A Woman in Bangladesh

I only saw men wherever I went, and every young man was a hopeless romantic

I explore one new city a year, and have travelled through more than 18 countries in America, Europe, Southeast Asia and South Asia. Bangladesh was unique. Never have I encountered so many obstacles before entering a country. First, plans to walk from Kolkata to Dhaka on foot were dashed when our train from New Jalpaiguri left more than a day late, forcing us to celebrate the Tibetan New Year in Gangtok. Then, our search for an English-Bengali dictionary in Siliguri took us on a search through every mall and street market in town. We were rewarded with nothing but the knowledge that bookstores are non-existent on Sevoke Road and Hill Street. The attempt to cross the border from Haldibari into Bangladesh was made on the only day of the year that the bus decided to stop running. “Every day, this bus runs… but not today,” was the only answer proffered by helpful townsfolk.

By the time we found ourselves waiting for three hours at a border shack in Changrabhanga for yet another round of security clearance, I was ready to turn back to India. When the fan in the immigration shack stopped spinning—our first power cut—and the officials left for tea, I looked to my Bangladeshi visa for strength, as a reminder of the painful process of obtaining it a month ago from the embassy of Bangladesh in Kathmandu. “I’d come so far to get here,” I thought. Even if ‘here’ is just the border.  With that, I swallowed hard and kept waiting, eyeing the immigration stamp a tempting arm’s length away.

A day later, I found myself in small-town Bangladesh, looking everywhere but back. To the intrepid traveller, Bangladesh is what India used to be before it grew used to tourists. People on the street thanked me profusely for coming to Bangladesh, for replying to their questions, and for making their country a destination of choice. “How is Bangladesh?” was the question most frequently asked, with a touch of uncertainty that was both endearing and charming. On my first morning in Lalmonirhat, a small town three hours from the Changrabhangra border, a bespectacled old man walked up to us in the middle of the road, shook hands, offered a ‘shukriya’ (thank you), then proceeded to pinch my cheeks the way he would a new bride’s. Across the road, a man with his young son clapped.

The same enthusiasm extended to my clothes. Moving slowly overland between smaller districts in the north, the absence of women on the streets was stark, perhaps prompting an 18-year-old student to notice me. “You are looking very nice,” he said approvingly. I was wearing a black long-sleeved shirt, and black loose-fitting salwar pants, what I considered very conservative and funereal. “You gift my girlfriend?” he continued, seriously alluding to my shirt. I pretended not to hear, not wanting the only clean shirt I had left to also disappear. He later explained patiently to me while directing us to the only ‘hotel’ in town—the Resource Centre for Persons with Disabilities and Rural Poor Women, where he recommended us a bed—that he was in a “love relationship” with the girl he had tried to procure my shirt for, and had been for the past four years.

He was not the only one. In the following weeks, I was to meet male stranger after male stranger, all smitten with their girlfriends and in ‘love relationships’, revealing a gentler Bollywood sentiment beneath the seemingly aggressive male-dominated streets. On the bus to Bogra, we met a young student who was undertaking a five-hour bus ride and three-hour train ride to see his girlfriend for a day, before commuting back to Dhaka. “I will marry her,” he said, then proceeded to show us on his laptop videos of Bengali love songs that reminded him of her. I pointed at the scantily clad women in halter-neck tops. “Does your girlfriend wear that?”  I asked.

“No!” came the quick reply.

“Bangladeshi women don’t dress like that,” I noted.

“They do, only in Dhaka!” he said. “They all dress like that there.”

Dhaka, of course, was not full of scantily clad women. Neither was Chittagong. The cities were also not places I encountered examples of romance. A successful 30-year-old female entrepreneur I met scoffed at the notion of being married, while her mother stood unhappily behind us. The men never stopped to chat. The night Bangladesh beat England at cricket in the World Cup, the streets erupted. A few women were part of the celebrations too, though most were safely ensconced in cars.

I headed out with a few local friends, all male, but even that was not enough to keep me from being swarmed by straying hands and a crazed mob descending upon us. A video I found a month later, taken on that night, begins with a frame of excited men chanting “Bangladesh! Bangladesh!” in the midst of dancing and drumming, and ends in darkness as we are surrounded. In the darkness, my voice suddenly pipes up indignantly: “He just groped me!” A second of silence. Then my friend’s uncertain voice: “That’s not good.” The dancing and singing continues for a moment more, and then the video cuts off. We exit the urban framework.

I continued heading south, out of the city. In the train from Comilla to Chittagong, it took me all of ten minutes to meet Shahadat Hussein, 22, a dreamy student of English Literature at Comilla University. He spent the ride gazing at my friend and I, discussed John Donne’s metaphysical poetry with me (specifically, Donne’s treatment of and attitude to love), and then proceeded to scribble furiously in his notebook. When we alighted at Chittagong, he pushed the piece of paper into my hands, and dashed off, abashed. It turned out he had spent his train ride rewriting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (beginning with, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’), contextualising it to fit our time together. It was a sweet gesture, one that convinced me that there were more romantics here than I’d ever encountered anywhere else on my travels.

By the time we hit the southernmost point in Bangladesh, I was weary of male attention. In the town of Ukhia, some 35 km from the famed Cox’s Bazaar, 200 staring men surrounded me in a circle, curious and amused by the foreigner that had wandered out of Cox’s tourist zone. Hiding behind my veil, eyes lowered, I panicked. We jumped on a bus away from there—it turned out that the bus was headed south, to Teknaf, a town that shares a border with Myanmar. On the bus to Teknaf, everyone warned us, “Don’t go to Teknaf! There are dangerous border men there.” We encountered nothing more dangerous than a few beautiful sunsets, but it did not escape my attention that there were even fewer women on the streets than before, all observing full purdah. I spent a few days in Teknaf, but the hostile male gaze did not elude me, and I soon left.

My last surprise was to be in Jessore. For the first time in a month, it was a young female who approached me in a snack store along a street and asked me questions that the men usually fielded: “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” “Do you like Bangladesh?” The familiar questions, posed by this young girl, felt like a new gesture of intimacy. I had taken to telling male strangers that I was married to the male friend I was travelling with, but felt compelled to be honest with her.

“What’s your relationship?” she asked, gesturing to my friend, as I knew she would.

“We’re friends,” I said simply.

She nodded, unperturbed, and said she was envious. We proceeded to exchange contact details, and she swore to be my friend forever if I so wanted. “Yes, please,” I said, before heading back to the hotel to watch cricket and pack.

Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on the door.  A shy young man stood before me, blushing, and managed to shake my hands and stutter, “The girl you met sent me to say ‘hello’,” before leaving abruptly, with many thanks.

I never saw the girl again, nor heard from her, despite her promise to call. Crossing back to India by the end of the month, I realised that the portentous omens encountered at the start had all been forgotten, replaced by a desire to return to search for more elusive Bangladeshi female friends.

So this time, I left Bangladesh with 20 new male friends, their love stories memorised, and the poet Donne’s words ringing in my head, quoted to me by the young student from Comilla: “Thou, when thou return’st, shalt tell me/ all strange wonders that befell thee/ And swear, no where lives a woman true and fair.”

Wei Fen Lee is a resident of Singapore, where she is a student and editor of the literary journal Ceriph

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Wei Fen Lee