A Trip Less Ordinary

Bangladesh smells like petroleum and human excrement and fried foods. It’s a distinctive smell that has a way of reaching back at you years later, in airports or walking the streets of some Western city. It’s the smell of the dead and dying. It has a way of feeling abandoned, a country beyond hope that’s little more than a sinkhole for NGO funding. Bangladesh is deceptive in this way. The prayer calls come early and late, sometimes punctuated by the heavy roll of broken trains, but the women wear no hijabs, rather richly colored textiles out of the best Bollywood films. Externally, it is a fusion of its neighbors Pakistan and India, with whom it shares complicated histories. Internally, it is something much different, a quietly peaceful Muslim people with a will to appease and friendly smiles for strangers. The beating of its heart goes far beyond its arsenic-filled water and overpopulated city streets.

A boy waiting for a flight to Dubai in the Dhaka airport boarding area showed me his documents from the UNHCR giving him and his family US residency. He looked 12, but his papers said he was 18. The six brothers and sisters around him said he was their only parent. We are Rohingya, he said - some of the Muslim refugees from a Burma that does not want them - living in squalid camps in a Bangladesh that doesn’t have the means to help. He was effusive and happy, showing no signs beyond his stunted growth of what was likely a traumatic childhood ended by adult responsibility.

Like the busboy who stood in my hotel room telling me that if only he could go to college, he could return and make a difference, or the ER doctors where I had surgery, proud and educated and kind, or the 16-year-old nanny who giggled at the mention of a boyfriend like any girl in the West would do, or the driver who kept a notebook of English words, occasionally stopping to ask me a meaning, this little boy with his six siblings embodied the spirit of a Bangladesh I had come to know.