Tag: British Council

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Essay

Where have all the Libraries Gone?

Professor Fakrul Alam writes of libraries affected by corporate needs… With this essay, we hope to launch a discussion on libraries as we knew them and the current trends…

From Public Domain

Dhaka, 2003

Where have all those libraries gone?

Back in the ‘70s, in-between classes, adda[1], and sports, I used to spend most of my time in the USIS[2], British Council, or Dhaka University libraries. I would go to USIS for its collection of magazines and fiction, and to the Dhaka University Library for almost everything else. Despite the dust, the load shedding, the noise, the frequent closures of the university and the missing pages within the books, it was a splendid place for both adda and study. Some of my friends and acquaintances lamented that somehow, I had lost interest in “fielding” and had turned into a bookworm, but every book that I read made me thirst for more treasures of English literature. And then there was the British Council Library.

Perhaps memory always rose-tints the past, but it seems to me now that it was the friendliest part of the city then. The lush green lawn and the open spaces that surrounded the library, the access to stacks and stacks of books, the periodicals that you could leaf through, anything from the latest cricket news to reviews of books, the abundantly stocked reference section that was a source of special delight for me, the rows after rows of books that you could explore—here was God’s plenty! The Dhaka University Library had no doubt a much richer collection, but inside the British Council Library you could occasionally experience the bibliophile’s ultimate thrill: leafing through yellowing pages of a fairly old book, only to set it aside for another one; or merely reading surreptitiously through a page or two, secure in the knowledge that not all books are to be swallowed, chewed, and digested, that at least a few are to be tasted, and that was what the British Council Library was for! I would take a book or a periodical on a lazy day, sit down in one of the chairs, and then dream away, secure in the feeling that “there is no Frigate like a Book/ To take us lands away/ Nor any Coursers like a Page/ Of prancing Poetry.”

Everything about the British Council of this period seemed to be inviting. You got to know the staff after a few visits and they were all very friendly. I was still a student when I was on a “first-name basis” with the expatriate assistant representatives and librarians. In the middle of the decade, though only a lecturer at Dhaka University, I could claim the Librarian, Graham Rowbotham, to be a dear friend. In retrospect and especially compared to the library decor and staff now, everybody and everything associated with the library seemed to be amateurish in a way that was endearing and conducive to aimless browsing and long hours of lounging. Book of verse or criticism in hand, I loved spending my mornings here, although “thou” would be a few desks away, and to be glanced furtively in an essentially one-way traffic!

New books kept coming fairly regularly and were ordered by people of catholic tastes and wide-ranging interests. But most importantly, membership was cheap. I can’t remember what the membership fees were, but it must have been ridiculously low since even in those cash-strapped days I never seemed to have been bothered about renewing my membership from year to year. And yet you didn’t have to be a member to go in and browse, although I always preferred to be one so that I could always have books to take away and read at home.

Returning to Bangladesh after six years in Canada, I found the British Council of the ’80s not that different from the inviting, relaxed place I knew in the ’70s, although by now incoming books had slowed down to a trickle. Towards the end of the decade, I think, the library added a video section, but, on the whole, the Council seemed to be cutting back on everything. I had also heard that the library was going to be restructured; apparently, the “Iron Lady” was bent on making the British Council less of a burden on the British economy and more of a self-sustaining, income-generating unit.

But the full effect of the restructuring of the British Council into a self-sustaining, charitable organisation was obvious only by the middle of the ’90s. The Thatcherite assault on the arts, a heightened British concern with security after the Gulf War, and unrest in Dhaka University all must have played their parts, for in 1995 the British Council decided that they would leave the campus for the security of the Sheraton Annex.

The first casualty of what was surely an ill-conceived decision, like USIS’s move to Banani was the British Council’s wonderful collection of books. Row after row of books were given away for free. Indiscriminately. Thoughtlessly. Even some reference books and bound periodicals were distributed gratis since it was felt the Sheraton British Council would have very little space.

Thankfully, the British Council abandoned its move to the Sheraton, but the Fuller Road library never recovered from the book-giving spree. Instead, the library was redesigned to give it a contemporary feel on the outside as well as the inside, security was beefed up, and everything about the library redone to give it a “new”, packaged look.

A cyber centre was installed to make you feel that the ambience was au courant, and impressive graphics-brightened the walls. But what is a library without stacks and stacks of books? The British Council was always the repository of the best in British culture, but this one seemed to be as anaemic as the foreign policy of present-day Britain and nowhere representative of the nation’s past cultural glory. Indeed, where were the Booker Prize winners, the Nobel laureates, the Poetry Book Society choices, London Magazine, Granta, The New Left Review, The London Review of Books? Where were the bibliographies, the reference books that you could use to track an idea or pursue a stray thought to an ever-widening world, so that even within the confines of a library you “felt like some watcher of the skies/ when a new planet swims into his ken?”

The British Council has leased the best piece of property in town from the University of Dhaka. And what does it offer the university’s students? Forced to generate revenues for its upkeep, it had become, as my dear friend put it so memorably, the New East India Company, making money any which way it is able to. Thus, the Council was now more bent on offering exorbitantly-priced language courses and all sorts of examination services, trading on its Englishness and cashing in on the dismal state of our educational system set back by excesses of linguistic nationalism, than on stocking books that represented the best in British culture and that could be made available to the largest group of people. Library fees are ridiculously high—which middle class family can afford to make its children members at Tk 1,300 a year? And entry to the library itself is restricted—you have to be a member to browse! In fact, everything about the present British Council Library reinforces the feeling that it serves almost exclusively two groups of people: the upper class of Dhaka and people desperate about going to Britain for higher studies!

Significantly, the British Council Library now has remade itself as the Library and Information Services. What services? I stopped becoming a member in 1998 when I realised that the membership fees, which I could barely afford even then (the current fees are Tk 650 a year!), were entitling me to diminishing returns every year since the books and most of the periodicals I wanted to read were not there. The year I quit my membership after I had requested the library to procure a book on Burke and India for a research project but, despite repeated reminders to the librarian, that book never came (and I thought that they would listen to a professor of English literature at Dhaka University). The reference section was no longer stocking current bibliographies and sources of information about the world of books.

When I decided to write this piece, I thought in all fairness I should spend some time checking out the Library’s current state before I started critiquing its current library policy. To my dismay, I found that things had gone from bad to worse in the last few years. What services? There is now left only one shelf of literature books and another one devoted to reference items. The library looks pretty, and everything is neatly arranged but why does it remind me of the artificial, vacuous smile of the catwalk beauty? No doubt in line with modern concepts of interior design the library has more space than ever before, but all I see in it is emptiness! Yes, it is smartly done and for the smart people, but where is the world of knowledge in all this?

As my colleague pointed out to me in a note, “What services? How can the young come and request books they don’t know about? Knowledge comes from browsing the shelves, from looking at books and authors you have never seen before, and then you pick it up and read a new author, and perhaps you find a lifelong favourite and your mental landscape changes and that’s what a library’s function is, to widen, to broaden, to expose minds to superior stuff, not provide some crap ‘services’, some videos, some paper hangings, and then have the gall to call it ‘progress’ or ‘keeping up with the times’ or whatever!”

I should add that I have no real problem with the British Council cashing in on the O and A level market and IELTS[3] examinations, but I can’t figure out why it can’t plow back more of its surely substantial profits into establishing a proper library instead of the Fuller Road scam that now calls itself one. Let it charge the people who can afford its outrageously-priced language courses all it wants to, but why can’t it lower library fees so that anybody who wants to can use the library facilities, can browse and read in the library without having to pay anything? I am aware that the British Council is a registered charity and believe that it is supposed to spend its gains here, but can’t it become a leaner operation so that it can beef up its library services? Shouldn’t charity begin at home?

Our libraries have become shadows and shells of their former selves, and it is time we started to ask ourselves a very simple question: what exactly is a good library? And don’t we owe our children and ourselves at least one library?

(Adapted from the essay, ‘The British Council Library: The New East India Company?’ Published on November 8, 2003 in Daily Star)

[1] Casual sessions of tête-à-tête

[2] United States Information Service Library

[3] Internation English Language Testing System

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Categories
Essay

A Short, Winding, and Legendary Dhaka Road

By Fakrul Alam

From Public Domain

Fuller Road, the short and winding road in the middle of the University of Dhaka campus, is quite legendary, not only as far as the history of that institution is concerned, but also in the annals of Bangladesh. It must also be one of the most beautiful of Dhaka city’s roads, having till now mostly escaped the degradations other old roads of the city have been subjected to due to rampant urbanisation. It is steeped in history, but still looks as if it was built not that long ago. Undoubtedly, it has real character and a distinctive place in the city’s life.

Bampfylde Fuller[1] was the first Lieutenant Governor of the province of East Bengal and Assam but he held that position for less than a year. Fuller Road must have been named to acknowledge his indirect role in the creation of Dhaka’s university. A controversial administrator and a very opinionated man, he had quit his position in a huff after less than a year at his job. The Partition of Bengal had been revoked in 1912, and all Fuller left behind then in his brief stint seemingly was the beautiful Old High Court Building of the city (whose construction he had initiated) and the splendid, sprawling rain trees of the university he had apparently imported from Madagascar. Nevertheless, the naming of the road indicates that he was part of the historical current that would lead not only to the building of the University of Dhaka in 1921, but also to the Partition of India in 1947, and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. Fuller Road is thus replete with history.

Enter it from Azimpur Road and you will see it flanked on one side by Salimullah Muslim (or SM) Hall, and on the other by Jagannath Hall. The former, of course, is named to honour Nawab Salimullah, one of the university’s founders, and someone who had donated a lot of land to the university. Built in 1930-1931, SM Hall is a splendid building, incorporating features not merely of Mughal architecture and gardens, but also of design elements of the colleges and halls that echo another venerable university, Oxford (one reason why the University of Dhaka was once called the “Oxford of the East”). Jagannath Hall comes with an overload of history as well. It, too, was originally modelled after the halls of the University of Oxford and was named after a zamindar of Savar who had contributed to the founding of Jagannath College, which had an organic connection with the university for a long time.

Fuller Road, in fact, is also steeped in the history of Bangladesh. If you enter it from its Azimpur Road entrance, you will see the Swadhinata Sangram, a group of sculptural busts by Shamim Sikder that commemorates the legendary names associated with the university and the birth of Bangladesh. If you care to enter the university staff quarters from either the left or right of the road, and if you then ask the guards to show you around, you will find the graves of intellectuals (or plaques honouring them). These were men martyred in 1971 due to the single-minded determination of the Pakistani army and its Bengali collaborators to eliminate dissident intellectuals who had worked for the birth of Bangladesh, thereby crippling the country at the moment of its birth.

If you exit the road on Nilkhet road, you will find a solemnly built commemorative area in another island, containing plaques listing university teachers, staff members, and students martyred in 1971. The sculptures and the plaques are testaments not only to the sheer bloody-mindedness of the Pakistani forces of yore but also to the major contribution made by the university’s people to Bangladesh’s independence. I grew up listening to snatches of the history of the University of Dhaka and Fuller Road that are relevant here.

One of my uncles, for instance, is still fond of retelling an incident when he escaped from the Pakistani police’s bloody assault on demonstrators protesting on February 21, 1952, against the imposition of Urdu as the sole national language of the nascent state by (West) Pakistani administrators and their cohorts. He had taken refuge at that time in the Fuller Road flat of an European Jewish academic, who was then a faculty member. A few of my teachers have either talked about or written about the movements that continued from that memorable incident till December 16, 1971, describing their involvement with the various other movements that led to the emergence of Bangladesh. They highlight, in the process, noteworthy moments in the road’s history and the roles its denizens played in our country’s pre-liberation stages, as well as the memorable transitional historical moments they had either witnessed or were part of.

As I move in from the Swadhinata Sangram island on the Azimpur Road entry point of Fuller Road nowadays, I can see only a few remnants of the natural beauty the road once boasted. Gone is the basketball court placed in a picturesque setting that SM Hall once possessed, or the lush green grass tennis court of the Hall that my uncle reminisced about. He played there before my time. For a long time, there were many statuesque and lovely trees on the SM Hall side of the road. However, the distinctive architectural features of the SM hall building still strikes me as very impressive.

On the other side, however, the first clear signs of the uglification of Fuller Road are visible in the drab features of the newly built extension of the Jagannath Hall complex. In addition to these two halls, Fuller Road is flanked on one side by the British Council and university staff quarters, and on the other by Udayan Bidyalaya (aka Udayan School/College), some faculty and staff quarters, the residences of one of the pro-vice chancellors and the treasurer, and the vice chancellor’s house. The two buildings of the pro-vice chancellor and the treasurer are pretty nondescript, as are the Udayan buildings, but the British Council setup is quite notable. I have written about the British Council’s transformation from an open access center for intellectual and cultural pursuits and my own memories of stimulating as well as adda[2]-filled days in anguished as well as indignant remembrance elsewhere, but let me just reiterate what I say in that piece briefly here: This new British Council is, indeed, sleekly designed and has state-of-the art security, but it is no longer the vibrant centre of intellectual exchange it once was, and is now mostly a place visited by those who can afford its wares of British education.

The Vice-chancellor’s residence, however, is undoubtedly still striking. If you have had the privilege of going inside, you must have been impressed by the building as well as the grounds, containing krishnachuras and jarul trees, which when flowering, make Fuller Road look vibrant and colourful—almost a garden in Dhaka city. Indeed, the rain trees, the krishnachuras and jaruls in bloom, one or two shirish and a solitary sonalu trees and (still) numerous mango trees play their part in making Fuller Road a distinctive floral phenomenon of the cityscape. Fuller Road is indeed as beautiful as you could expect any road to be in a bustling, bursting-at-its seam, and unsparingly chaotic city like Dhaka.

It is a road that also has many moods and that you can see in many lights—literally. I lived in Fuller Road for over two decades and frequented it for two more, and thus have had the privilege of viewing the road at different times of the day and on diverse occasions for at least four decades. When I now reflect on what I saw, I am struck by the immense variety of the experiences the road affords to those who live in it and even to passersby.

It was during my prolonged stay in Fuller Road that I got frequent glimpses of the wondrous place it once must have been. Even now, a nature-lover can take delight in its birds, for although the cacophonic crows still reign supreme amongst the bird population of the locality, throughout the day, and especially in the evening, you will see swiftly flying flocks of pigeons, tribes of parrots, and incomparably beautiful yellow-breasted holud pakhi[3]couples, in addition to the sad-looking, ubiquitous shaliks[4] and evening’s surrealistic bats.

When I first started living in Fuller Road, I would occasionally see snakes slithering by on monsoonal days; mongooses darting away at the sight of walkers is a not uncommon experience even now. Wild dogs roam in parts of Fuller Road at nights and early mornings. The foxes have disappeared, and I have seen a stray monkey only once or twice, but there is still enough flora and fauna around to make you feel an intimate connection with nature in this neighbourhood of the city. But of course, in addition to its nonhuman residents as well as its human ones, Fuller Road is now frequented mostly by people who find its free and open spaces appealing for different reasons at different times of the day.

Early in the morning or late in the evening, for instance, you will find men and women chatting away as they do their constitutionals; during the day students saunter across the road while vehicles fill the free and plentiful parking spaces; come evening lovers sit down discreetly in its dark spots, trying to be as close as possible and as far away as they can from prying eyes; with nightfall nouveau riche youths park faux sports and/or sleekly painted cars, trying to impress the girls who stroll across the road. Nowadays you will see with irritating frequency in evenings the parked motorcycles of busy-seeming student leaders. At night, Fuller Road can have a surrealistic feel to it—lit up but deserted, desolate as in some dreamscape, and as in a dreamscape, hauntingly familiar. 

What surely makes Fuller Road truly distinctive, though, are the festival days that it hosts throughout the year, and the processions and parades that cross it throughout the year for one reason or the other. If you list them by the English calendar, you can begin with the new year when celebrations continue from the final hours of the dying year and end till the first nightfall of the new one. February is a truly distinctive month in the road—first Bashanta Utshob[5]and then Valentine’s Day see it fill up with young men and women in bright, warm colours and obviously romantic, flirtatious moods. Even solemn Ekushey[6]February, when night-long Fuller Road residents hear the doleful notes of the Ekushey song commemorating our language martyrs, and when from dawn to afternoon the road is closed to all vehicular traffic, switches to a festive mood by late afternoon, as those crisscrossing it seem bent on leaving the sad notes behind to celebrate all things Bengali. But the most exuberant display you can see in and around Fuller Road is during Pohela Boishakh[7], when the road turns into a conduit for festival-loving people flowing from fun-filled event to event. Eid days and Durga Pujas, and Saraswati pujas too witness suitably dressed young people walking across the road in obviously celebratory moods, lighting up themselves and the people around them, as they either stroll by or stand in pairs or groups here and there in the curving road’s embrace.

And the processions and parades? Suffice it to say that they are motivated not only by politics but this or that reason or cause. In the three Fuller Road flats I lived in for twenty or so years, I felt the kind of contentment and ease that I did not experience in the many neighbourhoods of Dhaka I had lived in before, or the Dhanmondi flat I live in now. Mango-filled trees exuding mango blossom scents, kamini flowers with overpowering fragrances, wide open spaces where children and boys play to their hearts’ content and neighbours greet each other familiarly throughout the day made my life on Fuller Road incomparably pleasing.

Towards the end of my Dhaka University career, I moved to a flat on the ninth floor of the newly constructed faculty apartment complex. There I saw what I had never seen before—monsoonal cloud formations, magnificent sunsets (I would not get up in time for sunrises!), the moon in its full glory, and star-studded nights. Heaven seemed to come closer and closer to me then. I truly seemed to have ascended to celestial heights! But paradise has to be lost sooner or later and can only be regained in this world by willing the mind to vision it from exilic places every now and then. But to have had some close to it moments in this life through Fuller Road is truly something to be thankful for!

From Public Domain

[1] Fuller (1854-1935) held the position from 16 October 1905 until he resigned on 20 August 1906 after which he relinquished the position to Lord Minto (1845-1914).

[2] Tete-a tete

[3] Orioles

[4] Mynas

[5] Spring Festival

[6] Twenty-first February has been declared the mother tongue day by UNESCO. One of the reasons Bangladesh was formed was its insistence on Bengali being its mother tongue while Pakistan tried to impose Urdu as the national language.

[7] Pohela Boishakh (first day of the Bengali month of Boishakh) falls on 14th April in Bangladesh and  is celebrated as the start of the Bengali New Year with a holiday and fanfare.

(First Published in Daily Star on July 7, 2018)

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

Categories
Stories

The Wave of Exile

By Paul Mirabile

Mr Richards, employed by the British Council, had been teaching English at a posh, private preparatory school in Thailand for more than four years in the Province of Prachuap Khira Khan in a coastal town named Mawdaung. His first and sixth form pupils enjoyed his humour much more than his tedious grammatical explanations, and Mr Richards had no qualms about this.

Mr Richards taught twelve hours a week which offered him ample time to learn Thai, travel extensively throughout the country, especially up North in the dusk-filled jungles and along the Mekong River shores exploring villages and temples.

The one-storey school, perched high up on the brow of a hill, overlooked the turquoise-tainted Indian Ocean. The large windows of his class afforded pupil and professor much visual pleasure when grammar became too much of a bore, and Mr Richards too weary or hot to break the boredom.

“Now, instead of casting cursory glances out of the windows,” shouted a nettled Mr Richards, one very grey, windy day, “who can tell me what function the word ‘chewing’ plays in the composed word ‘chewing-gum’ ?” All the smiling faces and darting eyes happily translated their perfect ignorance of the answer. However, a minute later, a very pretty girl, one of the brightest in his class, excitedly cried out, “A verb, sir !” Mr Richards gave her a benign smile and shook his head.

“No, no. It is not because it ends in -ing that it is a verb,” he lectured in a paternal tone, so overtly exercised by Mr Richards, and so perfunctorily accepted by the pupils. He scanned the eager heads of the others ; alas none had the desire to crack the enigma. He checked his watch : “Oh well, I’ll let them out ten minutes or so before the bell rings. I have to catch that bus to Bangkok,” he sighed, still waiting for an answer that never came.

“No bother. Tonight think about it and tomorrow morning let me know, right ?” He stood up. “Go on now … down the hill … off to the beach, I’ll give you a treat this afternoon.”

Before he had even finished the word ‘afternoon’ the whole class, besides two girls, grabbed their books and scrambled for the door. Out they stormed, racing downhill towards the shingled beach of the crescent-shaped bay. Mr Richards observed them from the large windows. Their delightful screams made him a bit queasy: he had been told never to allow the pupils out before the bell. He, nevertheless, had done so on several occasions. He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his books and papers from the wooden desk and was about to make for the door when a terrible thundering or roaring sound froze him in his footfalls. He swivelled on his heels and gasped in horror as rolls and rolls of water smashed against the plate glass of the window panes. The violence of the impact threw the two girls to the floor screaming, but besides a few chinks through which spouts of water gushed in, the windows had miraculously withstood the brunt of the tidal wave. For a tidal wave it was, and a tremendous one! The two girls remained lying on the floor, crying but unhurt.

Mr Richards ran to the windows. The waves had receded, but what he espied below on the crescent-shaped seascape, or what had been a crescent-shaped seascape, caused him to fall back and scream involuntarily : “Dear God! There’s nothing left!” Indeed nothing remained: no palm trees, no vendors’ shacks along the shore, no boulders. No shore ! Only a vast ocean that lay several metres below the school, now churning a glaucous thickness under grey, sultry skies, upon which floated a myriad bobbing flotsam: uprooted palm-trees, lifeless cows and dogs, shoals of bloated fish, roofs of straw, pots and pans, planks, bright coloured robes with or without their proprietors’ bodies inside them !

“Bodies !” he cried covering his mouth. “My pupils … Have they all …” He dared not finish his sentence. The two girls stared at him, mouths agape, eyes deorbited. “The boys and girls floating in the water … Dear God they’ve all drowned !” He wept and wailed, stamping his feet, grabbing at his hair. The girls too began to weep and wail.

In an instant he came to himself. “Their deaths are my fault,” he mused. “I let them out too soon … against all school regulations. Blast ! Why did I do that … just today ?” He soon realised that the headmaster would be on to him soon enough; he feared his starched character. And the parents ? They would accuse him of manslaughter.  He would be arrested and put in prison, even hanged for involuntary homicide ! He had every call to be frightened …

Taking hold of himself, Mr Richards knew he had to flee very quickly from Thailand before the headmaster and the parents learned about his unpardonable blunder. And they would learn about it soon enough when the panic and hysteria had died down.

He leapt over the still supine girls and rushed out the door. Once outside he noted that the town near the school had hardly been damaged. But below, he caught glimpses of undulating corpses being poled out of the waters by villagers and policemen in pirogues, rowboats or catamarans. The tidal wave had been gigantic. He turned his attention away from the catastrophe and fled home …

He jogged up to his bungalow further up the grassy hill at the edge of town. Speedily he gathered what he could, for the alert would be out for him at any moment … Or, so he believed. A change of clothes, one or two books and his official documents he stuffed into a small backpack, and without locking his door quickly made a bee-line for the bus station, where luckily he managed to jump on a bus for Bangkok. Apparently no one recognised him, nor followed him. He paid the fare, settled into one of the many empty seats and stared stony-eyed out of the window. His red, puffy eyes filled with tears. What a blithering fool he had been ! And now, what had he become ? A fugitive … no, worse, a murderer ! “Dead ! All dead !” rose a ghastly whisper in his ear.  He had to get away as far as possible as the scenes of the bloated pupils danced before his bloodshot eyes.

Once in Bangkok he wasted no time. Further North he travelled by bus into the Province of Chiang Rai. There, in a village whose name he hardly recalled, he spent two nights pondering his dilemma, assuaging his jaded nerves, chary of leaving any sign or evidence of his frantic intinerary, thinking only of a plan to save his neck. He couldn’t possibly stay in Thailand, the police surely were now on his trail, or would be very soon. Neither could he return to England: the bobbies would be waiting for him at the airport, ready to handcuff the murderer of over a dozen innocent children !

Then in the middle of a hot, sleepless night it suddenly occurred to him: he would shave his head and eyebrows, don a monk’s robe, change his expensive Russell and Bramley shoes for sandals and set out for Laos. He had travelled widely in Laos and could even speak a smattering of Kra-dai. He had taught in Luang Prabang for three years and had many friends amongst his former pupils, two of whom had entered monkhood in Pak Beng at the Wat or temple Jin Jong Jaeng. “I shall escape naked from the shipwreck of mundane life,” he  murmured, smiling inwardly at his little metaphor which he recollected from his childhood upbringing. But would he ?.. Mr Richards sunk into his lumpy bed: the figure of an outlaw, a pariah, a self-exile stood before him like a shadow … a double of himself: -swollen little bodies drift like flotsam in waters, darkly … that fey voice droned above a tumult of incongruous thoughts.

Mr Richards shook his head and said aloud, “To Pak Beng. There I’ll join the sangha[1] of the Theravada monks. There I shall seek spiritual solace, rid my mind and spirit of those drifting bodies of cheerful boys and girls, swept away from the joys of life because I had a bus to catch!” So he hoped.

Yet the obstacles of reaching the temple caused him concern. The Laotian government frowned upon Western spiritual-seekers cluttering their monasteries and temples. He needed a visa. Where would he find a consulate in the North of Thailand ? And would they issue one to a ‘Western monk’ ?

He jumped up from the bed, and as he did his mind cleared of all that tumultuous tossing. He had befriended many of his pupils’ parents whilst working in Luang Prabang, and he knew, by correspondence, and his frequent voyages to Laos, that one of them, Mr Inthavong, had been appointed consul in one of the North Thailand consulates. He rushed down to the reception and asked at the desk where the nearest Laotian consulate could be found.

“You must travel by bus to Wiang Kaen near the Mekong River, sir.”

“Are there any other consulates ?”

“Not that I know of, sir.”

Mr Richards heart skipped a beat; Mr Inthavong must be working there. He had to take the chance.

The next morning the ‘Western monk’ got on a bus for Wiang Kaen, carrying only a small bag for his passport, photos and a bit of lunch. All along the tedious journey to the North-Eastern town Mr Richards prayed that Mr Inthavong would be there; it was his only chance to obtain a visa for Laos.

He reached Wiang Kaen by nightfall, found accommodations at a temple guest house and spent a horribly sleepless night, tormented now by the thought of the failure of his plan, now by the screeching rats and buzzing mosquitoes.

At nine o’clock sharp he was at the front gate of the bright new consulate, a lovely two-storey bungalow-like edifice enshrined by lush gardens carpeted with the most perfume-scented fruit trees and flowers. He rang. The security guard strolled out and sized him up. Mr Richards politely mentioned his friend’s name. The unshaven security guard raised two quizzical eyebrows, but took his passport and photo and left him to ruminate the events that were about to unfold behind that iron barrier, inside the lovely bungalow. It all seemed hours to him as that voice repeated  “irresponsible murderer !” Suddenly the security guard stood before him, together with a small, portly man dressed in a suit and tie.

“Can that be you Mr Richards? A bonze? A monk? What have you done? Where is all your beautiful black hair ?” All this was said in imperious tones much to the delight of the monk who sighed in relief: his pupil’s father had recognised him! He wiped the perspiration off his furrowed brow. “Step in, please … out of the heat,” the consul pleaded. So they both strolled into the air-conditioned consulate, Mr Inthavong wearing Russell and Bramley shoes, recently polished, Mr Richards, a pair of worn-out sandals.

Inside the monk was served tea and a bowl of rice in Mr Inthavong’s office, he himself abstaining from joining him since he had already breakfasted. “I’m so happy to see you Mr Richards,” began the enthusiastic consul. “What brings you here, and dressed like that ? Are you really a monk now ?” Mr Richards broke into a tapestry of lies that, as time went by, he himself began to believe: Living so long in Asia had infused his soul with the compassionate virtues of Buddhism, and in Laos, he hoped to pursue his path deeper in the compassionate depths of Buddhahood in order to glean its treasures. The consul smiled like a child does when listening to his or her favourite nursery rhyme.

Mr Richards then got down to business: his visa ! Mr Inthavong nodded, examining his passport and two photos. “You shall have it in three days. Meanwhile, you are to be my guest here, upstairs with my wife and two children.”

And so the first snag had been circumvented. For those three days, Mr Richards, plied with food, drink and homely conversation, had all but forgotten the wave, the floating bodies and merciless whisper … the abominable figure of a self-exiled …

On the morning of the fourth day, armed with a three-month visa, the Western monk set out to cross the Mekong River to Ban Houei Sai on a Nam Ou boat with six other passengers. It had been so long since he had been on the Mother of all Rivers. He inhaled the tropical river air in silent jubilation. As they navigated slowly downstream, his thoughts interlaced with the flecks of foam, wandered back to his days spent on the Mekong at Guan Lei on the Chinese border, where having been temporarily stranded, he finally was welcomed aboard a small six-cabin dai, a Chinese boat, heading for Thailand.

What a voyage! They had anchored by the soundless jungles at night, machetted through them in the evenings in search of mangoes, navigated by bathing rosy water buffalows and by tiny golden stupa-tipped isles. What an adventure! The crew had left him off in a small Laotian village where he made his way to Luang Prabang on one of those blue, wooden box-boats, gliding by stilt-home villages under whose piles lounged or snorted huge black pigs, scenes so reminiscent of Alix Aymé’s paintings[2] housed at the Luang Prabang Royal Palace. Then the real adventure began, upstream on the Nam Ou in a frail six-seater river boat, slowly weaving between treacherous snags and swift cross-currents. He passed the Park Ou caves, Nong Khiaw and Muang Khwa, sleeping in bungalows and eating rice with thick pieces of pork in the pristine territories of the Hmong tribal peoples. Alas, his grand voyage to Hatsa ended in Sop Pong near the Vietnamese border, the authorities refusing him an entry visa to cross Vietnam then back into Laos where he wished to continue on his river voyage to Chao Dan Tra at the Chinese border.

Ah yes, those were the days of freedom … of existential sovereignty. And now ? A fugitive … a prisoner to his own wretched egoism, Mr Richards suddenly felt overwhelmed by a deep loneliness. His mixed recollections were suddenly interrupted by shouts from the shore : they had reached Ban Houei Sai.

Once the formalities were completed, Mr Richards managed to hop on a collective taxi which sped him towards Pak Beng on a smooth road. He reached the town before nightfall, and to his joy he spotted his two former pupils seated on the temple steps. Were they waiting for him ? Indeed they were, thanks to a letter sent by Mr Inthavong who had explained in great detail to the Satu or Venerable Father of the temple-sangha Mr Richards’ religious fervour and enthusiastic intentions to enter monkhood. The consul had added that nothing should be said to the police or to other state authorities of his entry into Buddhahood.

His former pupils, who had grown into full manhood, heads shaven and bare foot, happily led him to meet the Satu Father. To tell the truth, Mr Richards hardly recognised them. But that made no difference. As expected, he deposited a large donation (all the cash he had on him which amounted to some six hundred pounds), then was given three bright new ochre-coloured robes of pure cotton, shown to his splayed window cell, through which he had a slight view of the inner temple gardens, and was told the daily procedures of his initiation as a pha or a novice: collective prayers in the Prayer Hall, breakfast, Sutra readings until lunch, discussion, rest period, an hour or two of manual labour such as gardening, restoring frescoes or termite-riddled woodwork, personal perpetual moving meditations, yoga exercises, then a light meal before the final collective prayer and sleep until the sound of the gong at four o’clock in the morning.

When the two monks had left him, Mr Richards lay back on the straw mat on the earthen floor that served as a bed. He had been given immaculately clean sheets and a pillow. A mosquito net had been nailed to the splayed window. The walls bore no images nor any other colour than a light beige. Putting his hands behind his head he followed the slowly turning ceiling fan with his eyes: yes, his plan had succeeded. No one would ever find him here. Yet he had no reason to rejoice. He would never again see his aging parents seated at the hearth reading or conversing in low voices, his trusty Irish Setter … his friends at the pub. A sharp pain of remorse, or better put, compunction stabbed at his chest. “Dead! Drowned ! All dead !” the whispers hammered at his temple. Would that relentless voice ever grant him respite ? Would anyone ever forgive him ? Only penance. Only the fires of tribulation could scrape away the rust of vice that had corroded his being. A life of contrition would be the most appropriate path for him, the most responsible. Tears again began to well up in his eyes. He fell asleep and awakened to the cascading sound of two or three vibrating gongs.

So began Mr Richards’ initiation into Therevada monkhood. He had to learn the akkara alphabet in order to read the sutras, the Buddhist acriptures. His practice of many languages enabled him to accomplish this in two months. What he enjoyed most was the tham nong or the musical rhythm method which empowers the monks to memorise the hundreds of sutras of the Sacred Books ; it formed part of the didactic games that the bonzes played every morning and afternoon. These didactic games also included dancing and chanting sessions. The ‘western bonze’ adapted quite rapidly to his new lifestyle … his new home … No doubt his last …

As time passed, the rigours of the monastic code, the kindness of all the monks towards him, his slow but steady immersion into the Kra-Dai language and the marvels of the modality of Buddhist life attenuated, to a certain extent, the mortifying effects his spirit and body had suffered since that horrendous wave. Images of the drowned bodies did wake him up in the middle of certain nights, heaving and panting in one sweaty mass of anguish. However, the whispered voice had long since been silenced. His prayers and ruminations served as a watershed for those waves of guilt, an oceanic ointment for his slowly healing wounds. He was so glad to do service at the temple, run errands for the personnel who worked in the kitchen, wash and hang to dry the three robes of all twenty or so monks.

Gradually he succumbed to the beauties of Buddhahood, of attaining inner peace, his mind having all but vacated that remorseful past. His wide struggles between jubilation and despondency, gaiety and sorrow, ecstasy and debasement dwindled to a few chinks of dread. In short, he enjoyed his laborious leisure …

It was his seventh year at the temple. In spite of his three-month visa having expired, the Satu Father allowed him to take up his begging bowl and go into town to beg for donations, and even have a bite to eat at one of the roadside stands if he so desired. Mr Richards beamed with joy. In all those seven years he had hardly stepped out of the temple. He knew nothing of Pak Bent besides several photos that had been left behind by some tourists on the bench of the veranda of the main Prayer Hall.

He strolled about the crowded streets of the main arteries admiring the colourful markets and smelling the cooked food that had once given him pleasure, especially the pork and prawns. He went from shop to shop, his bowl filling with dented coins and frazzled bills. He was about to order himself a vegetarian meal in one of the market eateries when a group of well-dressed men addressed him in broken English. He shrugged his shoulders, prudently. They then spoke in Thai which he feigned to understand a bit. They appeared to be part of a large tourist group. One man placed a five-dollar bill in the monk’s bowl. They spoke very politely to him, and even invited the good monk to their hotel for a bite to eat … vegetarian of course ! The monk hesitated at first, but finally agreed. Who knows, perhaps these good men, quite wealthy-looking, would donate a fine sum to the temple-sangha.

They hailed two taxis and soon stood outside the palacial Le Grand Pakbeng, a sumptious five-star hotel. The finest in Pak Beng. In the lift that shot them up to the Presidentielle Suite, he looked at himself in the lift mirror ; he hadn’t seen his face for over seven years (the temple-sangha had no mirrors) and noted that the corners of his eyes had shrivelled into crow’s eyes. He winced.

ThePresidentielle Suite was fabulously fitted out with an outdoor spa and living area. The majestic terrace looked out upon the rolling Mekong which snaked through the rich greens of the mountainous forests.

The door was slammed shut and locked behind him … 

And that was the last time anyone ever saw the monk from the Wat Jin Jong Jaeng, alias Mr Richards.

An investigating detective, sent by the Richards’ family, after a year or two of intense enquiry, believed that their son had been abducted by the group of Thai tourists who had checked into Le Grand Pakbeng. The detective, once learning their names, discovered that three or four of them were the parents of the pupils who had drowned in the terrible tidal wave that struck southern Thailand some nine or ten years back. Alas nothing could be proven against them. What proved very odd was the fact that Mr Richards’ parents had no idea their son had been the cause of the drowned children in Thailand, and even ignored his entry into monkhood, having received no letter from him for over seven years ! The detective had nothing to say about this silence. Nor did he wish to say anything.

The detective concluded in his report to the grief-stricken parents, rather sententiously, that no human being has ever disappeared completely, however altered his or her appearance. This trite remark hardly brought a ray of solace to them.

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[1]        A monastery or convent of Buddhist monks.

[2]        (1894-1989) French painter. She discovered the use of lacquer in her landscape paintings of Southeast Asia.

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Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.

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