The cars grew smaller and smaller. A strange feeling grew inside me, an uncertainty mixed with intense excitement. The cars below merged into the fabric of the sprawling city, a carpet of life, and then even that was gone.
It was dark when the plane landed in Amsterdam. After everyone else had deplaned, a flight attendant appeared, examined my charming dog tag, and escorted me off the plane. She directed me to one of the electric carts and we drove off, weaving a path through groups of passengers, honking the horn. I thought, This isn’t so bad after all!
We pulled up to a door marked “UM.”
“Unaccompanied minor,” she noted.
She opened the door and led me inside. “Craig, you have eight hours until your flight departs.” She smiled. “Enjoy yourself.”
A virtual prisoner. For eight hours. I looked around the room. A five- year-old sat in the middle of the floor surrounded by Lego. The Little Princess was on TV. I looked at the other videotapes: The Lion King, Aladdin, Beverly Hills Cop II.
In desperation I watched them all, and watched at least twenty kids come and go. One girl from Montreal recognized me from a television interview. She was close to my own age, so we talked and looked at bits of the movies until she left to catch her flight. There was nobody else, it seemed, going to Dhaka.
Finally I was escorted to the departure gate. The terminal was packed with travellers. At the gate I was taken straight to the front of the line and was the first passenger to go aboard. As a kid alone, I really stood out. People probably assumed I was the son of some businessperson or foreign diplomat.
For the first time since leaving Toronto, I was feeling nervous. I was going to a strange and distant country where I certainly wouldn’t be able to slip unnoticed into the crowd. I began to miss my parents, and hoped Alam would be there to meet me the minute I arrived.
A flight attendant came by and reviewed in detail all the safety procedures, including the operation of my seat-belt. This time, however, my thick guidebook to Asia, open on my knees, seemed to ward off the colouring book and crayons.
The other passengers streamed aboard, and as soon as the plane was in the air, and the seat-belt sign went dark, they were up and out of their seats laughing with one another, walking around, introducing themselves to other passengers, chattering away as if they were old friends. This is definitely not Canada, I thought.
Two meals were served on the flight to Bangladesh. I decided to go for the Western-style meal the first time, since I wasn’t sure when I would have that choice again. For the later meal, I decided to take the plunge and try the Asian selection. I ate it slowly, using my fork to sample a small bit at a time. To my delight, it was all interesting and tasty. In fact, I liked it a lot better than the first meal. I took that as a positive sign.
After ten hours we landed in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It was the morning of December 11; twenty-eight hours had passed since I left Toronto.
I had never seen such a place as the Dhaka airport. As I walked through the arrivals lounge, my eye caught a cockroach scurrying across the floor. Hundreds of mysterious faces rushed about, many shrouded in dark clothing. People were smoking everywhere, and the fans overhead had stopped dead. The sultry air smelled of sweat. I hadn’t had a shower in over two days and I didn’t smell any better myself.
The place was chaotic. Two 747s had just landed. People were pushing and shoving their way to the Immigration lines to present their passports and papers before any more planes arrived. When I reached the lines, they wound on ahead, almost forever. Fortunately, a KLM agent led me to the checkpoint reserved for the flight crew.
I placed my passport, visa, ticket and boarding pass onto the counter in front of the Immigration official.
“Reason, time, and place that you will be staying while here?” he asked in an accent so thick I could barely understand him.
Alam and the local organizations had instructed me not to say that I was here to do research on child labour. “Visiting friends,” I told him.
He peered at me, but didn’t bother to take issue with it. He handed back my documents and I was free to move on.
It took several minutes for my bags to arrive, and the flight attendant who had been standing by me all this time was getting a bit irritated. It was obvious she had other business to attend to. “Are you sure you checked two bags?” she asked.
I showed her my luggage tags. The area was crowded with people jostling each other to get to their bags, and there seemed to be a severe shortage of luggage carts. Arguments were breaking out all around me.
The whole idea of the unaccompanied-minor procedure is that young passengers are protected from abduction. The attendant was to leave me only when someone arrived with proper identification and matched the description of Alam that my parents had provided. But as soon as my bags arrived, the attendant scribbled something on a clipboard, rushed me into the main airport lounge, and abandoned me. “Have a nice stay,” she said, disappearing into the crowd.
I was on my own in the middle of Asia. Alam was nowhere to be seen. What was I to do now? I could feel my anxiety level rise several notches. I piled all my bags onto a luggage cart and looked around.
“Where is Alam?” I said out loud. Had he forgotten when my plane was due? Had he got into an accident? Should I call my parents?
I slowly scanned the crowd in the airport. The people were mostly Asian, a few of them in Western clothing, but no Alam.
One man asked me if I needed a hotel. Someone else kept asking if Lucinda was travelling with me.
“No.” I shook my head. “There is no Lucinda with me.”
He was insistent. “Where is Lucinda? Where is Lucinda?”
I got away from him and pushed the cart through a door to the outside. A wall of heat and humidity hit me. I was blinded by the intense sunlight.
I was immediately surrounded by a swarm of people, all wanting my attention. “You want a hotel?” they asked in Bengali and broken English. “Taxi, you want taxi?” Others asked for money, or held things for sale in front of my face.
One person rushed up to me and started to take one of my suitcases. “No. No taxi,” I said. I pulled it back from him. “Na!” I repeated again and again. With one hand I protected my bags as best I could, and with the other I pushed the cart away from them along a walkway. There I found a little peace and time to recover.
When I left Canada, there was snow on the ground. Here, the heat was thick and overpowering, and I was very tired from the long trip. I felt sick.
But somehow, through it all, there surfaced the excitement of being in a totally foreign place. I caught sight of a vendor balancing a long rod on his shoulder. The rod was bent from the weight of the goods he carried. He was a walking store. Everything imaginable hung in bags from the rod: pots and pans, knives, cups, cigarettes, water, prayer mats. As he walked, he called out the names of the goods he had for sale.
Small food stands dotted the area outside the airport. As people left the airport they flocked to these stands, as if they’d been missing their favourite foods during their travels. The most popular food seemed to be a large leaf of some sort into which the customers piled a variety of fillings.
A massive palm tree towered over me. The air was sweet with the smell of spices and curries and charged with the rhythms of a strange exotic language.
“I can’t believe you brought so much stuff!”
It was Alam. He looked at me, a grin on his face. What a relief to see him.