Silver linings

I arrived home from work the other day, pretty tired, and ran into Meena, my landlady. Because I’ve been working such long hours lately, I hadn’t seen her in a few days. She insisted that I come in and sit down. In between making me tea and piling at least a dozen biscuits onto my plate, she began to tell me how much she was going to miss me when I’m gone. She kept insisting that things would be altogether much better if I stay for at least one more year, that I live in her flat and (when I pointed out that I would have no job beyond 17th May, and therefore would not be able to pay the rent), that I get married in Bangladesh. Sumaia’s mother, who was passing by at the time, popped in to gossip. She said the same thing. Then Auntie from upstairs came downstairs and joined in.

Really, it was all very touching, and began to make me feel rather tearful.
But then, as Meena was bringing me my dinner (I only put up a feeble resistance to her offer of goat curry, I’ll admit it), the mood changed. She pulled her chair closer to mine, and glanced around nervously. Jumping up again, she pushed the front door closed. I began to worry she was about to offer me her son’s hand in marriage. As she leaned in towards me, I began to panic, racking my brains for polite ways to say no.

Alas, my consternation proved to be needless. Her proposition was of quite a different nature. She asked me very softly, as if afraid the neighbours would overhear, whether I planned on taking my rice cooker back to England with me.
I gazed at her in wonder for a moment, before carefully explaining that no, it was unlikely the rice cooker would fit into my backpack. She beamed enormously. Then she asked if I’d be taking the china teapot my parents bought while they were here. And so began an inventory of all the household goods that I’ve accumulated, and which she’s obviously had her eye on for the last year and more.

I suppose the lesson here is that every cloud has a silver lining. And the cloud of me leaving Bangladesh is, for Meena at least, lined with electrical appliances and crockery.

Job hunting

The bright sparks amongst you have probably guessed from the title of this post that, finally, after many months of denial and procrastination, the time has come for me to decide What I Want To Do Next.

Oh, those six dreaded words. This question, while I was at home and being clouted over the head by it at every turn, made my heart constrict and my natural ebullience wilt, before the questioner had even reached the inflection at the end of the sentence.

Now, however, as I sit here in Parbs, I see the long, dark years stretch out before me, rather like the road does in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (think nuclear winter, with a bit of cannibalism thrown in for variety), and I know that attempting to answer this tortuous question is infinitely preferable to living in Leicester for the rest of my life.

I suppose I hadn’t realised, until the possibility of extending my placement here was torn to shreds, set alights and the embers danced upon by a thoroughly ridiculous decision (I’m not naming any names, before you ask), how much that possibility had been cocooning me from facing this depressing prospect. It was only when that particular rug was whipped out from under my feet that the need to Find A Job hit me square in the jaw.

Unfortunately, I’m no closer now to knowing what I want to do with my life than I was when I arrived here. Convinced I was going to have an epiphany in a Bangladeshi village, I quietly pitied my university friends, all madly applying for jobs the summer we graduated. And now, here I am, not so much closer to The Answer than I was when we took off from Heathrow back in 2008.