The Bottle Gourd

When economic immigrants like my parents came over in the sixties and seventies they came over with the burden of their family's survival on their shoulders. They were scared and nervous as they ventured into this new world. It was the age before the Internet. Whatever they knew about United Kingdom was hearsay and historical. UK - the great empire, Queen Victoria, Lord Mountbatten, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin. Life will be better here. There will be opportunities of work, of financial and physical security, money will be sent back to the home country to family and relatives where the impact will resonate for generations. 

My father had two brothers, six sisters and parents. If my father succeeded then so would his family. They would have money to resettle from the villages with lushious crops and gigantic rivers to the comparatively modern progressive world of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. They will have access to education, jobs, a chance to better themselves, his sisters would attract better suitors and for the family overall there would be the promise of a better future. The family status would go from village people to the up-and-coming middle class. It's a big responsibility for a twenty something year old. Don't you think.

They take the risk to come over to a place they do not know, language they do not speak, a culture they do not understand but come over they do. As they come they don't just leave their country and everything they know behind, they bring it with them. For Bangladeshi people they bring their food, their recipes, their spices, their fish and vegetables which evoke the nostalgic, heart-warming, familial memories of home with every bite, every mouthful. 

At the end of my parents garden in Seven Kings, East London you will find a homemade vine where every summer they grow bottle gourd. A thicker, fleshier version of the British courgette. 

                                          

In Britain if you visit a friend or a relative you may take a bottle of wine or box of chocolates. Similarly in Bangladesh it would be typical to take a big, heavy, fresh, light-green, straight from the market, ready to be cooked bottle gourd to your host's house - otherwise it would be rude to turn up empty-handed, right; this is a customary Bengali practice especially in the village from where my father comes from.