runs out, and everyone warns us to look out for the police. So we go out less and less, only when we need to. My fatherâs afraid that they might find us and put us on a plane back to Bangladesh. Direct. I imagine the masked men in black whoâll be waiting to kill me as I get off the plane. M. Bamoun is scared too, frightened that someone might report him to the authorities. He tells us that in France you can get sent to prison for taking in friends. So he hides us: when visitors come, we wait on the stairs until theyâve gone.
One day, Iâm on the Métro with my father and M. Bamoun. Suddenly three men in navy blue uniforms and caps appear in our carriage. They look like policemen. People are showing them their tickets. M. Bamoun signals to my father, who grabs me by the hand and jumps on to the platform just as the doors are closing. We charge towards the exit. In front of us are two other men, one black and the other white. The train pulls out, accelerates and is swallowed up by the tunnel. We glance over our shoulders and slow down: phew!
Then all of a sudden the two men in front of us give a start and double back on their tracks: in the passage I can see more men in uniform. Still gripping my hand, my father runs after our two partners in crime. Following their lead, we race down some narrow steps that go down to the Métro tracks. Carried forward by his own momentum, the first man leaps over the rails and is already clambering up on to the platform opposite. My father and I are about to follow him when the other one pulls us back:
âNo! Itâs too dangerous!â
Iâm paralysed with fear. What if the policemen come on to the platform? What if they find us here, skulking in the shadows like criminals? And why have the rails suddenly started to judder and make that deafening noise? I flatten myself against the wall. The man checks the platform in the mirror above our heads, and after a moment that feels like an eternity he signals to us that the coast is clear. We climb back up and get on the train that pulls into the station, trying to look natural. At last the bell rings, the doors close and the train starts moving. My legs have turned to jelly and I want to cry, but I donât let it show. I want to squeeze up against my father but I donât dare. Slowly the knots in my stomach start to unwind.
In bed that night I turn things over in my mind. Why didnât my father, who is so honest, buy us tickets for the Métro? Has he run out of money? Over the next few days, I watch him secretly. I listen in when heâs on the phone. He says that we canât stay in the Bamounsâ living room for ever. When he asks for money â from his friends in Spain and Switzerland and a cousin in Scotland â he sounds embarrassed.
XP : Undeterred by his total lack of knowledge of the French language and legal system, Nura set out to find a way of staying in France with his son. There was good community support, and he discovered the existence of the right of asylum, a right recognised by the United Nations since 1967, which allows people who are in danger in their own country to seek the hospitality and protection of another country. He learned that France, âhome of the rights of manâ, had offered asylum for several centuries and viewed it as a national tradition. So it was therefore with complete confidence that he took to the tortuous byways of the French legal system and bureaucracy, embarking on a journey that â given the self-evident nature of his predicament â should have taken just a few months. Other Bangladeshis in Paris pointed him in the direction of the organisation France Terre dâAsile (the name means France, Land of Asylum), set up to provide support for asylum seekers, both in making their applications and in their daily lives.
So it was that, after Dhaka, Kolkata, New Delhi, Rome and Budapest, Nura and Fahim found themselves in the Paris