Dhaka Fog or is it?

It is so still. After a midnight choir of barking dogs and the dawn warblings of a million birds, it’s hard to credit the stillness. It has to be haze. It sits there, like a fly cover over left sandwiches, inert, dropped into place. The chaos of last night, its madness of lurching belching buses, taxis and innumerable toyotas, death by tyre and bumper bar avoided every second every metre, proffered enough fumes for a year of these mornings. But, no, the young man who brings me a weak and sweet ‘special cappucino’ looks out above the lake and advises me, ‘It is fog. Our winter’. ‘But it’s so still’ I say, images of Welsh mornings with eddies of fog over mole holes wafting around my head. ‘Out of the city you cannot see anything’. I’m told it will clear around 10, maybe 11 – when I’m due to see Grameen – the city HQ of the microfinance bank with branches across more than 83,000 villages. Sunday here is a work day, and they’re already open, I see them all beginning their days in rich fog.