THE EXOTIC RISSOLE

“Tanveer Ahmed is a great Australian citizen, commentator, practitioner and now memoirist. His serious intent operates in combination with an enviable geniality of soul  to make him a welcome voice in public discourse in our country. But now he will delight us in the intimacy of this superbly written and engrossing memoir, a memoir both so entertaining but also so important and therapeutic for this country now.” – Thomas Keneally

Dr Tanveer Ahmed is a psychiatrist and a foreign affairs journalist who writes for The Sydney Morning Herald.

He grew up in an immigrant Bangladeshi family in Sydney’s west and his new memoir, The Exotic Rissole tells of his adventures.

He joined a cricket team that was mistaken for a terrorist group, had a stint as a Bollywood-style game show host and discovered an aversion to dead bodies as a medical student.

Tanveer, quite inevitably, decided to become a psychiatrist.

In The Exotic Rissole cultures collide and identities mix, all held together loosely with breadcrumbs and egg. ” ‘Yes, I married your father. Of course, love is a myth.’ my mother once said.” In this extract from his memoir, Tanveer tells of his parents’ courtship in Bangladesh.

EXTRACT: ROMANTIC MISMATCH

I could never see what my parents had in common. My mother was a highly social, anxious, literature-obsessed woman who was raised to have a suspicion of both religion and money. She walked around the house quoting from the Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, while carrying dried fish and mango pickles to the kitchen.

“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf,” she once said, before urging Tania and I never to experiment with drugs. I wasn’t sure of the relevance. “The dew is on the tip of the leaf, not eating or smoking it.” she replied, fresh after a discussion about children and drugs with her Tax Office colleagues, where she had acquired the nickname Queen Latifa.

My father was the prodigy from a dirt poor village called Bijoyrampur who was interested in matters practical – money, machines and charity. His skills were in mathematics and DIY handyman work. He seemed restless and unable to sit comfortably with company, either loitering around in the garden tilling the soil or fixing the carburettor in our decades old, beige Toyota Corolla. When we walked in a group, he was often alone ten metres in front holding his hands behind his back. He seemed inaccessible, an advertisement for men as emotional islands.

I didn’t see it as a problem. The message I had received from my parents and family friends while growing up was that in spite of the movies, romantic love was a dangerous concept borne in modernity, one that led to flickers of passion but was destined to end in tatters.

“Yes, I married your father. Of course, love is a myth.” my mother once said.

It was not the environment in which to raise children. Whether it occurred in a Bangladeshi village or within the English Royal family, marriage was about renewing status or social climbing, depending on where one sat on the social ladder, and then transmitting quality genetic code.

I knew they were the views of the Old World, one which my parents were struggling to maintain amid the assault of television, rock music and Coca Cola.

But they were able to relent occasionally, such as the time when they bought me an electric guitar for my sixteenth birthday during a phase when I was obsessed with Bon Jovi and randomly sang lines of “Livin’ On A Prayer.”  The neighbours complained that the amplifier was too loud, consigning me to the garage.

“Tommy used to work on the docks… union’s been on strike, he’s down on”

“Acha, please, maths homework first, rock music later,” my father responded, pointing me to my room.