Seated at the counter was a man in a taqiyah, his beard lending him an air of quiet authority

As I walked through the provincial town of Bogra in Bangladesh, I came across a man seated at a roadside stall. He wore a thick, well-kept beard and on his head rested a taqiyah, the small cap that is a familiar sight among the country’s many Muslim faithful. His appearance seemed the very image of a devout Muslim man. Leaning forward with one elbow on the desk, he fixed his eyes on me—not so much with suspicion as with the idle curiosity of someone simply passing the time by observing a foreigner who had wandered into view. On the desk before him lay a stack of papers, though whether they were business records or nothing more than a half-read newspaper was impossible to tell. That kind of ambiguity, I thought, was very much in the character of Bogra itself.

The taqiyah, after all, is no mere ornament. It carries religious meaning, worn to preserve purity during prayer, and is common throughout South Asia and the Middle East. Beards, too, are often cultivated as a visible sign of piety. In other words, the man’s appearance was not just that of someone with a heavy beard; it was a living expression of his faith and daily practice. And yet, all such explanations did little to change the fact that he sat there with his cheek resting on his hand, gazing at me with the languid air of a man with time to spare.

Bogra on Google Map

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