Whenever Lajos Kalanos, my regular cameraman, planted his tripod somewhere in the far reaches of the world, we’d instantly be swarmed by hollering children.

The precocious flirting of tiny faces in Latin American slums, the exuberance in Africa, the defiant stares in Palestinian territories, the gleaming eyes on a Vietnamese schoolyard.
Even in the bleakest corners of the world’s news, children would jostle, laugh, and squabble for the camera’s attention—a swarm that my Hungarian cameraman generally fended off with good humor, but—if that failed—met with looming physical threat.

“Get the hell out of the shot.”

Because, “The little bastards are in frame, and I need a clean shot,” and, “The material is sacred.”
The material. Lajos was better at curses than articles. At parties, he’d sing: “Bij ons in de Jordaan.”

It was the first thing that struck me in Dhaka and Chittagong—sprawling megacities in Bangladesh:
around the imposing figure of Lajos—body like an inflatable Centurion tank, camera as a shoulder-mounted weapon, voice of a commander—the crowds were still life.
They approached in slow motion, then stopped, simply to stare.

I would see it again later in Rwanda, where I made a musical report with Frank Boeijen and Stef Bos about a girls’ choir of genocide survivors.
A guilty landscape of hills, where words like “Hutu” and “Tutsi” were now taboo, erased in enforced peace.
They sang sweet songs, the girls—mostly H, fewer T—but the moment the guitars fell silent, so did they: instantly, for long moments, and without expression.
“Like a dog looks at you,” I heard Frank say, full of empathy and helplessness.

I thought back to the eyes in Bangladesh.

And to the boy I had decided never to forget.

On the flight to the floodlands, I sat next to Jan de Graaf, genial globetrotter for VARA’s Achter het Nieuws.

“Right now, there are probably ten people in the newsroom hoping I come back with a shit report,” he said.
Morale was sky-high among the social-democratic colleagues.

In the early eighties, as a novice reporter for Brandpunt, I set course for the Bangladeshi island of Urir Char, where rising waters had once again claimed hundreds of lives.
Or were they thousands?
Monsoons, tropical storms, cyclones, floods—forces of nature in this low-lying delta.

I was in Chittagong, the last-chance port of global trade, with a hallucinatory view of tens of thousands of boats, ships, ocean freighters, wrecks—everywhere, swarming masses of people, whose up-close leanness of body and limb astonished me.

I was given chilling forecasts about Urir Char, the uninhabitable island that was our destination.
Some families, I was told, had survived by climbing onto the roofs of their rickety huts. In their desperation, daughters were pushed overboard—boys, it was thought, would have a better shot at rebuilding on fertile new mudflats when the waters receded.

By the time I arrived, most of the stories had been washed away.
What I remember of Urir Char is mostly the emptiness: clusters of people on soggy plains.
I held out the microphone.
Only later, back home through our translation department, did I learn that one man had told me all about saving his two cows. The fate of his wife and children came up only later, when asked.

Some relief had arrived.
A government helicopter brought a presidential envoy who handed out Bangladeshi taka—paper money on an island without an economy.

Would the footage make it to air?

It wasn’t a top-tier report, and we’d learned from Jimmy, the skipper of our motorboat, that reaching the coast in time would be a nightmare—if we wanted to make that week’s Brandpunt edition.
Thankfully, we’d arranged an ox cart, then a taxi, then a flight from Dhaka to catch the KLM home, then a dash to the edit suite.

But as we approached the twinkling lights of the coastline, Jimmy’s boat got stuck in the tidal channels. Just as he’d feared.

And then it got worse.

Night fell over the Bay of Bengal.

Lajos is a man of thunderous impatience.
Usually it starts with some coughing, groaning—then suddenly erupts into hurricane force.
That’s when I’m suddenly called Fonsio.

He looks at Jimmy, who—entirely unwarranted—remains calm and confident, radiating local knowledge.

“Fonsio, the bastard’s lost.”

It had only happened once before in Lajos’s career: his footage didn’t make the broadcast.
That was in Gaddafi’s tent, where he—alongside crews from ZDF, BBC, and ABC—had set up his tripod. When the Libyan leader began posing, Lajos yanked his camera from the mount and filmed him from inches away.
Ruined everyone else’s shots.
Didn’t matter—“The material is sacred.”
But this time, Gaddafi’s goons confiscated it.
House arrest in a hotel.
Empty film reels. Disaster.

In Bangladesh, his curses machine-gun over the water.
“This won’t do, Fonsio. We have to intervene.”

Intervene how?

It’s pitch black and dead quiet on the sea.

Lajos scans the darkness.
“That bastard needs to steer that way,” he gestures.

It’s not much of a plan. But I’ve learned to trust his intuition and determination—even if it takes getting used to his verbal vocabulary, in which interviewees, travel companions, and hesitant locals are all “bastards” or worse.

(While lighting Yitzhak Rabin once, Lajos said aloud—not in a whisper, because he didn’t whisper—“The bastard has a red face, Fonsio.”
Rote Kopf. Rabin clearly recognized the Yiddish echo.
I turned on the charm to downplay it as a misunderstanding.)

Now, Jimmy is the bastard of the Bay, hounded through darkness—until, under a crescent moon, we spot anchored boats.

Lajos grabs his flashlight, a hand-cam rig, and beams it across the water—illuminating a group of sleepy young Bangladeshis.
After some shouting, one boy is offered as a guide.
He knows the way. Speaks English.
He climbs aboard, nimble as a cat.

He has the eyes of someone who has read things.
The boy—nameless, address-less—is now our guide.

He helps Jimmy reroute, find navigable channels.
He stays busy. Always facing away.
His conscious detachment—modesty or shame—avoids eye contact with Western privilege.

Embarrassed, I pretend not to watch him, though we sometimes meet eyes from the corners.
He’s curious, I notice.

Sixteen, maybe.
And brilliant.

Jimmy steers.
Lajos sleeps—a skill he learned in Stalinist prison camps: instant naps for survival.

I sit next to the boy. Try conversation.

He hasn’t heard of Holland, but he knows of Europe.

“What is Europe like?”
He asks shyly.
His face, so close now, is strikingly open, beautiful, untouched—full of adolescent hope.

“Europe is rich,” I answer, lacking better words.

“And Bangladesh?”

He smiles—grimaces, really.
Out slips bitter irony: “Wrong family.”

You mean “poor”?

No. That’s not what he means. (Stupid question—poverty is the norm here. And yet you can still lose everything.)

He suddenly pours out words—anger, pain, sorrow.

“Poor family” means more than being penniless.
It means an inheritance of hopelessness. A future cursed by birth.

Aid workers had told me the caste system here was fading.
Nonsense. The boy’s monologue says otherwise.
Sometimes, between his sentences, I hear: “Take me with you.”

“I’ll never, ever have a good life here—not even a chance to survive.”

He’s from the lowest strata.
Condemned by custom, class, partner rules, labor fate—to exclusion and servitude. Always.

“Why is the boy crying?”
Lajos stirs.

That, too, he learned in prison—wake at the slightest sense of danger.

We see a face streaked with tears.

Together, Lajos and I praise his talent.
That he can still feel sorrow amid such systemic doom is strength.
Lajos strokes his hair, tells him in broken English: “You can force your dreams.”

“Not here.”

We cross bridges made of uneven planks.
Lajos talks of his “university” behind bars.
I search for a thread—some imagined path that transcends reality.
Maybe he’s a born writer. Or maybe his mind will find another escape hatch.

Empty words, perhaps—but for a moment, they lift his sorrow.
Imagined horizons.
We even laugh. His teeth, pearl white in the dark.

Lajos sings songs from his Hungarian youth.
I now know them by heart—naughty, double-entendre tunes in that incomprehensible, vowel-rich, Finnish-sounding language.
Somehow, they always end in “egészségedre”—cheers!
The boy laughs.
This is Europe.

As we reach the coast, he says he’ll never forget us.

“Do you have a picture for me?”

I give him my passport photo.
He kisses it.

A taxi is waiting—for a wild ride to Dhaka.

As the plane lifts off, I feel like I’ve abandoned him.
The boy with no name or address who, for one night, was our guide.

​