This time, Bangladesh started in the air over Dubai, at 2 in the morning, just after taking off 25 minutes late from Dubai International Airport. Besides the lateness, which is a classic characteristic of “Bengali time,” there was a child screaming straight through the night, from 2am until about 3:30, at which time I decided to finally try to get some sleep. After a half an hour of much-needed rest, though, Bangladesh really came alive. I was suddenly surrounded by your average crowd of shouting Bengalis, chatting up a storm with their seatmates at a volume several decibels comfortably above the airplane’s consistent din. This boisterous chatter lasted through the night and, as the cabin temperature continued to rise to its stuffy, humid peak, I knew we were in Dhaka before we even hit the ground.

While the journey had already acclimated me to the noise and the heat, which both remained consistent as I stepped off the plane, there was one thing no airplane could replicate, and it greeted me straight out of the jetbridge in Dhaka: the smell. That constant, putrid, burning smell. I can only describe it as “burning garbage” smell, which it often is. It’s not like there is a Waste Management truck, going around and picking up garbage in neat little bins, so conscientious families take their rubbish out into the street and burn plastic, banana peels, reeking empty oil bottles, wrappers. The whole lot of it goes up into a thick black cloud of smoke which succeeds in hanging just above eye-level, streaking through the air for your asthma-creating pleasure.

Tajul's flashy dash.

Aziz bhai, our driver, picked me up from the airport and took me to the guesthouse, which I would more accurately describe as a hostile hostel, utterly lacking in hospitality. (I’ve since moved to the “Aristocrat Inn,” which recalls a bit too much British colonialism, but I love it just the same.) I unpacked at the hostile hostel, took a shower in the bathroom (which I discovered did not have a working light) and waited for Aziz to come again and take me to the office and out of the constant drilling, sawing and hammering at the building next to my room. Riding in the car to work, I remembered the unique thing about Dhaka: there is constant building, but never finishing. What passes for a “road” here is really a narrow strip of dusty concrete surrounded on both sides by piles of dust, red bricks, garbage, tea stalls and people. I don’t understand where the money and labour comes for this constant construction when roads, buildings and infrastructure never seems to improve. The one thing that “improves” dramatically – or at least increases – year by year is the traffic. Theoretically, traffic drives on the left side of the road, but most drivers of cars, motorcycles, rickshaws and baby taxis have a very loose idea governing the concept of “sides of the road”: if traffic backs up on the left, it’s perfectly acceptable to cut into oncoming traffic to overtake a sea of rickshaws, or barely miss pedestrians, by swerving to the right. But amazingly enough, I always manage to feel safe when I’m riding with Aziz. Tajul, the head manager of BCM and the only Bengali at our office who has his own car, is a different story. When you open the door to his car, you’re entering a different world. A black light illuminates the interior when the doors are open, and I always imagine some thumping club music should start pounding out. In lieu of music, I have to focus on the dancing: Tajul’s collection of bobbling dashboard buddies rotates seasonally, but I like the ones he’s got right now. One is a happy daisy sticking out of a flower pot, another features 3 Chinese kitties with bobbling heads, and the third is a stoic, chic purple bottle of French perfume standing between the other two.

Since arriving, I’ve been prepping for our first shoot next week. Besides my three American counterparts at the office, our Bengali team has been finding actors and setting up all of the necessary people and equipment for shooting. The amazing thing about filmmaking in Bangladesh is that nothing is organized, yet everything seems to magically come together at the last moment. While I’ve been scrambling to finalize the scripts this week, it has been Tajul’s job to find the actors. But he can’t find the actors until we know what the shooting schedule is: they don’t need the script to make a commitment, they just need the schedule so they can say whether or not they’re free. Consequently, I’ve been writing, Dan has been making a schedule simultaneously, and Tajul has been contacting actors on the heels of Dan’s schedule. We leave for our location on Sunday to location scout, and we’ll start shooting Monday. Now that I’ve finished the scripts, I made shotlists for the first 2 shorts today and Dan and Sara, the office newbie (who grew up about an hour from where I’m from!), finalized shooting schedules for these scripts. Because the schedules have been made without a location scout (we couldn’t scout this week because the location is too far away), everything will inevitably change when we scout on Sunday. This could change things for the actors (who we still haven’t seen/auditioned/talked to) and inevitably, it will all end up working out, somehow. I have a feeling the way that it magically works out has something to do with Tajul screaming at the wall and sitting in his car watching his bobbling kitten heads to calm down after every time he talks to us and we change something. I have no evidence whatsoever to back that up; instead, I have a series of interactions with Tajul in which his final statement is always “It’s no problem. No problem, shistor” (meaning, of course, “sister”).

So as we end the week (for Friday is the Muslim holy day and Saturday is our extended weekend), I have nothing but questions about what will happen when we shoot on Monday. Nothing will be resolved until Monday morning, or perhaps Monday afternoon, but somehow, we’ll all get up to the location on Sunday, choose the shooting spots, and have 2 shorts in the can by the end of next week. It’s a wild, wild life.