The Scandalous Life – Dhaka, Bangladesh

Dhaka, Bangladesh — 2009

Dhaka doesn’t go quiet at night — it just changes its tune. The honking softens, the engines fade, but the city keeps murmuring: a generator coughing somewhere, a muezzin’s echo tangled with the sound of water dripping from an air conditioner, a rickshaw bell like an afterthought. It’s a kind of rest that never fully arrives.

I was staying in a small local hotel during a short mission, the kind of place where ceiling fans hum louder than the guests and the bar serves more stories than drinks.

He appeared there most evenings. Seventy-four, Irish, an engineer by trade and temperament. He’d walk in with slow confidence, carrying a half-empty bottle of Bacardi like a badge of continuity. The hotel didn’t serve alcohol, but everyone understood his ritual. The waiter would appear with a can of cola and an empty glass, no questions asked, and the man would nod as though confirming that the world was still functioning in some acceptable order.

He told me his name the first night, though I am not going to write it. He told me much more besides. He’d been working abroad for decades — dredging projects, ports, canals, power plants. “Always water,” he said, swirling the drink. “You can build around it, you can build over it, but you’ll never bloody tell it what to do.”

He was divorced, with a grown daughter in Australia, and mentioned both with the ease of someone who knows he’s loved and forgiven but only at distance. “The girl’s doing well,” he said. “Got her mother’s sense. Shame she didn’t get mine — though maybe that’s why she’s happy.”

He swirled the drink, looked at the glass as if it held a map. “Her mother had sense too, till she ran out of patience. I gave her enough reasons. Travelers think the tide waits for them.”

He didn’t elaborate, but the half-smile did the talking. You could read the rest between the lines — the hotel rooms that smelled of dust and new perfume, the nights that began with laughter and ended with guilt, the guilt so well-traveled it stopped feeling like guilt. There were always projects: dredging in Nigeria, breakwaters in Oman, canal work in Malaysia. “You start thinking every shore owes you something,” he said once. “It doesn’t. Waves just erase your footprints faster than you expect.”

He’d talk about his wife sometimes, though never unkindly. “She married an engineer, not a husband,” he said. “I was good at calculations — just not the human kind, never the cost of being absent.” He laughed softly, a sound more tired than amused.

He still wore his wedding ring — thin, loose, turning freely on his finger. “Habit,” he said when he caught me looking. “It reminds me that I was once someone else.”

Our conversations ran wide — from engineering disasters to monsoons, from whiskey to politics. He had a story for every country between Nigeria and Nepal. “You stay long enough in this business,” he said, “and the airports start greeting you by name. That’s when you know you’ve stayed too long — when the man at immigration knows your hangover better than your friends do.”

Somewhere between the second and third evening, when the bottle was half gone, he leaned forward and said, “Live your life as scandalous as you can. No one remembers the careful ones.” Then he sat back, satisfied that he’d given out something resembling wisdom.

I laughed, partly because I was thirty-one and thought I still had time to choose between careful and scandalous.

There was something oddly comforting about him — the way he accepted chaos as routine, loneliness as a side effect rather than a tragedy. He didn’t complain. 

On my last evening in Dhaka, I found him at his usual spot. He looked up as I sat down. “Leaving tomorrow?” he asked. I nodded. He poured two glasses, cola fizzing softly. “Don’t become one of those men who forget to live because they’re too busy earning the right to.”

He raised his glass in mock ceremony, and we drank to that — two travelers, two sets of luggage waiting upstairs.

I never saw him again. But when I think of Dhaka, instead of honks of cars and roar of buses, I remember the sound of glass on wood, the low hum of a ceiling fan, and the echo of his voice: half laughter, half confession.

He’d probably be in the end of his eighties now, if he’s still around. I like to think he’s somewhere pouring his rum, still giving advice no one asked for, and still laughing at the rough, unfinished miracle of being alive.