I was on my way to the capital of Guatemala via Dhaka but I couldn’t recall seeing the name of the city.
‘It ends with “tengo” I think,’ I said to the man sitting beside me in the bus. The man was blonde though he was from Bangladesh and he was irritated at the fact that I had squeezed in next to him.
Read moreI had missed the first bus, because I was delayed from leaving the first plane. Then at passport control I had had to shift through four of my passports before finding the right one.
‘You only need to bring one,’ snapped the officer as she flicked through its pages. The woman stamped my passport and handed me a small grey ticket for the bus to the other airport.
‘Church,’ she grunted.
I pushed through the entrance to a building that led to the bus terminal.
By the time I arrived at the bus the other Westerners had left. I looked up at the next bus, a shabby green double decker with a heavy solid grey staircase that led up to the top deck.
‘Is this the right one?’ I asked up at a man who stood at the entrance.
He called down to me. ‘There is no more room?’ He asked. Then he repeated his question to the driver.
‘Which bus do I take?’ I continued, and I held up my ticker. ‘Church?’
‘Yes, this is Church,’ he replied and I ascended the stairs and pushed into the bus and that was when I finally sat down next to the blonde Bangladeshi.
The bus pulled out from the terminal as I clutched my daypack. I looked around in a slight panic. My rucksack and computer bag were missing.
The bus began its long drive through the dusty city. It confirmed my expectations that Dhaka was a noisy dusty place.
Did taking the bus from one airport to another qualify as my having visited Bangladesh? I wondered.
As we drove away from the city and into the countryside we passed some villages. I pulled out my phone to take pictures. I zoomed in on two woman who sat at stools outside their hut and snapped them from behind.
Then I turned to the blonde man to confirm whether I was on the right bus.
‘Is the next stop Paris?’ I asked. ‘Before we get to Tengo?’
The man harrumphed at me and turned away as if to say ‘No, it isn’t.’ I looked at him, at his short blonde bangs and his pallid profile with his hooked nose.
He was ugly, I decided. Or was I just being racist?
Photo by Nahid Sultan via WikiMedia Commons.
