Women and cars need not apply

As close to the spotlight as I want to get.  When we say,
the grass is greener on the other pitch, what we mean is,
Grass acche (there is grass!).

 As avid blog readers may have gathered, I play a lot of “football” (no one calls it soccer outside America).  My guys there have become a family of sorts; I’m one of the older players, so they call me “apa” (sister) and I think of them as amar choto bhai (my little brothers).  They no longer go easy on me most of the time; the number of random bruises scattered across my body continues to increase (not that anyone but me sees them since I am pretty well covered most of the time).  I’m interpreting the increasing amount of jokes that they make at my expense as a sign that they are accepting me.  Also unfortunate for them is that “Mey” (girl) sounds a lot like “May,” which is what my old taekwondo/capoeira teacher used to call me, so it’s pretty easy to tell when they are talking about me (not that I always get the gist, but I was pretty happy when after a nice play the captain of the other team started yelling at the defense, “mey mone nai!” i.e. forget she’s a girl! I think it was followed by, “hit her hard.”  Evidently is used to be, “She’s not even pretty, so you shouldn’t feel bad about hitting her hard.”  There are downsides to learning more of the language).

With amar bhai, Rafi

One of the younger players is Naveed, who is a super bright guy who is just applying to college and is truly gifted at soccer.  I had a hat trick the other day, and it was mainly because he nailed me twice when I was standing in front of the goal; the ball hit me and bounced in.  He can get a little goofy and do things like start making gorilla noises on the “pitch” (yah, British English is creeping into my lexicon).  He takes advantage of the fact that I don’t always understand the switches that are made (in Bangla) by telling me he’s on my team when he’s really not.  Last week I countered by marking him on a corner kick and just throwing my arms around him while yelling, “Naveed ache!  Naveed ache!”  (Naveed’s open!).  That got some serious nervous giggles.  It’s turned into a bit of a running joke for the whole team, so when Naveed got his test scores back (some sort of end of high school test that’s really important for college admission and scholarships) and got a 5, the highest score, I went over and said, “Here I thought you were just wearing glasses to look smart!  That’s really impressive!”  He asked who told me, and I said, “everyone’s talking about it, obviously.”

After the game, I was playing goalie while another guy was shooting at me.  Naveed comes over with something in his hand.  It’s a box of sweets.  He gets down on one knee and offers them to me.  It’s in celebration of his test score (here, if you are celebrating, you buy things for others).  I just up and down in (mock) excitement at his “sweet” (mishti) proposal.  I ask him to pick one out for me, and the next thing I know, Naveed is feeding me.  Oh my.  Scandal on the pitch.

As I was heading out, the guys were talking about their tournament the following day.  “Okhane 8:45 sharp hobe” (be there at :845 shap), Tawsif said bar bar (over and over---but wouldn’t it be a great name for a bar?  Oh wait, alcohol is largely illegal here).  I was ignoring it all, until he looked at me and said, “I’ll pick you up since you don’t know where it is.”  8:45?!  I didn’t want to commit to watching a game that early!  Tawsif looks at me like I’m an idiot.  “You’re playing, Maria.  You’re on our team.”  What?!  Breakthrough!  They’ve played since several tournaments since I joined the team and this was my first invitation!  Definitely part of the motivation was the idea that I’d be distracting and/or disorienting to the other teams, and they were enjoying the odd factor, but still, I’ll take it.  Their desire to win superseded any other agenda, so it’s a big compliment.  They call themselves "Royal Oranje."  Yeah I don't know what that means either.

I got up early this morning to put my hair in pig tails.  Threw on my Harvard boxing team shirt since it’s the closest thing I have to red.  Tawsif came by around 8:30 in a rickshaw to pick me up.  We took it over to Airport road, which is a highway, and then walked up the sidewalk the last 500m or so to army stadium.

We get over there and one of our teammates, Arnaub, says hi and starts talking in Bangla.  I hear, “. . . . . . . . .mey not allowed.”  “What?!” I say, “Why not?!”  It is clearly not that Bangladeshis think women are superior at sports.  The organizers are young; I think I might be older than both of them added together, and they didn’t want anything out of the ordinary happening on their watch.  Our team is unfazed.  Arnaub and Tawsif go over to talk to the “in-charge” at the stadium, saying something like, “My uncle knows your cousin; my mom’s sisters husband has a high political position; my brother went to school with your cousin and now knows your wife’s brother.”  You do this for 10 minutes or so, and then say, “And we have a girl on our team that we’d like to play.”  Thik acche (no problem).  Handled.  Game on.  Except that, our green organizers actually haven’t gotten the right permission for the event, so none of us are technically allowed to play on the field.  We take a seat.  A friend of some of my team members comes by and asks, “match acche?”  (is the match on?).  My teammate Shifan says, “Yes.  And cigarette acche?” and the friend laughs and pulls out a box.  As they light up, I silently think about how impressively these guys flip back and forth between bangla and English.  It’s pretty cool to watch and try to follow.  In conversations about football or TB, I follow the jist now.  Any other subjects are tough....

Check out that pointing.  What a natural. Oh, and the
totally accepted* guy-guy(-guy!)
 hand-holding going on in the background.

So the tournament is postponed unless we find a new venue.  We offer to move the tournament to our field for a small fee.  Our opponents don’t like this.  We usually play 7 v. 7, and the tournament was supposed to be 11 v. 11.  But mainly they are unhappy about the home court advantage.  It seems like that’s the only option until one of the little organizers comes out and says, in his very distinct pre-pubescent voice, that they’ve found another field around the corner that they can use, but no women or cars are allowed on the premises.  It’s a training facility for the army (and no, there are no women in the army).  So that’s that.  Tawsif starts to escort me home and the independent side of me that has chilled out so much in my six months here just revolts.  I can get home on my own; we’re only a little over a mile from my place and it’s a fairly straightforward route.  I stomp home, unsuccessfully trying to cool down on the way.  But then I start to think about what’s going on.  This is cultural change at work.  Women don’t play sports, and definitely don’t play physical sports, with men at that.  There is not much of a precedent (outside of the games held in the ex-pat facilities, like the American school).  That my team invited me indicated a huge change of attitude since I first came out.  That they advocated for me (successfully at first) and then were indignant about the situation was also progress.  And while they would definitely not call themselves feminists (I’m tempted to buy them all “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts), there was something very, very refreshing about gender empowerment not for the sake of gender empowerment (which is sometimes becomes), but because they wanted me on their team.  They ended up having to play 9 v. 11 and tied 1-1.  Afterwards they invited me out for a post-game lunch of kichuri.  I had embarked on my own personal form of protest by wearing a brightly colored, long but sleeveless summer dress (definitely pushing the envelope on what is acceptable here, especially on a young bideshi lady).  When Tawsif came by to pick me up, he took one look at me and told me to change because it was Friday and people would be staring.  Normally I’d care and listen, but today, Bengali culture had declared war on me and I was not going to back down that easily.  It wanted me to act like a girl, then I’m also going to dress like one.  I’ll change, if it will too.  

The soccer team for the most part ignored my outfit, although a few were complimentary of my look (and no one yelled "hit her hard since she's not pretty," which is a start).  They mainly were amazed/annoyed/embarrassed at how much others were staring.  I knew what I was getting myself into; it was a deliberate choice to buck the rules today.  At least on the soccer field I’m contained and not wrecking havoc elsewhere.  Their choice.

One teammate blamed me for their loss.   Ha! Sooooo not fair!  I blamed them for not successfully getting the organizers to let me play!  They say when we play at another field that’s not on army property there should be somosa na (no problem).  Amra dekbo (we’ll see).

I also learned that our field is called “SWAT”.  Soccer With an Attitude Team.  Amazing.  I love it.

Say "paneer," SWAT!

Thanks Susmita for the photos!  Oh, and the really funny idea to change "say cheese" to say "paneer" for the group photo.  Yes, I heard her do it and then repeat it five times (again with underwhelming appreciation) prior to using it here :)

*I'd be remiss if I said "totally" accepted.  Common behavior for male friends to casually hold hands here.  Some of my buddies are extremely averse to this, and others deny it, but you see it everywhere.  Especially if you walk by the banani bridge at sunset.  But they are there to pick up chicks?  Maybe their strategy needs a little revising.....