My wife said that the women at the table across the aisle from ours were Bengali. They had pulled their veils up to the back of their heads, a rare opportunity when one can see that face under the veil that otherwise does not manifest itself but as two eyes peering out of a slit. I said Muslim Bengalis, recalling my reading of Chaudhuri, Bengal being both Muslim and Hindu. They were particularly roly-poly and round-faced. My wife said she just knew, could just tell they were Bengali when I asked her how she knew. She said they looked Mexican with their long noses. Their roundness was so round that the women looked like twins. Their husbands were not with them and they had a diminutive child in a stroller when they left that was at first sitting on the table wielding a spoon like a sceptre. There was even a woman in the back at a table and she was Bengali and had the same roundness as the other two. I even imagined the two signalling to her about my curiosity as if they noted the roundness too for the first time.
They were brown like Mexicans too. We were seated in the family section by the way. They were cushiony looking, had a pliability like a brown leather couch with buttons like eyes embedded in the upholstery. Good baby factories I imagine.
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Unfortunately, one is not able to take candid shots of the public here in this Muslim country as in your camera phone shots (my favorite is the one of the beautiful black woman in bell-bottom jeans and pink bag walking along), in fact my students on the women's campus, where I teach English, are not allowed to carry mobile phones on campus for this very reason, to prevent them from taking shots of each other.
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