My Bengali New Year in Washington
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Growing up on an unhealthy dose of fast-food chains, MTV, and sitcoms like Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond, I already felt like I had travelled back and forth aplenty from the US. I even knew not to call it ‘America’ as that undermined the regional significance of Canada and Mexico in North America, and the whole Southern American continent that lay below it. Cultural understanding and sensitivity in hand, I bundled myself off to the ‘land of the free’.
My main motive was work, which saw me heading first to Washington for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group (WBG) Spring meetings, where they formalize their strategy for the coming years.
Even though I was there to see how the bureaucratic machine worked and maybe even find potential partners and funders, I knew I wouldn’t be back to the US for a while, so I dovetailed as much as I could into the trip. The itinerary while in Washington was extensive, but the first challenge was actually getting there. I was travelling in April 2017, a few months after Trump’s machinations at renewed American greatness were underway, and therefore even though I had an Australian passport, I was treated like a security threat.
I was transiting in Abu Dhabi before my flight to Washington, and Trump’s America had started pre-screening passengers offshore. Upon going through pre-screening I was asked to step aside and led into a room for ‘random screening’.
After entering the room I could tell this algorithm for ‘random’ wasn’t as random as it ought to have been. Black, brown, Arab and Chinese, or those of Chinese descent, almost exclusively filled the room.
There were a few Eastern Europeans in there for good measure, just to make sure the world knows the US doesn’t have a racist screening approach. This whole saga must have been the start of the US ‘cultural experience’.
After an hour of waiting, I was told I had completed ‘preliminary screening’. Must have been an extensive secondary search for my global misdemeanors. Once through, there was another round of screening. This time they took our boarding passes, and upon the lady seeing three dots next to my name (meaning either pre-screening wasn’t extensive enough, or I had somehow racked up a criminal record in the 15 minutes between the pre-screening and now), asked me to step aside again. For the second round, I was taken into another room where I was made to wait an hour. As my flight got perilously close to leaving, I told the same to the officers who seemed sheepish at best. With 45 minutes till boarding, one of the officers that brought me into the room asked me where I was going, the length of my stay, and the amount of money in my pocket. Upon a direct response, he told me I was free to go. Strange how this couldn’t have been asked earlier. Almost as if they were waiting to break my resolve. Ticket in hand and no more potential cavity checks on the horizon, I bounded towards my boarding gate. On arriving in Washington, I noticed we were dropped off at the terminal with no taxi stands (great).
I had met a family friend on the flight, and, in typical Pakistani style, I told my friend that I’ll go wherever they’re going and figure it out from there. You can take the boy out of Pakistan, but you can’t take Pakistan out of the boy.
On arriving at her family-friend’s house in Maryland, I called my friend, who I was going to be staying with, and asked him what the scene was. He said it was Bangla Noboborsho (Bengali New Year).
One of his relatives had married into the Bengali community (Bengal being modern-day India and Bangladesh), and there was a huge shindig at his place. I asked my friend to call an Uber and pay for the ride. I’ll pay her back sometime in the future: ‘yeh zindagi bari lumbi hai’.
Upon getting to my friend’s relative’s house, I noticed the contrast of the quiet suburban homes lining the street to the party. Cars were lining the street and people were streaming into the house with clothes and food from all corners of the globe. Even though there was large representation from the South Asian community, family friends from all over the world were present—making it a truly global event. Who would have thought my first cultural experience in the US would have been Bengali New Year?
As the night wore on, people started dancing and performing poetry and songs from Bengal. Their beloved poet Rabindranath Tagore was quoted, and the paintings of renowned Bangladeshi painter Zain Ul Abideen were reminisced about. My friend and I, being Pakistani, were egged on to give a native performance, but were able to duck away to safety.
As the night ended, in true South Asian style, one of the guests offered us a ride back to town. The man was Indian and proudly proclaimed that some of his best bosses working in global institutions in Washington have been Pakistani. It is ironic yet sad that intimate relations between India and Pakistan exist most outside the borders of the subcontinent, rather than within it.
We thanked him for the ride, unlocked the door to my friend's place and surveyed my abode for the next 2 weeks. I noticed a South Indian boy sleeping to the side of the living room, and a Vietnamese guy cooking dinner in his jocks in the kitchen. The South Indian boy had taken the lounge in order to pay less rent and was blasting Tollywood songs, and the smell of the Vietnamese boy’s dinner was wafting through the room.
After 16 hours of arduous travel, the land of the free had presented me with the Asian migrant experience for the first few hours and the two weeks of my stay in Washington. The capital of Trump’s America was, in fact, a South Asian cultural delight.
Who would have thought?
*what’s the scene: A desi way of saying “what’s happening?”
*Desi: of South Asian descent.
*Yeh zindagi bari lumbi hai: “This life is a long one” so the saying goes in our culture.