theater of the absurd.
Mullahs still debate the decision of the official moon-sighting committee on whether it was right to start the fast on the day they chose. The opposition, sensing some potential gain, shamelessly joins the argument.
In his speeches, the Finance Minister seems to delight in a response he gave to the World Bank head about corruption in Bangladesh. "Close down the Swiss banks." No doubt. Clearly, if such banks did not exist, the cronies of the government would never find a way to loot this country.
But the stakes are high. It is people's lives and livelihood that are balanced on the edge. Food prices have climbed beyond the means of the poor. Garment workers rally in the streets each day to press their demand for a meager 3,000 Taka monthly minimum wage ($46). In the northern district of Dinajpur, the people stopped an open-pit coal contract with a British firm that would have devastated a large area and its residents; seven people died from police bullets. Daily a few alleged criminals are disposed off in 'crossfire' incidents with a special police force. A university professor was shot in his bedroom after a hit squad made its way into his house. While the poor worry about the price of rice, dal, oil, and salt, those with money tremble in fear of muggings and assaults. And everyone has a story about how they needed to bribe someone to get something done. A rickshaw puller says it used to cost 2 Takas to pay off a traffic cop to cross a road that does not allow rickshaws. Now they want 5 Takas. In this "holy" season, even the bribe rates have gone up.

This is the city into which I have arrived, a city, a city that tosses up a million stories each day. Through conversations and from the newspapers, even from a stranger who calls me after midnight, I encounter more and more of these stories as I settle into Dhaka, city of my birth, for the first time in over three decades. While the city greeted me with 'big' stories, I look forward to the small ones. I have already been inspired by one or two that reveal remarkable courage and thoughtfulness.

In my own life, the shape of things is fairly mundane.
I read novels I brought with me. From newspapers in English and Bangla, I learn of heartbreaking stories of pain and endurance. I absorb biographies and memoirs. I visit old friends from childhood and adolescence. I roam neighborhoods looking for "to let" signs, seeking a quiet central place to live where I can write. I conduct research for my novel. I stay in touch with friends I have left behind over e-mail. I fight jet lag and coffee withdrawal. I work on my novel. I have conversations with my brother, my sister-in-law, my nephew and his new wife who I have just met for the first time. We catch up, we share news. Some of the news is grim: several old friends from childhood are dead.

I finish this post with the news that an old friend found me an apartment that looks like it will be ideal for my needs: quiet and secluded with enough space and openness to it. The verandah (balcony) even overlooks a mango tree. Wish me speedy progress in moving in.

Take a look. The house below is not in New Orleans but in Detroit. It's been that way for a while. The factory below is the old Packard plant; it was shut down in 1956. The ruins of industry litter the old neighborhoods of Detroit.

I wasn't going to go there. I didn't want to see devastation, again. Years ago, when I lived in Detroit visitors would say I specialized in giving devastation tours of the city. That wasn't my intention. But when you drove around the city, you couldn't avoid seeing the scars. A visitor from Spain said it looked like a war had taken much of the city.
So you may understand why I was ambivalent about touring New Orleans.
New Orleans, the Crescent City on the Mississippi. I first landed there in October 1999. And it was love at first sight. Sure there was the music, bold and brassy over at Donna's on North Rampart Street or on a random streetcorner. There was the architecture, unique to this city, even though I knew I could never afford to live in any of the grand-looking homes or even the quainter smaller ones. And there was the food; even a meal at Popeye's was better than food in fancier joints in other places. But there was more. There was something in the air, the blend of heat and humidity even in October that triggered something nostalgic in my memory of life in another delta country. There were the parks and the trees, massive, lush, casting shadows carrying a whiff of something mysterious. And there were the people, warm, humorous, and friendly. I lucked out in New Orleans, immediately getting to know some folks who were rooted in its history, culture and struggles. They became fast friends, and I would return, again and again.
Last year, riveted to the television in a way I rarely am, I watched visuals of this great city's destruction. By wind and water, and as it would become clear soon after, even more by human follies that might be better called crimes. In the year since, I've talked to my friends, read media accounts and personal stories, and I found myself blue from the stories of despair, suicide, and abandonment. By the specter that this great city was done for.
Why would I want to go there?
But my friends who'd evacuated had returned. At first I gave Kysha a flimsy excuse. "I heard it's hot as Hades in August." She replied, "And how's the heat where you're planning to go after this road trip of yours?"
I would go.

I arrived just after 5 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. On the six-hour drive from Houston, it had rained a bit as I crossed the Henderson Swamp. And the temperature that had been hovering around a hundred had even cooled down to the upper 70s. But the closer I got to New Orleans, the temperature inched up to the mid 90s.
Driving on the highway, I couldn't see much hurricane damage. Some roofs missing here and there. The rush hour traffic was busy, hardly a sign of an abandoned city.
First impressions from elevated highways can deceive.
My friends managed to acquire tickets to the premiere of the HBO documentary "When the levees broke" directed by Spike Lee. It was scheduled for that evening at the Arena next to the Superdome. Off we went, arriving there around the scheduled time, seeing hundreds of people walking to the event from where they had parked their cars.
The show started at eight, and it went on for four hours. The air conditioning was set so cold we were freezing before even half the show was done. Many people left after the second hour. Some probably couldn't bear the cold any longer. But we waited it out. A voice near me joked, "Now it's like sex, gotta stay through to the end."
The movie held my attention. It provided footage of the hurricane, the levees breaking, the desperation of the people, the neglect by the government. There were interviews with people including both ordinary people and experts. And there was a tribute to the unique history and culture of New Orleans, the city of jazz, Mardi Gras, and pleasure.
But a four hour movie felt too long. Even when you spread it out two days on HBO. Perhaps New Orleans people (who have HBO) might watch it, but will others elsewhere? Or will they see the start of the second episode and say, oh it's the same thing again and change channels? They, more than the folks in New Orleans, need to see this movie. The movie seemed somewhat unfocused to me, trying to throw too much upon the viewer, but it's still worth watching.

The tour.
In a couple of hours the next day, Kalamu gave me a quick drive around the city. From the westbank, he wanted me to get a sense of the city. New Orleans is huge; there are open spaces, wetlands, even forests. The Westbank didn't get flooded. Neither did parts of Uptown and the French Quarter. The surface is uneven, with ridges all over the city, and many streets stayed dry. But the densest parts of the city did get flooded. He pointed out the water level marks on houses. I could not imagine what it must have looked like last year.
We drove through parts of the 7th Ward, the historic Creole neighborhood. Then the Gentilly neighborhood in the 8th Ward. Finally the 9th Ward. He grew up there and he showed me the houses where he and his relatives used to live. Those houses had passed on to other residents, but they were probably not going to last. I could hear the blues in his voice. Perhaps not very long in the future, he wouldn't even be able to point to any landmarks where he used to once live. Much of the 9th Ward may become "New Orleans meadows." I recalled a poem that the Detroit jazz pianist Harold McKinney once wrote about the east side of that city. We finished the tour by crossing St Bernard Parish next to the 9th Ward, and drove Uptown looking at New Orleans East to our right side.
Kalamu also took me to see the water that used to be wetlands just around the 9th Ward. They used to fish there. But for a long time it's just become blocked in muck. I was reminded of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where I grew up. Much of the city was low lying and there were many canals that drained the city when it flooded. But urban development has filled up many of those canals and the few that remain have mostly been blocked up from draining to the rivers. We pay a high price for this during periodic summer floods; it will only get worse.
New Orleans was hard to look at, even a year later. My camera batteries gave out. I'd seen the aftereffects of a tornado and a cyclone back in Bangladesh. But there they hit rural areas populated by people living in flimsy structures that were just swept away. But New Orleans is city: brick and wood and drywall and shingles and tile. It remains in ruins.
In some places the houses are intact from the outside; but the flood waters have destroyed everything inside. The people have not returned. But then in other places, house after house, broken, collapsed. Empty shells. Hollowed out.
There are folks back in some places, waging a hard battle to save their homes. They managed to get FEMA trailers. There were signs of repair work.
But on the larger scale, how can these neighborhoods be rebuilt? Can people rebuild when they are getting a pittance from insurance, when you'd have to work to live, and the economy remains shaky? There's a good deal of heroism from those who've chosen to rebuild, but they are the lucky ones, with some resources to draw upon. But if on a whole block only one or two houses are fixed, can the block survive?
The U.S. has not seen an entire large city collapse like this. To rebuild such a city would require a massive investment and doing things in new ways. There isn't much sign that this sort of effort is underway. In Detroit my friend Tom would say, looks like even the Hezbollah are doing a better job rebuilding war-destroyed Lebanon. Perhaps that's true.

On the way to Bennachin.
The best meal I had in New Orleans this time was at Bennachin on Royal Street in the Quarter, a restaurant that serves dishes from Cameroon and the Gambia. Kalamu took me there and on the way we picked up Jerry Ward who teaches English literature at Dillard University. We stopped to visit a woman named Mama D who refused to leave and is a powerful source of energy and resistance in her neighborhood. Jerry's done a great job at describing our stop on her street; I'd recommend you check that piece out. He began the piece with,
"Compromised freedom has become a major issue in my country since the Supreme Court elected George W. Bush, since 9/11 became the debatable icon of the twenty-first century, since Hurricane Katrina became the name of our national tragedy. We who believe that the United States is the most perfect example in history of what a democracy should be have an enormous problem of explaining to outsiders why suddenly certain freedoms are "unavailable"—unavailable for them and us. Nor is it easy to explain to an outsider why power is a glass tiger. The outsider believes that American citizens, whatever their status, can save the world, or whatever portion of the world the outsider lives in. She or he absolutely refuses to believe that we Americans are not omnipotent, that we can shatter.
"I shall blame my friend Kalamu ya Salaam for leading me down a straight-crooked New Orleans street and leaving me in explanatory difficulties. I had to explain the fragility of power as I talked this afternoon to a young man from Angola who lives in Zambia.
"We—Kalamu, Mahmud Rahman, and I—are supposed to be on our way to an African dinner and pleasant conversation. Instead, Kalamu turns off St. Bernard Avenue onto North Dorgenois and parks near Mama D's house/home/headquarters in the Seventh Ward." Read the rest at http://www.nathanielturner.com/returningtothesourcesjerrywwardjr.htm.

My own foray.
One morning, I drove Uptown to walk around Audubon Park. I'd driven along Magazine Street before, but this time the road was bumpy and I feared for my axles and joints. Even Uptown, restaurants that I had once eaten at were closed. But otherwise, these neighborhoods looked like the prosperous areas they had always been. This part of New Orleans will continue. It's also mostly white and well off.
I dropped in on the French Quarter. Perhaps it's just sentimentality on my part, but when I'm in the city I like to take at least a brief walk along the Mississippi, the great river that both gives life and takes it away.
I went to see if Faulkner House Books on Pirate's Alley was open. It was. The owner, Joe DeSalvo came out and we talked for a while. First, about the state of his store. He reopened in October but he's barely hanging in, the rent, insurance, all having gone up and hardly any buyers coming in, though there would be some lookey-loosers and be-backs now and then. While the Quarter may have avoided much damage from Katrina, there's simply not enough of the tourist traffic for many of the unique stores in the area to make it. Then, we went on to talk about the city, my trip, writing, literature from New Orleans. I asked him if he had the new book by Ngugi. He hadn't heard about it, but he went to the back and came back with an advance copy of Vikram Chandra's new book, "Sacred Games." I took the book out of its gold box and leafed through it, scanning the opening paragraph. It drew me in. But of course I couldn't read it. Joe said, you can have the book. Maybe you can read it on your long flight. And if you do, let me know so that I know if I should stock it.

Detroit.
When I drove into Michigan on I-75 from Ohio, the condition of the highway immediately reminded me of New Orleans. The Interstate highways were fine most of the way, but in Michigan, they're torn up. Once again, I feared for my axles. I've heard part of the reason for the bad roads is because the state allows greater weight on trucks, but surely that's not the only reason. It's also because the state doesn't want to spend enough money. There's road technology that can withstand harsh winters and heavy trucks. Once inside Detroit, some of the highways were newly paved but many streets were like New Orleans.
While in Detroit, I mostly visited with old friends. I'd been there last year so I didn't go around the city to see what the place looks like. But on Friday evening I did drop in on a music concert downtown at the Campus Martius plaza. This plaza was put up last year and it's become the center of downtown gatherings. The old Hudson's building that anchored downtown retail and had been shut down in the early 1980s was demolished and a new Compuware building has taken its place. There's retail stores open on the street and I also noticed a sign for Hard Rock Cafe. While it's still sadly true that many of the neighborhoods in the city remain shell shocked, I must admit that it felt good to see people at night downtown. It was a small sign of life.
The next day I did my usual pilgrimage to Belle Isle Park. This is a beautiful park on a little island in the middle of the Detroit River, from where you can see the U.S. on one side, Canada on the other. When I first moved to Detroit in the early 80s, Belle Isle was a lively place. Then many years of neglect came along. And it looked sad and pathetic on some recent visits. This time I was pleasantly surprised to find a large group of families attending a Back to School Rally, dozens of family reunions at nearly every picnic canopy, and many other people having picnics. The grass seemed to have been cut and a new Nature Center's going up. The small zoo has been closed down and my friend Karen would tell me that the people had again defeated a proposal to charge admission to this lovely urban oasis.
People celebrating on Belle Isle. Another sign of life in Detroit. And Detroit needs more such signs of life, available to all residents and not just the well off who can afford the new housing that's going up along the riverfront.
Things are still shaky in Detroit. Last week the teachers were planning to strike on the first week of school. They're refusing pay cuts. The school system remains in terrible shape. And without a decent educational system there will never be a true renaissance in this city.

In one more respect the two cities are similar. Both of them were 'monoculture' cities, their ups and downs depending on a single industry. Tourisim for New Orleans, the auto industry for Detroit. In New Orleans, tourism is far from reviving. It needs year-round convention business but that's not yet on the horizon. Detroit's placed its bets on casinos and new entertainment downtown, while the auto industry remains shaky. It's painful to think of, but the shoots of life that I saw in the Motor City may not survive.

On a hazy, drizzly Sunday morning, August 27, I crossed the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit into Canada. The Canadian border official asked me why I was so far from California. I said I was traveling across the continent, visiting friends and family, working on a novel. He wanted to know where I had stopped last and where I was headed after Canada. I told him, Detroit, then down to Rochester in New York state. "And all these people support what you're doing?" I assured him they did. He returned me my papers and wished me a safe trip. I was relieved. In present times, relaxed border crossings are no certainty, especially folks like us burdened with names like mine.