What is that alien creature?

The first thing that strikes you in Bangladesh is just how much people gather around and stare at you. Six, eight, or maybe even fifteen people, men,boys, and women alike, circle around you like hummingbirds on a nectar nest, at a  distance between two and four feet. They stare at your face without blinking, without saying a word. No shame. Not for fifteen or twenty seconds, but for several minutes, if you stay in one place that long. They seemingly do not move their eyes. They just look at you!

Who/what is this alien creature, they seem to be saying. Taller than anyone I know, and with a light skin color that I rarely see. They seem, in their own way, to be trying to make sense of all that I visually represent. And so they stare, some of them maybe breaking into a faint smile. 

We are, for a lot of these people, as close as they will ever come to having traveled to a foreign land. For many we are their first geography of those white people far away that they will, perhaps, have heard about from a friend or a parent, or seen on TV. If they have a TV, have been able to put their eyes on one for more than brief moments when not hustling and moving about to make enough to buy the day’s rice.