Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [26]
Up the road, along Jainal’s cable route, I meet Selina Akhter, an elegant and serious woman of 22, who arrived three weeks earlier from the Jhenaidah district, near the western border of Bangladesh and India. Her one-room house had been half-built by a couple from the north who had grown disillusioned and moved back before the doors and window had been filled in. Now, dressed in the bright, celebratory sari favoured by Bengali women, she is outfitting her family’s space: a mattress, raised on a platform bed, with a few feet of floorboards for her three-year-old child, a small cooking area in the back with a single butane burner, and a storage loft above. She shares a small dirt courtyard and a larger outdoor cooking fire with five other families.
“There is far less space than in the village, but there is no question that life is better here,” she tells me. “I knew as soon as I became a mother that I would have to come to Dhaka. We’re alone here, we don’t have any family around us, but one guy we know from our home village, we met him working in the city and he recommended we take this house here. It’s the beginning of our family’s new life.”
Three years before, she gave birth to her first child, a healthy son. Children in her region do not fare well: it is subject to monga, a seasonal famine, mainly caused by poor farm investment and management, which leaves families without enough food in the winter months. This is compounded by frequent flooding of her farm by the nearby tributary of the Ganges, resulting in appallingly high child-mortality and chronic-illness rates. Whereas her parents had been forced to endure such conditions, Selina and her husband were determined not to watch their boy starve in the winter. Her husband found work in Dhaka as a painter, sleeping on the pavement at first. After three years, sending back enough money to buy rice in the winter, he had saved almost $700, enough to pay for a single-room hut in a slum bustee. They were drawn to this place by the well-formed social network of people from their village living on this street.
Her husband earns 3,500 taka ($50) a month painting houses, a typical arrival-city wage, just enough to eat two meals a day, send money back to the village, and pay the $15 monthly payment on the house. That’s enough for their needs today, but they will need more to afford their intended future. Selina wants to start working in a garment plant to pay for a private secondary school for her son, if she can find a source of child care while she works. This may have to wait until she finds a primary school. And it is here that her plans collide with the reality of this side of Kamrangirchar, one of the reasons why slum houses here are more affordable: it is outside the municipal boundaries of Dhaka. That makes it ineligible for schools, water and sewage lines, and assistance. Everyone on this street, in this neighborhood, is gambling that this well-established mass of migrants will become a sufficiently powerful demographic and political force, so that Dhaka will be forced to incorporate it into the city’s boundaries—a reasonable gamble, since the city has done so with several slum districts before. On the other hand, Dhaka has also demolished bigger and better-established slums than this one.
As everywhere, life is a bet on the future of the children. Arrival cities are places of generational deferral, in which entire lives are sacrificed,