Goodbye, Bangladesh

This post has been a long time coming. I sit writing it in my parents’ house in Leicester, shivering in an English summer, and wondering how I got here.

Maybe this is how Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy must have felt when they got back from Narnia. Nothing at home has changed, and Narnia feels a bit like a peculiar dream. To be fair, people aren’t just exactly where I left them (i.e. coming up the stairs to shout at me for being in a room where I’ve been told in no uncertain terms not to go), but it doesn’t feel like things have moved on that much.

Which is fine, because I’d be well and truly screwed if everyone had grown up, got married AND found their dream jobs whilst I was gone. It does feel a bit like that in some cases, but thankfully not in all (sorry guys!).

Really, this post should be several. In my last few weeks, I had a load of good ideas for posts, but things were too busy and too downright emotionally traumatic to find time to write them. So this is all you’re going to get, I’m afraid.
So. Where do I begin? How can I say goodbye to Bangladesh? To friends, colleagues and the people who became my family in Bangladesh? To the rickshaw wallahs, the little children who shook my hand every morning on the way to work, the aunties and uncles who asked me endless questions on long journeys, the market men where I used to buy my vegetables every week, the woman I bought bananas from practically every day, the little boy who shouted hello every morning from behind his pyramids of cucumbers, and all the others who made my daily routine so much more colourful? How do I say goodbye to saris and lungis and salwar kameez, and silly sandals, anklets and heavy gold jewellery? How do I bid farewell to mangoes and pineapples and jackfruit and red spinach and shojna? And what about the endless emerald paddy fields, the damp heavy air and the furious storms? And then there’s the call to prayer, which I sometimes find myself listening for, even though I know I won’t be hearing it.

And what about all the things I have to say thank you for? For everything Bangladesh has taught me; for all the support of friends and colleagues; for all the experiences, which I can’t help feeling have changed me fundamentally.

Bangladesh, it’s been wonderful. Abar dekha hobe.