A Stranger from Home

I'm from Chittagong. I grew up around this music without ever really listening to it. So this summer I went to Hamtramck, Michigan and the Dallas Fort Worth area to ask Bengali families living in America a question I had never asked anyone back home: what did your family sing when things were hard?

Twelve conversations. Six of them are in this documentary.

Hasnat manages Alif restaurant in Michigan and studies at Wayne State. He's from Sylhet, and he told me that when someone in his family got sick, they would arrange a milad or a mahfil, gatherings where people come together to pray and recite, often with devotional singing. You hold one for illness, for grief, for gratitude. The room fills up and the sound becomes part of the medicine. His own listening runs wider than that. He named Bokul Ful, an old folk song, and Habib Wahid, the producer who took Bangladeshi folk music and ran it through electronic beats and urban pop and somehow made it work. Then he said something I keep returning to. In Bangladesh there's a saying, mache bhate Bangali, fish and rice make a Bengali. It's what we're made of. He put music in the same category.

A journalist from Sylhet, Sahel bhai listed composers the way you'd list family. Hason Raja. Lalon Fakir. Shah Abdul Karim. Radha Raman. Pagol Hasan. Mystic poets and folk composers, most of them born in Sylhet or shaped by it, some centuries old. At his nanur bari, his mother's family home, they sang gojol in the mosque, devotional songs passed down without anyone formally teaching them. You just grow up inside it. He listens while driving. That's when he goes back.

The owner of the restaurant, from Cumilla gave me something different. When he was sick as a child, his mother said rhymes over him at night. Not songs. Rhymes: Aam pata jora jora, Hattimatim tim. Beyond that, his family didn't really listen to music, and there was no tradition waiting to be inherited. I heard this more than once from people from Cumilla, and some of them seemed almost apologetic, as though I'd come looking for something they were supposed to have.

Shoriful Hossain Bhai came to America so young he says he doesn't remember much of Bangladeshi culture. But he listens to the songs anyway. A different kind of inheritance, found rather than handed down.

And one elderly man, Habib Ahmed bhai, when I asked what he missed most, didn't say the food or the weather or the sound of the street. He said his parents. They died while he was here.

What surprised me most is that Bangladesh does not distribute its music evenly. What you inherit depends on which district your family came from, and whether anyone bothered to pass it on.

Nobody sings for you right away, either. First they talk about their children, the weather here compared to home, the restaurant in town that calls itself authentic and still gets the food wrong. Then eventually someone tries a song. Half remembered. Usually followed by an apology for forgetting the rest.