by Caroline Gans

I had all but given up on Bangladesh before I became, if only for a moment, one of its most sought-after celebrities. I had been in Dhaka for a week and a half, leaving me only three days to make something of my time there, when it happened.

I’d had all sorts of reasons, of course, to want to go there in the first place. Preeminent among them, though, was a desire presumably as old as time itself: proving my grouchy dad wrong. When I had first told him about this great program to study economic development in Bangladesh, he’d looked at me like I had just said I’d quit college to run away with the circus.

“Bangladesh?! Why the hell would you want to do something like that?”

And from that moment, I had to go. I did go. But as days went by, I started to think he was right. The country was a shock I just wasn’t prepared for. Our professor had the trip planned down to the hour: another slum to visit, another round of interviews, then lunch at that same grim restaurant again. I felt out of place and morose. Most of the people I met seemed profoundly sad. It got to me.

But the last thing I wanted was to go home and admit to my dad that he’d been right. He’d never let me hear the end of it. I needed a feel-good, uncomplicated story—something clean and nice and neat. That story would go something like this.

#

I have never felt quite so special as I did when my OCS group took a proper outing to visit the National Monument of Bangladesh. Located just outside Dhaka, it’s a beautiful memorial to the people who fought for Bangladesh’s freedom, but I didn’t get much time to look at it. The distance from the road to the landmark itself wasn’t so long, but as I embarked on the path, I suddenly found myself on a Hollywood-style red carpet.

It started with a tap on the shoulder. I turned around to see a middle-aged woman looking at me, gesturing toward a group of children and a man about her age. She held up her phone to me.

“Camera?”

I assumed she wanted me to take a picture of her with her family, so I nodded and reached for her phone.

“Oh no, no!” she laughed. “You go with us. Here.” She pointed again to her family, and then beckoned me to go stand with them. I had no idea what her plan was, but she certainly seemed to have one. Her smile was so genuine that saying no didn’t even seem like an option, so I stood by her family and awkwardly waved hello. By then one of the Dhaka University students in our group, Tasfia, had noticed the hubbub. She ran up to see what was happening, and spoke with the woman at what felt like an impossibly fast pace. She turned to me.

“She wants a picture of you with her family. I told her I’ll take it so she can be in it, too.”

Before I got a chance to ask why on earth she would want a picture of her family to include me, a total stranger, I was being instructed to smile. The camera flashed, and then we waved goodbye. I had begun to ask Tasfia what had just happened when I heard someone call out “Hello? White shirt?” I looked down. White shirt. Huh. Surely this couldn’t be someone else wanting a picture with me…

Half an hour later, poor Tasfia had become my own personal paparazzo. I couldn’t walk five steps without someone wanting a picture with me, which, though initially confusing, ended up being all sorts of fun. After a while, a group of people had formed around me, waiting to get their pictures. I obliged each request, not wanting to let my newfound stardom go to my head. But of course, I had to set some boundaries. I couldn’t stick around after any one photo op, and besides, there was something of a language barrier between my entirely Bangladeshi fan base and me. So I would smile for the camera and then gracefully make my exit—on to the next one. By the time I actually made it up to the monument, it was time to leave.

On the van ride back, all the students hypothesized what it was about me that had caused such spectacle. I was white, which certainly placed me in the minority of the crowd visiting the monument that day, but so were most of the other people in my group. I was wearing pants, which was atypical, but a woman wearing pants was frowned upon, not celebrated—that couldn’t be it either. In the end, the group’s consensus was that it must have been my height—a full eight inches taller than average for Bangladeshi women. I tended to chalk it up to a more general star-power quality, but I couldn’t have expected them to understand that. You either have it or you don’t, after all. That’s showbiz!

#

It’s a good story, I think. It’s mostly true, too.

The only thing that isn’t quite so honest is its ending. I did make it up to the monument, and spent quite a while sitting on the steps in front of it, taking it in. Jatiyo Smriti Shoudo—the National Martyr’s Monument—was built to honor the people who died fighting for Bangladesh’s freedom in the Liberation War, and during the ethnic cleansing of Bengalis carried out by Pakistan’s army, both in 1971. Its structure of seven overlapping triangles, each representing one of the seven stages of Bangladeshi history in which resilience and strength won out, glared in the harsh incandescent sunlight.

Tasfia was sitting there next to me. Neither of us talked about the commotion from earlier, even though we’d both found it pretty amusing in the moment. I didn’t know about her, but for me, it had been the happiest moment of the trip. I had grown so tired of studying people, so disillusioned with all of it, that I was glad to finally be the one other people were gawking at. I felt so much lighter than I had that morning. I was suddenly compelled to strike up a conversation with Tasfia.

“What do you think happened back there? Why me?”

She smiled, and gave the answer I had been expecting.

“I think most of these people haven’t seen a lot of white skin. Especially here, they don’t expect to see you.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But come on,” I prodded, “you were talking to that first lady forever. What was she even saying? Don’t hold out on me!” I grinned at Tasfia, hoping she’d understand I didn’t really care so much about what she had been saying, but just wanted to talk to someone.

“Well, you are very American. You wear a huge T-shirt with a racecar on it, and jeans and sneakers. The first lady said you look like a pretty man.”

“Damn, Tasfia, what the hell? Did she actually say that?” I asked, laughing.

“She means you look free.”

Free. Me, of all people.

Tasfia was silent for a few seconds. She looked up at the monument, and then back down at her shoes. Something shifted. Still not meeting my gaze, she said, “You know, there are nice parts of Bangladesh. I’ve argued with your professor that he isn’t giving your group a fair view of it all. He wants you to really feel the poverty here, but it hurts me that you’re seeing nothing very good about my country.”

“Of course we all know there’s good parts, Tasfia. Don’t worry! I mean, look around,” I gestured out at the lush grass spattered with red flowers surrounding the monument. “This place is beautiful!”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” Tasfia’s voice grew agitated. “The whole time you’ve been here, what have you done? Interview textile workers barely getting by, meet people in the slum? Suffer through gross food?” Then she looked right into my eyes. “Caroline, where do you think I live?”

“Um, I’m sure you live a great life. Somewhere nice… with a nice family?”

She kept staring at me. Her eyes were soft and sad, but her expression was intense. I saw myself in her then—I had been fighting to turn sadness into resolve since arriving. There was so much about her life that I couldn’t understand. But I wondered if there was a lot of it I could understand, too.

“I think you live in a dorm on campus, same as me.” This came out far stronger than the tentative response I’d given moments before. I kept going. “And okay, since you mentioned it, what has been up with the food we’ve been eating? Do you also think it’s kind of… bad?”

A little smile began on her face, just a hint, while she kept watching me. Then it was too much to hold in and a laugh broke through. “Yes! You guys eat at the same restaurant every single day, I can’t understand it! And it’s so bad, like picked out to be as bad as possible. It’s way worse than even the Dhaka University cafeterias!”

We laughed harder than the words really merited, relief pouring over me. In five minutes I’d been shown a fundamentally different possibility for this place. And we kept talking, with her describing a side of Dhaka I hadn’t experienced—her Dhaka. It didn’t change the poverty I’d seen—we were there to study it, after all—and honestly, what else was our professor supposed to show us? But somehow it helped me get my equilibrium back.

#

Now as I looked out at the park surrounding the monument, I saw things that hadn’t occurred to me before. The visitors were well-off enough to take a day off from work with their families. Walking up, they talked among themselves, but all grew quiet as they approached the huge structure.

And I realized, this place was not supposed to be happy. It was a memorial to people who had died in ethnic cleansing and war. I cringed at the memory of all the picture-taking that had happened not an hour before. I was not supposed to be the main attraction here. I felt a familiar shame creeping back in—here I was, a white tourist, taking attention away from a monument to the hundreds of thousands who had died for their country’s freedom. I had so hoped to finally get a nice story to tell my dad, but I was realizing I’d had no idea what was going on.

But I also thought about what Tasfia had said, that I had looked free. I thought about how happy the women had all looked to get their pictures taken with their families and me; it was always the women who asked for the pictures. I had given some of my freedom away, worrying that if I didn’t enjoy my time in Bangladesh it would prove my dad right. Why should he have that much power? The only things he knew about Bangladesh were from Western headlines about poverty and despair. But that Bangladesh was not the one Tasfia had grown up in. Just as the thought crossed my mind, she nudged my shoulder.

“I guess we should head back,” she gestured at the rest of our group, which had dutifully stuck together and was now walking back towards our van. “Your professor is going to kill me if he notices we were apart this whole time.”

“Yeah.” Our professor had told us to stick together from day one. I looked at her with a sly grin, “Besides, we wouldn’t want to miss lunch!”

That got us laughing all over again. As we walked back down the former red carpet, our steps fell into sync.