On Saturday morning, while checking my Facebook notifications, a usual routine of mine during the early hours, I saw one update from Eric Butruille, who was "marked safe during Paris terror attacks.” I remember Facebook introduced the "marked safe" option during the Nepal earthquake to notify friends and family about one's whereabouts.
I immediately went on to my Twitter feed and found out that all the news media in the world was uploading the latest updates about the terrorist attacks in the French Capital. I messaged Eric on Facebook, asked him about his whereabouts. He replied, “In Paris and still alive; and more resolute than ever to fight those Allah fanatics.”
That sort of reply by Eric could have started another long debate between us, but on Saturday morning, I didn’t do that. I just wrote, “I understand.”
A strange meet
Eric Butruille is not my friend. He is in his late 50s and I am in my early 30s, and friendship usually doesn’t form with such an age gap, at least not in my opinion. However, we have built this strange bond. If people read our conservation (we usually maintain contact through Facebook messenger), they would think that all we do is debate. But a peculiar sort of friendship developed between since we were both fond of each other, accepting all our similarities and differences.
I first met Eric on a bus. A no-6 bus (route no-6 that runs from Motijheel to Gulshan) in Dhaka, to be more specific. Those who are familiar with no-6 buses in Dhaka know that it’s not usual to find foreigners on those buses, especially a Caucasian one. However, inside that packed bus, I saw one Caucasian guy reading a book. When I looked at the title of the book, I realised it was about trekking in Nepal Himalayas. I also saw that he was wearing a trekking boot from Timberland.
I am an avid trekker and I immediately wanted to strike up a conversation with him. It was hard to do so inside the congested bus. I asked him where he would get down, he replied, “Kawran Bazar.” Fortunately that was my stoppage too. We both got down from the bus there. He was in a rush, so was I, but we exchanged our numbers and he told me that he would call me in the afternoon.
In the afternoon, he called indeed and we met. I came to know that he was from Paris and he was a theater production coordinator there. He lost his job (it had been eight months when I met him in 2014), and the amount of money that he received from the government was too little to survive with, in an expensive city like Paris. So he chose to roam around in South Asian countries like India, Nepal and Bangladesh for every three months because, apparently, doing so is cheaper than living in any of the French cities. However, he has to go back to Paris every three months to draw money from the social security department.
Before he came to Bangladesh, he was in Nepal for a month, trekking in different parts of Himalayas. In Bangladesh, he chose couch-surfing because here, he couldn’t live in a tent like he did in Nepal. I didn’t know what couch-surfing was until he told me. He was crashing on someone’s couch in Baridhara, whom he had found through a couch-surfing website. My parents were out of town for a week during that time and I invited him to stay at my place for two days. He accepted my invitation.
A friend I respected
It was an exciting thing for me to invite a Frenchman to live in my house. I remember that I was much psyched about it. I called many of my friends and they came to meet Eric. Most of them were fellow trekkers and they were very excited to hear Eric’s experience in the Nepal Himalayas. My cousin, a poet, had a long conversation with him about France’s theater and their underground literary magazine society.
Interestingly, after he came to my house, I found out that Eric was a staunch atheist. He was so strong an atheist that I called him a “religious atheist.” He considered Richard Dawking’s The God Delusion his bible. I read that book earlier, so I knew what it was about and we would spend hours arguing about our religious views, or the lack thereof. I am a religious, practicing Muslim man and was trying to defend my religion.
I remember during those two days, we spent hours after hours debating. After that, he stayed for another five days at my cousin’s house (the poetic cousin of mine liked him so much that he took Eric to his home). We also travelled to Rangamati for three days. All this time, Eric and I had long conversations about Islam, atheism and religion in general. He tried to tell me about the futility in practicing religion; I tried to convince him into realising how beautiful Islam is. They were long discussions of intellectual depth and we both enjoyed them. We had very different views and even if we were debating constantly, we never felt any sort of hostility towards each other. Rather, we felt like that our knowledge had improved through those conversations.
Eric went back to Paris after spending a month in India and got a job. We have been maintaining contact through Facebook ever since. Every time he sees any act of terrorism, he knocks me and starts the debate. I too, vehemently, defend with my views. I talked about Western hypocrisy on the Palestine’s issue; he condemned Islam when Charlie Hebdo was attacked. I told him that the cartoonist shouldn’t have mocked the prophet. He didn’t agree and the debate went on.
Those debates were something that we both enjoyed and didn't mind having. But on Saturday, I did not feel like starting another one. He probably didn’t either. I just asked him about how things were in Paris. He replied “Well, Paris is under shock, but life goes on.”