A House in the Sky: A Memoir

by Amanda Lindhout

  Sarah and I turned to look at her. “What?”

  Kelly raked a hand upward through her hair and then let it fall—as if it weren’t the down-to-the-butt envy of every woman she’d ever met, the glossy cornerstone of her beauty, but rather some sort of tiresome dishrag. “I want this gone,” she said. “All of it.”

  “No way,” I said. “You’re talking crazy.”

  The idea of it was making her smile. I recognized the ignition point, a new flame running up some edge of Kelly. We eyed each other sternly for a good thirty seconds before I shrugged. “Just don’t hold it against me when you hate it.”

  This would become the thing I remembered, a memory I’d lunge for in my mind five years later, when I was locked up and kept alone in a rat-infested room in Somalia, when I was suffering and half starved and my earlier life seemed like a made-up story. This warm early evening on a shimmering satin lake in Guatemala would feel like a fever dream. I would reach back for it, trying to lasso the small details and rope myself closer: Kelly and Sarah with their legs kicked out on the dock, their faces lit orange in the sunset. The way I ran barefoot up to the guesthouse lobby, borrowed a wooden chair and a pair of blunt-edged office scissors from a drawer in the front desk, and asked Kelly one last time if she was sure. There was the fact—refreshingly unimaginable, given that one of my kidnappers had hit me so hard, he’d broken several of my teeth—that the stakes of a haircut ever could have seemed so high. There was the specter of Dan Hanmer and the half-bloomed, eternally perfect love affair, and the first loops of Kelly’s dark hair dropping heavily to the dock. There was the way the mountains angled like green drapery behind the sparkling eye of the lake. We were laughing at this point, harder than I think we’d laughed all those three months we’d spent traveling, as Kelly sat in the chair and I struggled to hold the scissors steady, hacking off one thick tendril and then another, as Sarah—whom we’d never see again after that week—streamed tears of hilarity and clutched at her belly, and as Kelly, no longer heartbroken and still lovely with a shingled, jaggedy bob, reached down and swept the remnants of her hair into the big lake.

  6

  Hello, Madame

  As I calculated it, three or four months of serving martinis to nightclubbers in Calgary could buy me a plane ticket and four or five months of travel—six, if I kept the budget extra-tight.

  “What do you do?” people would ask me casually, the way people do—new friends, the dentist, the woman seated next to me at a wedding. Or “What do you want to do?” was what people who came into the bar more often asked, presuming correctly that nearly everyone working there had other aspirations.

  “I’m a traveler” was what I’d say back. “I want to see the world.” It felt exactly that simple.

  I’d made two trips to Latin America and one to Southeast Asia, and I was fully obsessed with doing more. Travel gave me something to talk about, something to be. That I’d just been to Nicaragua or was thinking about going to Ethiopia seemed, in the eyes of the people I encountered at work, to override the fact I hadn’t been to college or that I was late in getting a round of dirty mojitos to table nine. It helped erase the past, too, allowing me to duck questions about where I’d grown up or who my parents were. Among travelers, talking about the past usually meant talking about the just passed. The expiration date on old experiences came quickly. What mattered most was where you were going next.

  In the late fall of 2004, when I was twenty-three, I spent a month traveling in Thailand with my mother. We wandered beaches and Buddhist temples, ate curry and mangoes, and slept in three-star hotels rather than my usual budget backpacker places. My mother was a surprisingly mellow traveler. For the first time, she and I were learning to really laugh together, to excise some of the ugliness of the past. When she flew home, I continued on to Burma, where—still nervous as a solo traveler—I immediately grafted myself to a group of traveling geologists who were doing field research in the jungles. From there, I went to Bangladesh, in part because the flight was cheap and in part because it was on the way to India, where I wanted to go next. I had an idea that I needed to get better at being independent. I didn’t know anybody in Bangladesh. I didn’t know anybody who’d ever even been to Bangladesh. It felt like the right next place.

  *

  Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries on earth, and Dhaka, where I landed in January 2005, is the country’s most densely populated city. Walking from the airport arrival hall and into the swelter of the afternoon, I saw nothing but people, a few hundred of them pressed up against the black iron gates separating the airport from the parking lot—taxi drivers, rickshaw drivers, unofficial baggage porters, women in bright saris clutching the hands of little children, vast families waiting for a relative to turn up.

  “Hello, madame!” a man shouted, a hopeful taxi driver, it seemed. And then another—“Hello! Hello, madame?”—and then more—“U.S.A.? Den-a-mark? Where from? Hotel? Hotel?”

  On the plane I’d met a man named Martin, a middle-aged German guy roughly my father’s age who worked for an electronics company and did business in Dhaka all the time. “You’re traveling alone?” he said, lifting his eyebrows. “That’s going to be interesting.”

  Martin had insisted that a taxi ride to the Old City and the twelve-dollar-a-night hotel I’d picked out of Lonely Planet would take three hours and the driver would overcharge me by virtue of my white skin and my gender. “They never take you to where you want to go, anyway,” he said. “You’ll end up at their cousin’s hotel.”

  He had a driver waiting behind the fence with an air-conditioned white minivan parked nearby. Walking out of baggage claim, I took one look at the taxi drivers scrumming madly for our attention and decided it was okay—a minor infraction of my mandate to be self-reliant in Bangladesh—to accept a ride in Martin’s car.

  It took us two hours to crawl through Dhaka’s traffic to the old part of the city, along the north bank of the Buriganga River, which was full of slow-drifting freight barges and ferrymen rowing blade-thin canoes over the mud-brown water. The sun was going down. The streets narrowed, and the intersections between them were an unpatrolled bedlam of thousands of swarming bicycle rickshaws, honking vehicles, and wandering pedestrians. When Martin’s driver found a way to ease the minivan over to a corner near my chosen hotel, I climbed out, hefted my backpack, and cheerily shook both men’s hands.

  The noise around us was deafening, a cacophony of bike bells and blaring car horns, people yelling at one another, and some sort of shrill siren cutting through it all. Martin was sweating through his nicely pressed shirt. He had to shout so I could hear him. “Are you sure,” he was saying, “you don’t want to just stay at the Sheraton?”

  I waved a hand as if I’d stood on this corner a hundred times before. “No, no, this is good!”

  Martin pressed his business card into my hand. “All right, then, call if you need anything.”

  With that, they drove off. And I was alone.

  Only I wasn’t at all alone. Every head on the street seemed suddenly to swivel in my direction. As I walked the fifteen feet toward the sign marking my hotel, pedestrians stopped and stared. A round-bellied man was trotting behind me, calling, “English? Hello? Hello, hello, hello?”

  I ducked inside the hotel and climbed a narrow flight of stairs leading to a small second-floor lobby. Two men in white Muslim prayer caps sat behind a Formica desk, watching a soccer game on a small television in the corner. The guidebook had identified this as a cheap English-speaking place with clean Western toilets.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’d like a single room, please.” I pulled out my wallet and passport.

  The older of the two men took a long look at me. He had deep brown eyes behind a pair of rimless spectacles and a sparse gray beard. “For you?” he said.

  “For me.”

  “Where is your husband?”

  “I don’t have a husband.”

  The man tilted his head. “
Then where is your father?”

  I’d met young women travelers who wore fake wedding rings and pretended to have husbands stashed elsewhere, in an attempt to ward off men who believed that an unmarried woman who wasn’t staying virtuously at home while her father negotiated her bride-price had somehow been disgraced and therefore was either a prostitute or a witch. I had always been irritated by this, thinking that the male attitude toward women like me was bullshit and that the fake-ring solution was not helping the cause. I was wearing a couple of rings on my right hand—cheap, chunky silver and rhinestone things I’d bought on the beach in Thailand—but I wasn’t going to pretend they meant anything.

  “My father’s home in Canada,” I told the man a little hotly, “and I need a room, please.”

  By now, the second guy had taken his eyes off the soccer game and was shaking his head slowly and silently, as if the very thought were preposterous. The older man leaned back in his chair. “What are you doing here?” he said. “I cannot understand it. Does your father know you are here?” He lifted his hands in the air with feigned helplessness, as if to say it was not his fault that my father had let me out of his sight. I did not mention that my father was home with his gay lover and that I was in Bangladesh on vacation from my job serving alcohol to unmarried young people who went out at night, largely looking to get laid.

  Instead, I continued to angle for a room. “I won’t bother anybody. My money is no different than a man’s money. What is the problem here?” At the same time, I was examining the hotel map in my Lonely Planet, relieved to see another recommended hotel a couple of blocks away. Giving in to what seemed like inevitable defeat, I descended the stairs in search of another place.

  Old Dhaka smelled of diesel fuel and fish paste. Horns blasted and rickshaw bells jingled as I left the first hotel. It was early evening now. The round-bellied man materialized almost instantly, taking up his chant of “Hello? Hello? How are you? Madame?” Within minutes, I was caught inside a swirl of inquisitive onlookers, a rapidly dividing cell of mostly men.

  A man with a neatly trimmed mustache and short-cropped hair had pushed his way into the patch of space where I was standing, the eye of our human hurricane. He wore a white prayer cap, but where the men at the hotel had worn loose-fitting Arab-style shirts and Asian-style lungi wrapped around their waists, he was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” he said officiously, “what is your good name?” The crowd leaned in close to listen.

  “Well, my good name is Amanda!” I said back, finding it funny, raising my voice over the noise. “I am from Canada!”

  “Can I help you?”

  I pointed at the map, turning the guidebook so he could see it. “I think it’s just up here, right?”

  “Ah,” said the man, taking the book and examining it. Someone from the crowd offered what sounded like advice in Bengali. More people chimed in. The Lonely Planet was passed around enthusiastically until a consensus appeared to have been reached, and the whole knotty mass of us started moving down the block.

  The friendly man with the mustache introduced himself as Mr. Sen and trailed me inside the hotel. Another narrow flight of stairs, another tiny lobby with a Formica desk, though this time there was a sofa, and on it, three dark-haired young men who looked like they’d been dozing. A fourth sat behind the desk.

  I asked for a room.

  The deskman pointed to my new friend. “This is your husband?”

  I sighed. “No, I need a room just for me.”

  Mr. Sen jumped in, speaking a fast Bengali as the guy behind the desk waved his hands to indicate he was not in any way interested in renting me a room. Mr. Sen turned to me. “He is saying that if you have a husband here, then it is no problem.” He gave a flustered smile. “Do you have a brother with you?”

  I could feel a small kernel of fear beginning to form. “No, no brother. It is just me, and I need a place to stay.”

  Mr. Sen smiled again. “No problem, no problem,” he said. He added, “You can come to my home. My mother, she will welcome you.”

  “No, I can’t go home with you. I need a hotel.” I smiled, hoping not to offend him. “Please,” I said, “I am tired.”

  We walked several blocks to the next hotel listed in the guidebook—me and an entourage of what had to be forty Bangladeshi men, led by Mr. Sen, most everyone in the group seeming to be jabbering to somebody else about my predicament, calling out to others we passed in the dusk. A woman was frying chili peppers over an open fire and selling them in bags to people headed home for evening curry. The scent nagged at me. I hadn’t eaten since morning.

  At the third hotel, the older man behind the desk looked me up and down and then asked about my husband. I started to quietly panic. This was no lark. These people really were looking at me—with my harmless ponytail and jeans and battered blue backpack, with my hoop earrings and eager-beaver smile—and seeing some sort of threat.

  I was not totally naive. I understood the intricacies here, at least a little. I understood that it was a culture built on modesty and strict adherence to Islam. Most of the women on the street wore head scarves. Some kept their faces covered completely. I had read about purdah, the practice of shielding women’s faces and bodies from public view. I was aware of how completely foreign I appeared.

  “Na, na, na!” the latest deskman was saying, waggling a finger emphatically, as Mr. Sen mounted some sort of argument in Bengali. Their words hummed indistinguishably past me, a telegraph-wire blur, until my self-appointed protector turned back to me.

  “You see,” he said calmly, “it is simply not possible for you to stay.” He added with a note of defeat, “I am sorry.”

  Not knowing what else to do, I dragged my pack over to the black vinyl couch along the lobby wall and plunked myself down on it. “I’ll sleep right here, then,” I heard myself saying, surprised by the forcefulness of my voice. I fixed the white-haired hotel man with a stare. He looked away. I fought back tears. I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to appear formidable. “I’m not leaving,” I said.

  The hotel man looked uncertainly to Mr. Sen for a translation.

  A quiet conversation ensued. The man behind the desk appeared to be weighing his options. After a few minutes, he signaled grudgingly for me to step forward and hand over my passport. His eyes stayed down. A rushed notation was made in the guest register. A small brass key was produced and passed to a skinny young boy in an embroidered skullcap who stood waiting by the stairs leading up, apparently with fresh orders to guide me to a room.

  The truce was awkward. The enemy was inside the gate. I thanked Mr. Sen warmly, taking care not to further damage his reputation by shaking his hand. I made an awkward bow in the direction of the deskman and then wordlessly and gratefully followed the boy with the key upstairs.

  *

  Once I got used to it, Dhaka excited me. I bought a sheer black head scarf and draped it loosely over my hair, like many Bangladeshi women did. I grew used to being the only Westerner on the sidewalk, the only woman in a restaurant. I strolled the Hindu market street, where clouds of incense wafted and jewelers in little stalls pounded silver. I stepped into one of the city’s high-domed mosques where, beneath an eggshell mosaic ceiling, rows of kneeling, murmuring men touched their foreheads intently to the floor.

  Islam was everywhere in Dhaka. On the mirror in my room was a small arrow-shaped sticker helpfully pointing the way toward Mecca. Five times a day, the muezzins chanted and the prayers began. These moments were strangely private and public at the same time. The men in my hotel lobby, guests and employees, arranged themselves into lines and bowed in unison, unaware of or unruffled by my presence. People, mostly men, were praying in the streets, outside of the mosques, which were often too small to hold everyone, especially on Friday, the Islamic holy day. I thought it was beautiful. The repeated bowing, the rows and rows of people humbled before God. After the bowing, they sat with their hands cupped in front
of their faces in supplication, whispering a finish to their prayers. It was so foreign to me, a religion that required so much from its believers, this display of devotion every few hours.

  As a traveler, I was formulating an edge that would help me in years to come—finding and holding the line between the pleased-to-meet-you openness that both served backpackers and made them easy prey, and a more aggressive way of using my own power. Without the language or a way to pick up cultural cues, it could be hard to parse opportunity from danger. Your mind always had to be thinking a move or two ahead. I believe I was good at this, for the most part. I’d spent enough of my childhood trying to read cues and navigate uncertainty. Uncertainty was what I knew.

  Back in my hotel room one evening, I heard a rustling in the hall and some raggedy masculine breathing. When I got up to investigate, I realized with horror that a man was lying in the hallway, his cheek pressed against the floor as he tried to see through the half inch of space beneath my door. My first instinct was to scream, but I quickly thought better of it. The blame for any disturbance, I was sure, would fall on me. Any problem and I’d be kicked out, forced to make another humiliating quest for a hotel.

  I did what I always did when I was scared. I reminded myself to breathe, to ignore the prick of anxiety, to settle back into my body. Calm, calm, calm, I thought. I then checked the lock on my door, dragged my chair out of sight of the doorway, and sat waiting for him to get bored and go away.

  A couple of days later, having wandered my way to the outskirts of the city, I flagged an auto rickshaw and asked the driver to take me back to old Dhaka, to my hotel. “No problem!” he said as I climbed in. He was young, close to my age, I guessed, and I was tired enough that it took me fifteen minutes to realize that instead of steering us into the dense city, he’d driven us into an outer ring of Dhaka, and the two of us were now, as night began to fall, traveling what was almost a country road, the city high-rises having given way to ramshackle huts and roadside food stands.