A small mystery

Travelling to and from Dhaka over the last few days, I stumbled upon something quite curious. In the roadside hotel that the bus stopped in, the old glass bottle placed on my table for drinking water caught my eye. Although the bottle’s label was long gone, there was something familiar about the logo impressed on the glass – some kind of coat of arms, perhaps – but something I had definitely seen before. Then I looked at the bottle on the neighbouring table, where a scrap of label still stubbornly clung to the glass. Just three letters remained, but I realised what I was looking at. The washed out red ‘-off’ that remained was instantly recognisable to me: it was an old vodka bottle. Glancing around the room I saw that each of the fifty-odd tables was graced with a similar glass bottle as a centre piece. Different brands, different sizes, but all vodka.

Now tell me. In a country like this, where alcohol is officially frowned upon, where does such a supply come from? How did fifty old vodka bottles wind up in this little service station, bang in the middle of nowhere? And more importantly, why has no-one let me in on this little secret?