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don’t understand the questions they ask us?
    By the time our number eventually comes up it’s lunchtime. Too late! We’ll have to come back. The next day we have to wait all over again, until a lady hands us a ‘receipt’ that allows us to stay in France while our application is being considered. Three months later, a letter arrives by recorded delivery giving us another appointment. This time we see a lady who gives us another appointment a month later. I’m at school that day, so my father goes by himself.
    He comes back late that afternoon looking puzzled. He’s seen the lady, this time with an interpreter. To start off with she asked him simple questions: his name, my name, his date of birth, my date of birth, etc. After that my father got confused, because the interpreter was Indian and didn’t speak much Bengali. He stumbled when he tried to translate what my father said to the lady, and when he translated what the lady said, my father couldn’t understand what he was saying. After the first question, my father said:
    â€˜I don’t understand.’
    The interpreter translated, and the lady looked surprised. The question seemed to hover in the air, hanging over my father’s head. It seemed as if it was really important. Then the lady said:
    â€˜What’s your job?’
    â€˜I used to be a fireman. Then I set up a small car business.’
    Years later I read the translation of this, as given by the interpreter:
    â€˜I used to be a fireman. Then I set up a car dealership in Germany .’
    â€˜A car dealership?’ asked the lady.
    â€˜I rented cars out by the day.’
    â€˜Did you import the cars from Germany?’
    My father was surprised at this. He explained:
    â€˜No, it was a business in Bangladesh.’
    â€˜So what was the connection with Germany?’
    â€˜There wasn’t one.’
    My father frowned: why was she asking about Germany?
    The lady looked at him in astonishment: what was he concealing from her about his car imports from Germany?
    After that, she focused her questions on our problems in Bangladesh.
    As my father was giving his answers, the interpreter would suddenly cut across him:
    â€˜Don’t say that. No, that’s no good for your application. Wait, I’ll say it another way. You mustn’t say that sort of thing. It’s better if I say something else.’
    He argued with my father, interrupted him, butted in when he was in the middle of answering, made him lose his thread, cut across his conversation with the lady, changed his replies. My father was getting annoyed. The lady, who couldn’t understand anything of what was going on, was starting to get suspicious.
    At the end of the interview, my father returned to the original problem:
    â€˜I didn’t understand the first question, at the beginning.’
    But it was too late, the lady had made up her mind:
    â€˜I asked you why you had left your own country. You said, “I don’t know.”’
    Later on at the hostel, when my father talked about what happened, the Bangladeshis there told him some surprising things:
    â€˜You know, Nura, there are some Indians who try to pass themselves off as Bangladeshis in order to seek asylum in France. Before you arrived, there was an Indian in the hostel who managed to get his visa that way. Maybe the interpreter was trying to sabotage your application so as to give more chance to people from his own country?’

    Summer is here. At school, some of the children start to talk about their holidays. The children from the hostel say nothing. After coaching one evening, Xavier asks:
    â€˜Fahim, would you like to come and spend the month of July with me in Brittany?’
    â€˜Brittany? What’s that?’
    â€˜It’s a region in western France. My mother has a house there. I take a few pupils there every year. We relax, have fun and compete in the Plancoët tournament.’
    This